Buzzed Books #94: Nana Nketwi’s Walking on Cowrie Shells

06 Tuesday Jul 2021

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books

Buzzed Books #94 by Jan Elizabeth Watson

Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nketwi

As any writer knows, the quality of voice is sometimes elusive. It is something that you either have and can develop further or do not have until you begin to locate it within yourself. Nana Nkweta’s debut collection, Walking on Cowrie Shells (Graywolf Press), has a voice as pointed and well-aimed as a dart in the center of a bullseye. While the ten stories in this collection often reflect the immigrant experience or the second-generation American experience, these are not the stories of struggles and assimilation and identity crises that one might expect from the subgenre. Rather, these are stories of characters who know who they are (or are on the verge of knowing) and are not afraid to convey this with force.

At turns fiercely intelligent, caustic, and lyrical, the language of Walking on Cowrie Shells shifts between Cameroonian idioms to American jargon to high-minded pontifications on race and class. Nkweta’s use of voice and characterization is perhaps most finely showcased in the collection’s first story, “It Takes a Village They Say.” The first half of the story is presented through the point of view of Mr. and Mrs. Saliki, who have adopted a young girl from Cameroon and brought them to live with them in suburban New Jersey: “For weeks Our Girl roamed our house merely touching things, eyes saucered, while we followed her hopefully with our own,” the narrators say (“we” and “our” are used to give them a joint identity; husband and wife are comically not individuated here). And, later: “In retrospect, it strikes us as hideous, our bottomless need for validation when we should have striven for her love. Back then, we needed a win, we habitual gold star scholars, six-figure earners, C-suite careerists.”

The setup of “It Takes a Village They Say” is a classic story of manners—a modern-day equivalent of parlors and sitting rooms— until “Our Girl,” Zora, commands the second half of the narrative and cuts through the niceties. Observant, contemptuous, and far cleverer than her conventionally aspirational parents, Zora is a self-described “hustler” who is not afraid to exploit the Salikis and use men for financial gain. Of one male prospect, Zora has this to say: “I looked at him and saw plenty: fattened calves, amber waves of grain. He looked at me and saw exotica… spears, teats… everything jutting.”

While Nkweti has much to show us about the inner lives of Black protagonists, she also dips into surrealism and plays against expectations of genre, inserting a story about a mermaid, a story about zombies, and a would-be whodunit into this collection—each with their own footing in our current cultural landscape. But there are earthier stories, too, and these are where the author’s voice brings her crashing to the forefront of new literary fiction. In “Rain Check at MomoCon,” adolescent Cameroonian girls at a comic book convention unexpectedly find themselves at the height of their powers. In “Schoolyard Cannibal,” the gifted, overachieving young narrator tries to understand her heritage and her place in the world amidst the din of what the world tells her it means to be African.

In “Night Becomes Us,” Zeinab, a restroom attendant at a nightclub, remembers her life in the war-torn homeland, where she survived a suicide bombing. Shattered, displaced, and distrustful of the American Dream, she is still quite capable of self-sufficiency and bold expression. The story ends where many others might begin, suggesting a greater life waiting beyond the page. Similarly, in “The Statitician’s Wife,” the closing line could just as easily be its incipit: “Elliot Coffin, Jr., maintained that he did not kill his wife, but he would be the first to admit that, statistically speaking, he could have.” Whether Coffin killed his Nigerian wife or was even charged with the crime is an almost incidental fact in a story that exposes the horrifying reality of how many Nigerian women are murdered by their spouses… a yearly total that often goes unreported.

Walking on Cowrie Shells closes with “Kinks.” The title alludes to a sexual liaison and the “free and unfettered” hair of Jennifer Tchandep, a young editor having an affair with the esteemed scholar and “Black blogosphere sensation” Kwame B. Johnson. Johnson is quick to dictate how she, as an American Cameroonian woman, should think and feel; he convinces her to endure twelve hours in a hairstylist’s chair to get tightly coiled Senegalese braids, warns her against the trappings of cultural imperialism, and even renames her “Jamila” to replace her less ethnic name. When Jennifer rebels and comes into her own, it is a triumphant and fitting end to a story collection that reverberates with themes of complicity, rebellion, and freedom.

“We are not what we once were but we are getting there,” notes a Cameroonian-American character in an earlier, epistolary story. At their most devastating and effective, Nkweta’s stories are peopled with characters like Jennifer who show us where there is and suggest where we go from here.

Jan Elizabeth Watson is the author of two novels: Asta in the Wings (Tin House Books, 2009) and What Has Become of You (Penguin Random House, 2014). She received her MFA from Columbia University, where she was also a Teaching Fellow. Originally from Maine, she now lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and is at work on a third novel.

Buzzed Books #93: Love and Errors

06 Tuesday Apr 2021

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Buzzed Books #93 by Wanda Fuentes

Kimberly Dark’s Love and Errors

Kimberly Dark’s Love and Errors is an extremely compelling read that is enjoyable despite its heavy themes. Emotions rage on each page as victims, survivors, abusers, and bystanders perceive abuse differently, speaking to each other and themselves in the midst of being. Dark creates a world where breathing is an occupation and each new turn is another battle that must be won to live freely the next day.

Dark’s tone alternates between comic despair (“I’ll drown myself in that toilet”) and frank insight (“She is young / She is alive”). Trauma’s clinging offspring express themselves at different timelines of survivor’s journeys. Women frozen within trauma’s grip (“could’ve thrust / the stick into his belly / but for what? / More men in the next room.”) without any exit. Others after escaping its physical hold, remain vigilant to protect themselves and others from trauma’s snare (“I will not end up in a Mexican jail today / because she is a threat to maleness / and I need to be shown the error of my ways.”). Family members battle pain’s all-consuming dependency (“to be cast / as the cause of pain, and watch it become all / she was.”) seeking ways to extend life and love. All throughout, Love and Errors boldly penetrates straight into the war within the soul-seeking out the truths and myths of life beyond pain.

Love and Errors contains 38 poems that unravel the traumas of sexual violence, damaged families, cultural injustice, and caregiver burdens. From childhood rape to struggles of married life, Dark illuminates the various paths of survivors through girls, women, lovers, and siblings—independent and dependent. All throughout, Dark expresses an underlying message that even the worst relationships and violating memories can become a source of new strength and hope.

Relationships between trauma’s complex emotions and the body’s normal healing process are suggested (“I am made to be torn down / my pride to be shredded / I heal / get new skin / become new / beauty / is in the living”). These familiar comparisons bring forth hope as, with time, all things heal. Dark opens the door out of isolation, as one realizes they belong to a unique community, (“The way we hold our love / and errors, expectations / rooted into common ground; that’s how / we find each other and become capable / of doing what we feel we must do”) that struggles with fear and pain. By the end, readers are presented with new skills, viewpoints, and knowledge of a community which needs them—and they it.

Wanda Fuentes is a poet and social worker who lives in Orlando, Florida.

Buzzed Books #92: Red Comet: Heather Clark’s The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

30 Tuesday Mar 2021

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Biography, Buzzed Books, Poetry

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Buzzed Books #92 by Jan Elizabeth Watson

Heather Clark’s Red Comet:

The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath at nineteen, smiling broadly, her face scrunched into what Ted Hughes once described as a “tight ball of joy.” It was the photo on The Bell Jar’s back cover that hooked me first. Below that, a paragraph-long bio that ended with a terse, jarring mention of her suicide at age 30. I needed no further enticement to check this book out from the library; I was fifteen years old, prone to despondency, and certainly on the lookout for a kindred spirit.

The reading of Plath’s poems came next. Then the journals. Then the letters home, carefully edited by her mother. Then the onslaught of biographies, each with its own agenda. Then the longer, unexpurgated journals and still more biographies. Somehow, the more I read about Sylvia Plath, the more I wanted to know. And in my blue-collar, small-town innocence, I had no idea that there were millions of other people out there who felt exactly as I did: those with an insatiable desire to have more of Plath, without being able to pinpoint exactly why.

What about Plath inspires such fierce, if misguided, identification? Is it, for some of us, a particularly female or particularly American desire for recognition and accomplishment? Is it the incongruity of her public face, so exuberantly wholesome and beaming, measured against Plath’s writing voice: seething, theatrical, lethal? Is it the Grand Guignol nature of her late poetry, making the audience complicit in the inevitable course of her last days? Perhaps it is simply the question of looking at her life and her body of work and wondering where everything went wrong.

To satisfy this collective curiosity and appetite for Plath comes the biography that may at last be enough: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, by Heather Clark. A decorated and tireless scholar herself, Clark wrote this 1,154-page colossus with cooperation from the Hughes and Plath estates and aided by documents that no prior biographer was privy to. The result is as complete an account as one could dream of. And Clark’s agenda is refreshingly pure. Rather than attempting to hold Plath up as a feminist icon or as a victim, Clark’s intention (made plain in her preface) is to make the “peanut-crunching crowd” disperse at last, ending the mythology of Plath as a highly performative femme fatale and inviting closer inspection of her legitimacy as a writer. And to some extent, this approach works. I say “to some extent” because Plath’s most famous poems may always be viewed as predictive of her death… a blueprint for her suicide replete with knowing winks to the audience. (Clark does her best to debunk this idea, showing that the real story of Plath’s final weeks, which were not self-destructive and defiant but hope-filled in some regards, which in many ways is makes for a sadder story than the myth.) This is not a book of what went wrong so much as it is a great celebration of the many things that went right in Plath’s life, particularly her complete dedication to her writing.

Like many women who came of age in the 1950s and early 60s, the real Sylvia Plath had a tidy exterior and an inner life that was anything but tidy. She was, as many might say nowadays, problematic. She was a woman who wanted to be a rule-follower who was also highly sexualized and impatient with sexual mores of her time. She wanted to be a good wife and mother and a recognized force in the fast and loose literary world of London in the early 60s. She wanted to be a fresh-faced all-American collegiate girl and a serious English lady of letters both. She drew people in with her vivacity, but had a sharp, judgmental eye that often resulted in tartly written depictions of the people she was closest to. With a remarkable lack of bias, Red Comet contextualizes the many faces of Plath and gives fair treatment to many of the key figures whom Plath eviscerated in her writings… including the much-pilloried Ted Hughes, guilty of infidelity but also in possession of great sensitivity and a complete paternal allegiance to his children that was unusual for an Englishman of his time. This biography respects Plath’s perceptions and feelings, but it also gives us a great deal else to consider.

Despite the push-pull of Plath’s deeply human contradictions, her writing ambitions remained a constant, and her efforts to strengthen her writing voice had a heroic single-mindedness. The child of two academics, her talent for language manifested itself at a young age, and Red Comet chronicles Plath’s evolution from teenage writer of magazine fiction to the poet whom Al Alvarez described as one of the finest who ever lived. Her fiction, too, was taking off toward the end of her life. One of Clark’s most fascinating revelations is her discussion of Plath’s destroyed, unpublished second novel—a sequel to The Bell Jar entitled Falcon Yard—and the possible existence of a third manuscript (long thought lost) called Doubletake, a “funny” and “wicked” tale about an American expatriate wife and her philandering British husband. The thought that this novel could yet see the light of day is almost too much to hope for, but if it does, one can only imagine that readers might gain a greater appreciation of Plath’s humor and view her infamous, doomed marriage in a different light.

Ultimately, we all have our own ideas of who Plath was. Plath had her own ideas, too, and it is these ideas that Red Comet attempts to honor at every turn. Though lumped in with the “confessional” poets, Clark reveals that Plath saw herself as a surrealist, and perhaps we would be wise to begin to view her work the same way: premised upon wild, representational fantasies as opposed to a literal depiction of the life she lived. Had Plath lived to old age and enjoyed a long career, her surrealist leanings may have taken her to poems to even more ferociously imagined heights and left a different legacy for us all. Lacking that, we must be grateful for the prolificacy of her poems, the feverishness with which she documented her life, and the arrival of a biography like Red Comet that celebrates and observes in equal measure.

Buzzed Books #91: Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird

29 Tuesday Oct 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Theater

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Buzzed Books #91 by Chuck Cannini

Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbird on Broadway

A friend of mine paced in his living room one evening. Bill O’Reilly spoke to him from a television screen; something about a man named George Zimmerman, who had fatally shot African-American teenager Trayvon Martin. What mattered was how this friend of mine fumed, how his nostrils flared, how his face contorted, how he ranted and raved, then turned to me and somehow concluded, “I fucking hate Obama. I hope they lynch him from a tree.”

I remembered that living room conversation during a crowded Saturday matinee of To Kill a Mockingbird.

The 59-year-old book by Harper Lee welcomed readers to her fictional “tired old town” of Maycomb, Alabama. Readers familiarized themselves with Scout—her summers with her brother Jem and that weird boy Dill, her school life, and the kids’ limitless fantasies about their mysterious neighbor called Boo Radley. Out of 281 pages, the first 150 established the absolutes and simplicities that occupied Maycomb and, in her own retrospect, Scout’s thoughts.

Aaron Sorkin, playwright for the Broadway adaption, skimmed those first 150 pages. He did not ignore the ideas that ran through those pages. He chose not to lingeron them. The ideas were not as fleshed out, the price of what was already a two and half-hour theatrical experience. Young Scout (41-year-old Celia Kennan-Bolger), alongside Jem (Will Pullen) and the amusing Dill (Gideon Glick), danced around the stage and narrated these details while members of Maycomb and large mobile sets (such as high sections of fencing from the townspeople’s homes) swept across like a tornado of recounted memories.

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Scout, Jem and Dill did not walk around the stage so much as they ran and skipped and pushed each other out of the way. They did not speak; they yelled. They talked over each other when something was explained to the audience. Jem and Dill wrestled. A friend who joined me noted how on the Finch family’s front porch, Scout slouchedon the rocking chair, how she hunched her shoulders and pointed her feet inward.

The fun parts about coming of age lasted half an hour.

Then came the trial.

On Broadway, Mockingbirdis a legal drama. Though best known as the creator of The West Wingtelevision series, Sorkin is no stranger to courtrooms; he wrote A Few Good Men(the 1989 play, then the 1992 film), a story about a court-martial. He is uniquely qualified to write about the fabrics of American society. Sorkin pulled audiences back into 1930s Alabama, then boomeranged everyone back to modern day, to a state of uncertainty. On Broadway, Mockingbird was not just an adaption; it is a timely harsh reflection.

It’s Bob Ewell (Frederick Weller). He’s trash, a drunk and a racist. On stage, Bob voiced a newfound hatred for Jews, not present in Harper Lee’s novel. He started with the n-word, then labeled Atticus a “Jew lover,” and all of a sudden Bob Ewell seemed more familiar. On stage, Bob testified in an Alabama court, and yet America had also witnessed Bob Ewells in 2017, marching through Charlottesville with tiki torches and shouting, “Jews will not replace us!” I saw Bob Ewell in that friend of mine. He threatened to lynch a president, a very specific way to kill a man with a specific skin color.

Atticus: “You never really understand a person until you see things from his point of view.”

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Back on Broadway, Bob had also lost his job, Atticus explained. The single parent raised eight kids. The man felt inferior and powerless. He turned to something that gave him a sense of dominance and authority; Bob turned to the Klan; he took his anger out on Tom Robinson (Gbenga Akinnagbe), an African-American whom Bob falsely accused. Again, I thought of that friend of mine, a year and half deep into a dead marriage and unable to talk about it, perhaps too embarrassed of his situation; now let’s lynch Obama. Naturally.

This is not to sympathize with Bob Ewell or people like him. The character became less of a caricature. Ewell’s character evolved.

Harper Lee’s themes of racial injustice as well as our relationship with good and evil are just as relevant today, but twice as complicated. Hero Atticus Finch preached an uncompromising faith in the balance of good and evil in all people, even in Bob Ewell and his daughter Mayella (Erin Wilhelmi), but in a cynical age like today that faith prove hard to swallow, even for Atticus.

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Unique to the Broadway show, the Finch family’s long-time African-American maid, Calpernia (LaTanya Richardson Jackson), challenged Atticus’s moral high ground during private exchanges not in Harper Lee’s book:

Atticus: “I don’t want them hating people they disagree with.”

Calpernia: “‘You gotta’ give Maycomb time, Cal. This isthe Deep South. You gotta’s give Maycomb time. Well, how much timewould Maycomb like?”

Words failed Atticus again later, when his arms wound around Bob Ewell in a headlock.Harper Lee’s estate disapproved of the character’s action. Even Atticus broke. Harper Lee’s philosophy missed something 59 years ago, almost like her publication was met by complete and utter apathy. The proof is in the courtroom.

Jeff Daniels stood at the stage’s edge, his back to the court, his gaze on a new jury: the audience.

Atticus: “Can’t go on like this. We have to heal this wound or we will never stop bleeding … So, let’s hasten the change. Let’s hasten the end of the beginning. Let’s do it right now, in Maycomb. … Don’t do this! Let him go home. In the name of God, just let him go home.”

The trial ended. A bailiff handcuffed Tom Robinson, then walked him across the stage, to the electric chair. A silence hung in the theatre. It was a long, uncomfortable walk. My eyes looked away from Mr. Robinson and instead fell on the jury. The seats were empty. They had been empty for the entire play.

The curtains dropped. Applause thundered in the dark. When the lights turned on, up in our balcony seats, someone behind me noted to his colleague how it was sometimes difficult to understand Jeff Daniels’s Alabamian accent, something between a fast-talking auctioneer and a nasal congestion. It was a minor nitpick. In the two weeks that followed, the play still in my mind, Aaron Sorkin’s To Kill a Mockingbirdvery well may be the strongest of the story’s three mediums yet.

To Kill a Mockingbird continues its run at Shubert Theatre well into 2020. Jeff Daniels’s last bow will be on November 3^rd, while Ed Harris will take on the role of Atticus Finch starting November 5^th.

Chuck Cannini

Chuck Cannini read To Kill a Mockingbirdduring his sophomore year of high school. The then “wise” and “worldly” teenager was surprised that he enjoyed a “50 or whatever-year-old book.” His appreciation for the novel grew after he graduated with a B.F.A. in Creative Writing for Entertainment.

Buzzed Books #90: Enchantée

27 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Fantasy

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Gita Trelease's Enchantéé, JD Langert

Buzzed Books #90 by JD Langert

Gita Trelease’s Enchantée

Diving into the world of Gita Trelease’s Enchantée will bewitch you into wanting more, but fade over time like the magic of Camille’s dress.

Gita Trelease's Enchantéé

Set in Paris, 1789, on the brink of the French Revolution, the story follows Camille Durbonne as she tries to navigate a world of thieves, revolutionaries, and magicians. After losing her parents to smallpox, it falls upon her to care for her sickly younger sister with no resources or help. Her one blessing, as well as curse, is her magic. With it, she can transform objects for a limited time, but the cost is her very life force. Driven to desperation after her abusive brother steals the last of their money, she uses forbidden magic to sneak into the treacherous Palace of Versailles. There, she gambles to change her fate, unaware of the darker games being played.

With a premise like that, I expected to be served a tale fit for a queen. And, for a while, Enchantée delivered. Within a dozen pages, I’d already been introduced to numerous world conflicts (the impending revolution, apathy of the queen for her starving subjects, recent famine) as well as problems closer to Camille’s own heart (her sick and worldly-naive sister, poverty, dead parents, life-sucking magic, and a knife-wielding psychopath for a brother). This combined with a dynamic first meeting with the mixed-blood love interest, Lazare, via runaway air balloon and dark warnings from her fellow gambler/magician, Chandon, I anticipated a delicious feast of conflict and peril. Yet… like the cake, it seems that was a lie.

Or at least, another sleight of hand from Camille herself. Not to say that the story was bad at any point, but lackluster as it fumbled with its own potential. What harmed Enchantée the most was the tradeoff of concrete goals and action for leisurely thought and the contemplation of past events. After solving Camille’s initial desire of getting enough money for rent, the story feels lost as for what to do next. While there would be references to a revolution brewing, Sèguin being a dark magician, and the looming threat of her brother, Camille seems rather unaffected. Sure, she was aware and concerned, but did very little to either deal or learn more about said issues. While I cannot fault Trelease for not putting Camille at the forefront of the French Revolution (no matter how that idea is set up with her father being a former revolutionary), there is still the expectation that if a problem is introduced in the story, the main character will play a role in trying to solve it. This is possible to do even without drastically changing history.

However, Camille doesn’t seem to play much of a role in anything. As charming as gambling aristocrats out of their money and playing hide-n-seek in the gardens is for hundreds of pages, it doesn’t scream an active or suspenseful storyline. Camille reveals her heroic intentions with, “I don’t know, but something is happening, Sophie. Perhaps something great, but perhaps something terrible. If we stay in Paris, and I start a press, I can do my part in telling the truth about it” (423). However, she remains on the edge of decision long enough for it to resolve before she does anything. While danger does eventually strike, it comes from a rather uninspired source and resolves too quickly with Camille benefiting from the conflict. Me personally, I stand by Vladimir Nabokov’s theory that “the writer’s job is to get the main character up a tree and throw rocks at them” rather than the way Trelease tosses vague threats at Camille.

The writing style both helped and harmed this impression. While wonderful in terms of recreating a vivid Paris during this time period, character thought and dialogue fell short on many occasions. Particularly with the main antagonist. “You and I–together we will rise. Victorious. We will be the court’s second monarchs, the King and Queen of Magic” (383). Given that this is the apparent reveal of the villain’s plans and motivations, it felt underwhelming and lacking in depth. Given Camille’s own indecisive sentiments, the antagonist’s lack of the solid plan further decreased the impact of the story.

However, there were times the writing hit all the right notes. “What if she told him her fingernails used to be like his? Would he believe her, in her silk dress and clean hands? It seemed like another life” (321). Given the gritty depth of hopelessness Camille felt earlier in the story, the reader is able to immediately sympathize with the street urchin while also feeling the strange dissonance of Camille’s new status. Yet, even here, I would want Camille to do something to honor that person she used to be instead of just lamenting how much she’s changed.

For all it that could be improved, I would still recommend Enchantée to anyone with a love for France, history, and empathetic characters. Many novels that deal with revolution often frame it with one side being irrevocably good and the other undeniable evil. Trelease strikes a unique balance as she guides Camille to care for the aristocrats she befriends as their glass houses shatter around them while keeping her own revolutionary beliefs. While I wish Camille hadn’t permanently sat on the fence as to what to do, her open-mindedness and compassion in spite of her bitter life was as refreshing as it was enlightening.

JD Langert Author Photo

JD Langert is pursuing her MFA in Genre Fiction at Western Colorado University. With interests in both screenwriting and novels, she’s been published in John Hopkins Imagine Magazine, Flash Fiction Magazine, and other publications. Feel free to visit her website here.

Buzzed Books 89: The World’s Desire (Ballantine 1977 edition)

26 Tuesday Mar 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Fantasy

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Buzzed Books 89 by Mark Scroggins

H. Rider Haggard and Andrew Lang’s The World’s Desire (Ballantine 1977 edition)

The story behind this lurid paperback is fascinating, though not quite as fascinating as the book itself. In 1965, Ballantine Books issued a paperback edition of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, which had been published in hardcover ten years before. The hardcover had done okay, but the paperback proved to be an outrageous bestseller. People had never read anything like it before, and were immediately clamoring for more “stuff like Tolkien.” Ballantine scrambled—in short order they published, in editions similar to LotR, early twentieth-century fantasies by E. R. Eddison, Mervyn Peake, and others, and new books by folks like Peter S. Beagle (The Last Unicorn).

The World's Desire

Eventually, Ballantine commissioned the SF/fantasy author Lin Carter to edit a full-blown series, the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series, which between 1969 and 1974 issued around 65 volumes, most of them reprints of “classic” but forgotten fantasy works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shortly thereafter, entirely new large-scale fantasy series—Terry Brooks’s Shannara books and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books—began appearing. So a whole new genre—Fantasy Fiction—had sprung up, with folks like Donaldson, Brooks, Evangeline Walton, and Katherine Kurtz constituting its present, and the BAFS furnishing it with a past (or a “canon,” as the literary scholars say).

The World’s Desire, first published in 1890, was reprinted in the BAFS (with one of their trademark druggy, borderline surrealist covers) in 1972. This particular copy, with its lurid cover image of a naked Egyptian queen communing with a giant snake who has a miniature copy of her own head, was printed in 1977, when the BAFS had passed into history but the fantasy boom was going strong. The advertising pages at the end of the book make the cultural context crystal clear: a notice of the first printing of The Sword of Shannara; an order form for Walton’s and Kurtz’s books; an ad for the paperback novelization of Star Wars; an ad for no fewer than twelve volumes of Star Trek books; and two pages advertising Tolkien books and posters.

Let’s just say the book itself is every bit as nuts as its provocative cover (which, by the way, is a precise representation of a scene from the novel). When the book was published, H. Rider Haggard was already famous for King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and She (1887), adventures in unexplored “lost worlds” of Africa, while Andrew Lang was an all-round man of letters and classical scholar, best known for his translations of Homer (though he would later become famous for his collections of international folk tales). Haggard contributes the storytelling chops, and the themes (familiar from She) of the gorgeous and dangerous femme fataleand of reincarnation and the eternal quest for perfect love; Lang contributes a close eye to bronze-age Mediterannean cultural detail and a comprehensive knowledge of the Homeric storybook.

So yes, this is a sequel to the Odyssey—the new adventures of Odysseus, now unencumbered of Ithaca and Penelope, sailing off to Egypt on a quest for Helen of Troy, who he’s decided is his true love. (The notion of Odysseus’ further adventures appears in a number of ancient Greek texts, as does the idea of Helen being in Egypt rather than Troy during the whole Trojan war business.) In Egypt he gets tangled in a love triangle with Queen Meriamun, who’s as dark and evil as Helen is blonde and beautiful, but who’s also a powerful sorceress. Helen may be an incarnation of the goddess of love—the “world’s desire”—but Meriamun’s got her sidekick snake ornament, which enables her to do all sorts of shapeshifting and astral projection. At the same time, Egypt has to deal with a series of natural disasters brought upon them by the prophets of the enslaved Apura (Hebrews)—so Haggard and Lang are able to work in the narrative of the book of Exodus—and an invasion from the north by the seagoing Greeks.

It’s a wonderful, compulsively readable mess, told in a kind of fast-moving (Haggard) mock-Homeric (Lang) idiom, with some actually good poetry along the way. (I always skip the poems in Tolkien, but these are actually worth reading.) You can get this one for free at Project Gutenberg, but there’s lots of copies of this Ballantine edition for sale out there. You’ve gotta have that woman-headed snake, don’t you?

Mark Scroggins

Mark Scroggins lives in and around New York City. He writes about poetry, art, and fashion. His latest book of poems is Pressure Dressing.

Buzzed Books #88: Olivia Laing’s Crudo

26 Tuesday Feb 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Buzzed Books

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Crudo, Kathy Acker, Olivia Laing

Buzzed Books #88 by Drew Barth

Olivia Laing’s Crudo

Identity is nebulous. Namely in how we perceive ourselves in terms of the work we create and how it is visible to others. In terms of Olivia Laing’s Crudo, her work with identity ties directly into the work and life of another author: Kathy Acker. We can see this done straight from the beginning with “Kathy, by which I mean I, was getting married. Kathy, by which I mean I, had just got off a plane from New York. It was 19:45 on 13 May 2017.” And anyone familiar with Kathy Acker knows she died in the 1997. So from line one Laing is blending both her own narrative and that of Kathy Acker into her novel. This brings up the question of where identity in the scope of the novel begins and ends. When is it Laing or Acker or neither?

Crudo

What Laing specializes in more than anything is the constant imaginative sensory output of her prose: “When she was anorexic in the aughts like everyone she was conducting an assault on gravity, she was the apple that would go upwards, that simple. How nice to astonish the philosophers, to go off like a firecracker in all their faces.” But it isn’t just sensory overload as a means of simply overwhelming readers. Laing is working with a more contemporary rhythm. From her/Acker’s Twitter dependency, to checking airline and hotel websites constantly, to the perpetual movement of herself all over the world, she creates this wonderful voice that captures the moment of mid-2017 in all its horrendous Trump and hate-filled splendor. Even in those moments of time screeching past like a freight train we have this slow building and composing of emotional peaks that hit perfectly every time. The novel is visceral, yet wonderfully composed.

Laing uses the ideas of an oncoming dread or time screaming too quickly past us as a means of conveying how her/Kathy’s life works within emotional peaks and valleys. Never forget that there is a wedding taking place in this novel—accompanied by all the joy and stress that brings—but also the events of 2017. Trump and North Korea, Houston flooding, Charlottesville. All of that coupled with Kathy thinking “She missed Obama. Everyone missed Obama. She missed the sense of time as something serious and diminishing, she didn’t like living in the permanent present of the id.” But Kathy is married during this time, vacations in Italy, moves in with her husband. The volatility of the times are reflected in how the novel structures itself around them: with deft realism. We all remember many of the events of 2017 recounted, but we also remember our lives as well. But then again, it still all felt as though the time was being ripped from our hands as too much happened too often.

All of this to say that Crudo is a novel that feels like an incantation at the end of the world as a means of preserving one’s self. Getting lost in the timeline of our lives is relatively normal, but her working with identity and sensory components ensures that she is creating her own memorable impact on the world around her. For her, the act of writing and creating feels like it could be enough to fight back against a world that moves too fast and works to erase the individual.

Dharma Bums Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat. His blog, Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart, appears on Wednesdays on The Drunken Odyssey.

Buzzed Books #87: The Lonesome Bodybuilder

05 Tuesday Feb 2019

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The Lonesome Bodybuilder, Yukiko Motoya

Buzzed Books #87 by Drew Barth

Yukiko Motoya’s The Lonesome Bodybuilder

At times, there’s only so much a person can say about a collection of stories that moves them or a collection that so meshes with their own sense of what makes a strong story that it’s hard to not just post one of the stories on here in lieu of a review to show just how good the collection is. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is one of those collections that makes me feel that way. But I can’t just copy-paste a whole story here. There’s a lot to talk about in Motoya’s latest collection in terms of its oddity and its spotlighting of characters that radiate a certain kind of sadness. At times existential, it’s a sadness that blooms from circumstance and the particular loneliness of being both together and separate from one another.

The Lonesome Bodybuilder.png

Although the oddity and sadness of the collection are apparent throughout, the idea of transformation is one that resonates most with her work. At times it is quite literal, in the case of the titular story, and at other times it is much more subtle. Take for example the story “Typhoon,” in which an older man and a boy watch people attempting to grapple with the wind of a typhoon as it destroys umbrellas and disrupts lives. We’ve all seen people running through the wind of a storm as it reduces their umbrellas to shambles. But our understanding of what they’re doing is wrong. It isn’t that they are attempting to get through the rain with their umbrella intact—they are trying to catch the wind on their umbrellas to launch them skyward.

The transformation of understanding of what people do with themselves is a thread that resonates heavily throughout the collection and is one that can read like twists at the ends of stories. But it really isn’t. It helps readers to reconsider things that may be fundamental to how they understand the people around them. It is this fundamental misunderstanding that lies at the heart of the titular story and many others in the collection. But these misunderstandings never come from a place of ignorance or malice—rather they come from a sense of isolation. Motoya crafts these, at times, unbelievable worlds and yet they always feel completely true. These are snapshots of contemporary Japan in which people are unable to talk due to strenuous work schedules, family situations, or simple meekness. And these small things resonate so completely that they feel unique to their location and universal.

To enjoy The Lonesome Bodybuilder is to enjoy reading. It is a collection that surprises constantly. At no point do I feel as though I know what a story will entail or how it will come to an end and I absolutely love that. The unpredictability, the depth of craft, the tangibility of these characters and their world creates a collection that is so completely outré but absolutely familiar all at once. I already want to forget that I’ve ever read it so I can experience these stories again for the first time. If a collection of stories ever felt like the familiar warm blanket draped over the couch for nights in, The Lonesome Bodybuilder fits that completely.

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Dharma Bums Drew Barth

Buzzed Books #86: The Kiss

29 Tuesday Jan 2019

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Brian Turner, The Kiss

Buzzed Books #86 by Aurora Huiza

The Kiss

The Kiss: Intimacies From Writers is a lovely arrangement of vignettes, short stories, essays, and poems. Each is a quick, satisfying read. They all have to do with the act of kissing. More broadly, they are about intimacy. And if bountiful, rapturous show of affection is possible, then there are also festering wounds and forever scars. The body remembers a kiss just as it remembers trauma and violence. Experiences are lasting and they inform the trajectories of lives. So it is refreshing that some of these stories also explore bad kisses, violation, and loss. Major Jackson’s piece is particularly memorable in this respect. He writes about observing a young couple kissing, and admits that their love reaches a part of him “that needs healing.” Even in adulthood, he can move back into his “childhood of violence” like walking “through a door.”

The Kiss

Many of these pieces are doors. We walk through them and sit for a few pages in somebody else’s waking life. In doing so we remember our first kiss, our first time. Rebecca Makkai offers us a brief but powerful story about what it’s like to be in college and miss your period, something that many might recognize. She later learns “that when Cassiopeia was cast into the sky as a chain of stars, an angry Poseidon ensured she’d spend half the night standing on her head.” A woman’s life, it seems, is turned upside down because of a man. She makes us think of the things that almost happened to us, of how scared we have been for the future we currently live, and of the people we knew briefly but fiercely.

Upon finishing the book, some standouts naturally come to mind. Who you are likely determines which writers you latch on to. There is something for everyone. Terrance Hayes recalls the first time his father kissed him. He prefaces this with a fictional story about a giant named Tall Paul. Tall Paul kisses his father. “The kiss was so near his ear,” Hayes writes, “the giant could have whispered something about sadness to him. They pretended it had not happened.” We ache and we long to share our deepest sorrows, and especially to connect with our parents.

Some writers truly make us hurt. Laure-Anne Bosselaar finds a poem her late lover wrote about her. He had written that there is a kiss for her left inside him. He says “it will be the last of me to die.” Much of this collection is simple but grand in this way. Such is love.

There are plenty of small truths and great lines. The shudder of a train reminds Honor Moore of a man that was once beneath her. The comparison is heavy and jarring.

The book can also be funny. Christopher Paul Wolfe offers us a slice of intimate family life. In bed with his wife, he tells her, “‘I want you more than Hillary wanted Barack’s soul.’”

These writers all bare their souls. This anthology is inclusive and refreshing. Our most sacred memories as readers are lodged in these pages. It is a book best read in parts over time, and it is meant to be mulled over. Otherwise you might find yourself overwhelmed with feeling. You might have to call your mom gushing. It’s something you’ll want to flip through every now and then, especially in your most emotionally vulnerable moments. Brian Turner did an excellent job curating an honest, diverse assortment of work.

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Aurora Huiza

Aurora Huiza is from Los Angeles, California. She is an undergraduate student at NYU studying English and Creative Writing. She writes fiction and creative nonfiction.

Buzzed Books #85: Permanent Exhibit

08 Tuesday Jan 2019

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Buzzed Books, Creative Nonfiction

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Matthew Vollmer, Permanent Exhibit

Buzzed Books #85 by Drew Barth

Matthew Vollmer’s Permanent Exhibit

Think of a thought process and all the ways it branches out and around. The thoughts rarely stay in one place or along one singular train of thought for too long. It’s that aspect of his own mind that Matthew Vollmer examines in Permanent Exhibit. In this essay collection, he looks to examine not only what is happening in his mind, but what’s happening around it at all times.

The organic nature through which Vollmer shares himself in this collection really helps to reinforce both its structure and how the collection presents its content. We see first in “Status Update” the scene being set: it’s 2016 and this is like going through a Facebook feed. It’s a nonstop barrage of information until it cuts off. The essay is short, sweet, and gives us the founding seed through which the rest of the collection branches and grows. From there a reader is given Vollmer’s life during these essays—little bits of bike riding, the death industry, Grand Theft Auto, ruminations on the professor who changed his life. The essays build like concentric rings in a tree as they grow and crest upward.

It’s hard to talk about Permanent Exhibit without mentioning the collection’s structure. Forty-one essays and not a single paragraph break to be found. I love it. And for a few reasons. This helps to reinforce the idea of the mental process through which our minds go through when thinking—there’s no mental paragraph breaks, the brain simply takes a topic and runs with it. But in contrast, it helps to create this kind of focus throughout the essays. We as readers are engrossed in the words on the page because there’s nowhere for our eyes to wander and break from the flow. The essays are like a slideshow of images: focused and singular until we’re enamored with the next one. But they always stick to us no matter the subject. The structure presents us with a slab of words that makes us want to remember and devour the words before us so we can keep some of the beauty in them for a while longer.

And ultimately everything done with the essays is something that Vollmer does incredibly well throughout this collection—he makes the idea of the personal permanent. While some aspects of an individual change, there’s always this concrete, personal foundation that will subsist forever. And what Vollmer typifies here is what essay collections are: this deeply individual examination of the self and how that self interacts with the world around it.

The mind we’re peering into throughout this collection is one of compassion and principle. To go through this collection is to explore what is essentially Vollmer: the father, the husband, the man who bikes and plays video games. But his mind’s eye, the lens through which we see it all, always casts a light on small moments like enduring terrible pop music after his son’s dental checkup, the circus sideshow acts he saw as a child, or the articles his father emails him. He creates the meaning through observation.

It’s a universal experience, but the idea of this collection, his collection—the exhibit of the self and the personal permanence of the self—creates this fascinating look at Vollmer’s mind.

Drew Barth

Drew Barth (Episode 331) is a writer residing in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida. Right now, he’s worrying about his cat.