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SIFF Review: King Of The Ants

King Of The Ants
US, 2003. Dir. Stuart Gordon (WORLD PREMIERE)
6/13 9:30p Egyptian
6/15 11:30a Cinerama

Sean Crawley (Chris McKenna) is a likeable, callow fool drawn into a murder-for-hire scheme. When he attempts to collect his blood money, he’s held captive and tortured in a graphic second act, into which hallucinations and fantasies are intercut. Escaping, he seeks out his murder victim’s wife as his lover, fulfilling one of his fantasies. When she discovers who Crawley is, he accidentally kills her. He then seeks out the thugs he originally killed for and systematically kills them in a climactic confrontation.

This film is better than my summary implies. Unfortunately, I found it less intelligent than it wanted to be. You’re supposed to like Crawley; I thought he was an idiot. The closing scene’s reliance on the vengeance-bound heroism of the self-made man was not appealing to me, not a big Charles Bronson fan. Despite this, there’s serious filmmaking here, delineating an amoral, misanthropic existentialism with an unflinching eye.

—

(originally posted June 10 on the Tablet SIFF Board)

I felt obligated to see and review this film after having seen Gordon’s fascinating, entertaining interview on the Onion A.V. Club web site. Gordon is the director of Re-Animator and other cult fare, as well as Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.

I went with a bit of trepidation, as I am not at all a gorehound or generically interested in horror or slasher flicks.

King of the Ants was adapted from the novel of the same name by Charlie Higson, a British TV comedy writer. Originally published in 1992, the few online encomiums for it I saw were uniformly celebratory; one suspects it belongs to the New British Novelists grouping around Trainspotting, but I found no direct link between them.

At any rate, the thrust of the narrative is similar: what happens if you take a poorly educated, callow young man and instead of thrusting him into the military, a job or family life, hook him up with thugs and torture him for several days? Higson’s answer: he grows an antisocial philosophical system. Fair enough. That’s the serious material the film grows from as well.

My disinterest in and discomfort with screen violence meant that I was was not entertained by the film. Again, that would appear to be a part of the film’s intent. So does the film succeed?

I don’t think it does. It’s brutal and in the end celebrates Crawley as a kind of Randian architect of house demolition. I personally have a bone to pick with Randian existentialism – it’s philosophy for adolescent idiots that seek isolation to confirm their egocentric fantasies of revenge and power – and this certainly colors my view of the film. What I’m uncertain of is whether the film intends to celebrate this worldview. The closing shot – Crawley strides purposefully toward the camera as the house explodes behind him – is such a cliche of the action film that it reads as both celebration and – just maybe – ironic commentary. If it’s supposed to be ironic, however, it’s overly dry and will not be noted as such by the great majority of viewers.

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SIFF Review: Westender

Westender
US, 2003, Dir. Brock Morse
6/13 – 9:30p Broadway
6/15 – 6:30p Broadway

Asbrey of Westender (Blake Stadel) is a medieval swordsman, trailing a crew of brigands in an attempt to reclaim his dead wife’s ring. Shot in verdant Oregon forests, the film’s first half is fairly pedestrian fantasy fare, dimwitted sidekick, flashing swords, rope-bound slave girls, and all. Stadel has an action-hero’s presence; however, a more judicious use of raging tantrums by the script might have been advisable.

The film veers off unexpectedly in the final 45 minutes to depict an arduous desert crossing by the troubled, angry warrior. The last section of the film is nearly wordless. The light and beauty of the landscape against which the character sheds his armor – literally and emotionally – were remarkable.

When at journey’s end, a climactic battle resolves the hero’s quests, the return to genre conventions is a letdown, reading as an appeal for consideration as a back-door pilot.

—

(posted to the Tablet SIFF Board on June 10)

In writing for Cinescape, I became aware of the large numbers of downright kooky independent genre films being produced. I don’t mean so much films that are created with even the least possibility of being distributed in the conventional manner – I mean works whoch are created by obsessed individuals and their extended social networks.

For whatever reason, many of these films are genre works, probably because genre works thrive in the context of marginalized subcultures. People that don’t believe they have access to the center of the culture seek smaller-scale arenas in which to define themselves and their work. From these isolated environments, great works can emerge, and any lover of punk rock or the science-fiction short story will immediately understand my interest in zero-budget indie genre filmmaking.

In the case of Westender, I was disappointed in my hopes for an avatar of this concept of film. It’s relentlessly commercial in production values and displays the common accidental misogyny of a certain style of pulp fantasy writing. This misogyny is most notable in the “mercy killing” of a dying woman, apparently a rape victim – probably intended to convey the idea that the warrior’s code includes mercy, it effectively reiterates the rape, which otherwise would have remained offscreen. Rather than feeling I’d learned something about the character, I felt I’d learned a bit about the age and judgement of the filmmakers.

Despite these flaws, the desert segment of the film was successful on its’ own terms. Inevitable comparisons to Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars aside, the film’s most direct debt in this segment is to A Man Called Horse.

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Somethin' tasty

Fort Ebey State Park and Whidbey Island

Viv and I took advantage of the unseasonably warm weather over last weekend, the first full weekend in June, to camp out at Fort Ebey State park. It’s south by about one-third of Whidbey Island from the bridge at spectacular Deception Pass. You can reach Whidbey from Seattle either by road or by ferry. If you choose to stay off the big boats, the route takes you north to Mount Vernon. There, turn west and drive through the Skagit Valley before heading south again through Oak Harbor.

Mount Vernon happened to be holding a farmers’ market by the banks of the river that flows through town. Viv needed a latte, so we took a pit stop. We’d planned to buy bread on the road, and bought an overpriced loaf at the market. It was good bread, mind you, but we paid too much for it.

While I was there I enjoyed some of the signage typography on the town’s buildings.

We got on the road again, following a familiar route that takes us by a fast-food shack that I constantly forget to take a picture of: “The Net, since 1956.” Apparently the Skagit has a good lead on the rest of us in high-speed networking and so forth. I’m always puzzled, though, by the relatively small size of the building and the refreshing lack of Californiesque bragmobiles parked about the facility. Oh well, it’s probably some sort of distributed-office, miniaturization deal.

Once out of the Skagit, you’re in Military Land. Several active military bases are nearby. While rainbow stickers may be seen with frequency, yellow ribbons, American flags, and hand-painted signs in support of the military were everywhere, some a bit the worse for wear after months of hard service.

The drive into Whidbey passes over the twin spans of the Deception Pass bridge. The parkland abutting the bridge is generally reckoned the most beautiful in the Washington State Parks system. The better known parks, like Rainier and Olympic, are National Parks – the state sorta got the leavings, but geez, what leavings!

We were headed to yet another of the land scraps that are ever-more-shakily administered by a perennially underfunded state parks department. Fort Ebey was used as a coastal defense gun battery emplacement during the end of World War II and opened to the public as a state park in 1967. The gun-emplacement mounts and accompanying bunker system is still in place, overlooking Admiralty Inlet and the waters directly north of Port Townsend. Just a few miles down the island is another state park, also a former military post, Fort Casey State Park. It also offers a campground, but it’s not reservable in advance.

I’d picked out our campsite online, believing, based on a map, that it would be just steps from the water’s edge. Neglecting to consider the strategic elements involved in locating an artillery battery, I hadn’t considered that we might be atop a 300-foot cliff, as indeed we were.

Despite this, the views – and weather, topping 90 degrees – were stunning. We strolled along the flat trail at the bluff’s edge, still hoping to find a route to the beach in our flip-flops. Gnarled, ancient pines, obviously Ents deep in woody slumber, provided shady respite as we followed the cliff, helplessly stopping to ooh and aaah at the view.

Finally, consulting the map with growing consternation, we grew puzzled. “Beach,” it said, an arrow pointing off the map. We kept on, finally finding the trail indicated but noting that is was not a well-maintained trail. In flip-flops and shorts, we were not really prepared for a woodsy lumberjack hike.

At last we reached a point where the trail looped by a breach in a sandwall. A family group mugged for their camera, and we asked if they knew of a beach trail. They were quite puzzled, and began to describe local landmarks and things that had washed away years ago, and finally decided that the cut in the cliff they were occupying was the supposed trail.

I went to the notch and looked at a steep series of eroded sand gullies, a slippery decsent of “only” about 200 feet. A subset of the locals encouraged us to go down. “Oh, it’s easy,” they urged. A voice of reason among them also noted the easy-speakers had just returned from the Andes, and thus nearly any trail might appear easy to them. Viv and I turned back, disappointed.

We had passed a closed trail; the main path we were on showed signs of neglect; and throughout the park were signs of other budgetary limitations. The check-in booth was only manned a total of three hours that day, forcing us to take a special trip to get a park map. Information posted along trails appeared to be outdated or inaccurate from time to time. There were limited numbers of trash receptacles and restrooms.

When we got back to the trail to our campsite, we decided to continue down the bluff trail in the opposite direction we’d taken earlier, toward the gun emplacement site. We walked a few yards down the path and saw a magnificent plateau covered with long, waving grasses. On the plateau was a concrete bunker, and above was the gun emplacement. We went into the cool, pitch-black interior of the man-made cave, and exited the other side.

Back at camp, we made dinner and then returned to the plateau’s long grasses to investigate a trench and to watch the sun set into the water. That night I read Vivian book six of the Illiad by the fire.

The next day, we finally found the beach access, to the north of the gun battery, and walked along the beach, noting the myriad dead crabs, presumably cooked in the heat of the day before when their kelp strands had grounded on the beach. On a snag above us, a bald eagle sat a while before taking wing.

The weather was absolutely perfect again, and it was pleasant to be in the cool ocean air as the sun beat down.

We decided to poke around the nearby small town of Coupeville before leaving, which sits on the shore of Penn Cove, home of Washington’s most-eaten mussels, and the shoreside districts of which are a national historical reserve. Founded in the 1850’s, the small, old-fashioned downtown includes an 1853 blockhouse – one of four nearby, all dating to the 1800’s – and a commercial wharf which was in use in the 1880’s.

The tidal flats under the wharf are covered – absolutely covered – with mussels. The gulls walk along the banks of shellfish, pecking and gulping with less than the usual squawking and squalling. In the wharf-building itself there’s a mounted skeleton of a juvenile grey whale, found dead on Whidbey in 1998, and a tourist gewgaw shoppe.

The shops in the historic area near the wharf tend to the antiquey and baubley, as ever in America’s tiny tourist hamlets. We even poked into a store that featured everything for the dog owner that’s got everything, including hats for your dog and tiny dog-angel ornaments to comfort those seeking the solace of knowledge that the afterlife includes beloved pets.

After learning that the plastic bags of water stapled above the open shop door “keep flies out,” I chuckled, noting the buzzing winged creatures just inside the door. Perhaps they were the beloved pet-sprits; plainly they couldn’t be flies. We moved on.

Toby’s was the only beer-serving establishment open that Sunday afternoon, and so we stopped in for a plate of their repeatedly prize-winning fish and chips, which I must endorse as among the best fish and chips I’ve ever eaten. The front window of the place featured unit stickers of countless military outfits, and there were a couple of well-shorn young men impressing some ladies with tales of derring-do in booths nearby as we ate. In fact, as we ate, the place filled up, and competition for booth space became as cutthroat as in your favorite hipster cafe.

One of the truly striking things about Coupeville, in fact, was the relative lack of crowds. To an extent, this was true at Fort Ebey as well, although the campground was full to capacity. Whidbey is just remote enough, and just working-stiff enough, thanks to the military bases, that it’s in the third rank of attractions among driving distance to Seattle, after the big mountain parks and the San Juans themselves.

Third place in Puget Sound, especially in the summer, is still pretty damn good. The thinner crowds on Whidbey are without a doubt a perfectly good reason to return; anyone who’s ever been stuck in the perpetual, summer-long traffic jam high atop Mount Rainier at the unhappily named Paradise parking lot will have good reason to appreciate an unhurried, crowd-free weekend on Whidbey Island.

(Here are all the photos from the weekend. Anita Rowland has also written about a visit to Coupeville.)

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Seeing green

For years now, I’ve collected a peculiarly American subspecies of handbill, one which seems to bring out the obsessive best in the designers of the material. It’s been a popular subgenre for years, probably longer than I have been alive, and sits right on the border of illegality.

Friends, I am discussing the fake-bill advertising handbill, in which the size, shape, and markings of genuine American currency are imitated, with varying degrees of acuity and detail. The reason for the popularity of the device is not hard to fathom. First, as a handbill, if the fake money is casually discarded in the street, it’s very difficult for a passerby to ignore as it reposes on the sidewalk.

Second, one’s impulse is to immediately pull a bill from your wallet to compare the two works. This impulse toward comparison means that the handbill designers have the liberty of going to town on each discrete element of the design, re-imagining each part of the currency’s iconography in support of their own goals.

Here are some. Click the images to see the bill at 640 pixels wide; from there, click again to see it at 1000 pixels wide.

Additionally, refashioning currency is a recurrent meme in art as well, irresitably merging art and commerce into a reflective unity. I’ll begin with the front and back of such a bill I’ve have for about 15 years, probably the work of a zine artist who now lives in San Francisco. I also have a bill that is unquestionably by this person, but not reproducible here, as rather than employing degenerated xerox imagery on green cardstock, the bill was photocopied on to black cardstock. It’s eerie.

Occupying a middle ground is this $100 playing card:

This bill combines an unusual bluntness with the peculiar typographical choice of a kind of Olde Germanic font, probably intended to convey a message of impending fascist danger. The artist’s urgency of comittment here apparently led them to eschew both the use of color reproduction and the more customary obsessive detailing. Curiously, particularly on the back of the piece, these two tendencies come together to create a note whch bears a distinct resemblance to a Weimar Republic inflation-era mark. Personally, I suspect this to be an accident rather than an intentional reference.

I’m concluding this little show-and-tell with my two favorites in the collection. For balance, I’ll interject this remarkable born-again Christian bill between the 9-11/anti-Bush pieces. This bill is one of my older pieces, and is marked “copyright 1980(?) by Robert H. Hill.” I can’t tell if the date is 1990 or 1980. It’s entirely hand drawn, and really rewards careful scrutiny. Olive branches become loaves and fishes, “One Dollar” becomes “One Savior” and “One Way”, and so on. The hand-drawn nature of the rendering accentuates the act of creation itself as an act of faith and devotion.

The artist has also simplified the design of the bill itself, eliminating the anti-countefeiting measures such as intricate engraving and so forth. Again, this has the effect of increasing the effectiveness of the piece: there’s no way to misunderstand the simple message the artist is interested in communicating.

Finally, we come to what must be regarded as the undisputed masterwork among the collection. It’s so incredibly detailed, so carefully printed, that a doubletake is almost always required to really grasp what it is you’re looking at. The publishers of the work undoubtedly realized this, and upsized the bill from a standard U. S. currency size by about 20%. This is not reflected in these thumbnails, but if you check out the large images, you can see the sizing difference there.

The bill itself is festooned with URLs, none of which I’ve checked out, and it picks up the thread of the N30 bill and runs with it. In fact, it runs to the ends of the earth, to the moon, and back. It’s by far the most obsessively detailed phony bill I’ve ever seen.

Where Robert H. Hill’s simple message was enhanced by a stripped-down presentation, the 9-11 artist’s work is interested in conveying the idea of a sinister, complex world of interlocking interests, cynically exploiting the events of that terrible day to move their international corporate agenda forward. The design of the bill reflects this in every detail, from the spiderwebs in the corners of the front of the bill to the hidden corporate logos that appear throughout the surface of the detailed engraving.

Having a hard time spotting them? Here’s a couple. On the back of the bill, to the left and the right of the circular seals, a leafy decorative element curls up and over the thin white rule separating the central cartouche of the design from the border. Click into the very largest view of the bill, which will be 1250 pixels wide. Look in the center of that curling foliage. It’s the Gulf Oil logo!

Now look in the lower border band, still on the back. Look directly to the left and also above the large word “ONE”. In order, from left to above the white band, moving clockwse, we see: “HALLIBURTON”, the masonic order symbol, the Lockheed-Martin logo, and neslting under foliage again and in the shade of an oil derrick, the ARCO logo.

On the front of the bill, the internal decorative fringe atop the central cartouche border at the bottom of the space is a repeated motif of oil derrick and oilfield pump. In the numerals “9-11” on the back of the bill, the letters “C I A” are faintly visible. This is only a sampling of the incredble amount of semi-hidden material visible on the bill.

Clearly, the objective is to provide a kind of miniature training ground for the sort of perceptual experience the designers and publishers of the bill hope that people will have upon encountering it, the experience of looking around at the world and forever seeing new and sinister patterns. Whatever your opinion of the world-view expressed in the bill, it’s a tour-de-force of this particular school of design.

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How's that again?

An argument for increased sensitivity in the proofing and decision-making process among dental advertisers in The Seattle Weekly. From mid-May, this was going to run here when my disk crash went down.

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A True Relation of William The Blind's ARGALL

Argall
William T. Vollmann
746 pp. Viking, 2001.
ISBN.nu listing

I already ran a quick piece on Vollmann’s Argall, and noted, foolishly, that I hoped to complete a formal book review of the work before going on about the book for another five hundred words, which permitted me to start to say what I wanted to without expending any particular intellectual energy. Absurdly, yet obviously, my need to review the piece became much less urgent as a result.

Nonetheless, it’s past time, so here we go.

Argall is volume three of Vollmann’s seven-volume “imaginary history” of the mythic points of contact between the native peoples of North America and the inbound Europeans, Seven Dreams. In my earlier gesture toward a review of Argall I outlined the plan and scope of the series, which is not necessarily published in the chronological order of its’ subjects. Thus, volume six, The Rifles, preceded Argall to the bookseller’s stall. To date, including these two books, four of the seven volumes have seen print.

Argall tackles what is likely to be the best-known of the historical-cum-mythic events that Vollmann will tackle in the series, the fateful encounter of one Pocahontas and one Captain Smith of the Jamestowne colony in the reign of King James, father of Elizabeth. Previously he’s tackled the Viking colony at l’Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland; Franklin’s ill-fated polar expedition in the mid-19th century, and the arrival of French missionaries among the Huron in the 1500’s. While I have never seen subjects listed for future volumes, it would be reasonable to expect a work that covers the encounter on the plains at Little Big Horn, possibly with reference to the later one at Wounded Knee; perhaps one covering the meeting of the Aztec and Spaniard, and so forth.

My interest in Vollmann’s work is multifold. I was introduced to his writing not as a reflection of his status as one of the most interesting, ambitious, and challenging writers of his generation, but because he is the son of one of my father’s long-time colleagues and close friends. I first met him when we were both teenagers, but I can hardly say we know one another.

When he was in Seattle for the release of his fugue-like, carefully developed collection of short stories, The Atlas, I introduced myself and expressed hope that we might correspond or have a beer together sometime. This was reciprocated, but due to laziness and ill-fortune that’s not yet happened. He did not have a recollection of our childhood encounters, I think.

At any rate, what a pleasure it’s been to come across his work. It’s very nearly perfectly to my tastes, although his fascination with squalor and extremes surpasses mine. His playful intensity in the use of language and his commitment to a kind of transparent authorial subjectivity and honesty are both unique, in my experience, and of a depth that invests them with the resonance of poetry. They are not merely the work of a clever wordsmith, but also express perceptions and emotions that can be hard to convey.

For example, the works of Tom Stoppard are often knocked for a kind of surface gleam that is said to prevent deeper emotional resonance. I believe this criticism is misguided, but it’s founded on the density of Stoppard’s wordplay: it’s not uncommon for viewers or readers to have to work so hard to keep up with the language that the material is drained of emotive intensity.

In Vollmann’s work, this is not the case. He certainly engages in pyrotechnic displays of both structural and linguistic virtuosity, but the material he covers is generally so compelling – or so distasteful – that it never flags into coolness.

Argall features Vollmann’s most mannered linguistic game to date. The entire book (save the eighty or so pages devoted to glossaries, personal and place names, chronology, and exhaustive sourcing notes) is written in a kind of neo-Elizabethan English, complete with shifting spellings of common words, names, and places. The frontispiece of the book announces the game. It emulates, with a modicum of winking, the frontispieces of any number of pre-modern publications, with their exhaustively florid typography presenting a long-winded précis featuring the citation of a higher being. The higher being is Okeus, the name that Powhatan and his people gave to their god or patron demon. Reader, mark it well.

A passage, selected at random:

While his Soldiers doff’d their armor at last, then cleansed it by rolling it in a barrel of sand & vinegar until it glistered again like unto new, Sweet John (fearing to un-brigandine himself, on account of President Radclyffe’s malice) strolled about the Fort, discovering that most were sick or idle, as ever, and the rest dissatisfied.

–page 286, Argall

It might seem that the lingo, daunting as it is, would prove wearing. Vollmann has such control over the language that one readily adapts to it. This is partly due to a sort of stagecraft. The language he employs is a gesture to genuinely antique language, but once one adjusts to the unexpected frills of “doff’d” and “glistered” and “un-brigandine,” the architecture of his stage-flat stands revealed as contemporary spoken English.

Under the surface of the ornamented, metric prose, Vollmann’s up to still more trickery. He writes of social activity between the people from whom Pocahontas comes in plain language, if there’s no European on stage. While retaining the rhythms of the rest of the prose, he employs shorter sentences and has “doff’d” the flowery ornament-words. When the narrative centers on this or that individual in the company of the English colonists, a similar shift in voice occurs. Vollmann notes in the end matter that he has sought to employ not only temporally appropriate phrasing and floridity in the prose and speech but also to use vocabulary elements that are regionally specific to the region of England that the individual character in question came from.

The sum effect of this meticulous craftsmanship is to cast the characters in the book into remarkable relief and definition. It’s truly striking, as one swiftly gains a sense of the persons he’s writing about without fully apprehending how it’s done. He allows the character’s voice to overflow the directly attributable quotes and thoughts and to momentarily appear to inhabit the authorial space.

Of course, for all this mummery, it’s Bill, Bill, Bill behind the stage, and as is customary, he interweaves direct personal narrative – of his visits to England, his visits to the strangely barren site of the original colony in Virginia. He looks at the graves and rusted buckles of the multitude who perished of starvation and disease. They lie next to a river so full of fish that it was a constant source of comment by the starving, poxed aristocrats of the little fort by the River James.

Adding to my enjoyment of the book was my family’s Christmas Eve, 2000 visit to the colony site itself. The visit enabled me to more clearly visualize certain aspects of the locale. Additionally, while I was reading the book, National Geographic’s earlier article about recent archaeology at the site was consulted. They published a reconstructed view of the stockade and information about the Starving Time, when so many of the colonists died.

Vollmann closely focuses the book on the historical relationship of Pocahontas and John Smith, concluding that there was no lovers bond between them, but as he imagines it, a loving relationship as between an uncle and niece or even siblings, of a sort. The Native girl was truly a child when they first met and eventually married another man in the colony before traveling to England with her husband, were she died still quite young.

He pulls no punches, evenhandedly recounting the ways of low-intensity conflict on all sides. He renders the intricate political and social relationships between the Native Americans in their villages and the complex weave of familial relationships and personalities that constitute their society. He carefully delineates the dangerous ground of class and privilege that both fires the ambitions of and regularly kills off the Englishmen in their rusting helmets and listing stockade.

In fact, he’s obscurely chosen to name the book after one Captain Argall, in mocking contrast to the failed ambitions of Smith. Argall was a sea captain who was intimately bound up with the colony from its’ inception, and whose journeys of resupply gave him much the advantage of constant exposure to the swirl of London court and royal politics. The lesson of the book, based on Smith’s unfortunate trajectory, appears to be: do not serve your masters with the sweat of your brow, but with the bended knee, the embroidered lace cuff, and with large quantities of gold and treasure obtained in any way whatsoever.

As noted previously, of the published books, Fathers and Crows is surely the most accessible of the published works in the Seven Dreams to date. However there’s simply no question that Argall, with its’ intricate construction and obsessive craftsmanship, is the highest literary accomplishment in the series thus far. By now, I suppose it’s possible that the next Dream may be deep in final editing: from a purely selfish perspective, I surely hope so. If Vollmann continues to leap forward from book to book in this manner, there’s simply no way to know what to expect.

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McSweeney's 10: McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales

Edited by Michael Chabon
ISBN.nu

I picked this up at the same time as I did McSweeney’s 9, thinking it was a McSweeney’s spinoff or one-shot like the Hornby music thingy. It’s a stunt book, guest edited by the reigning high priest of high-and-low-brow, the Pulitzer-prize-winning Spider-man scribe (HA! that was fun to write) Michael Chabon, and it delivers exactly what it promises: McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. Out in March (published, apparently as a gift to me, on my birthday), I just now completed the book. I read it as I once did Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction – over many short sittings, generally a story at a time, and had a great time. The book collects a genuinely impressive array of literary stars and up-and-comers with grizzled vets of genre writing.

Chabon welcomes readers in an agreeably reactionary introduction in which he effectively points out that the fashionably reflective, quiet, “moment of truth” short story has driven “plot” out of respectable literary journeyman’s bag of tricks. While the veracity of this claim is disputable, the essay is also a recognizable permutation of the genre writer’s defensive frustration with the ghettoization of American letters. Chabon proposes to rectify the matter by guest-editing an issue of McSweeney’s in which Each! Story! Will! Thrill! And! Amaze! As you might have guessed, this is that book.

One odd feature of the publication is the large number of mountain-climbing stories – apparently, if contributors couldn’t bring themselves write a real genre piece, a mountain-climbing story would do. I felt, in general, that these attempts at Outside-style adventure travel writing fell flat. This is possibly because I have a prejudice against adventure travel writing in general, a distaste which goes back to my dislike for Hemingway, so I shall refrain from reviewing or citing any of the mountaineering pieces.

(UPDATE: Upon reflection, it may be that I’m mischaracterizing these pieces – at least two of them concern the neocolonial power relations inherent in guided adventure-travel getaways, rather than the testosterone-and-landscape material I associate with the likes of Jon Krakauer.)

The balance of the stories (in my mind, about two-thirds of the book) are a mix of genre writing, from straight-ahead science fiction to a delightful cops-and-robbers piece set in 1930’s Oklahoma from the well-tempered pen of Ellmore Leonard. Neil Gaiman contributes a Gaimanesque memoir –cum-ghost story, Michael Moorcock weighs in with one of his yummy pastiches on prewar juvenilia, and Stephen King bangs out a deft post-apocalyptic tale which forcefully reminds one what a subtle writer he can be.

Moorcock’s piece offers the tale of the metatemporal detective Sir Seaton Begg‘s well-known intervention in the Nazi Party’s Night of the Long Knives. It should be noted that Moorcock is far too crafty to even hint that he’s writing about actual historical events, or that in his version, Himmler dies rather than the bumbling brownshirts.

I have always loved King’s short stories much more than his unutterably cruel and sadistic novels – I am always amazed that my fellow Americans take pleasure in these extended meditations on the nature and practice of cruelty and torture. You are all bad people, and should be ashamed of yourselves. Does your mother know you read that stuff? King’s a saint, though, and writes like an angel when he’s keeping to word-count.

So far so good, eh? It’s sweet pleasure itself to read these people’s work in conjunction with other, more literarily conventional writers’ works, and in certain cases, where the non-genre folks put aside the fear or distaste or disinterest that has kept them out of the pool previously, they rise to giddy heights on the shock of the fireworks.

Predominant among these stories is Chuck’s Bucket, a hilarious, beautifully pomo sf story by Chris Offutt, son of Andrew Offutt, a prolific fantasy and sf author. In the tale, a blocked writer named, unaccountably, Chris Offutt, meets an academic who’s perfecting a time machine, and uses the time machine to get sufficiently unblocked that he can turn in his assignment for a magazine, McSweeney’s, assigned by the scalawag and generally more-successful author Michael Chabon to the somewhat sad-sack Offutt. The story struck me as so funny, and is so knowingly attuned to the conventions of the hack stories that certainly do populate the pages of many’s the pulp magazine, that it sort of took flight, managing to speak emotional truths at the same time as it took a burlesque turn on the stage of my mind.

Chabon himself contributes a pastiche, The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance. It’s an alternate-history sf tale set in Victorian Colonial Louisiana in the aftermath of the failed Ohio Rebellion of 1896. Interestingly, the story is a straight homage to none other than Michael Moorcock’s wonderful alternate-history Warlord of the Air series. Chabon does a great job on the too-short tale, which is effectively an origin story, setting the stage for full-blown serials should Chabon find himself suddenly out of work and in need of penny-a-word pickup gigs. It’s of particular literary interest to read Chabon’s work after the Moorcock piece. I came away from Chabon’s story confirmed in my appreciation for his work, and hope he takes the time to proceed directly into straight-up sf for a time. I could tell he read the right stuff when he was kid the first time I laid eyes on Kavalier and Klay.

However, and in some ways this is not surprising, the most original of the stories is by hometown hero Sherman Alexie. He turns in a brief zombie story called Ghost Dance. In it he imagines the shambling bodies of Custer’s long-dead Seventh Calvary rising from the graves at Little Big Horn. Alexie’s unique voice delivers the story with both greater brutality than is usual either in his writing or in horror generally, and manages to both respect and expand the boundaries of the genre he’s working in. At the same time the story packs an unmistakable rhetorical punch, which derives directly from the specific genre elements he employs. It’s quite a piece.

A brief aside about Alexie’s work – his stuff seems to me to be growing stronger with each story I read, and his stuff was pretty good to begin with. It’s getting to the point that I’ll be scouring for everything he’s ever written quite soon, I suspect.

So, in short, dear hearts, if you cleave to your Cheever, you might feel free to take a pass on this. But if you share the fine, manly tastes of the brighter classes among us, and savor the ozone tang of a laser-scored orbital liner on the tarmac after the dawn run from Istanbul, you’ll find McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales a suitably improving and civic-minded read.

From the reading deck, this is your Literary Commander, signing off.

Posted on by mwhybark

I'll huff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down

Ed Emmer’s Wolfe essay from BOT is now available as scanned images hosted on my imageserver.

Ed, a fast talking brainslinger of no mean wit, wrote the nine-page stemwinder, a hilarious, withering dismissal of a specific essay that Mr. Tom Wolfe published in Harper’s just as the hardback edition of “The Bonfire of the Vanities” hit shelves.

Here’e how Mr. Wolfe‘s website describes the essay:

In 1989 Wolfe outraged the literacy community with an essay in Harper’s magazine called “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast.” In it he argued that the only hope for the future of the American novel was a Zolaesque naturalism in which the novelist becomes the reporter — as he had done in writing The Bonfire of the Vanities, which was recognized as the essential novel of America in the 1980s.

(“literacy community“?)

As Ed warms to his topic, the dismissal becomes broader and ever-more peppered with funny invective. It’s the literary equivalent of watching a friend grow frothy in rantful wroth over a couple glasses of beer.

Ed, as Anne has noted, also sweated his fevered brow in a heroic effort to precisely duplicate the layout of the original essay.