Caution: Don’t Read While Eating

I’d heard about Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love long before I ever decided to read it. It was the kind of book that gets talked about with tones of respect from other writers, especially Mark Askwith, who would say You have to read Geek Love! I’d also heard that it’s one of Chuck Palahniuk’s favourite books and after reading a few chapters it is not hard to see why.

 Geek Love is about a family of circus freaks and geeks, whose parents strike on a golden idea, experimenting with chemicals and radioactive substances during pregnancy to give their kids the special “gifts” they need to support themselves in the carnival life. Our narrator Olympia is an albino dwarf hunchback, but this alone is not enough to make her special in a family which includes Arturo, the flipper-handed Aqua-Boy; Illy and Ephy, the Siamese Twins; and later Chick, who can move things with his mind.

 Never before have I had such a visceral reaction to reading a book. I read during meals, and this is the only book I’ve read that has made me feel sick to have food in my mouth nearly every time I picked it up. That’s some powerful words! And yet as I was disgusted, I was compelled to keep reading. That’s the real trick of this book, is that it keeps you caring about the characters just to find out how awful things will turn out.

Geek Love dares you to empathize with monsters basically, people in extraordinary circumstances, turning the knife on what we call normal. It’s one of the things I like about Barbara Gowdy in this respect, who asks you to feel for necrophiliacs and more recently, child abductors.

You can see the roots of Palahniuk’s fiction in this book; his Invisible Monsters for one, the massive cults of Fight Club for another. But most of all, I think the lesson of Geek Love is not to limit yourself while writing; but to take your premise to its logical extreme. This is something I also heard from Susanna Clarke, a lesson she got from Neil Gaiman. (Why NOT just kick everybody out of Hell and see what happens?)  When you’re writing, don’t hold back on the scope of your story. Push your imaginative world to the most fantastic depths. Books like this show that a reader who empathizes with your character and their ambitions will follow them all the way.

1 Year

My Mind is on Fire

And I can’t sleep– which is really the point of this blog.

So rather than dreaming under my duvet while holding my beautiful wife, I’m lying there spinning my around in my head what my favourite books are of all time. See I just finished Geek Love, and I think it might be one of the best books I’ve ever read. And then I pause, and think, hang on a minute.

There has to be more than that. To start with there’s Money. Pyrotechnics pop in every single sentence on every single page of that book. It pops. It sings. It’s goddam cocaine whiskey stripper excess turned into a book.

Then there’s House of Leaves, a sprawling, gothic, labyrithine, unbeatable, unassailable, haunted house in book form that through all it’s postmodern tricks and messy messy moments manages to open up a big black hole into the darkest well of fear in anyone’s soul.

And what about David Mitchell? Cloud Atlas, Number 9 Dream? He’s now one of my favourite authors and I’ve only read two books!

I could go on here, but then I get shut down cause there’s still ULYSSES waiting at the start of the twentieth century to kick every book’s ass; a book built of bricks an entire city in a day in a hundred different ways with a lineage stretching back to the dawn of storytelling itself. A gauntlet thrown down to anyone who ever dare to write a novel again; How do you get over that, y’know?

But waiting before him is everything from before… Moby Dick; Villette; Jane Eyre; stretching back to the Odyssey itself.

This is going to need some thought.

More on Geek Love later.

Hibernation

Sometimes you’re looking for a challenge when you pick up a book. Something that can really push your boundaries, of what you know, of how to write, of how to read. Other times you just want to escape. That was the choice I was making when I went to indigo to cash a gift card my sister gave me for Christmas. I stared down at the new Mark Z. Danielewski, the author of the labyrinth-in-book House of Leaves. His new book Only Revolutions literally goes forwards and backwards, telling a love story from two sides. The author recommends you read the book 8 pages at a time, and then flip it over to read the other side for another 8 pages. And then back. And I thought… um…. No.

So I went with the Ladies of Grace Adieu instead. It’s winter. It’s time to go underground. Retreat a little. Let the sap slow. So. I picked it up. LoGA is a collection of short-stories by Susanna Clarke, a sequel of sorts to her massive 18th century dualing magician romp Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. This new book is set in the same England, and focuses on elements that got left out of that story, and at the end you realize that it is a lot more of a magical place than you thought. Reminiscent of the best of Neil Gaiman, although I would say that she surpasses him in what she has done with prose. The stories are written in a number of different styles, from more reserved Jane-Austen style voice to a Robbie-Burns Scottish dialect. This book focuses more on the world of faerie, which proves to be consistently capricious, alien, curious, fragile and deadly. It’s so strange imagining Emma-like heroines running into these majesterial creatures, but quite enjoyable. My favourite story in the bunch is The Adventures of Tom and David, about a fairy lord and a Jewish doctor who go on adventures, and debate their distinct points of view through the English countryside. Both come from an ancient tradition, one with a moral tradition, the other decidedly without.

Anyhow, I reluctantly surfaced from this book, hoping for more to come. There’s not to much more winter left, but its the kind of book that you can sink into and not worry if the snow would never stop.

A Guilty Pleasure

Did a review for Quill recently about cartoonist Joe Matt’s most recent collection Spent. I think it turned out all right. You’ll be able to read it up on their site soon.

Till then, look at this amazing cover, and just imagine what Joe Matt might be doing to that poor bed.

Dang.

 

 

 

Further journeys into the Weird

Continuing my journey into the occult by reading Disinformation: The Interviews, a selection of extensive outtakes from a television show run by The Disinformation Company. The book was part of my research for the 23 Enigma piece for the Post; it containing a more recent interview with Robert Anton Wilson.

I sometimes get caught in a book though; reading it just for the sake of finishing it when I start it, even if I’m not particularly liking it. I just like the sense of completion. So with that I made my way through the dozen or so interviews conducted by the author and host of the show Richard Metzger. Now Metzger struck me as a very familiar character, an autodidact with an interest in the occult and the bizarre; the darker sides of alternative culture which before the internet were only available in crappy paperbacks, photocopied zines and the Re/Search series of books. This made their knowledge quite specialized; treasured it seems. Made the owners of it feel like they too were secret wizards! And that well… just seems like so much hippie bullshit at this point.

And yet; there were a number of excellent articles in this book. Grant Morrison was tremendously revealing, of his own personality, and actual experiences with mysticism and the uncanny that have been poured into his comics. Douglas Rushkoff had a tremendously optimistic view of how to survive in corporate culture; there isn’t really a corporation there at all, just people who are as alternative as those on the outside as well. Like, the lucky few who get hired as ad-directors or editors are just as likely to have piercing or be into black-metal these days as anybody. So the man doesn’t really exist—it’s just what we do within these systems. Interesting. But then… well… there’s an assortment of performance artists and painters whose work leans towards the transcendental… and that’s where it loses me entirely. Hmmn. In sum, perhaps best to stick with the website.

Or perhaps their book 50 Things You’re Not Supposed to Know. Surprised to see this book appear now in video form on the George Strombo show.

Book videos on the web man!