Definitely Non-Required Reading

Okay, this is the last anthology I’m going to pick up. I’ve had a short attention span recently, so jumping into a short-story before I go to bed has been the only answer. But this one has really put me off. Damn you McSweeeneeeeeeys!

Technically, The Best American Non Required Reading 2006 is not McSweeney’s, but it was edited by Dave Eggers along with a team of high-schoolers from San Francisco tied to his 826 Valencia school program, so ah, well, it’s basically McSweeney’s okay? Do we get that?

I was a fan of McSweeney’s for a while, followed whatever books came out, but gradually I dipped into their website less and less, and finally dropped off altogether. I am still curious about their short-fiction anthologies, as you can see below, but it takes a lot for contemporary short-fiction to get my attention, so that’s been waning too. This is not the first “Non Required Reading” I’ve read– I have found in the past collections some of the best and in someway off-beat stories from the year, culled from regular print journals like Zoetrope to online sources like the Onion. This year’s contains all that but also has broadened its scope to include short graphic works, an inexplicable excerpt from a screenplay (Me and You and Everyone we Know by Miranda July—dreadfully dull) as well as other odd ephemera. But somehow this one was just not right.

So what’s the problem? Well let’s start with the fiction: limp and meandering, and it really failed to convince me of how it got the editors attention in the first place. And the non-fiction selections seem to be chosen not for their quality of the writing but because rather the social importance. Here’s the Katrina story. Here’s David Rakoff yakking off about becoming an American Citizen in post 9/11. Here’s one about Iraq. Here’s a story about losing religion in America. And listen. I fucking hear you. But if you’re putting out a book with Eggers’ name on the cover aren’t you preaching to the choir? Perhaps I’m being too harsh here—but seriously now. All of these would be fine if they were well told—but after the great examples of New Journalism found in Wolfe’s anthology—they just fall flat. The overall tone is reminiscent of the recent skewering of This American Life as done by the Onion—“we couldn’t be more pleased with ourselves.”

So not to be too much of a hater and to save you the trouble of having to do more than flip through this sucker, let me give you the goods. The 3 graphic short stories are all fine, which include aJoe Sacco piece set in the contemporary America about human rights and a really funny little story by Guy Delisle about being working for an animation company under Kim Jong Il in North Korea. George Saunders’ travelogue of Dubai ain’t bad. The collection actually begins with one of it’s best pieces called Shipwreck by Cat Bohannon an odd, poetic investigative journalism piece (if you can imagine such a thing) set in “Plastination City”, aka Dalian, a Chinese factory town that processes the corpses used in the Body Worlds exhibition. It’s really the best thing in the book—really hits on what she thinks we are looking for in the exhibit besides the macabre. And the excerpts from Chuck Norris Facts are still funny. “There is no chin behind Chuck Norris’s beard. There is only another fist.” Maybe 2007 will be a better year… or maybe I’m just out of the demographic for these books now… either way I’m not encouraged to pick up the next volume.

Aliens, Mutants and Telepathic Velociraptors

Had a longer post here, in brilliant prose, which somehow has been eaten by WordPress. So here’s the
short short version.  Just finished reading the latest volume of Runaways. I got addicted to the digest versions after writing a story about them for the Globe and Mail last year.

Runaways might be the most highly original comic-book set in the Marvel Universe—by taking the idea of super-powered teens and going completely in the other direction. Runaways is about a group of teenagers who discover that their parents are actually super-villains, part of a team called the Pride. The teens then, well, run away, stealing the source of each of their parents powers as they do so.

And how’s it different?Well to start with, the Runaways aren’t superheroes. They don’t wear costumes. They are just young people trying to do what’s right—but suspicious of any sort of authority after their upbringing. This makes their decisions more realistic, closer to the motivations found on Heroes, mixed with the ennui of My So Called Life, with a bit of Party of Five worked in for the orphan factor. It’s easier to compare it to a television show than a comic-book– just has the mix of serial storytelling has been lifted from their pages, blended with the soap-opera like relationship stories more commonly found on the screen.

Their story is set in LA, not Manhattan. And this is a bigger move than you think. Vaughn makes the most of his setting, using L.A.’s urban dislocation, where everything’s separated by huge freeways. The Runaways are essentially on their own more often than not. This is a big difference between the claustrophic canyons of skyscrapers and subway tunnels that Spider-Man and Daredevil fight crime in. In Runaways, the only thing worse than their parents is public transit. 

It’s not the deepest read out there, but more original than 99% of the other crap being put out by Marvel right now. There’s a lot more relationship drama than you’d expect—but I’m fine with that. Since Buffy has gone off the air it’s the only place for me to get my metaphorical-fantasy character fix.  This crossover is intriguing–as Buffy’s Joss Whedon is taking over the reins of the series for the next volume.  In the first issue he’s already relocated the team to Manhattan…    

Follow-up

Tipped off to this from Mingus T’s mighty site.  Good follow-up to all this talk about non-fiction.
VONNEGUT

“I think it can be tremendously refreshing if a creator of literature has something on his mind other than the history of literature so far. Literature should not disappear up its own asshole, so to speak.”

Why We Write

I’ve been getting paid as a freelance writer now for just over 2 years, and have been drawn to it long before that. While I was in university I wrote for a number of different papers, which is probably where I got my first stab at journalism. I did it for a number of reasons I guess–because I loved to see my own name in print; because it got me into things I wanted to get into; because it was fun to see what I could do with words and sentences, how to tell jokes on the page; what rhythms you need to actually be funny, to make a point; how damn nice it was to have something you could hold in your hands even if it was going to be thrown out with the trash the next week. I did it because I get excited about topics; I feel compelled to be the one to explore them; because through exploring them, by directly talking to the people involved, whether its authors or comic-creators or subway sketchers or black-market japanese vintage fashion hunters; I feel that’s how I understand their lives, and a little bit more about what I find mysterious and intriguing about life as a whole.

But after all of this, I never really sat down and thought about the big picture. What am I getting at. Why do I do this? What is this freelance game I’m playing, and who are the other players? What really is my motivation in all this and what am I trying to accomplish with my words? Because as most freelancers will know, it sure as hell ain’t the pay.

And then I read this essay by Tom Wolfe called The New Journalism, from an anthology he edited in the mid-seventies of the same name. And in that essay he hit on exactly the motivations that drive me to do what I do, and the modes in which I do them. See, for Wolfe, he was writing in a time when New Journalism was something that was still being made up. Now, we take it for granted, the first or third person immersive, fiction-like experience of magazine feature or any other non-fiction writing frequently found in pop-interviews of celebrities, but not just that, but all topics as well. It’s everywhere now, and I think it’s practitioners take it for granted. And don’t consider why they do it. Or How exactly. And what is driving them. If you can see what your means are , what the actual techniques you are employing are, than you can use them to much greater effect. I never went to journalism school, I actually openly deride people who talk about “J-School”– it seems so formulaic to me, and so against the point. I want to go against the grain. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be conscious of technique and form, and why the hell I’m doing this anyway.

Besides heralding the rise of New Journalism as the first genuinely new form of writing in English in the last hundred years, Wolfe also very much puts it in its place next to the novel, which for so many years has been the benchmark of all literary achievement. According to Wolfe that has been undone, and the novel has been surplanted, as the New Journalists have usurped it’s techniques and melded it with true and deep observation of real life, of low down dirty life, and in doing so created a form which is more compelling, more gripping to the reader than high and mighty literature. This is why he suggests that so much of the novel, while still looking down on the grubby hacks who now crowd the shelves with their bestselling non-fiction, have switched to fabulism, to magic-realism; as they no longer have a monopoly on the big Truths; they have to grasp at them in some other way that can’t be discredited for lack of research. I’d also guess that this is why so much fiction, so much “literary fiction” is mired in the capital “P” poetic mode… the lugubrious liquifaction of the Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje’s etc; who make Canadian writing into something precious and deadly dull.

Bring on real life man! That at least has got some sparks in it.

Oh and just to further complicate matters, there’s this New New Journalism happening now too. What the Hell’s that all about?

Next up: Comic Books!