Goodbye, JD Salinger

JD Salinger died yesterday, the same Salinger who died to the literary world dozens of years ago when he hid himself away in New Hampshire. Like just about everybody who grew up suburban, and white, I read Salinger with devotion, latching on to his depictions of affluent ennui and existential noodlings, and declared him a soul mate for about two years. He may still be responsible, in an indirect way, for my over-zealous and potentially gratuitious use of commas, parentheses, semi-colons, and other methods of dragging – some would say mutilating – sentences to unnatural, and unwelcome, lengths.

I suppose the next few weeks will see some sort of Salinger mania begin to take over the literary world. I don't know who his executor is, or who will be the guardian of his estate, or what to expect when it begins to be reported what is or is not found in his home in regards to manuscripts. If they were there, I hope he would have had sense to burn them all. I think he would have liked for the silence to continue, and for all of him that remains to be only four slim volumes quietly selling themselves without context or hype.

Viking's loss brings winter blahs

I don't like to post about sports, or politics, because once you do it's often just a rant no one cares about but man, I watched that Vikings game last night and holy cow went through the damn wringer. So many mistakes, but still so many chances to win. And now we get to go back to being a quiet city on the prairie for the rest of the winter. I was looking for a 'before the game' picture, something that showed Minneapolis on a sunny day, fish jumping into the boat, smiling like Wendell Anderson did on the cover of Time so many years ago - Minnesota, the good life! No doubt had the Vikings won I could find just such a picture. As it is, all I have is the "after the game" picture posted there to the left. Bleak, icy, wet, and now, with the Vikings done and the Gophers a disappointment (again) and the T-wolves a disgrace, it leaves only the prospect of the Wild getting hot and making a run to keep the local sports folks away from the razor blades. Put a spring in those skates, boys, and give us some hope till Spring gets here!

As a final insult, the link to Time above goes to an article titled "Worst Time Covers Ever." Jeez, that's just piling it on.

morning haiku

railyard grafitti
cryptic urban scripture crawls
to distant prairies

Dawn in Northeast

My neighborhood has been exceptionally beautiful this winter. Colorful dawns, and days with every gradation of white. It's enough to make me patient for Spring.

Short Story Review: Natasha by David Bezmozgis

This story, like the rest of Bezmozgis’s debut collection Natasha (released in 2004), is narrated by Mark Berman, a proxy for the author’s own immigrant experieince. Born in Latvia in 1973, immigrants to Toronto in 1980, the Bermans live a life of slow ascendancy. The father toils long hours at shit jobs, and by the time Natasha begins, they have finally settled in to a suburban homestead.

Mark is sixteen, on the cusp of North American adulthood and in the nexus where the old ways of Soviet Russia collide with suburban ennui. He sits in basements and gets high. He hangs with his dealer, in full retreat from either world.

Then Natasha comes into his life. Fourteen, a recent immigrant from Moscow, daughter in law to his uncle, who has married Natasha’s mother out of convienence and desperation. Natasha is a perfect neutral, a victim of sexual exploitation completely desensitized to her own history of abuse, whose sole motivation seems to be an escape from the permanent conflict with her mother. But Bezmozgis treats this highly charged situation with a delicate touch, never stooping to pornography or sensationalism. As the marriage of convenience crumbles, and Natasha stands in need of saving, Mark grows, rises, and makes his decisions.

By the end, Bezmozgis has handled so many threads with such delicacy, I can only sit in awe. This may be one of the ten best stories I’ve ready in the past ten years. Or ever. So far, this has been Bezmozgis’s only book, but I’m eagerly waiting for more.

Natasha can also be found in Best American Short Stories, 2005.

SuperTest

This is just a test, folks, don't get too excited.

Spoon and Fork

Lesser known than his sword, the fork and spoon of Damocles were lost for generations before turning up in a diner in Duluth, where they hang over the heads of unknowing tourists to this day.

Short Story Review: Rabioux Rising

I've been reading the Best American Short Stories 2009, edited by Alice Sebold. I do this with some trepidation, as I found Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones (now a major motion picture directed by Lord of the Rings uber-master Peter Jackson) to have been amateurish, shallow, and written with such poor, dead-eared prose I threw the book across the room four times. I only picked it up three. And so, she has been let loose on BASS. How is her editorial taste?

Judging by the first few stories, her ear for stories is as dead as her ear for writing novels. The book's centerpiece may be Rabioux Rising, by Steve De Jarnatt. This was De Jarnatt's first published story, though that fact is skewed by him being an established Hollywood player (he's directed or written several major motion pictures you may have heard of (or not)), and a graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop. There may be talent involved in those two things, but it's not necessarily the talent of writing fiction.

You'd think with that pedigree, the story would make some sense. And a synopsis makes the story sound better than it is. Rubiaux is an double-amputee Iraq war vet and addict who has been locked in his mother's attic for a home-cooked detox session. At the same time, the floodwaters of Katrina are rising, forcing him to consider he just might drown. Perfect Hollywood plot, I'll give you that. But De Jarnett knocks words together and falls back on cliche after cliche rather than developing a writing style, and his character remains a cipher. And the climax, I can't help but give away the ludicrousness of the climax: This guy pulls the metal plate from his own head and uses it to focus the rays of the setting sun on the inside of the attic, thus burning a hole for his escape to the roof.

I can't think of any events in supposedly realistic fiction less realistic than what this guy does with only one arm and one leg. Somehow he manages to a) pull tomato vines into the attic (these are magic tomato vines, by the way - volunteer heirlooms that have climbed 20 feet up the house and kept several perfectly ripe tomatoes as the floodwater beat the hell out of them, but whose roots are weak enough to give when he needs food) b) stacked crates and get on top of them c) crawl through the magically burned roof hole (How is the hole large enough for him in less than half an hour, then extinguished enough for him to crawl through?) And remember that he's also weak from heroin withdrawal in the last three days. How did no one stop this story from getting this far?


I don't know. This whole thing feels written from a sense of entitlement, and anger at the Bush administration (Iraq war BAD! Treatment of homecoming vets BAD! Handling of Katrina BAD!), rather than from an honest investigation of character and situation. Which is another way of my calling it a sell-out, pandering to what people expect to read, rather than what people don't know they need to read. But I can't fault De Jarnett - he's Hollywood, this is what he knows. I can fault Sebold and the series editor Heidi Pitlor. And I can't really care that they have a politcal agenda, but I do care that they have lousy taste. 

End rant.

You can tell how cold it is in my neighborhood by the size and height of the plumes coming off the powerplant down the street. There used to be two other stacks, and all three would billow out massive, twin plumes that spiralled out over the houses like stretched cotton. You could count ten degrees below freezing for every block they stretched over, a plume that came to my place meant it was around twenty below. This is what we get now, a giant ominous cloud rising like godzilla is just about to emerge from the river and wreak havoc on all the neighborhood bars. Too bad Godzilla is a warm-weather monster. We'd get something like Frost-gira, a massive pile of ice shards breathing ice-blasts and glaring with blue-steel eyes. Hey, happy new year everyone.