Posts Tagged ‘Spencer Dew’

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A Review of “The hairpin tax” by David Appelbaum

Saturday, November 13th, 2010

Spencer Dew

milkweed steam
blows across the fuchsia
fly caught in courtship

container later
an amber wand
electrics hair

fear another
white Turk brain
bring an amulet

This is “Coming revolution,”  in full, from David Appelbaum’s The hairpin tax. Beginning with a piece entitled “Origin of the work in art”—where we go from caves to “old masters” to “this lidded tomb”—Appelbaum’s little chapbook piles the language on thick, “black syrup/ Winnebago” (14) and “razor-back sleuth/ ever-dying twin” (9) and “fake brown vinyl makeup/ leans along against a stud/ scored with cigarette burns.”

These “haunted trash words” can be, sometimes, rich, with seemingly intentional puns—“as on the goad ahead”—and crafted couplings of words—“edifying skirr of a fan,” “jagged edge along/ thistle spines a comb.” “Swagger craft at/ the new dame,” Appelbaum says, nicely, “Tucson rust-pocked/ arch roost/ but neither local nor/ germane.” As poems, however, such fragments don’t always click into place, leaving some pages of The hairpin tax reading too much like they’ve been produced by the tumble of the bingo hopper. Fair enough, especially as the text ends on a note at once self-reflexive and inconclusive, a longing left gaping into white space on the page. But then Appelbaum has to go and ruin it all, affixing a self-aggrandizing “Afterword,” which affects the reader like a chugged half bottle of cough syrup immediately after a meal, bludgeoning away all the earlier subtleties of flavor.

“The fragmentary poems are of flight, written in the full fury of movement from a known habitat to one full of strangeness,” Appelbaum insists. “The uncanny is their constant envoy. They enter into things at an obtuse angle and forget their origin, beyond good sense, beyond good taste and use of time.” It is such observations that go beyond good sense, that test the patience of readers, who should not have to listen to an author, whose poems we still hold in our hands and are capable of judging on their own visceral merits, go on about his own “excessively complex meanings.” More attention to the poems, and less to praising his own accomplishments, would have been a wiser path for Appelbaum to pursue.

Official Codhill Press Web Site

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A Review of “Lambs of Men” by Charles Dodd White

Friday, November 5th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“The night was cool, the wrack of the marsh heavy. A chevron of geese cut noisily overhead as they passed across a gibbous moon.” Such is the prose of Charles Dodd White’s tale of a man returned to Appalachia from the war, haunted by visions that “came back in grotesque shapes that were but masks of the waking world” and manning a military recruitment office next to a coffin shop. As with that symbolism, sometimes White lays on the language a little too thick in trying to conjure a lost time, a lost place:

By midday, he had come onto a wind-scoured road trafficked with every sort of commotion bound in or out of the Carolina Lowcountry. Even the occasional Model T truck gave a cheeky honk as it flew by, raising smell whirlwinds of dust. The daily mania of commerce in the vicinity of Beauford was a stark contrast to the regimented order of a training day on the island. Here, men and woman in sundry raced along the road, their colorful clothing whipped by the breeze. The variety was something of a poke in the eyeballs for Hiram, having been for so long accustomed to a shallowly deviating hue of green.

Such a paragraph, from the novel’s first chapter, exemplifies the problem that exists throughout; there is never a sense of an ease of phrasing—nothing here seems to have naturally formed itself into words, nor are any of these words particularly perfect. The poke in the eyeballs is the overwrought quality, the too-crafted description, the too-packed paragraph. And such language—rather than immersing readers in a the world of violence and death that White lays out for his protagonists, a father and son—distances the reader, discourages deeper wanderings into these mountains. “Hiram breathed out and let the preacher wince in the dusty sulk of the office made claustrophobic by the cigarette smoke,” for instance; such lines, rather than conveying an unshakable image, sound like tongue-twisters, a catalog of words, each too lovingly clung to for the wrong reasons. And the language occluded, leaving the hooch runner describes as having a “smile as wide as greed itself” invisible behind the cliché. White has his moments, sometimes, and some readers will surely be drawn into this tale, echoing as it does, albeit a bit too intentionally, certain tropes from Cormac McCarthy or Charles Frazer. There is a murder, a posse, a corpse that needs to be dug up. And there is an attempt at deep reflection on the mortality itself, though many readers will find the writing, along the way, to be like so many rusty bear traps scattered across their path.

Old ghosts kept to these mountains. In running from them, Hiram had thought he put them away, dispelled them somehow. But he now saw himself for the fool he was. Coming back into the hill country, he realized he was the one who haunted the land. Those ghosts, they belonged here more than he ever would.

Quite a lot of haunting, of several sorts, is happening here, but that most needful haunting of the reader by the word, of the story as something that lingers on, visceral, for the person who has read it—that is something White doesn’t manage to pack inside this book.

Official Charles Dodd White Web Site
Official Casperian Books Web Site

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A Review of “We know what we are” by Mary Hamilton

Saturday, October 23rd, 2010

Spencer Dew

This beautifully produced chapbook–the winner of Rose Metal Press’s fourth annual short story chapbook contest, judged and with an introduction by Dinty W. Moore–features an unsettling letterpress printed ribcage on the cover and deals out short pieces driven by free-wheeling first person voices and a surrealist logic anchored solidly in the concrete, such that, for instance, we have

I am a long coat, a black duster, the kind that hangs off your shoulders and brushes your palm. The kind that nicks the backs of your knees and parts open front and back to allow for movement. The kind of coat that makes you taller, kinder, ghost-like. I don’t know,

and

It’s one of those things like how a riddle works its way into the notches in your sinus cavity and lingers and infects and wakes you at night and you try every possible path to resolution, and still you can’t figure the answer. And still you are awake at four a.m.

What’s hypnotic about such passages owes much to the coupling of real-world particularity–in object, in description, in language, and in experience–to something vast and mysterious, some message relayed, as in another story in this collection, via coded dots and lines. We have a coat, a way of talking about the cut and hang of said coat, we have “sinus cavity”  and infection, we have this insomniacal pondering, and yet all of these pieces are like glass shards glued down onto a mosaic, and the pleasure of We know what we are is that this mosaic is never visible as a whole. We see an arch, patches of color, a pickup truck loaded into a pickup truck, but something–like the visions of a fever dream–remains always just out of reach.

Consider Bull Shannon, for instance, or Theodore Huxtable. Both are invoked repeatedly in this collection, and in some sense surely hover above it as guiding spirits. The text is prefaced with the acknowledgement that without “Malcolm-Jamal Warner and the creators and writers of The Cosby Show…I would be lost.” Yet a story like “Me and Theodore climbed to the top of the water tower because we were scared of the tremors beneath the dirt,” beginning “There is nothing wrong with lanterns under your skin” has little to do with The Cosby Show per se. Rather, the story titles featuring these names function more as joke intros or oblique glosses on the brief narratives that follow, reflecting, as well, the speed with which one image, in Hamilton’s work, move on to the next. A songbird is replaced by a fruit bat, Malcolm-Jamal Warner in Eskimo kit is transmogrified into a plastic bag full of silver buttons.

This alchemy is not unconnected to the oral, performative nature of Hamilton’s work.  She, with Lindsay Hunter (whose Daddy’s was reviewed in this month’s decomP) co-founded the Chicago reading series Quickies!, focused, as it is, on polished and entrancing live presentation of literature. These quick pieces have the ring, frequently, of texts intended to be read aloud, where, unmoored from the permanence of the page, their shifts, non sequiturs, and free associations play out to different effect, part of the small talk preamble and intermittent gaze of the stage magician pulling off something casually spectacular with a deck of cards. Or an audience volunteer and a handsaw.

“Many rips make one hole insignificant,” says the narrative of one wisp of a story, at once speaking to and exemplifying Hamilton’s sleight of hand. Precision in the display of randomness, this is skill behind We know what we are. From the plainly stated–“There is a certain faith in the body’s ability to heal. In the way a broken bone set correctly will find its way back together.”–to the fantastical–“I said take up your weapons and make your way into the belly of night. Slash apart her mud veil.” Imagine a stage magician who, amidst assorted nonchalant pyrotechnics and the seemingly spontaneous hat-based production of numerous rabbits and fruit bats, also makes appear on stage, in glimmering mist, the motley billing of a night court session while shimmying around in imitation of the freestyle dance of The Cosby Show’s opening credits–this is the sort of book that begs you to flip back to the front page of a short story just finished and riddle your way through it again. “Tremors?” you’ll say, “Like, Tremors?”

Official Mary Hamilton Web Site
Official Rose Metal Press Web Site

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A Review of “The 2010 Jersey Devil Press Anthology” by Eirik Gumeny, Editor

Friday, October 15th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“My teacher told the class that if we feel strongly about our stories that we should submit them to a publication. I’m submitting this one to Jersey Devil Press. I read that one of its main criteria for accepted submission is quality,” reads one of the pieces in this collection of stories, many of which first ran on the Jersey Devil Web site. The quality here is less anything like artistic quality and more like quality of place, the quality of a Taco Bell franchise, for instance, at once forgettable and rich with details that seem to demand an ironic gaze. This is a quality shared by narrators for disparate stories, a longing for the coolness of Bruce Lee movies and untoasted Pop-Tarts, or the hope “that the McRib sandwich would taste as good as it looked on the commercials…that the 11 herbs and spices represented a genuine mystery; that the individual locations were part of something larger than themselves, and that chains had discernable personalities.”

It is a hope unfulfilled, and most of the stories here are “haunted by nothing,” to quote another line. They feel, amidst the bluster of brand names and detritus of strip mall culture, like “When the Apocalyptic Armageddon of Y2K finally arrived, and not a damn thing happened.” One predominant sense is that we’re being presented, here, with exercise pieces, skits penned out at the spur of the moment, unplanned, winking a little too loudly at the porn industry or junk food. There’s a unpleasantly unfunny jokey-ness. And, maybe worse, an unsettling feeling of reading something unready, unfinished.

A notable and necessary exception is Kate Delany’s brief and tonic “Jersey Fresh,” a story which stabs at some of the problems plaguing all the other pages. “You just love how authentic and unpretentious everything is:  the hyper-laminated menus, the dump wait-staff, the enormous windows with a view of the highway on one side, of a brick wall on the other.” A story about a native returning to Jersey from California–obsessing, over scrapple and eggs, with veganism, raw diets–who can’t get enough of how everything is just “so Jersey” back in the Garden State. “For several minutes, you marvel over the chocolate chip muffin on the menu which no one, you insist, would ever eat on the West Coast and that’s what’s so great about being back here! No one gives a shit!” There’s a wisdom to Delany’s story, craftsmanship in her construction, a rage and a sympathy, real characters and real images. “Jersey Fresh” is a page and a half of real quality; it’s a pity the rest of the volume can’t measure up.

Official Jersey Devil Press Web Site

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A Review of “Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist” by Robin Spriggs

Friday, October 8th, 2010

Spencer Dew

Some schools of occultists are inordinately fond of merit badges, hierarchic ranking, fancy dress, special handshakes, Excel spreadsheets brimming with esoteric codswallop, and the like. In certain lodges, club houses, and initiatory chambers, these folks are hailed, by their peers and underlings, as magus maximus, etc., etc., but in the wider world they are usually identified as bores, gas giants with pretensions to some new, much speedier, mathematics. Beware the man who soliloquizes on “infinite delight.” He has a set of manikins in the basement, which is fine for his own private hours, but shouldn’t be confused with what he’s preaching about nor passed around, in sticky pieces, to houseguests.

This little collection of what are inexplicably self-identified as “prose poems” suffers from something of this larger problem of blabbing on about the occult and thus stripping away from it its very useful occultation–useful in the sense of actually inspiring a sense of power, mystery, creepiness, or allure. What we have instead, here, are bits like: “Mighty Moloch, book ablaze, to you do I sacrifice the word-born babes of my fevered brain, hoping to glean from their silent wails the golden secrets of the Infinite Self.” Good luck with that. There’s some saying somewhere about wisdom and its relation to keeping ones mouth shut from time to time, but you won’t hear that alluded to in Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist. You will, however, hear plenty else, with accompanying sigils, or squiggles, an alphabet of energies, as best I can figure it, that drains a little more ink in the printing process but otherwise adds nothing to the book. “All of his bad Latin was entirely intentional,” it is said, of a certain character, a certain type. “Sometimes he even confused it (both purposely and purposefully) with Italian, Spanish, and French, having learned long ago the potent effect of such pseudoscholarly inscriptions on minds of a particular stripe.” This “particular stripe” of mind might find Diary of a Gentleman Diabolist worthy of a half hour or so. Others most likely will not.

There are some genuine spooky bits (any stuffed toy monkey is a terrifying stuffed toy monkey) and some watery reproduction Lovecraft and some fan fiction for the new religious revival of the old religions–“The hatchling Prince, his ways Loki-wild, his words Odin-wise,” etc.–grimoires get eaten, things happen to trees involving semen, and there is an eye, deliciously, in a candy jar, “pressed hard against the glass by a crush of gobstopping spheres made all the more horrific by the fact that they were sweet.” But the book is in desperate need of an editorial hand. Must we really endure such weary declarations as that hell is a woman “every warlock worth his wand” wants to stick his stave into or that “She stood like a phantom before me, like a dream of a ghost in the mist, but her smile was the smile of a sunrise, and it reached to the core of my soul, the core of my Stygian soul”? Again, a “particular stripe” of mind will surely dig this, and feel some excitement, too, over the fact that “The wrath of the nigromancer is like a hairtrigger rifle of unlimited range in the hands of a fickle sniper,” but it is a rather limited “particular stripe” to feel anything from lines like “I am…the thing under your bed, the hate in your heart….” No spell is cast by such deflated clichés. That scent isn’t brimstone, it’s just something stale.

Official Anomalous Books Web Site

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A Review of “They Had Goat Heads” by D. Harlan Wilson

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Spencer Dew

There’s a Bob Dylan song about umbrellas and crime, darkness and climbing, and the flow of that song, the flow which that song is about–the narrative form of dreams, the logic of their progression, without “great connections” or “intricate schemes”–is a useful notion for making sense of what D. Harlan Wilson is doing in this collection of short, strange stories, each its own dream, in a sense, unfolding in the manner of dreams, laced with absurdity and non sequitur, yet engaging, too, in the specific lineament of genre, of what is now called the “speculative.”

You walk into a theater and realize you’re the star of the movie, or a motel clerk tries to have you arrested because you don’t have your key. “Near the restrooms, a contortionist juggles minute koalas while dishing out smoked sausages for $3 a pop. Takers are legion, and they’re not unhappy with the taste, given the proper medley of condiments.” This is the stuff of Wilson’s stories, but the most successful ones are the most stripped down. There’s the case of the man who “screwed an antenna into the soft spot on an infant’s skull and tried to get a signal,” for instance, or the child who wants to crawl back inside his mother’s womb, or the man who denies the existence of elbows, who has something to do with a bridge engineered out of Cornish hens….

The collection begins with an experimental tweak of genre, a piece called “6 Word Scifi,” which reads, in its entirety, “Mechanical flâneurs goosestep across the prairie.” There’s quite a bit going on here, and, to some interpreters at least, it is a string of words thick with allusion. Sometimes, however, Wilson can misstep with his attempts at some sort of witty meta level. On flying squirrels, for instance, he writes, “One should not do battle with arboreal gliders, theoretical or otherwise (ref. Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus), no matter what they’re wearing.” But perhaps the point is that Delueze and Guattari references–or Arabic script, or definitions of terms from Japanese cinema–do turn up in the genre and, likewise, do turn up in dreams. That which is jarring, here, also packs a gentler, in-joke nudge, as when descriptions devolve to blunt declaration of “Animé nights and scikungfi battle royals.”

Mid-book there is a story deserving special note: “The Sister,” presented in graphic novel fashion via the artistry of Skye Thorstenson. These are gorgeous, disquieting, and addictive pages. I only wish the entire book had been told this way, with the dreams visible on the page, an anteater, a gash for a face. Here the hallucinatory logic takes on even more haunting resonance. While elsewhere Wilson gives us the dangerously pendulous stray breast of a nurse or all those strangers tying notes to bricks, it is the image of the tangled birdcage, the leg sticking out of it, that will linger longest, like the afterimage of a particularly baffling and unshakable dream.

Official D. Harlan Wilson Web Site
Official Atlatl Press Web Site

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A Review of “The Artist in Question” by Michael J Seidlinger

Saturday, September 18th, 2010

Spencer Dew

What is exciting about this book is how unlike other books it is. A compendium of bits, in different san-serif fonts and styles, ranging from aphorisms to flash fictions, notes on larger projects, and editorial asides enclosed in parentheses. The document begins with “an editor’s note” (and note here the article, its anonymity) that “editing the following documents has been limited to comprisal, arrangement remains ‘as-is’ according to how all documents birthed, and typeface alterations transpose the nature of transcription, be it bold, italicized, underlined or otherwise constrained to reflect the proposition and dissuade any proposal unintentionally made.” And with that prose, so begins the problem–whether in an awkward attempt at intentional opaqueness or merely as a result of associative exercises or even a blend of both, the writing in this book is such that many brave readers will throw the thing away.

Then there is the content: “He writes of himself like a character, from the third person to filter out discomfort,” one unpaginated page says in large font, nicely. Another declares, “‘The concept’ is my main source of interest” while somewhere else we see this definition: “The avant-garde–really, the intent on changing and challenging forms is an art in itself–an art of an art/ an art in an art.” All fine so far, especially if coupled with, say, any sense of this uneasy third person, this concept, this meta art. Instead, we are barraged with platitudes. “No love is as precious as a need for a new idea.” “Dreaming is a form of development.” “Entertainment is the most important aspect of this society.” It feels, quickly, like going through Barbara Kruger’s trash. But then it get worse. “To use politics is simply to engage in the methodology of managing something,” we are told. Now please tell me what that means. “Morale shall never be forced; panic into justice yields ignorance. One must speak from stability. Never must we follow by alarm for self-preservation, we must identify and recognize. We must truly care.” Huh? Thus we go from the cliché of “We all create stories to protect ourselves from ourselves” to the gaseous musing that “Even with the civil services in First World countries, all it takes is a five-car pile-up to have your house burned down before the firefighters could get there in time. Insurance or not, a policy could have a loophole that only compensates for a certain amount of damages, and there are [sic] the obvious increase of charges. A single spark and that ‘safety’ could be gone.”

If your idea of an enlightening time is flipping through a thick text for tidbits like “Arts and Sciences are both forms of expression–much like anything else that presents humanity in a manner–yet have different qualities,”  then, by all means, go for it, but others will likely feel that Seidlinger’s work could have benefited more from an editorial presence than this extended wallowing in rather cheap, even lazy, interpretations of so-called death of the author theory.

“I write this as I am here,” it is written, “anxious;/ I’m writing to stay busy, to look busy to avoid being singled out. My spastic scrawls/ double as a/ defense/ mechanism…. freely writing in the wake of boredom, droplets of irritation immaculately irrigating a desperate battle defense of pen, scribbling to paper, eyes averted in order to attain the image of concentration.” This reads like first person from the writer. Maybe it’s a conceptual trick, but, in any case, it’s dull, arguably inexcusable. Likewise, “When doodling, words creep in through certain contexts: band logos, personal names, words from notes often randomly chosen/highlighted. Our association with language AND art transcends any limitation coming from the subconscious response to boredom to keep the pen moving.” But, brother, might it not be better to pause the pen from time to time? Might a little silence and stillness and thinking be what’s required to make a work of writing that’s worth reading?

“Whether or not the world will remember you, is not important; it is about whether you ever find yourself.” One gets the sense that all of this is about precisely that–or, rather, is precisely that, the author’s own coping mechanism, the author’s way of trying to make sense of the world, pen in hand, etc. As is said somewhere here, “For every novel approach, there’s an underlying personal need.” If only a little more of that “personal need,” that motivation, showed through, and showed through in such a way that it was conveyed and could be felt. Instead, we have parenthetical notes to the effect that “certain statements can nearly be considered as evidence of the supposed disappearance and expected demise of creative license,” bits of description such as “The cold that’s just too low numbered for comfort, doing its best to break down subsistence, freezing then shattering the top layers of proposition, tensing only the lowered mists as they huddle together to preserve” and such snippets of farce as “To compare, will only cause disrepair. Vacant stares. Swiftly downstairs, twin pairs would fall down, fading despair.” But wait, there’s politics, too, of a (again, as with the insurance premium discussion, shockingly bourgeois) sort: “Already common, obesity is a result of no self-control and poor diet because of many factors, one of which involves the food within reach of the common citizen. The common citizen cannot afford to eat healthy salads, cuisine, and even power/energy bars.”

This book may be many things, including, certainly, a record of a wrestling with the act of writing and the concept of textuality itself. It will not, however, function for many readers anything like a “power/energy bar.”

Official Civil Coping Mechanisms Web Site

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A Review of “The Really Funny Thing About Apathy” by Chelsea Martin

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

Spencer Dew

“Sometimes I received text messages from people about things right as I was about to send them a text message about the very same thing, on a day when there were no previous text messages between us,” says one of the narrators of one of the stories in this collection, each hooked, in some thematic way, to a paradox, each exploring the quotidian this and that of life. Apathy figures, and humor:  there is the high school girl prepared to tell her boyfriend she’s pregnant–“Well, I’m not really pregnant, but that’s what I’m going to tell my boyfriend”–and the high school girl who thinks it “a pretty funny thing to do” when a boy brings a wrench to school, threatens another boy, and gets himself arrested. There is the narrator “consumed, of course, with thoughts of” an ex-lover, halfway attempting to bother to believe that “Maybe someday I would find someone sort of almost close to as good,” and there is one extended piece, echoing a notion from Zeno, as to why “Eating food from McDonald’s is mathematically impossible.” Cause and effect unwinds: “…before you can read something that reinforces your insecurities, you have to have insecurities./ And before you can have insecurities, you have to be awake for part of the day./ And before you can be awake for part of the day, you have to feel motivation to wake up.” There are funny bits throughout, about battery acid and parents, and the rhythm of paradox allows Martin both to skewer fallacies–“And before you can stop being so depressed, you have to understand what depression is”–and stretch out tangled motivations–“I wanted to make people think I was manipulative so that when I appeared weak they would think I was just trying to get something.” Much of the minimalism or whatever tone of these pieces–“He sent me a link to a music video. I can’t remember if I watched it or not.”–is too familiar, however, and ultimately there is something unsatisfying about the state of suspension in which Martin locates her characters, never quite making it, pondering impossibilities. “In a movie I had seen recently,” one narrator relates, “there was a scene in which two people looked at each other and made subtle facial expressions back and forth that conveyed very little.” “I belonged in that movie,” she says, but this book, with its generally stripped down language and glossed-over tone–“And before you can buy alcohol, you have to want your psychological state to be altered”–isn’t really anything like that movie. Rather than drawing an audience into the subtleties of the visual, or pulling readers along into the mechanics of language, The Really Funny Thing About Apathy plays some small and generally forgettable games. It’s like that video, the one you can’t remember watching or not.

Official Chelsea Martin Web Site
Official sunnyoutside press Web Site

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A Review of “99 Problems: Essays About Running and Writing” by Ben Tanzer

Sunday, September 12th, 2010

Spencer Dew

It is fitting that as disciplined and obsessive a writer as Ben Tanzer–who, by way of disclosure, I have known for years–would produce a book like this, a lean volume of reflections on how the act of running feeds his creative habit. Autobiographical in that most intimate sense of an artist’s working notebook, though polished into its present form with the help of a rigid framework based in part, structurally, on Haruki Murakami’s book on running, 99 Problems explores Tanzer’s belief that “Running produces a means for escaping mental clutter, which most of the time allows for processing ideas and untangling the kinks that slow the evolution of any story” by chronicling specific runs in specific places and the ways those runs helped with the “untangling” of specific stories. While Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running was, as Tanzer says, “about the pure act of running itself, in all of its metaphysical and quotidian awesomeness,” his own book is very much about writing, with running as a necessary step in the artistic process. Yet this process, as construed by Tanzer, encompasses everything. Consider this diary-like passage:

Last night I went to listen to Ike Reilly at Schubas, and many beers were drunk. I got home late and, after watching television and gabbing with my wife for an hour, I didn’t sit down to write until 2:30 in the morning. That got me to bed at 3:30 in the morning, and then back up at 7:30 in the morning to get the boys ready for school. Then after that it was time for my annual physical, for which I have been fasting since midnight, clear liquids only; I am allowed to drink coffee, but have not.  At the physical I give blood, and have a prostate exam. Sweet. I walk to the supermarket, so I can help my wife carry the groceries back to the house. We get home and watch the latest winner of American Idol perform on Oprah.

While much of 99 Problems consists of monologues on stories-in-process, garnished with scenery from the run in which such monologues, to some degree, unfurled, the larger story here is Tanzer himself, the writer and his life, a portrait of the author as man no longer so young, though defined by a youthful exuberance and attitude (“Sweet”) in the face of the responsibilities and anxieties of adulthood. In athletic exertion, Tanzer wrestles with his own physicality; running was easier, he writes, “before the kidney stones and cancer scares, colonoscopies and high cholesterol, arthritis and biopsies,” yet that long-ago time was “also before September 11th, before my father died, before I became a father as well….” All of these things are approached as fodder for writing, of course, something that, like running, is more than the sum of its parts, more than, say, “drugs or sex. Or Pringles” because it encompasses and orders all of these things, imposing a structure upon the otherwise random, be it terrifying (“cancer scares…September 11th”) or merely banal, like the hours in Atlanta that Tanzer alchemizes into something solid, with words:

I land. Get off of the plane. Board the tram. Exit the tram. Navigate the terminal. Buy a Breeze card. Board the Marta. Exit the Marta. Walk to the Springhill Suites. Check in. Take elevator to room. Plug in laptop. Check email. Open bag. Remove running clothes. Remove running shoes. Put on running clothes. Put on running shoes. Grab iPod. Leave room. Take elevator down to lobby. Leave hotel. Start running. Victory. Atlanta.

As I said, there is something diary-like to much of this, yet there is something more here, too; a writer at work, crafting raw experience into product, with discipline and hunger. If anything, there is a bit too much discipline in these pages, with the inadvertent effect of self aggrandizement. Obsessive about folding laundry, obsessive about television, and obsessive about hitting the streets to push through new thoughts on the day’s story, Tanzer can come across as if feigning what might be meant as intimate moments of introspection. When he admits, “maybe I do enjoy whatever ‘outsider’ status it is I think I possess, but I don’t think it’s been holding me back or making me less ambitious, has it?” His question seems insincere. “I always thought the whole effort was about improving my craft and seeking opportunities, and that like with running, when my skill level and the right opportunity converged I would grab it,” he says, but by this point we don’t need to be told, we have already seen.

And yet, 99 Problems also offers insistent reminders of what we have not yet seen, standing as a series of paced training runs for competitive literary projects to come, both the stories it describes working through and larger future projects emerging from the basic dynamic it seeks to describe, not just that running fuels writing but that “the bigger you feel things, the more curious you are; and the more problems you want to solve and not actually run from, the better everything is, even the things you already love.” I take this to be not only a nice summary of Tanzer’s approach to the world (as seen in his two novels and story collection), but also a promising manifesto of intent.

Official Ben Tanzer Web Site
Official CCLaP Publishing Web Site

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A Review of “This Boy, This Broom” by P. Edward Cunningham

Sunday, September 5th, 2010

Spencer Dew

This attractively designed little book from BatCat Press relays a series of dispatches from the frontlines of the American cineplex, P. Edward Cunningham’s accounts of his days as a teenage employee of a movie theater, replete with sweeping, second-hand candy, and occasional snippets of human tragedy. The writing, alas, does not match the productive value of the text itself, though there are stronger moments, such as the repeating “Shift” sections, terse, chronological reports of the job itself. “Return to lobby,” one such entry reads, “No popcorn to sweep. Concessionist smiles at me. Asks me what my name is. I tell her. She wears too much eye shadow. Eyes like Nixon. Swollen. Results of a shellfish allergy? She tells me I’m cute. Radio lights up.” Where such a minimalist–and speedy–style succeeds, much of Cunningham’s writing falls short, stumbling over its own phrasing while aiming for a comic didacticism, a discourse of distance from the thing itself. “As a person who is often oblivious to the obvious, I consistently fail to notice statistics that some would consider highly informative when searching for someplace to spend on holiday,” the author writes, by way of a story about the wonders and horrors of Detroit. Then, of the visit, he says, “Meg and I were rather stunned by the number of Picassos hanging in the halls of the DIA–an amount larger than that of most museums we had visited. Compared to the copious amounts of wind-swept trash throughout the city, the museum was quite the contrast.” My problem here, ultimately, is that the awkwardness of the writing masks an absence, that of full characterization of the narrator. “I imagine that having the rare permission to photograph anything in the contemporary portion of a museum is similar to a police officer letting you hold his gun for a moment or two,” he says, and there is, in the unreality of that particular comparison for the narrator, in the stretch and the smirk of it, something simply missing. The relationship to art–to photography of it–remains vague, and while this is a minor example, the same problem plagues the book’s emotional core. As the narrator remains vague on his own feelings about his situation, his work (he’s upset when a new manager promotes all ushers to the “head usher” title, which is clear enough, but “Nothing mattered anymore” hits the wrong sort of hyperbolic note) so too does he remain disturbingly distant from the suffering of others that he routinely encounters on the job. The narrator can turn away from a man sobbing into his hands after, on his day out with his son, sitting in a movie seat saturated with human waste…yet he turns away, too, as author, leaving his readers unsure whether to cry or laugh, leaving them, in the wake of his own unexamined insularity, ready to quickly move on as well. This Boy, This Broom is autobiography devoid of intimacy, lacking an authentic sense of the author’s self and his relations with the world. Ultimately, the book mimics the tedium of the work at the cineplex, which is perhaps one of its goals. But with the scenes Cunningham witnessed and the experiences he endured, he could have crafted a much more affecting text.

Official P. Edward Cunningham Web Site
Official BatCat Press Web Site

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