I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: HÜSKER DÜ-Metal Circus EP (1983).

After the insane hardcore mess of Land Speed Record, this EP is a bit of a change.  It’s still pretty hardcore, but now you can tell that the noisiness of the guitar is deliberate.  Bob Mould is playing around with multiple layers of feedback and distortion to create a wall of noise that sometimes hides, sometime accentuates the overall sound.

What strikes me as odd in retrospect is that I think of Bob Mould as one of alternative rock’s poppier songwriters.  And yet when you listen to this disc the two poppiest (which is a relative term to be sure) tracks are by Grant Hart.

The first two tracks are fast and furious.  But what separates them from 4 x 4 hardcore is, mostly Greg Norton’s bass.  He’s all over the place.  There’s also some diversity within the songs themselves (a little guitar squeal in “Deadly Skies”).

“It’s Not Funny Anymore” (Hart’s song) is surprisingly upbeat (with guitar harmonics) and is not quite as noisy (although it’s still pretty noisy, and is not going on the radio anytime soon).

The next two track are more of Mould’s screamy hardcore.

The longest song (4 and a half minutes) is also by Hart. “Diane” is a creepy song about abduction and murder (yet with something of a  singalong chorus).  I actually know the Therapy? version better because I had listened to that disc a lot when it came out.  But the Hüsker’s version is even creepier.  Wikipedia says it is about a real incident (which makes it less creepy than if Hart has made it up, I suppose).

It ends with Mould’s least hardcore song, although the guitar solo is pretty insane.

And then it’s over.  7 songs in twenty minutes.  That’s nearly half as many as on Land Speed Record.  You can see the songs changing already.  Just wait till the next disc!

[READ: June 29, 2009] McSweeney’s #5

McSweeney’s #5 plays with cover ideas again.  On this one, the cover idea is actual different covers and slipcovers.  The book is hardcover, with three different cover designs.  It also has 4 different slipcover designs. The colophon explains that if one wanted one could have requested for free) each of the cover designs because they did not intend to make people buy multiple issues.  Click on the covers to see them enlarged on flickr (all images are copyright McSweeney’s).

This is the Koppel front cover.

I will quote from the McSweeney’s site their description of the covers:

As many of you know, the new issue of our print version is out, and by now is in most stores. This issue is a hardcover book, and features four different dust jackets. One dust jacket has on it a man who seems to be suffering from terrible skin lesions. The second cover looks very much like the cover of Issue No. 1, with the addition of a medical drawing of a severed arm. The third cover is blank, with all of its images hiding on the back. Hiding from the bad people. The last cover is just red. Or, if you will, simply red.

In addition, under each dust jacket is a different cover. One features pictures of Ted Koppel. One features new work by Susan Minot. And a third features a variation on the second cover, described above, though this version is legible only with aid of mirror. This inner cover also is featured under the red dust jacket.

I was quite surprised when I took the slipcover off mine, as it is possible that I have never done so before.  I have the Ted Koppel cover (which, all things considered, is pretty cool).  My slipcover is blank on the front (very odd) with the half-face design on the back cover.

This is the Koppel back cover.

The colophon also explains that they will allow authors’ stylistic quirks to remain, and not to be uniform in their publishing appearance.  This seems especially relevant about Elizabeth Klemm’s “Mr. Squishy” which they left unchanged at all…notable in that there are a typographical glitches left in.  (where the double dash is rendered as an æ because it is translated from a different program).  Oh, and they are using a larger font size. 11.2 up from 10.5.

They also admit that they are publishing some “normaler” fiction.  “The Days Here,” “Soot,” “The Observers” and “The Hypnotist’s Trailer” are all un-self conscious, and thus threw the editors for a loop.  The colophon includes a chart showing the appeal of certain subject matter and themes: Stories involving interactions between motorcycle gangs and octopuses that talk is a +40, while A story that involves relationship problems being dealt with in a fabulous Manhattan apartment is a -55.

They also admit that LaFarge’s story has already been published elsewhere (in 6500 Magazine, which I had heard of but which I can’t find anything about anywhere).  They then say which award (and the monetary amount) the authors should win for these great stories.

The Submissions policy is included with a circular chart showing how many people that got published this time around were actually unknown to the editors (48%).

The next page is 64 thumbnails of previous McSweeney’s issues all shrunk down so that you can see the all 64.  Some stories are quite apparent: Marfa, the Supreme Court basketball one and Symmes Hole.

The contents page is quite helpful this time around. It gives the author, the title, what type of story it is, the subject matter or theme of each piece, whether or not it is humorous (this so that people would know whether or not to describe McSweeney’s as a humorous publication, the degree of difficulty of the piece and the page number.

Genre Types include: (F) Fiction, (NF) Nonfiction, (F/NF) Fiction/Nonfiction Hybrid, (E) Essay, (T-P E) Thought-Provoking Essay, (DE) Dumb Experiment, (I) Interview with Ted Koppel or Joshuah Bearman’s Dad (FARPiMA) Fiction about Relationship Problems in Manhattan

Difficulty levels: (E) Easy and Enjoyable, (M) Enjoyable, but moderately difficult (SD) Enjoyable but somehow more difficult, (D) Difficult (and yet still enjoyable), (VD) Very Difficult (but fun when parsed), Ch (Challenging) (RS) Rural Setting, (M) Talk of Life on Mars.

There is also more discussion about the wonders of Iceland (and the baby bird nest that they found).  As well as the affordability and timeliness of using a publisher in Iceland (and how they would print faster–including shipping by boat–than the publisher right there in Brooklyn).  And also how the quality of the work is so good that it’s absurd that publishers publish expensive yet crappy looking books.

DIGRESSION: My coworker was just browsing the issue and–I kid you not–marveled at the quality of the publishing, how it was stitched in, the way they don’t anymore.

Also: a large ad for The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature: the first book published by McSweeney’s, and as such it is our obligation to purchase one.  [It is also very created very well by Oddi Publishing in Iceland].

LETTERS:

COURTNEY ELDRIDGE
Shows several examples of stories that are in her “will not complete” file.

GARY PIKE
A dream about a land of nothing but domes.

SARAH VOWELL-Nationalism Round up #2
Sarah feels awkward about the 4th of July and actually told a company to remove the promotional flag that they placed on her (and everyone else’s) lawn because the flag symbolizes the freedom to not have that done to her.  Part Two discusses the feeling of warmth she gets from a NYC subway sign that informs all passengers that if they are sick, they will not be left alone.  She secretly hopes someone gets sick so she can offer, at the very least, a tissue.

GARY PIKE
A second dream.  This one about the Pike’s son flying a plane at an Air Force base.  The flight lasts several days and, despite the fact that the dreamer was in the plane with the son at times, when the plane lands, the son is pronounced dead.  The son died in a seated position, but how will he fit in a coffin that way?

LYDIA DAVIS
This is a discussion about Davis’ piece.  (See the piece below for more details about these letters).  There are several letters that go back and forth and it is nice to see how accommodating the editors are to Davis’ suggestions and preferences.

THE MAIN STORIES

KELLY FEENEY-“The Days Here”
A story in 11 parts.  Most parts are very short.  I’m not entirely sure what is happening as some details are left out.  However, the narrator is in a hotel.  She used to work for people who are now dead, and she is writing a letter to one of them.  The individual sections were rather compelling, although as a whole, I’m not sure what happened.

RODNEY ROTHMAN-“My Glorious Publishing Empire” including: “An Excerpt from The Rodney Rothman Holy Bible in Italics,” “Excerpt from The Rodney Rothman Underlined Holy Bible in Italics,” “Excerpt from The R. R. Underlined Holy Bible in Small-cap Outline Italics,” and “Excerpt from Rodney Rothman’s ‘Rollercoaster'”
This first piece describes Rothman’s attempts to get published via iBiblio and Xlibris.  Not just a book, mind you, but an empire!  So he takes the bible and prints them in the above mentioned styles. “Rollercoaster” is a pretty darn funny novel, excerpted here, and I wonder exactly what Xlibris thought of it.
None were accepted for publication.

PAUL COLLINS-“Solresol, The Universal Musical Language”
Paul Collins does it again.  He finds a mysterious figure and reveals all.  In this case, Francois Sudre.  In the 1820s, Sudre created a language based on the 12 notes of the musical scale. He shortened it to 4 notes for the military, but eventually settled on a simple 7 note language based on Do Re Mi So Fa Ti Do.  I won’t go into details because that is what the article is about, but suffice it to say that Sudre’s language was simplistic but very effective at allowing people with no common language to communicate through musical notes.  It also worked for the blind, deaf and mute (when he transferred it to a series of pressure points on the hand).  Sudre spent a fortune promoting his creation.  But despite praise from every corner of Europe, nothing ever came of Solresol.   There’s some info about Solresol here, as well as a Wikipedia entry here.  And a lengthy explanation of the grammar of Solresol here.

ALASTAIR REED-“From: Anecdotes”
An amusing one page anecdote.  This one is about Borges and his travels as a blind man around Buenos Aires.  It includes a very funny example of the blind leading the blind.

BEN GREENMAN-“My Hopes and Dreams”
This is a detailed look at the short piece that Greenman is currently writing.  He explains what he hopes to write, how long it took him to write what he did; his percentage chance of finishing the hoped-for story (20%) and of finishing this very piece (90%).  It is unclear if he actually finished it.  It is all very meta-.

CHAD WILLENBORG-“Soot”
A “real” short story.  This concerns a young man and his father.  They work at a crematorium.  They learn that Fr Don, a defrocked priest who left the church to open a record store and was generally quite cool, has died.  He is currently in their possession.  The story leads to the young narrator’s reminiscence of a dinner he had with Fr Don, wherein he discussed his reasons for leaving the church.  It’s quite a moving story.

LAWRENCE WESCHLER-“Convergences”
The first convergence is about Trees and Camera Obscura.   Camera Obscura is the technical method of putting a small hole in an object and having an image projected behind it turn out upside down. Often seen in a pinhole camera.  The trees are connected at the idea of how weird it would be to see a full sized tree upside down. I found this to be the least interesting Convergence.  However, there is a postscript about David Hockney who posits that Carrivaggio may have used this technique to paint his pictures (as there are no sketches or papers left from his ouvre.  This was fascinating and cool, and a somewhat subversive idea.

The second Convergence also relates to trees.  It concerns how the internet and our brain patterns (as well as family trees) use this basic layout of tree-ness to show branches and roots. It was very short, and was mostly theoretical, but it was cool (especially the pictures!)

R.J. CURTIS-“Solicitation”
This brief story concerns a woman who lives in a bad neighborhood where people come to her door to ask for money for crack.  It ends in a rather hazy way.

SUSAN MINOT-“This We Came to Know Afterward”
This is a horrifying non-fiction piece about abducted children, especially girls in Uganda.  The truth behind these poor girls’ lives of violence, rape and enslavement into a rebel military group is in a word, really really depressing.  Especially since nothing seems to get done about it.  A real eye-opener.

DANIEL O’MARA-“Letter to Hugh H. McColl, CEO of Bank of America,” “Letter to Robert G. Miller, CEO of Rite Aid,” “Letter to Peter I. Bijur, CEO of Texaco,” “Letter to Christopher M. Connor, CEO of Sherwin-Williams,” “Letter to David I. Fuentes, CEO of Office Depot”
These are all single page letters to these various CEOs.  Each letter is written from the pint of view of a dog.  In each letter the dog writes about how fast, how very very fast he is.  No replies are given.

PAUL LaFARGE-“The Observers”
This is the story that the introduction states is too normal for McSweeney’s.  And indeed, it is a pretty normal story (aside from the fact that the man builds an astronomical observatory in his backyard).  It is a very appealing story.  The man gets fired from his advertising job and leaves the city for the country. He moves back in with his father, in his boyhood home.  He has no plans, no ambitions, and feels uncomfortably like he did when he was a young boy.  The desire to build this observatory changes things. It gives him a plan and something manual to do.  He slowly becomes friends with the people in town, but once he sets his telescope on earthbound subjects, things in his life change dramatically.  This was a really cool story, simultaneously earthbound and fantastic.

LYDIA DAVIS-“Marie Curie, Honorable Woman”
In the letters section this piece is discussed between Lydia and the editors.  She explains the origin of the piece: Ms Davis was assigned to translate a “cute” biography of Marie Curie from French to English.  She selected several of the most awkward phrases and compiled a brief biographical sketch of Mme Curie.
I think a page or so would have gotten the point across.  As it is, it’s like reading a badly translated book or instruction manual (but it’s not funny like in English As She is Spoke.  I think if the story was translated into readable English it would make for an interesting biography, but as it is, its’ just sort of clunky.  I learned a lot about Curie, though.

PAUL MALISZEWSKI-News, Good and Bad (cover version of “In the Mechanical Age,” by Donald Barthelme)”
I have not read the Barthelme story, so I can’t comment on it.
This was a surreal story.  It begins with a man’s decision to read the newspaper every day, whether good or bad news.  It then morphs into a sort of prodigal son story.  The man’s son returns after many years away, and then spends 8 years in his room.  This morphs into a story about the dad working in Siberia creating action figures.  Your guess is as good (or better) than mine on this story.

STEVEN BARTHELME-“The New South: Writing the Newsweek Short Story”
This is a hilarious piece about Barthelme’s story for Newsweek. He assures us that he did a lot of research for the story and it is all true, except for…well just about everything.  He keeps backtracking about the truth of individual parts.  Very very funny.

BEN MARCUS-“Literary Enhancement Through Food Intake”
This may have been the most irritating piece of writing I have ever read.  In many ways it reminded me of the consuetudinary piece from Issue #31.  In this piece, Marcus describes the necessary diet and regime one must undertake to be, what, a good reader, a safe reader, I don’t know.  Through ten laborious and seemingly endless pages, Marcus goes into great detail of all manner of foolishness.  It is all done so seriously, including things like putting a language cloth in your mouth and reading aloud with only vowels that it loses all ounces of humor.  But it is so absurd that it can’t even be read as a mock-serious piece.  I actually had to read these ten pages in 4 separate attempts I found it so tedious.

ANN CUMMINS-The Hypnotist’s Trailer”
This was a totally surreal story.  I often wonder what goes into making stories that are just so divorced from reality.  In this one, a woman goes into a hypnotist’s trailer and, at the urging of the hypnotist, she removes her bellybutton.  The hypnotist morphs it from its small dying shape into a large floating peach, among other things.   Finally the woman’s daughter, bored by the shenanigans drags the woman out of the trailer while she freaks out about leaving her bellybutton behind.  In the epilogue the hypnotist talks to himself and laments his state.  The ending was a little unsettling but otherwise the story was very cool and trippy.

SARAH VOWELL-“Ted Koppel Interview Re Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
A fascinating brief interview with Koppel.  It focuses almost exclusively on Aurelius’ Meditations and how it can apply to everything in life.  Koppel gave a copy to Bill Clinton who claims it is his favorite book).  Makes me want to check out Meditations myself.

J. ROBERT LENNON-“The Accursed Items”
I’m not entirely sure what to call this piece.  It consists of about twenty items.  Each item is given some backstory about how it has become accursed.  It is a surprisingly emotional piece, given that most items get no more than three lines.  In a way this could be flash fiction in that a fairly deep story is told with just a few lines.  It is available in audio format on This American Life.  Truth be told, the audio version is even more compelling than reading it.

ELIZABETH KLEMM-“Mr. Squishy”
This is now the third time I’ve read “Mr Squishy.”  I don’t recall where the first time was–it may have even been in this journal when it first came in, although I don’t think it was.  The second was when I read Oblivion some time ago, and now I’m doing it for the third time.

The third read is much better.  This is a difficult piece. The language is convoluted, the various plots overlap each other in awkward ways, and it is full to the brim of advertising jargon.  But once you understand that and you’re able to parse the language, it’s a mostly rewarding story.  I say mostly because although we pretty much know what is going to happen there are still one or two things left utterly unresolved.  And that’s a bummer.  To put in so much work and not get rewarded is kind of….

The plots include: a focus group learning about, and eventually commenting on the new snack food confection Felonies!  [In light of recent events, someone ought to make this snack food in memorium…it sounds delicious].  Schmidt is the man who is running this focus group.  While he is giving the presentation, he daydreams about a number of things including a) the woman in the office who he would love to get intimate with but who he is too afraid of to talk to b) how he would love to advance in his job but even an advancement wouldn’t be as satisfying as when c) he was younger and thought he could change the advertising world with his ideals (thinking about how Tylenol acted so swiftly to the cyanide scare of 1982) and d) how easy it would be to inject ricin into any Mr Squishy product after he had concocted some in the lab in his apartment.

The third(ish) plotline concerns the man who is climbing the outside of the building.  He has suction cups on his hands and feet (and head) and scales the outside of the building to the 18th floor (which is the floor on which the focus group are meeting).  He also has a shotgun.  This story is left unresolved as far as I can tell.

The confluence of stories is fueled by incredibly minute details and hyper-aware language of people’s behaviors, both in the room and in general.  It also zooms in on people’s tic and idiosyncrasies and shows a staggering knowledge of just about everything including physics, advertising jargon, and crowd behavior.

The insight into marketing, while certainly not new (as evidenced by the idea that the young men in the room are also savvy about marketing, is nevertheless, very detailed.  And, frankly far more informative than anything else I have seen.  I tend to trust this author when it comes to things like this, as it seem like once an idea is discovered, it is followed to the nth degree.  So yes, major fun in dissecting marketing.

It is an intense story, but careful reading is quite rewarding.[1]

COLLEEN WERTHMANN-“Hot Sex Story Lost in the Thicket of Humanity”
The title of this story tells the whole thing, even if it doesn’t seem to.  Basically, the story starts with a very sensual description of a young woman.  She is driving in her convertible, wearing short shorts with no underwear and a tank top with no bra.  She is heading to the grocery store. When she gets there she sees that the building is on fire. Firemen approach.  She recognizes one and starts talking with him.  He is very handsome, their eyes meet, and she can’t help but notice his muscular body.  They start talking about his brother whom she recalls from school.  And, basically the whole story proceeds like this, with sexy set ups that are undermined by reality.  Funny and frustrating.

JASON OCKERT-“Mother May I”
A disturbing story about a daughter getting pregnant.  At one point she is chained to a radiator.  But, as the story progresses, it clarifies itself a little more.  The pregnant woman’s mother is in a mental institution.  And, in the most interesting part of the story, the young girl brings balloons to her mother; they write notes on index cards and send the balloons up in the air.  As the mother deteriorates she stops writing altogether, she just doodles.  The daughter is convinced that the mother wants her a child, and as her final gift, she decided to get pregnant in the most repulsive way I can think of.  She goes to a park where kids have sex and…no I can’t say, you’ll have to read it.  A very sad tale, with moments of humor thrown in.

JOSHUAH BEARMAN-“Second Interview between Joshuah Bearman and His Father.”
I really enjoyed their first interview in the last issue.  This one is a discussion of water on Mars.  Bearman’s father is involved in what I believe has become the Mars Rover. It was unnamed in this interview, but it discusses going to Mars and taking samples (they assumed the mission would launch sometime in 2005).  The interview is casual and very funny with Bearman’s father getting exasperated about questions about Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.  It is a rewarding and quite satisfying piece nonetheless.

[1] Yes, I am aware that this was written by David Foster Wallace.

For ease of searching I include: Husker Du