I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: NOW,NOW-“Thread” (2012).

I really enjoyed Now, Now’s last single “Dead Oaks” quite a lot, and here’s another one.  A beautiful shoegazer song, hints of My Bloody Valentine, hints of early Lush.  The singer has a great voice soaring over the chugging and swirling guitar chords.

The song is smooth and dreamy, but when the guitar solo comes in, it’s kind of jagged and really unexpected–a nice treat to keep a sing from becoming too obvious.

“Now, Now” is kind of a crazy name for a band–i assumed that it would be difficult for search engines to find them.  But no.  Type in now now and there they are.

[READ: June 20, 2012] “Monstro”

I’ve read a bunch of stories by Díaz, and I was a little surprised to see him in a sci-fi issue.  Although his characters are typically nerdy sci-fi fantasy geeks, his stories are pretty much all about reality–scoring women, losing money, fighting cancer, getting women back.  And, that’s what this story is about too.

One thing that I especially liked about the story is that it is such a conventional Díaz story–his main character g0es to the Dominican Republic to be with his ailing mom.  (They live in the States but her medical costs would be much cheaper there).  So he goes to the DR for the summer.  And he meets up with a fellow Brown student who just happens to be a Very Important Person in the DR (he’s related to the 99th most wealthy person on the planet).  And this guy, Alex, hooks him up well–he gives the narrator the royal treatment all over the country.  Alex also introduces him to Mysty, the most beautiful woman he has ever seen.

And so they spend the summer together.  The narrator knows that Mysty is out of his league, but he lusts after her anyhow.  He confirms with Alex several times that the two of them are not an item, and that seems to be true. It’s clear that Mysty likes him–he doesn’t put up with Alex’s shit or with hers, but it’s also clear that they will never be together.

Díaz doesn’t skimp on the story either–we learn all about Alex’s background (and the fact that despite all of his wealth, he’s not coasting–he’s pulling down a 4.0 from Brown).  We also learn all about Mysty–her history, her desires and her disdain for the Dominican Republic.  And, naturally we learn all about the narrators mother–what’s wrong with her, how she’s coping and how she’s tells him that he doesn’t have  to stick around–he’s not doing her any favors.  And so he leaves her to have fun with his friends.  As he says, “What an asshole, right? What a shallow motherfucker.  But I was nineteen–and what is nineteen, if not for shallow?”

So how is it a sci-fi story?  Well, because Díaz introduces a major sci-fi plot right from the start: “At first negroes thought it was funny.  A disease that could make a Haitian blacker?  It was the joke of the year.”  And, in the next paragraph, he casually tosses out: “These days everybody wants to know what you were doing when the world came to an end.”  And the point of all that stuff about Alex and Mysty is that that’s what he was doing when the world ended–he was chasing a girl.

Diaz creates a fascinatingly vague yet rather terrifying “disease” that affects only Haitains to start with).  It caught random people and they were clearly sick–but it never killed them outright.  The just lingered.  At first, because it was just poor Haitians infected, the world kind of looked way, but then some more intense things started happening–and shit got really serious.

The story ends with a new character, a character who looks back at a blast with one eye closed.  And the open eye is fried in the socket.  It seemed like a strange inclusion at the end of the story but then, of course, Karen pointed out that this is an excerpt of Díaz’ new novel (I keep saying I’ll read those Q&As, but I read my copy in print form so I’m never near the computer when I’m done).  Well how about that.  I assumed he was modifying an existing story for a sci-fi issue of the New Yorker and here he’s going the Colson Whitehead route and writing a serious thriller instead.  I am definitely on board when that comes out!

In Karen’s post she says that people talking about Díaz are sick of his Spanglish writing.  He tends to throw in a lot of Dominican words as the story moves along.  And if you’ve ever known people who are bilingual that happens all the time.  I’m not going to read the thread (reading comments is a sure way to madness) but I will say that asking Díaz to not use that Spanish words is kind of like asking Joyce not to write in Dublinese (not that I’m comparing Díaz to Joyce) or Faulkner to not write in his own dialect (not that I’m comparing Díaz to Faulkner).  I don’t believe it’s a gimmick, I believe it’s just the way he lives words.  (That’s pretty highfalutin for a story about getting some action while the world ends).

For ease of searching I include: Junot Diaz