SOUNDTRACK: MODEST MOUSE-“Lives” (2000).
This song (quoted in the story) comes from the first Modest Mouse album that I ever bought, The Moon and Antarctica. I have very vivid memories of listening to this album on a long dark stretch of road–not a bad image to connect with the album. This song comes near the end of the album after the stomper “I Came as a Rat” and the slow guitar and slightly ill sounding bendy note really set the unease of the song. After about 45 seconds the tribal drums kick in and change the pace of the song. But rather than bursting forth, the song kind of falls back in on itself until what feels like a brand new song comes out of this little cocoon–an upbeat acoustic number with strings that tries to remind you to live before you die. After a brief flirtation with yet another style, the song returns to whence it started.
It’s representative of Modest Mouse’s quieter side, although it barely showcases the extremes that the band is capable of.
[READ: July 11, 2012] Arach nID
My former co-worker Jay is one of the few people I know who is “writing a book” who has actually written most if not all of said book. He has been writing a sci-fi opus for a few years now and at last count it eclipsed 600 pages. I mean, sure, I’m “writing a book” but it’s all in my head. Anyway, I told him about a short story contest and asked if he had any short stories to submit. We once had a discussion about how novelists shouldn’t really write short stories if what they wanted to write was a novel, so I didn’t know if he had anything handy. He told me he had this work partially written and, with a deadline in mind, he polished it up and finished it off.
Because the story is unpublished, I’m not going to give away too many details, as that’s not cool (and because he may always revise it). But I will talk about the basics of the story because I think it’s pretty interesting.
It’s tempting to classify this as a sci-fi kind of story because it involves a six-foot spider. However, it’s more akin to The Metamorphosis than genre fiction. In something of an inverted Kafka, the main character is a spider who believes himself to be a human. Especially when he grows to human size.
Pop culture references abound in the story (including a quote from the above mentioned Modest Mouse song). David Foster Wallace argued many times that pop culture was absolutely necessary for contemporary stories. He said that his old writing professors would pooh-pooh pop culture because in the classics, they spoke of nature not ephemeral man-made ideas. His response (paraphrased here) was that for “classic” writers, trees and nature were their every day occurrences, whereas for contemporary authors, pop culture is the every day occurrence. This story takes this idea to the extreme–our main character is raised in a web on a window sill that looks into a room with a TV. And so, the spider’s formative years are fed by nothing but TV. This would probably be true for all creatures born in a window, but the important thing to remember is that the main character has consciousness whereas his score of brothers and sisters do not. I keep saying Main Character not because he doesn’t have a name–indeed he names himself based on the pop culture he has consumed–but because I don’t want to give too much away here.
The beginning of the story is very real in terms of spiders–cannibalism, wonton destruction, the dominance of the females–it’s all there. But as the protagonist grows to absurd sizes, he concludes that he must be part human. And so, he heads out for the city to try to pass. The funniest scenes occur here, especially when he is trying to assimilate and earn rent for his apartment. And yet the story is not a comedy, for our protagonist knows that he cannot pass in our society and he has to make the ultimate choice to kill or be killed.
I hate to paint the story with such broad strokes, but as I said, I don’t want to give away too much for the above mentioned reasons. The voice of the character (it’s in first person) is well constructed–pompous and intelligent in the way of a movie villain. And the emotional arc of the spider is complex.
It’s always risky when you agree to read a friend’s story (like reading their poetry in college), but this one was well worth the time. (I mention time because it’s more of a novella than a short story–Planer doesn’t do things by halves).
If you’d like to read it, you can contact Mr Planer at: jplan74 [at] gmail [dot] com. But ask him to fix the typos first (ha!).
[…] nine months ago, Planer asked me to read this short story. He has since revised it and expanded it, making it […]