I don’t have the energy to write reviews, but I would like to mention a few books I’ve read recently that I would wholeheartedly recommend to a certain kind of reader, the kind who requests bleeding wounds and welts from language, the kind like me, who trembles on his knees anticipating lacerations from those authors most willing to wield the necessary whips.
First of all, from Chômu Press (one of my favorite small presses): Member by Michael Cisco. I enjoyed this book, although for most of it, I was not nearly as drawn in as I had been by his previous novel Celebrant. When I came to the third section, however, and finally understood the engine of the novel, I was struck by the power of the conceit, just as I had been with Celebrant. The man is creating orderly, rational dream states in these novels to wrangle down the despair and pain of life; he is doing it in such a unique and visceral way that you can’t help but twist up inside when you grasp the correlatives. (But you have to give yourself over to it. Which is not as hard as you might think: the language is so beautiful, imaginative, and commanding.) The last lines of Member felt like a cheat, however, a lie effected to provide a cheap punchline; he gave up (in my reading). He didn’t do that in Celebrant … Well, I’ve got to reread that now! I’ve ordered his first Chômu book, The Great Lover … I have the feeling there is a thematic unity in these three novels: Male/Female Love as a Cosmic principle … the thing that either suckles you in the bosom of the Mystery (Celebrant) or freezes your noncompliant ass pitilessly out of the Game (Member). In both cases, the narrator functions as, hmm, a kind of hostage negotiator, mediating tense discussions between a cruel, arbitrary author and a hapless schlemiel of a protagonist … while the language itself is a cathartic cloud chamber (I’m appropriating one of Cisco’s devices here for my own purposes!), through which external information (i.e., from beyond the covers of the book) is channeled and transformed into metaphor. (Literachoor, I mean.) Huh, it just occurred to me that I experienced almost identical sensations watching Synecdoche, NY (one of my favorite recent films). Indeed, Charlie Kaufman’s aesthetic is remarkably similar to Cisco’s (in these two novels), the way he creates nonsensical imagery to adumbrate otherwise too painful emotional truth. Wow, I now have a great deal more to think about…! Don’t hold me to any of this, it’s all wild speculations! I wait to confirm my theory (re: do Cisco’s Chômu novels together compose a Love Doctrine of some kind? And, uh, what kind? It could just be straight-up catharsis, too, I don’t discount the possibility; Life, after all, is fucking pain. There are so many modes to choose from! One isn’t necessarily better than the others, and they can even coexist, right?). If it’s the case, though, then I hope there will be a fourth novel: Member should not be the summa. (I am not sure whether to pursue his earlier titles from other publishers. I suspect they are different than these ones. Maybe in the next decade … I’ve got several of those left me … I think. Ha ha!)
The Galaxy Club by Brendan Connell. I really loved this one. I read it last year, but since I was recommending the Cisco, I figure I might as well throw in Connell’s novel. It features a page-turning noirish plot/no-plot about characters that range from a blue boy who runs wild killing minor gods for no good reason to a sociopathic Sheriff with a multiple personality disorder to a broken statue of the Virgin Mary to the gods themselves, who are rather pissed off by the blue boy’s crimes … and a passel of other (living and non-living) characters! Each chapter is told from a different point of view (which reminded me of As I Lay Dying), and the overall sensation I emerged with, oddly enough, was that I’d just read a fantastic Jim Thompson novel. Big Jim had some good ones and some bad ones, of course, but this one would have counted among the good ones, and I am here to testify! Brendan Connell is a strikingly original writer, and as much as he tries to create distance in his approach to characters and situations, I couldn’t help but feel emotional resonances in this particular novel. (Which is probably why I selected this novel it for the featured excerpt in Gone Lawn # 14, of course!) (I should mention that when I was on Facebook, Connell was one of my Facebook friends (one with whom I actually interacted from time to time). I should also mention, I suppose, that Chômu Press published a story of mine in their Dadaoism Anthology back in 2012. We can’t avoid conflicts of interest in this small press world, I’m afraid, but we can declare our associations. On the other hand, who cares? This isn’t a review site; I’m not commercial in any way. Nor am I credible. No one is coming here to find out what to read next! If you’re reading this, it’s most likely due to an accidental landing. (Google does lead us astray from time to time, eh?) Thus, ergo, and furthermore, there’s no issue, and I have nothing to declare but Oscar Wilde’s genius! ;)
Okay, now here’s a title that’s not Chômu-affiliated. Indeed, this author is unaffiliated altogether, publisherwise: a self-confident, self-promoting self-publisher whose brass inspired in me a certain tickled admiration. The book is The Parallax Groove by Michael Loughrey, featuring a delightful Houdiniesque Houdini portrait on the front cover and tasteful book design inside and out (a major feat for the self-published). It collects fourteen fictions, which were all previously published in journals and mags, including one of my personal favorite online lit mags, Sein und Werden, in which several of my own fictions have appeared over the years. These stories are fantastic excursions in word menageries. The language is witty, absurd, viscerally funny. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of most of the situations, but that’s not the point of this kind of writing, of course. If I were to reread the pieces more closely, I suppose I might be able to sex up some kind of plot or thread, maybe even a theme or philosophy … but probably not. And I wouldn’t particularly want to! The Parallax Groove is the fine edge of a syntactic blade that draws blood in word-shapes on the canvas of your literary skin … which sounds gruesome, but actually, hey, it feels like a tickle, I swear! You’re laughing at those blood words!
Hmm, some other books are starting to come to mind, but I’m too tired to mention them. (You can probably tell by the way I’m straining for the metaphor in that last passage there! Whoa!)
This is an unusual activity for me … composing a blog post. Yikes, that’s … wow, that’s what I just did, isn’t it? All I was going to do was make a little list of books with no commentary whatsoever. And I’ve stayed up far too late! Now you know why I don’t do this very often. Frankly, the main reason I did it was that Loughrey (quite sensibly!) suggested I review his book on Amazon, since I made the mistake of telling him how much I liked it. Ha ha! Well, I’d prefer to stay far away from Amazon in general, and I can’t stand their review sections anyway (which is why I copied the few reviews I posted there (long ago) over to this blog). I’m not much of a reviewer to begin with, let’s face it, I don’t have the requisite analytical mind, I am all emotions and prostrations before sublime Beauty when I’m reading something. I knows it when I sees it, Ma! But I gets ALL CHOKED UP when you be askin’ WHY. (Also, I’m a crank, that doesn’t help.)