Pretension & Cleverness: Who is Salinger?

What to make of myself? I finished a Doctor Who novel (The Dalek Generation). It frustrated me as pretentious & self-impressed. The story didn't breathe as much as live on life support. Steady on, with a few scattered memories & references to story lines past in the series. Honestly, I have been disappointed in the quality of the television series as well.  Smith is as brilliant & entertaining as ever in delivering his snappy lines. Also, he demonstrates an effective range of expressions.

I closed the cover to that novel unsatisfied & irritated by the story, as I figured out the key plot twist early.

On the way home from the road trip, my family was caught in a two hour traffic jam on the highway. I opened "Raise high the roof carpenters." By J.D. Salinger. There is hardly a better setting for the appreciation & identification with the story. The weather was humid as in the short story, & I sweat along with the uncomfortable intellectual Buddy Glass. He was stuck in a car with attendees to the stand-up wedding of his older brother, Seymour. His brother is something of a hallowed figure to Buddy, & that Seymour left his fiancée cold at the altar is a matter of exceptionally bad manners in the estimation of Buddy's fellow passengers.  Buddy has been the narrator of other accounts involving the Glass family. Salinger bestows a conceited version of humanity to Buddy. Mr. Glass's narration is sidetracked frequently by pedantic rants & crowing philosophically apologetic defense of his older brother's habits in context. Seymour was a frustrating person with which to live, but his mystic proclamations were religiously read with the fervor reserved for a modern day poetic prophet. I so want to be the amateur reader to whom Salinger dedicated the twin stories. The novel has such beautifully thought-provoking phrases & sentiments. In the second story "Seymour: An introduction," Buddy attempts to paint a portrait of his suicide-suffered older brother. But the contents feel more like a framework. It is difficult to reduce the whole of a person to words. But Buddy doesn't reach the details of the person, only circuitous impressions of the soulfulness & impact of Seymour. The short Tao anecdote about the horse evaluator in the first story's beginning provides a tentative lens through which to understand Buddy's perception of Seymour. Seymour is the Indian elephant in the room of the Glass family. His life & death affected them to various degrees. The personness of Seymour is known only through the secondhand accounts of Buddy & slightly through the second youngest, Zooey,'s short story. Buddy is the foremost prophet for Seymour though. In his position as an unmarried English professor for a small women's college in New York, he has plenty of time on the side to muse on his older brother & write letters to his family. Even Buddy's theme of happiness in the account of Seymour's introduction is conditioned as distinctly unencumbered from any particular emotion: joy or otherwise. The Glass family suffers from over-intelligence, hardly anyone is at their level of intellect to offer a counterpart to their conversations. They are either eccentrically mad or unnaturally sane. Depending on their moodiness, they oscillate betwixt the two.

Earlier, I said I've tried to be a casual reader. But reading this material awakens my mind to try to fathom the depths & nuances of the characters. Buddy alternately frustrates & fascinates me as a reader. While he pontificates on points of taste & curious ideas, the digressions skew the intended focus of his writing. He talks about nearly everything except what was to be his main subject. But the views from this winding path reveal angles & views of the scenery of Seymour as a brother, friend, poet, mystic, prodigy, intellectual, abstractly sentimental, & yet all too human Seymour.

Horror and Isolation

I was told by a person whom I respect that I shouldn't review what I didn't like. I think it was meant that I shouldn't mock an author's work and enjoy my own attempts at cleverness. That is too stereotypically the balm of a failed or frustrated writer.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt [excerpt from the speech "Citizenship in a Republic"; 23 April 1910]

I believe I first heard this quote in the movie "The World's Fastest Indian" about a kiwi and his garage-engineered motorcycle, dreaming about taking it for the speed trials on the Salted Dunes of Utah. The three novels which I have recently come across allow you to watch vicariously through the eyes of those in the arena - to understand their pains and triumphs.

First, there is Warren Ellis's "Gun Machine." I have liked this writer ever since he appeared on a podcast and spoke of writing the graphic novel series "Transmetropolitan." These novels follow around the cantankerous journalist Spider Jerusalem, who lives in a future city of squalor and corruption.  I've only read the first three volumes so far, in which Jerusalem returns to the city which he left on a high point.  He wants to be a hermit and not deal with the noise of the city. He must be in the city to be provoked to write, but the masochism and loathing in his column "I hate it here" published in the newspaper The Word nearly kills him.  He needs to be loathed to get off in writing his scathing and insightful pieces on society.  He stirs up troubling matters wherever he goes, but has a point. Although he makes no claims to being a role model, with his drugs, drinking, and swearing, he has a great respect for the truth and no tolerance for lying hypocrites.

But I digress, "Gun Machine" has John Tallow, a disillusioned cop following the trail of a hitman with an artistic bent towards his victims. At the beginning of the novel, a cache is discovered in a condemned building by accident. This room was sealed shut by a state-of-the-art secure doorway, and within rests a pattern of firearms. On the walls, on the floor, arranged with gaps to be filled like  massive immobile machine with gears awaiting delivery.  Each of these firearms is linked to an unsolved homicide, opening a can of worms for the Manhattan Police Department, who had not linked these killings - writing each of them off as isolated events over the years.
When the hitman discovers the breach, he is not pleased - he will have to begin anew his collection. As an artist, he must reconstruct the machine from scratch.  It becomes a slow game of weary cat and patiently insane mouse between Tallow and the killer. Tallow gradually takes an interest in this job, knowing that the discovery is pinned on him. It is a win-win for the Manhattan department - if he fails to locate the man behind the guns, Tallow is the fall guy. If, most unlikely, he manages to locate this elusive figure who has managed to remain undetected for years, then Tallow merely solves the problem he created by the discovery. As the investigation continues, the killings are revealed to be a tangled web of distressing connections. Highly recommend reading this book.

"I am surrounded by everyone I know. If you know what I mean. I say that a lot. I worry that people don't always know what I mean these days. I don't think I speak as clearly as I used to. Or think as clearly. But that's hard, because life was always simpler before, and there just weren't as many things  to think about. It's like, walking through a city, on sidewalks, you only have to think about one thing at a time. But if you are walking a deep forest trail, you have to think about three of four things at the same time." - Emily Westover {pg. 199}

"Sometimes the rain is so heavy that we look up at all the raindrops when we should be looking at the shape of the puddle that forms from them. All this has been rain. It's been rain for twenty years, and everyone was looking at the raindrops falling while all these people have been moving invisibly. They weren't even traveling through streets we'd recognize. And the rain was so heavy, all over the city, that no one looked down and saw the footprints filling with water. I'm starting to see the shape of them now. I just need to be able to see the maps." - John Tallow {pg. 210}

Secondly, there is Joe Hill's "NOS4A2." I admit I was puzzled by the title, when I should have read it phonetically.  I like Joe Hill's writing - his characters are human, flawed, and desperate. But they try to survive and play the cards that fate has dealt them. But they are often in a card game with the devil, with their choices culminating in fatal games.  Hill is also a comic book writer, with his series "Locke & Key." This storyline features a set of magical keys forged from the otherworldy "Whispering Iron." Adults are prevented from seeing the effects of many of these keys. Gabriel Rodriguez works wonders with the demented details of the plotting. It is a creative and enthralling tale which is plodding forward with a doomed plot. Two more issues remain in the series and it is a grim outlook.

Hill is unflinching in the fleshing out of his characters. They suffer mightily from the choices they've made, the careless mistakes of overlooking the potential consequences. It doesn't make it any easier when they face the music. I am almost tempted to sympathize with the villain so I can receive some sense of triumph in plots.  Hill has said that most villains believe that they are heroes, even when their actions are monstrous. That is what imbues them with such undertones of terror and desperation when viewed with the eyes of the potential heroes.

NOS4A2 follows the life of Victoria McQueen.  As a child, she owned a Raleigh Tuff Burner which could cross a memory bridge to locate misplaced items. The actual bridge collapsed in 1986, but Vic can manifest the concept as a knife into reality, bridging the space between the woods behind her house and the destination she seeks.  Each time she crosses to retrieve an item, her left eye burns and she becomes feverish for days afterward to recover.
Vic cannot explain this phenomenon to her parents. Her mother, Linda, nags her father, Chris. And he physically lashes out to stop her criticism. Both love her, but neither would understand her.  When Vic searches across the Shorter Way bridge for someone to believe her talent, she encounters Maggie Leigh, a 20-something punk librarian in Here, Iowa. Leigh is also a strong creative, whose reality knife is a bag of infinite Scrabble tiles which answer her questions through anagrams.  Leigh explains that each talent takes a toll on the user, in her case, the more she uses the bag, the more her speech is impeded by a stutter. It is in the library that Vic first learns of Charles Talent Manx.
Mr. Manx has lived off his talent for years - his knife is a 1938 Rolls Royce Wraith.  He takes children from their parents, and takes them to his thought inscape of "Christmasland" - where every morning is Christmas and unhappiness is abolished. He believes that he is saving the children from lives of abuse and disappointment, preserving their states of innocence in a winter wonderland amusement park.
Vic encounters Manx, and the consequences of that meeting poison the rest of her life. Manx is imprisoned in a federal facility, while Vic's spirit is trapped in a cage she constructed to deal with her trauma.  She soon receives phantom phone calls from children in Christmasland, who laugh and blame her for keeping their "father" away from them.
Miss McQueen's life takes on a self-destructive trajectory, where she feels guilty and insufficient to deserve the love of friends and family.  She lost her bike after meeting Manx, and conditions herself to view the trips over the bridge as a childhood coping mechanism. One day, Manx wakes up from his coma, and seeks out the girl who ruined his life. Vic is forced to choose between the stable reality she constructed, or face the chaos and fear wreaked by reopening the wounds she has stitched over as fantasy.

This is a really long book. But once I got to page 400, I hardly bear to put it down.

"Adults had a harder time with it than children did, and Vic had gradually realized that this was because grown-ups were always trying to see their way to the end, and they couldn't do it because there was too much information. There was too much to look at, too much to think about. Children, though, didn't stand back from the puzzle and look at the whole thing... The difference between childhood and adulthood, Vic had come to believe, was the difference between imagination and resignation. You traded one for the other and lost your way." {pg. 533}

Lastly, there is Charles Yu. My first encounter with him was his novel "How to survive in a science fiction universe." This was an in-context brilliant piece of work regarding time travel in continuity. The main character encounters himself stepping out of a time machine, panics, and shoots himself in the stomach. Future him stumbles outside while he falls inside. The door shuts behind him, and he has all the time in the world to consider the massive paradox he has and will create. He discovers that he has/will have written a book and spends a lot of his time in the machine both reading and dictating a manual/memoir about his life and learning, while embarking on a quest to find where his father disappeared many years ago in a prototype time machine.

If you do not understand why or how such a confusing story can be constructed or reconciled, you are most likely right. I didn't understand it the first time around, and will probably appreciate it better when/if I read it a second time.  But it was an intriguing concept and a testament to Yu's cleverness in building such a concept and storyline.

I just finished the first short story in
[]Sorry
[] Please
[] Thank You
[X] Stories

"Standard Loneliness Package"

It is the story of a cubicle employee for a corporation which outsources bad emotions. For predetermined fees, as the protagonist rattles the price tags off throughout the story, and a set appointment, you won't have to deal with feeling bad for rented times.  Heartbreak, guilt, despair, grief, pain? Someone else can feel that for you.  The protagonist endures days of reaching emotional breaking points with each clock out for $12/hour.  He convinces himself that it is a job like any other, that he is renting his life rather than selling it like his father did. For $40,000 adjustable to 3% inflation annually, his father gave up 40 years of his life as a human hard drive, excess storage space for the bank to use. At 70, his contract will be served and he will be free to return to society.
The story is narrated in tones of impersonal, matter-of-fact events for the job.  Privately, the protagonist hopes that he can afford a pre-packaged life at a secondhand store. A "standard happiness package." Yu's short story is beautifully constructed, with sorrow, hope, and resolution. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book's contents.

"There are 247 ways to have your heart broken, she says, and I have felt them all." [pg. 21]

"I want damage. I've looked down the road I am on and I see what's coming. A lot fo nothing. No great loves lost. And yet, I feel I have lost something. Better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all? How about this: I lost without the love. I've lost things I've never even had. A whole life." [pg. 22]

Something Wicked This Way Comes - Ray Bradbury

Admittedly, I have two blogs - one for reviews, the other for musings. This is a hybrid post, but this is the longer neglect'd one, and needs the dusting off.

Ray Bradbury is a curious author to me. He weaves stories, though sometimes his lyrical and rhythmic tangents diverge from the main plot. He thinks out loud about his characters, spinning descriptions and impersonal scenery through emotional filters. Depending on the length and connection it resonates with me as a reader, it can be distracting or endearing.

"We read to know we are not alone." - Shadowlands.

This quote holds me to the candle of bibliophilia, which computers don't recognize as a valid word, but it should be. Bradbury has a short attention span as an author with these tangents. He is good at themes and harping on different perspectives. I first read "The Veldt" because of the DeadMau5 song, and was pleased at the tribute both of them bore. That is a horror story to some extent - quite disquieting in retrospect.

My friend was fond of Bradbury and encouraged me to read further. Martian Chronicles was next - it was excellent in its own way. My favorite chronicle was the rocketship whose crew was given a chinese fire drill treatment, for I could understand the sorrowful truth behind the Martian's unbelief. I was not in love with the author, but was curious and interested enough in seeing the allure through the eyes of my friend to keep reading.

Next came "The Illustrated Man," a concept which Mr. Bradbury threaded through many of his tales in different incarnations.  This collection of short stories was also hit and miss for me. I didn't understand all of the settings, or why he found certain tales worth the telling.  In the end, that collection probably had at least one story which would appeal to a reader, perhaps different ones than I enjoyed.

Previous to "Wicked this way," I read his novel "Graveyard for Lunatics" concerning a young writer and his special effects wizard friend, and the surreal mystery into which they fall at the studio. I saw the end before it came, but not how all the players would fall into place in the story.  It took a while for me to make my way through the book.  This is where I first noticed Bradbury's tendency to wander off into minor tangents. I forgive him that, but it does a wide-angle drawback on the story; an overhead view of the characters scurrying below like ants in a farm.

And currently: Something Wicked This Way Comes.  I encountered the curious properties of the carrousel in "The Thief Lord" by Cornelia Funke. Similar to Shakespearean tropes after the fact, I know that Bradbury's use came first, but you can hardly blame someone for the ill luck of having been born later. I am interested for good stretches of the book, and I know that rushing a masterpiece is unfair to expect.  I want to like Bradbury, but my mind is tapping its foot with the plot, wanting to see what he plans to do with the characters.

For we are the dream stealers, always chasing what is incorporeal. Sneaking off in the dead of night; dancing out percussion on the old boardwalk. Come, the carnival calls us. The mirrors reflect all but what is true, a man can lose his boyhood in the forest of metal faces.  What of the redhead, whose eyes burn with ancient hatred? He glows electric and his whispers are poison.  Does no one listen? Does no one see? Can you hear the screams and wailing of a child betrayed as years slip like sand? Hourglass, time passes. The old librarian is tall. Will may find a way to jim open the mystery. Can he wait? Is he wise beyond his years? Run, never stop, the shadow trails the golden child. Tied from birth, they were destined to be inseparable.  Look to the sky - the dust witch cackles as her hands feel the world below. The illustrated man's skin lives and breathes, he feeds on the misery, ageless from the rotation of a Funeral March played in reverse. Don't tell your mothers, they will only wring their hands and keep you locked away. A parade of freaks, transformed beyond recognition. Does the soul survive when the vessel is twisted? Stories are powerful in their structure, wait for their shape to rise. Like calliopes in a valley at twilight - unfolding before your waking eyes.