Minerva's Wreck

EVERY MOMENT IS SACRED

2011-05-27T14:53:00.002-05:00

Sequel Harangue for the Literary Farang

2011-05-17T17:22:00.003-05:00

1. Right now I'm halfway through reading John Burdett's The Godfather of Kathmandu, the fourth in his series of vivid Bangkok-set crime novels featuring Detective Sonchai Jitpleecheep; I've already read the first three.

2. You know the whole thing about sequels, right? The conventional wisdom, whether it's regarding movies or books or whatever? How the sequel's never as good and possibly much worse? Well, check two cases in point:

(1) William Goldman's 1974 novel Marathon Man was made into a terrific movie in 1976, but, as if amazingly, the original book was even better.

Remember? What a richly textured, character-thick narrative for all that it was a popcult thriller, right? What an excellent read.

But then there was the sequel, Brothers. Which was like Goldman revisiting those characters while he's goofing around on vacation somewhere and visiting upon those characters the mere framework of a farfetched plot in a story containing barely any of the textures and depths of the original.

A disappointment, to be sure.

(2) Same thing, IMHO, same damnable progression, same devolution following from Erica Jong's excellent 1973 bestseller Fear of Flying.

Well, sure, I completely skipped FoF's immediate sequel, How To Save Your Own Life. But, by the time Parachutes and Kisses, the third in the series about Isadora Wing, was available and I'd given it a try ... all I could do was give it was a try.

Again: It was as if the author had decided, Well, okay, I put enough work into the first novel, and never mind reveling in the depths of character, let's just streamline this one so it requires less effort for me to write and for the average reader to consume.

Sad, y'know?

[ Listen: If we wanted to read Teflon-coated Lite fiction, we'd already be doing that (we already do do that, occasionally) with the wide variety of options available and constantly renewed everywhere else. We don't need, from deeply capable writers, Lite scribblings that so many others can crank out. We need the heavier stuff that only they can provide. Stuff, say, in the diverse Atwood/Mieville/Mantel/Lethem-inhabited range between Harry Potter and Ulysses. Yes? ]

3. And so, sweet suffering Buddha, how weird to discover
what seems to be the opposite of the lame progression noted above.

John Burdette's Bangkok series was a delight from the get-go, the briskly paced police procedurals made more flavorful and exotic by their Thai setting and the engaging, near snarky philosophical musings of the half-Anglo protagonist, Det. Jitpleecheep. The novels weren't the most strictly nutritious literary meals around, sure, to wrack a metaphor; but neither were they merely Asian-flavored paperback potato chips. But now here's the fourth one halfway down my reader's judgmental gullet ... and damned if Burdett isn't reversing the sequel curse.

The Godfather of Kathmandu is both spatially thicker than its precursors and more deeply written than them, regardless that the thrill & mystery of the story remains undiluted (and is, I'd insist, enhanced) by the more complex textures of character and philosophy woven therein. I have no idea how it's going to end, and I don't really care: I'm caught up in the story around the plot, and in Jitpleecheep's ongoing, conflicted, journey-of-self megillah; and when the book's over, okay, where's the next one, please.

About that: Burdett's fifth in the series, Vulture Peak, is due out from Knopf in January 2012. I've already bugged the Austin Chronicle's books editor about letting me review it when it's available, as soon as the advance copies are released. Hell, yes.

4. What I haven't mentioned in this extended harangue is the urge ... the faint but incessant urge ... to write some sort of fanfic wherein Det. Jitpleecheep teams up with Henning Mankell's Kurt Wallander to solve an international series of murders stretching from Thailand to Sweden.

And I won't, goddamnit.

I won't mention that urge.

Lend Them Your Fears

2011-04-27T15:02:00.005-05:00

Authors Nate Southard and Lee Thomas are the co-chairs of this year's World Horror Convention ~ unveiling itself (in other than stygian darkness) over four days in the urban paradise of Austin, Texas. I recently interviewed them for the Austin Chronicle ~ you can see that much longer transcript right here – and these are some of the highlights of our palaver at Quack's Bakery on 43rd:

Brenner: Why does someone go to a horror convention, much less
the World Horror Convention, in the first place?

Thomas: People can’t always talk about this stuff at work or with their families. A lot of times people just don’t get it. But you go to the con and suddenly it’s like you’ve got four hundred of your best friends sitting around talking about horror, y’know?

Southard: For a lot of us, it’s the one weekend a year where we can sort of function as a society, where we’re not all the quiet people standing in the corner wondering how to start a conversation. We can actually figure that out in this circle.

Thomas: The wallflowers become a weed species.

[Brenner makes a note: This Thomas guy, he's fierce with the soundbites.]

Brenner: So both of you guys write?

Southard and Thomas: Yes.

Brenner: And when did you get started on that? How old were you
when you thought, “Oooh, I’m gonna write some fuckin’ horror.”
Although, ah, you might not have phrased it quite like that.

Thomas: I was in third grade, but I don’t think that counts. I was basically breaking copyright on the universal classics. And I just wrote as a hobby. That’s what I did when my friends were playing video games or going out to the movies and whatnot. I didn’t even try to start publishing until about ten years ago.

Southard: Pretty much the same story for me, but I’d gone about it from a different angle. In middle school and high school, I always wanted to write comic books for a living. And through high school and college, that morphed into wanting to be a screenwriter. And I came down here and went to RTF at UT. Very odd, getting a screenwriting degree from a documentary school. But, by the time I graduated, mostly by reading and picking up on some authors that I hadn’t really heard of before, I found this new fascination with prose. And I’ve really been trying to focus on prose for about seven years now.

Brenner: What drew you guys to horror as opposed to the literary-fiction genre or sword & sorcery or something like that?

Southard: It’s just what I’ve always liked to read. Some of the first prose I remember was Stephen King’s collection Night Shift. And for the longest time I couldn’t actually read his novels, because they just took so long to get going, but maybe that’s because I was just a smart-ass little kid. But his short stories always fascinated me.

Thomas: I read anything I could get my hands on when I was a kid, and when I was nine or ten I picked up a copy of The Exorcist, because my parents had it in the house. I picked it up and read it and I was just ...it was stuff I understood at that age. And I remember that I put down the book, and I was walking out of my bedroom, and my mother was standing at the end of the hall. And just the way the light hit, she was in silhouette, and I … I freaked. I mean, it was just this terrifying moment. And yet, on some level, I dug it. So I just kept reading, trying to find something like that again.

Brenner: Are there obscure horror writers – not new ones who are just starting out, but classic writers – who you would recommend to people who might not have heard of them?

Southard: I think the big one for me would be Jack Ketchum. In some circles, he’s pretty well known. But he hasn’t really had a huge break-out, he hasn’t really crossed over yet.

Thomas: And he’s our grandmaster for the convention. He’s a phenomenal writer. He’s very much from a literary background, but he deals with things that are so unpleasant, so difficult for people, that I think they take the warning seriously when someone says “You may not want to read this, because blah-blah-blah.” It’s difficult work for people to get their heads around, it’s extreme stuff. But with Ketchum it’s so well done.

Southard: He wrote my favorite book, but it’s a book I can’t read a second time.

Brenner: What book is that?

Southard: The Girl Next Door.

Thomas: They made a movie out of that about three years ago.
And it’s very disturbing stuff.

Brenner: Do y’all make a living solely from your writing these days?

Southard: I do not, no. [He sighs.] I’m still working a day job.

Thomas: I am. I can’t say it’s a terrific living, but, yeah.
I’ve been doing that for about six years now.

Brenner: Have you done that with just books, or have you had things optioned for movies as well?

Thomas: I’ve not made that jump yet. I’ve had producers who, well, they contact you every time you have a positive Publisher’s Weekly review, and then you never hear from them again. Or they want to talk to your film agent, so you send them to your film agent, and then you never hear from them again.

Brenner: Are there sub-genres of horror that y’all are particularly drawn to, like splatterpunk or ghost stories or true crime?

Southard: I find most of the best horror coming out right now to be marketed as more of the crime genre. Gillian Flynn’s two books, Ken Bruen’s American Skin, those are – you find them in the mystery section, but they’re horror.

Thomas: I prefer the supernatural work – except in the case of Jack Ketchum, which is all real-world based – it’s more fun for me when I’m writing, and when I’m reading it’s more enjoyable to see somebody bring something new to it.

Brenner: What do you guys think of the – not intentionally, necessarily, by any one organization – but the mass marketing of, the pop-culture force that is HP Lovecraft,
these days?

Thomas: I think it’s great, in a lot of ways. Because he was overlooked, but now people are starting to get it. And I think a lot of it has to do with where we’re at culturally, now. A lot of people are feeling pressed-in by these indifferent forces. Whether it's the government or their jobs or whatever, there’s a lot of that in our society right now. But I think people also realize, on some level, “It’s not just about me,” so they get into this idea that all of these forces that they can’t control are affecting them. And Lovecraft was all about that. The Elder Gods are wreaking havoc, but we don’t know it. We either don’t know it, or we come to realize that they don’t care about us: They’re not here to hurt us or do anything with us in particular, they’re just walking through, and we’re getting stomped on. And I think that’s coming out in fiction right now, a lot of great writers like Laird Barron and Wilum Pugmire.

Southard: Some John Langan stuff.

Thomas: There’s this whole undercurrent – many of them are British – none of the three we just mentioned are – but there’s this whole British movement, a very strong current of that, just waiting to break out. So maybe that’s what will follow the zombie trend, I don't know.

Southard: Just … no more mash-ups.

Brenner: Mash-ups?

Southard: Like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Thomas: A classic novel, with some horror thing thrown on top of it.

Southard: Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Thomas: Yeah, we really want all that to go away.

Brenner: Candide and Cthulhu.

Thomas: There you go, that’ll be the next one. Dibs on the title.

[laughs]

The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books

2011-04-14T15:39:00.001-05:00

[Edited by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee
Soft Skull Press, 192 pp., $14.95 (paper)]

So here's an anthology of writing about how long-form writing and reading, in the omni-connected, ever-distracting Internet age, is (possibly) threatened with extinction or is (more likely) changing to survive. The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books is neatly summed by a back-cover blurb from John Wray: "I sat down to read it expecting a coroner's report and found a manifesto instead."

Fuck yeah, John Wray, you're not kidding: What a refreshing surprise in these days of lit-scene doom and gloom. Editors Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee have gathered essays and vignettes and such from a bright segment of modern scribes – a few of the names recognizable from The New Yorker's recent best "20 Under 40" issue, hey – who weigh in with author's-eye views in their engaging styles and do much to dispel the more funereal prognostication going on at the corporate level of booksmithery.

Rivka Galchen starts off the post-introduction considerations, her surreal "The Future of Paper" a palate-cleansing abstraction before the less fantastical responses are served. David Shields isn't among the lettered company in this volume, but his Reality Hunger: A Manifesto functions as a sort of welcome touchstone for several of the writers, especially for David Gates and Jonathan Lethem, whose back-and-forth emails (originally seen in PEN America 12: Correspondences) are as relevant to the subject at hand as they are cleverly revelatory in general. Treme writer Tom Piazza briefly interviews himself about the future of books. Reif Larsen, of T.S. Spivet fame, tackles the more hardware-oriented, structural side of things with his graphics-embellished "The Crying of Page 45." Kyle Beachy, aside from dissing the abovementioned Shields as "an asshole" who "doesn't believe in communion," offers a plaintive assertion along the lines of novels (that he finds important) being important because, c'mon, guys, you can feel how important they are. Emily St. John Mandel, on the other hand, thoughtfully welcomes our new e-book overlords: "The conveniences of the digital age are inarguable," says the staff writer for editor Magee's The Millions website.

Indeed: How did you access this very review, friend?
And how will it please you to encounter the contents of this recommended book?

You Can Dance If You Want To

2011-03-23T16:37:00.002-05:00

So, right, Duran Duran played SXSW this year,
and oh the nostalgia that burned like a quicksilver fever
through certain demographics that used to wear legwarmers.

Was there swooning?
Was there squealing?
Good bleeding Christ.

For me, though: Whatevs.

Partly because my memories (and appreciation of New Wave in general)
were tweaked by the sweeter knowledge that Men Without Hats
were also playing the festival, in preparation for their upcoming tour.

Men Without Hats!

I mean, "Safety Dance," right?
I mean, "Antarctica."

(And I don't mean much else, because Men Without Hats
are a bit too poppy for me after that, a bit too ... cute, maybe?
Or: The songs lack a certain something
that I'd rather they not lack? Yeah, clear as mud.)

(But: Oh, those two songs!)

I wound up not seeing them anyway ~ with or without hats.
Because I don't really do live music, almost spitefully,
unless it's part of a theatrical show or the players are friends of mine.

Hey, we all have our things.

But I jumped ~ literally sprang from my chair, anyway
as I'm sure R. Hernandez or A. Schroeder will corroborate ~
at the chance to interview MWH's creative epicenter Ivan Doroschuk.

And so I did interview him, via phone
~ an actual landline, goddam ~
before he & the newest bandmembers arrived in Austin.

And the Chronicle published an even more truncated version
of the already truncated version of the transcript I'd made
of our brief but pleasant conversation.

But never mind that.

Here's the ~ longer and (I reckon) better ~ version of the interview:

Brenner: Disregarding any idea of nostalgia, and even what a fucking terrific song “Safety Dance” is, what’s it like having created such a powerful cultural touchstone?

Doroschuk: I’m constantly amazed at what goes on with that song. My all-time favorite was the Beavis & Butt-Head thing. Check that one out, it’s really funny. The punchline was something like, “This guy keeps saying he can dance, but he can’t dance.”

[Maybe at this point Brenner attempted to mimic the Butt-Head laugh,
which attempt may have been met with polite silence.]

Brenner: So, uh ... why did you choose to set the song’s video where you did, with the Morris dancing and the maypole and all?

Doroschuk: Well, we were originally signed to an English label called Statik Records, and they had bands like The Slits and The Chameleons UK, bands like that. It was a really small label, and their people put the video together. It was Tim Pope who did that, who also did most of the Cure videos.

Brenner: If you don’t mind me talking about all your old songs, which are the ones I know … although, actually, what about the new ones? Are they available anywhere yet?

Doroschuk: No, we haven’t released anything yet. We’re going to be trying out new stuff on the tour. That’s the beauty of the industry today: You don’t even have to put together a whole CD. If you have a good song, you can put it out there, and people are used to it. It’s a lot more immediate, these days. It must be really fun to be a new band today, to be somebody just starting off? There’s just so much out there, so many possibilities, so many possible connections.

Brenner: Has the Internet helped your music sales in general?

Doroschuk: Oh yeah, I think it’s helped everything. I’ve discovered so much music myself, that I would’ve never known about. Even music from my generation – I’m constantly discovering bands from the Seventies that were just awesome bands but they went by unnoticed. The Internet’s an awesome, awesome tool for everybody, y’know?

Brenner: If one of the new songs really connects with an audience and it’s one that you guys like, too, is there a possibility you’d make a video for it?

Doroschuk: Oh, I’m sure.

Brenner: What can you tell me about “Treblinka,” which I’d guess is the darkest-sounding song you’ve written?

Doroschuk: I don’t think that was officially released. That was off a demo tape that never really saw the light of day.

Brenner: I heard it on The Silver Collection?

Doroschuk: Yeah, that’s an unofficial kind of thing. That whole album was put out by, ah, I had nothing to do with that, basically.

Brenner: Ha, how things can get away from you – Jesus!

Doroschuk: Yeah, I have a very unscrupulous ex-manager.

Brenner: Thank god for the “ex” part. And, ah, hey, do you ~
do you read Metafilter online?

Doroschuk: Metafilter, yup.

Brenner: Because I followed a link from there last night, and wound up looking at these absolutely gorgeous photos of Antarctica, all these ice caves and stuff. And I was wondering what inspired you to write your song that references that place … ?

Doroschuk: Just the whole new wave movement, with the cold wave stuff, y’know? There was this sort of icy, robotic feel to the whole scene. That was basically the inspiration for it.

WHAT IS STEAMPUNK?

2011-03-15T18:24:00.002-05:00

"We're living in science fiction," people like to say.

They wave a hand at the array of laptop computers crowding shaky tables in a downtown coffeehouse; they nod toward a passing citizen with some telephonish gizmo clamped along an ear's fungiform cartilage; their fingers stroke the sides of a tomato genetically modified with the DNA of distant jellyfish; their LASIK-enhanced eyes track, in the night sky, the glimmer of a private spaceship plying its tourist trade against the vault, the vault, the vault of heaven.

"The future's already here," people like to say.

Because we've been prepared for it for so many years. Because its coming has been heralded throughout our cultures since homo sapiens learned to bind time and gaze beyond the moment. And the times change, and with that change have always come new visions of the future. Only now, the problem is, our vigorous science and technologies have begun to advance at such a pace that what we're creating for ourselves is close to matching the most popular predictions of our recent history.

Oh shit: We're catching up.

This makes further extrapolation more difficult, for one thing. Who can properly conjure a tomorrow that innovation might render obsolete before the light, perhaps bioluminescent, can dawn on that new day? Who can focus a sense of wonder on a realm that relentless industry has shattered into a fractal clusterfuck of shifting possibilities? Also, isn't everything going to hell around us? Aren't we headed, after all, for some final disaster ~ military, environmental, planetary, celestial ~ that our machines and ingenuity can't save us from and which makes the idea of any future highly unlikely at best? What the hell do we do with a situation like this?

We go, as the Firesign Theatre asserted in another context, forward into the past.

Deep into the past: To a simpler, more elegant time before ubiquitous electricity and the internal combustion engine warped a wider vulgarity into the tapestries of our lives. To a time before, especially, plastic. Victorian, in a word. But ~ and here's the neat trick ~ in harking back (in fiction, in visual art, in fashion and other modes of expression), we bring our favorite modern technologies with us.

Ladies and gentlemen, madames et messrs, inhabitants of this brave new world ~ welcome to steampunk.

Gentleman-tinkerers of the late nineteenth century inventing clockwork-driven automatons that would put Honda's Asimo to shame; analytical engines, the bastard brainchildren of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, performing computation beyond human reckoning; the more personal bits of today's polyvinyl-chloride technology now reconfigured in brass and wood and leather. Nothing virtual here: It's all hardware: Machine culture you can pry apart and modify with elbow grease and scientific know-how. And, dash it all, don't those frock coats and goggles look simply smashing!

The writer K. W. Jeter suggested the term steampunk back in 1987, as a label for the sort of narrative created in his 1979 novel Morlock Night ~ a sort of twisted sequel to H. G. Wells' The Time Machine ~ and in the fiction of Tim Powers, James Blaylock, and others. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's 1990 novel The Difference Engine brought the nascent sub-genre to a higher resolution and a much wider audience. Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (which debuted in 1999 and which please don't confuse with the abomination later desecrating neighborhood cinemas) gathered the creations of steampunk inspirators ~ the aforementioned Wells, Jules Verne, et al. ~ into one magnificent and vividly depicted amalgam of romance and adventure. Katsuhiro Otomo's 2004 feature-length anime Steamboy fueled the engines of cultural saturation with swashbuckling period details and astonishing visuals. And now here's the New York Times, the Old Gray Lady with the New Digital Gown, covering the burgeoning steampunk style of DIY fashion and industrial design undertaken by the fiction's more talented acolytes. And, hell, that was back in 2008.

If the future's already here and what may follow it is fraught with anxiety, of course we're retreating to the past. If the present seems uncertain and tawdry when compared with some abandoned Golden Age our forebears knew, why not take our favorite toys and go (if only metaphorically, via speculative fiction or material trappings) home again?

The steampunk abode in which we'll abide won't be bedecked by the likes of Ethan Allen or Karim Rashid but by ourselves, more likely, with a little tutelage from Sean Slattery or Richard Nagy; and it'll boast a library of books like Jay Lake's Mainspring and China Mieville's Perdido Street Station and that themed anthology from Ann and Jeff VanderMeer; and we'll listen, while lounging in our taffeta gowns and riveted trousers and fingerless gloves, to Rasputina and the Decemberists and Abney Park and, oh, probably anything featuring a homemade theremin.

"The street finds it own uses for technology," as William Gibson famously put it, glossing his cyberpunk opus Neuromancer. In the case of steampunk, that street's likely paved with cobblestones and lined by brass-chased gaslamps; and those lamps glimmer in the dark, lighting the way toward a Temple of Exquisite Anachronism where the future's expertly retrofitted with the past and the best of all possible times can provide a bright refuge from the worst of this world's fleeting present.

Nethermind's Taco of Bliss

2011-03-11T11:59:00.002-06:00

Here's an appropriate, I think, follow-up to the last (Valentine's Day) post,
from right here in the middle of the start of SXSW Interactive,
the city of Austin flooded with tech geeks & scenesters & celebrities
& media flacks of all kinds.

It's romantic as hell, this true slice of life.
It's about going from online friends to meatspace marriage.
It's pretty damned heartwarming, and I'll assume that anyone who has a heart
likes to have it warmed every now & then ... ?

“Neither of us joined Second Life looking to find love,” says Elle Waters from the home she shares with her husband Charles Callistro in Louisville, Kentucky. “Besides exploring a new virtual space, it was more about, as it is for a lot of people, seeking a connection with people you can have intelligent discourse with.”

And none of those people, during those first months in Linden Lab’s virtual world, was Charles Callistro.

“I was part of the Digital Cultures discussion group in SL,” says Waters. “We’d have these very philosophical conversations, about the impact of the Internet, about the communities that develop online and how they translate to real life.” This was a professional area of interest for the woman who works as Web accessibility coordinator for Humana, exploring issues of better online access for people with disabilities.

“We knew some of the same people in SL,” says Callistro, IT operations manager for a small California company. “We hung out in a couple of crowds that sometimes overlapped, so maybe we said hi to each other at a party or event, but we never really got together.”

“And then we met in real life in 2006,” says Waters.

“There was a Second Life meet-up in San Francisco, where Linden Lab is based,” says Callistro.

“I was involved in running that, and flew out for the weekend, and Charles and I got to know each other there,” says Waters. “And then, back in SL, there was his radio station.”

“I was running Phreak Radio,” says Callistro. “The station was broadcast through SL and the Net in general. And Nether [Nethermind Bliss: Waters’ avatar name] had been DJing for a while, doing private parties, so we brought her on board.”

“We had this ongoing joke of how Phreak Radio was a charmed environment,” says Waters, “with 12 of the 14 DJs eventually becoming couples with each other.”

“And then Elle came back to San Francisco,” says Callistro.

“I was invited by Linden Lab,” says Waters, “as an Influential SL Resident, to take part in discussions about how to improve the in-world experience. So they flew me out to San Francisco. And that was how Charles and I had our first actual date.”

“But I couldn’t attend the discussions – or the party afterward,” says Callistro.

“He was persona non grata at Linden Lab at the time,” explains Waters.
“Taco the troublemaker!”

Callistro [avatar name: Taco Rubio] laughs.

After that, the two went into World of Warcraft, they and some other SL friends, levelling up characters and going on raids and generally socializing in that MMORPG as Second Life devolved into more of a kludgy, virtual shopping mall. And Waters and Callistro dated elsewhere online, hanging out on Skype for hours, watching shows together on Hulu as they chatted. And every three or four months they’d get together offline, sometimes in San Francisco, sometimes in Louisville, sometimes at a halfway point. And – eventually –

“We decided to take the plunge,” says Waters. She couldn’t leave Louisville, having shared custody of a daughter with her ex-husband; so Callistro would be the one to budge; and he turned in his resignation at his job, but the company countered with a telecommuting offer, allowing the IT manager to work from Louisville. FTW, as they say online.

“We got an apartment for Charles a few blocks away, so we weren’t just throwing ourselves together,” says Waters. “I think it’s important to have a transitional period for this sort of thing, especially if there’s a child involved, for people to get used to each other, to the constancy of being in the same space and sharing the everyday life.”

“And that worked great,” says Callistro.

“So a year later, we found a house to move into together,” says Waters,
“and five months after that, we got married.”

And their time online now?

“Well, except for our jobs, not so much anymore,” says Waters. “I go into SL maybe once every couple of months, to attend a friend’s event or whatever, but that’s about it.

“We keep in touch with old friends via Skype,” says Callistro, “and various online forums.”

“We play so many games together as a family – video games, board games – and we have so many other things going on IRL,” says Waters. “My entertainment these days is our daughter, my husband, and our 80-pound puppy. We’re never lacking for amusement, or for intelligent discourse on any number of subjects.” She pauses, and her smile is almost audible over the phone lines.

“That’s what happens," she says, "when you marry your best friend."

Wings for a Paper Saint: Valentine

2011-02-09T16:58:00.009-06:00

Love is in the air like a brace of lepidoptera, iridescent membranes flapping like the beat of a thousand paper-thin hearts. What'd they morph from, these insects d'amour, and who's to disparage their larval stage in favor of the flighted form, to shun the worm yet woo the wings?

All things change, of course, and love no less than others and more than most. A time of infatuation may be the only hour that never stretches, the emotions shifting swiftly along a course less straight than that of Cupid's drunkest arrow toward some far terminus of romance. And the day that celebrates this multihued passion, the day named in honor of St. Valentine? What are its origins?

February 14, fast approaching here, was originally the feast day of Juno Februata, the Roman Goddess of the Fever of Love. In celebrating this goddess, whose day fell within the festival of Lupercus, a box was provided from which single men could draw a small piece of paper that was inscribed with a woman's name. The couple thus formed would participate in the erotic games that followed, would remain partners for the subsequent 12 months, and would sometimes even get married. This is what passed for reality programming in pagan times ...

Jump ahead to the advent, so to speak, of Christianity, and to the repression of all things erotic. Juno's rantum-scantum lottery couldn't cut the ecclesiastical mustard, and something had to be done. One something was: replacing the women's names with the names of saints or with short sermons. Young men and women were expected to emulate the life of the saint whose name was on the billet they'd drawn; you can imagine what a box of chuckles that turned out to be. So, to assist those of the partying public who still preferred forming the two-person tortoise to sitting around in a hairshirt, the church decided a little revisionism would be just the thing: Out with the old gods and in with the new. Juno, man, she was yesterday's news, and quicker'n you could say Quod erat demonstrandum, all mention of her or of Lupercus was repressed. The happenin' kid on the block was a saint, went the official word. A saint, um, let's see now ... Valentine? Yeah, that's the ticket: St. Valentine! One of ours! And, listen, old Val is why all this celebrating started in the first place, capisce?

His day was officially set as February 14 by Pope Gelasius I in 494 C.E.

But ... wait just one fucking minute. Was this saint the Bishop of Interamna who was martyred circa 271 C.E.? Or was he the priest that Emperor Claudius had executed for marrying couples in secret? Or was he a different priest who'd been subjected to much chin music and a little beheading for having dissed Jupiter and Mercury in the still-mostly-pagan days?

One source claims there were as many as seven different Valentines.

It didn't really matter: The papal instrumentality simply threw together a fake bio and set their propaganda loose and their soldiers onward and extinguished the public spark of Juno for good. However, the human spirit being resilient and love conquering all & so on, people eventually returned to using women's names instead of saints. At least there was that. And soon thereafter ~ well, in the 14th century ~ the custom of sending love letters on St. Valentine's Day began in England and France. By the 17th century, it was handmade cards; followed, in the 18th century, by commercially made cards.

Decades passed, and the celebration grew increasingly secular;

the festival was finally dropped from the 1969 Roman Church Calendar.

These days, it's a largely Hallmark time for many of us, and heart-bedecked cards lie in piles ~ for the lucky ones ~ like so many paper butterflies resting their polychrome wings. But you know that even the blue morpho's got a flightless past, and you know those cards began life as nothing more than points of affection worming their way deep into the hearts of your loved ones. And you know that the transformation's not complete, nor will it ever be, and that over time what we call love may move from the fragility of a swallowtail's wing to a strength beyond the history of insects on this world.

Of course, yes, that sort of love does require a bit of work.

It's just a little easier than flying.

...

Who is Merricat?

2011-01-20T14:47:00.001-06:00

"My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenent, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

~ Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle

The Lover's Dictionary

2011-01-20T11:43:00.006-06:00

by David Levithan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pp., $18

There's a Venn diagram somewhere ~ just like there's a true love out there for you somewhere, sure, because abstractions are as ubiquitous as they are unattainable ~ and in one circle of this diagram are the sort of relationships experienced by people who aren't self-reflective, who are only mildly neurotic and also sort of boring, and in the other circle are the sort of relationships experienced by people who think perhaps too much about themselves and others and are also, on some emotional or psychological level or other, fucking apeshit crazy. And then, of course, there's the overlap. In this diagram, the overlap is where parts of pretty much anyone's relationships can be seen. This is the area covered by David Levithan – author, most famously, of Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist – in his new book, The Lover's Dictionary.

Levithan's unnamed narrator uses a lens of words to reveal the particulars of his two-year (so far) relationship with his girlfriend: words, a few of them for each letter of the alphabet, which serve to mark the short passages he constructs after every one. This gambit's effective as a format for exploration by the author, and, for the reader, it renders the text into easily parsed pieces rarely longer than a Facebook update. It's effective as The Lover's Dictionary because Levithan has been through an emotional wringer or two, or has somehow grokked what it's like, and still dares (or is helpless) to hope that another journey through another wringer could end up elsewhere than in a sodden pile of regret on the cold, hard floor in some laundry room of love.

To some extent, you've been this narrator, I've been this narrator, we've all been this narrator. That's a compliment to Levithan's skill at making the personal work universally and vice versa; he's just telling one man's story ~ well, one-man-and-one-woman-together's story, from the man's point of view ~ and yet it's so damned familiar. What else it is, thankfully, is not overly or merely or more than occasionally clever or maudlin ~ a relief, as this Dictionary is clearly written by A Sensitive Guy. And of course here it is, in its fine and smallish hardcover package, just waiting to be the perfect Valentine's Day gift for, what's the term, that special someone? Or just for yourself. Because, c'mon, aren't you just as special?

This review also appears in The Austin Chronicle, for which scrappy altweekly it was originally written.

Again with this one:

2011-01-12T12:43:00.006-06:00

Yeah: The dottir & me.

Because maybe
you haven't read it before?

Because I desire an easy post
while other arenas command fierce attention?

Because sometimes the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

It's this sort of thing

2011-01-05T15:13:00.000-06:00

... makes me wanna put up one of those vinyl banners that say WELCOME VISITORS FROM MAGTASTIC BLOGSPLOSION, y'know?

Or maybe have it spelled out in plastic letters on one of those trailer signs, a little food stand nearby selling, like, breakfast tacos and hot java, kind of monetize the whole situation?

Wait, what sort of thing?

This, from Andrew Losowsky of Magtastic Blogsplosion.

*blush*

One feels a certain pride welling up.

One feels galvanized to better one's previous endeavors.

One had better fucking post to this blog more often, hadn't one?

Soon, m'darlings.

Two Blogs, One Ax

2010-12-08T14:06:00.000-06:00

Just posted a review on the Austin Chronicle site, righteously pimping Top Shelf's Ax anthology by Sean Michael Wilson as a fine solstice gift.

You must be swayed solely by my impeccable taste, because a benediction by the likes of Publisher's Weekly is, like, bupkis, right?

Also, hey, Chris Staros? Please work some of your Top Shelf magic & offer that cover, sans title, as a big old poster?

Please?

*bats eyelashes*

Jewells Among Us

2010-11-23T17:09:00.001-06:00

Right, so the first volume of Jewell 1-2-3
is back from the printer & being distributed
by myself and its author.

( The second volume is due sometime soon
& will be released during the second week of December.
The third volume will be sent out in January,
is the plan. )

These books are bits of prose & verse from that multifaceted David Jewell (see previous post for more), set in spare surroundings and in oversized type, because even brilliant texts are sometimes overlooked because they're presented in too-small print and/or with too goddam many other bits of brilliant text.

I mean, c'mon.

This trilogy's printed as 500 of each volume;
I'm sending out 135 copies of each, gratis,
to the Usual Suspects of Cafe Armageddon/Minerva's Wreck:
To the people, in other words, who've done me favors
or provided comps over the years;
or to people I've worked on projects with;
or to people I'd like to work on a project with in the future;
or to people I'd like, for one reason or another, to impress
with my meager curatorial and design skills.

Of course, that's a lot of people
& perhaps you've been neglected,
and perhaps unintentionally, free-copywise.
For which, ah, my sincere apologies
& look to my somewhat haphazard methods
of keeping track of these documents once they're been printed
to explain the oversight.

But also know that Jewell himself
has more'n 300 of each volume,
and will also likely give you one if you ask nicely for it,
and he might also be selling them via the good offices of Domy Books.

Okay. Okay.

RE: JEWELL

2010-10-06T15:03:00.006-05:00

Sometime in the middle of the housewarming party my wife Katherine and I recently hosted, the letterpress printer and bookbinder Laura Thoms mentioned that she'd like to do a print for inclusion in next year's (final) iteration of Minerva's Wreck.

"Hey, " I said, "that'd be great! I can probably find some awesome bit of verse from David Jewell for you to work on."

And design shaman Marc English, who'd been profiled in Minerva's Wreck: 2009 and was also in the room with us, said, "Well, that should be easy enough."

Marc had seen mine & David's Double Exposure stage show a couple years before & so had experienced DJ's spoken-word wit & mysticism live, as they say, in concert. So, yeah, he knows there's no great difficulty in finding Jewell texts that are (at least) worthy of excellent design, display, and distribution.

But, although there'll be something by Laura Thoms in MW: 2011, that something probably won't, on second thought, incorporate text by David Jewell. Because, after all, the man will already be represented therein: A work of Jewell's, boldly illustrated, has long been designated as the two-color centerspread for that issue.

So, that's that.

Except.

Except that we're going to produce, first, a thing called Jewell 1-2-3.

Which is, as the title implies, three separate volumes of work ... and each of these volumes will be approximately tabloid sized, and will (besides possessing sufficient intellectual heft) be the sort of visually appealing artifact that might improve the top of your coffee table or reading desk.

And they'll be distributed, one volume each month, starting in November.

Fuck, yeah.

Ain't A Rider Can't Be Throwed

2010-10-05T16:34:00.004-05:00

Sometimes, instead of updating a blog, you just want to pull your favorite blanket over the top of the coffee table and crawl into the space created there, into a sort of secret fort in the middle of the living room, with a bunch of old comic books and chocolate-chip cookies and a glass of milk, to do nothing but read the golden afternoon away.

But then you realize, ah, shit, I'm not a little kid anymore.

In fact, you realize further, your own kid is no longer so little herself and is doing a great job with her own blog and her tweets and all, and ~ jesus, old man, get back on the goddam bloghorse already.

And so it shall be, with, in the next couple of weeks, this horse steered right into the midst of Minerva's Wreck: 2010. I mean, I'll be webifying the issue: Texts, images, and so on, all the bits that can be faithfully reproduced pixelwise will be added to this ongoing compendium.

Because? Well, because 1) All 500 of the physical, mildly handworked copies of the anthology have already been distributed & so this is the only place from which, ah, non-recipients can glean the MW-specific knowledge & amusement ... and because 2) It's much more convenient to share the goodness this way, isn't it?

Until then, by way of entertainment & recommendation & even cheap distraction, there are the link-studded paragraphs you've just read. And this link to an Austin Chronicle blogpost happily pimping Fantagraphics' Meatcake collection.

Tomorrow: The making of Jewell 1-2-3.

Getting Bitter All The Time

2010-07-02T16:43:00.007-05:00

You have to read Daniel Clowes’s
new graphic novel Wilson at least twice.

You read Wilson the first time, you might come away with an overwhelming feeling of what an unsympathetic schmuck the main character is. Not bitter and arch in an entertaining Lloyd Llewellyn way or with the slapstick angst of Ivan Brunetti, ho ho ho, but just damned sad & ingrown & mean & unenlightened & all those things that are the opposite of what regular yoga practitioners would tell you is the Bodhisattva ideal.

You read the book for the second time, you’re more likely to see emotional distance and pain that not even a yogi’s One-Legged King Pigeon pose could describe the deep contortions of; you’re more likely to see Wilson’s struggles – often half-hearted, mostly half-assed, yes; but relentless to the point of something like bravery – to move beyond that.

Yes, bravery.

Warped and reluctant, sure; but bravery nonetheless.

Because how difficult is it, at times, to sincerely connect with other people, to appreciate the miracle of existence, even when you’re not half as miserable as this miserable Wilson? Answer: It’s pretty fucking difficult, at times. And yet, here’s good ol’ Wilson – how he hates us – trudging his way through the latter half of his life and trying, trying, trying to connect somehow, with someone, with anyone, to glean some comfort from his existence in panel after panel, drawing style after drawing style, page after page.

The way Clowes shifts his illustration through familiar spectra of “the funnies” works to relieve the initially monotonous harshness of Wilson’s outer personality, hints at a complexity mirrored within the character, and simultaneously refutes the idea that simplicity of drawing is equal to simplicity of message.

“What is man,” asks the Bible’s Psalms, “that thou art mindful of him?” Wilson is Wilson, a distinct character dealing with complex issues, whether he’s rendered at some level of realism or reduced to wacky big-nose style. Clowes has worked this tack before (cf. Ice Haven), but it’s especially successful here, partly because of a tight focus on the one character and partly because ... well, okay, I don’t know about you, but the times in my adult life when I’ve most regularly come into contact with the Sunday funnies have been pretty bleak times. The Sunday funnies are what’s read in the grimy break room when you’re hungover and between the halves of a double shift in a go-nowhere food service job; the Sunday funnies – so many of them often unfunny to anyone with, like, a functioning forebrain – are what’s used, with stale cigs and bitter coffee, to blot the hollow pain that follows from the one you love breaking your heart the night before.

That’s why the (stunted, negative) humanity of Wilson doesn’t seem out of place in this range of cartoon styles; it seems, unexpectedly, right at home.

And so, at the end, unexpectedly, does Wilson.

I’m telling you that you have to read this book at least twice.
But, if you do that, you’ll probably read it again and again and again as the years slide past.

GO ASK ELLIS

2010-05-28T13:46:00.013-05:00

Action artist David Ellis aka SKWERM

… who, among other things, is the founder of the Barnstormers
as featured in the December 2009 issue of Juxtapoz …
was layering down the paint in Austin recently,
as the first international artist invited to create work
for the new Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas.

I interviewed Ellis for a short piece in the Chronicle.
It was a sort of hey-check-this-out press shout about his residency,
so's to stir up (or satisfy) some general interest about
the man's work and what the Center promises
for the future of UT-sponsored art.

Since Ellis's big thing (aside from the painting itself)
is videodocumentation of what he does,
YouTube was a great source for research,
for seeing what his paintings look like
as they morph from one image to the next.
And how the man collaborates with other artists,
as seen in this mindblowing collaboration with Italy's BLU.

I'm pointing this out to you not just because
you'll enjoy watching those videos (which you probably will)
or because the Chron article is especially well-written
~ it's merely adequate ~
but because I want you to be aware, if you're not already,
of the vivid graphics that Ellis creates and the
~ dare I say it? ~ oh sweet jesus, I'mma say it ~
the paradigm-shifting way he videographically captures
and intarwebbishly distributes his acts of creation.

And I want you to be aware of this because
this year's printed edition of Minerva's Wreck will be released soon.

Which means I'll be free to begin work
on next year's edition, on Minerva's Wreck: 2011.

And, among the other wonders to be found in its pages,
each instance of Minerva's Wreck: 2011 will include
an original painting by David Ellis.

Whoa, you may say.
W, you may wonder, TF?

This: I was in the Visual Arts Center, pre-interview, waiting for Ellis.
I was talking to Nicole Vlado, the internal affairs coordinator
of UT's "Landmarks" public art program.

As Vlado described the program and its planned future,
I was looking around the enormous front studio
that held the structure that Ellis & his crew had built
to house and light the painting surfaces for best video recording.
Sitting to one side of this working structure was a canvas:
A big canvas … an enormous fucking canvas … a canvas
that was so large that it had been folded into itself many times
& was still larger than the back seat of my car.

The part of the canvas that was visible was covered with familiar colors and lines. I knew, because it was obviously one of Ellis's worksurfaces, that the bright latex marking the giant canvas must be in, what, ten, fifteen layers?

The giant folded canvas was sitting atop
a scattering of rags and wires and sawdust.

I asked Vlado, "Uh, what's ... that?"

"That's a used canvas," she said.
"David's going to take it out to the Dumpster later."

"The Dumpster? He's just going to ... throw it away?"

"Yeah," said Vlado, "he ~"

"I could do that for him," I said.
"I mean, I could take it, if that's okay. If he wouldn't mind?"

"Well," said Vlado, "you can certainly ask him ..."

And so I did. After the interview wound down ~ Ellis had to get back to painting, I had to get back to the office, the afternoon was grinding on through an overcast, grackle-bothered sky ~ I pointed to the folded canvas. Told Ellis that I'd be glad to take care of it for him. Told him that I did an annual anthology to which pieces of the canvas, accompanying an article about its creator and the cultural ramifications of his work, would be a perfect addition.

"Sure," he said, shrugging. "Yeah, that's cool."

The folded canvas was just slightly larger than the back seat of my car; a bit more folding & its bulk was accommodated.

The mass of paint-thickened fabric is in my apartment now,
taking up about one-sixth of my small bedroom.

And so: For the oversized Minerva's Wreck: 2011, which will be released in an edition of 250 in the summer of that year, Ellis's canvas will be cut into pieces approximately 10 x 12 inches each and ~ enclosed in a heavy-gauge clear plastic bag ~ affixed to the inside back cover of the anthology ... to illuminate an article ~ a combination of fact-based reportage and critical essay ~ by design journalist William Bostwick.

Yeah, we're pretty excited about this.

Deep in the Adamantium Heart of Texas

2010-04-25T15:38:00.036-05:00

Something about a big white space that needs adding to, right?

Like that issue of Love & Rockets that starts off with Maggie & Hopey scoping the unmarked wall across their street, cracking wise about "The Great White Wall" and "Call me Fishmael" and so on before Hopey goes to tag it?

Yeah: Beautiful. I read that issue, what, once? Years and years ago?
And I still think of it every time I see a white wall, untouched, waiting on the street.

But I'm no tagger, no paint bomber, nothing but a vicarious aficionado of that whole fat-cap, wildstyle, mondo-piece street scene. What I do with spray paint involves stretching big swaths of burlap on an empty parking lot somewhere and spraying across the patterns of masking tape I've set onto the fabric ~ nothing more, little less. Art, some people call it; but what it really is, if I do a good enough job, is something that looks compelling enough that I'd buy it if somebody else was selling it.

But there's that call of blankness ~ "Hey, you! Fuckin' fill me with something, here!" ~ that obtains whether it's from a big urban vertical in the shadows of night or a sheet of leftover copier paper in some rat-race office or ... the Specials Board of a 24-hour diner on the near Westside of Austin, Texas.

Something about a big white space that needs adding to.

Something about the iconic sound effects of the Marvel Universe.

The Magnolia Cafe on Lake Austin Boulevard. Mid-90s. Don't ask me to remember the exact year. I was in my mid-30s. I was working as a waiter, had been at The Mag for half a decade already, ferrying hot food to patchouli-smelling hippies and Lexus-driving yuppies and Westlake fratboys and unsigned bass players and so on.

Busting the ol' hump so as to provide for self and young daughter: It was, at the time, a living.

I had a couple of graveyard shifts in addition to the dinner shifts and a Sunday brunch, and this was one of those graveyard shifts: Where this thing with Marvel's Wolverine happened.

Not with the character of Wolverine, exactly, nor with Hugh Jackman who would later play him in the movies. With the sound effect of Wolverine, as mentioned above.

It's a funny world, I'm telling you.

Because there was no nightly special on the graveyard shift. So by the time I was on the floor, the Specials Board ~ an approximately 20" x 30" whiteboard with accompanying cohort of Dri-Erase markers ~ had been wiped clean of that night's unique dinner offering.

There was the Board, sitting above the beverage station, right where all the customers could easily see it, but now displaying exactly nothing.

And there was a lull each night, a lull that fell between the last of the late-dinner crowd and the first trickle of the bustling bar rush to follow. And, yeah, if you've got time to lean, you've got time to clean. But, first off, everything had been pretty much cleaned already by the departing dinner waiters and, second off, after seven years of working there, my cleaning habits had become somewhat, ah, lackadaisical.

Shame upon the house of Brenner, but there it is.

So I had a bit of downtime near the start of each graveyard shift.
And there was that Specials Board.
And customers ~ especially late-nightt customers ~ like a bit of distraction, a bit of let's-call-it whimsical diversion every now & again.

Also, I've always had all this trivia stuffed in my head ~ literary things, comicbook things, movie things ~ and, except for endless self-amusement, it doesn't do anyone a damned bit of good.

Well, so, hey: What's the intersection of all those conditions?

This: At the start of each graveyard shift, I'd write a different quotation on the Specials Board. From a movie or a book or a graphic novel. Just throw it on up there, give people something to look at and ponder over. And if they asked about it, hey, I'd be happy to tell them. Or, if they wanted to give a thumbs-up, because it was (typically) kind of an obscure quote and they were pleased for having recognized it & wanted to share a fleeting bit of camaraderie with whoever had written it on the Specials Board ... well, so much the better.

"Only connect," right?

In fact, that line of E. M. Forster's, "Only connect," that was the first thing I put on the Specials Board. And then, night after night, a new quotation, dragging up lines that were memorable from what I'd read of E. Hemingway ~ The road to hell is paved with unbought stuffed dogs. ~ and S. Jackson ~ 'Merricat,' said Constance, 'would you like a cup of tea?' ~ and N. Gaiman ~ How fares the gryphon at your gates, Dream King? ~ and so on, night after night.

And people would occasionally inquire, and I'd tell them where the quote came from; or my fellow waitrons would refer the customer to me, and then I'd tell them. And, much less frequently ~ maybe every fourth time I worked graveyard ~ a customer would happily inform me of the quote's origins ... and we'd yak about the book or movie for a few minutes ... and I'd give them ~ surprise! ~ a free slice of Peanut Butter Cream Pie.

Good times.

But after about four months of this, I was running out of especially interesting quotes. Things were getting a bit banal, and I didn't want to (during my non-Mag hours) have to start looking things up and writing them down for later. And so one night I grabbed the black marker and wrote, in big comic-sansy letters, SNIKT! across the Specials Board.

Strangely, no one made a peep. There wasn't a single response, querying or otherwise, from that night's trickle of people. Even through the bar rush ~ maybe it was slower than usual, that night? ~ there was nothing about the exclamation on the Specials Board.

After bar rush, however ...

After bar rush, it was mostly empty in the section I was working ~ the front of the main room, with another waitron working the back section, and a third waitron on the covered patio. It was mostly empty, except for this one guy sitting in the first booth. He'd been eating pancakes, I think, and nursing a coffee ... and looking up at the Specials Board with a hint of amusement on his goatee'd face.

And I'm standing there, leaning against the beverage station, pretty much directly underneath the Board with its bold SNIKT!, just taking a breather before it's time to start busting ass on all the closing sidework.

And this guy in the first booth gives me a little c'mere tilt of his head, like he's ready to close out the check. And I walk over, all waiterly attentive. "Yes, sir?"

And the guy nods at the Specials Board. "That's Wolverine," he says.

And I smile all big & toothy, because ~ finally ~ somebody in the diner knows what the hell I'm talking about that night.

(Or, okay, at least somebody knows and wants to share the knowledge.)

"That's right," I say. "You know the X-Men?"

The guy reaches his hand over his emptied plate, reaches his hand across the booth's table, offers his hand to me for a shake.

"I'm Peter David," the guy says. "I write the X-Men."

It's a funny world, I'm telling you.

Recommended like wow:

2010-04-22T13:34:00.010-05:00

"Dash Shaw's BodyWorld

is a twisted masterpiece of storytelling built from stunning visuals and panel-manipulation, rendered with much care by the young artist whose first full-length graphic novel, Bottomless Belly Button (from Fantagraphics), was a black-and-white foreshadowing of what he's capable of in full color and unbridled weirdness."

That's from my Austin Chronicle review of the book, written for a general audience but not without a faint stain of insight.
Click this for the rest of it.

The Meatspace Manifestation

2010-04-21T13:47:00.013-05:00

The offline form of Minerva's Wreck was released in 2009,
in an oversized, handworked edition of 300. The most thorough response to the project was from Alan Rankin, writing in Poopsheet:

“This is the artifact itself.”

These words are on the indicia page of Minerva's Wreck. They remind me of Magritte's painting of a pipe, labeled “This is not a pipe.” Minerva's Wreck, no mere reproduction, is an art object itself, rare and beautiful, and perfectly aware of its status as such.

I can't write an ordinary review for this celebration of all things Austin and arty. Minerva's Wreck deserves something special. To give it the standard Ebertian thumbs-up would be like describing the canelones caseros at Austin's Buenos Aires Cafe as merely “delicious.” No words can adequately describe it to the uninitiated; and for those who already know, no explanation is necessary.

I liked Minerva's Wreck so much, I picked up and moved to Austin. Yeah, that's closer to the mark. An exaggeration, of course - or is it? Read the long personal narrative by editor Wayne Alan Brenner that threads its way through the pages of Minerva like a needle through fine cloth. Brenner's essay is all about the subtle, synchronous ways the city entwines itself into one's life; how the people and places at the hippie heart of Texas can create an Austin epiphany. Having experienced my own such epiphany, I cannot write about the city or its artists with objectivity - and it wouldn't really be appropriate to do so. Like the Beat, or the blues: you just gotta live it.

Minerva's Wreck is a very limited edition. Its rareness means most Poopsheet readers will never see it. This provides a special challenge to the reviewer. Ordinarily, the message of a review comes down to some version of “Buy the damned thing.” (Or: “Don't.”) But in a case like this, I have to sum the experience; the reader's vicarious pleasure depends on how well I express my own. Fortunately, I have lots of experience describing those wild paths and arcane alleys that most readers will never visit.

Good art makes you feel things: anger, hope, loss, love. Great art makes you feel things that cannot be summed in single words. Sometimes a photograph or a painting can fill you with a complex longing, like nostalgia for a place that never existed. When we say art enriches life, this is the full meaning of the word. Examples:

· Molly Rice's memoir of youth and illness, “Seizureville,” is listed under “Fiction.” But it is so painful it must be real, a sore spot in your mouth you can't stop touching with your tongue. It reproduces a tiny slice of life to perfection - like intricate dollhouse furniture - then rips it apart with one cataclysmic, drug-triggered grand mal.

· Profiles of the Alamo Drafthouse and The Order of the Oosik offer insights into gatherings of the Select. Somewhere there is a Church that never passes the plate, whose members pay for the privilege of congregating - but not with money. Their roving Witnessses walk right by you, their eyes passing over without interest - they're not looking for you. You must first approach them.

· Robert Faires' comic “The Lad in the Iron Mask” pastes a four-color hero into a little boy's life, just as that boy once imitated his heroes on the playground. If pop culture has invaded our lives to the extent that it supplants genuine experience, the story argues, then pop culture becomes genuine experience.

· Henri Mazza's “Kangaroos and Vibrators” successfully mingles loneliness with sheer banana silliness, like a 12-hour Animaniacs marathon and no one to watch it with.

· Brenner's rambling personal essay is the rooted bulb from which the rest of the magazine flowers. He's too wordy by half, but you can't stop reading, even flipping back to peruse footnotes that parody themselves. He's the friend whose chaotic personal life you've witnessed with alternating love and horror for the last 20 years.

The mag is full of goofy bonus materials - zines, stickers, postcards. The fact that some articles are illustrated with glossy color photos added by hand to each copy affirms Minerva's existence as an objet d'art. Other add-ons simply qualify as art. For example, why is Benjamin Reed's story of slow apocalypse, “Speechless,” obscured by multiple Post-it Notes portraying an open mouth? Well, Junior, that's what makes it art: Sometimes the question is the answer.

Brenner's mission in assembling the Wreck was clearly to collect some of the great art and writing generated in his home city on a regular basis. The fact that so many of the contributors are or were connected to him - even family - is neither accident nor design. It's just another example of what happens when you have a gathering of creative people, those for whom art is a way of life, not something you do in the off-hours. In a place like that, art and life intertwine so beautifully, so naturally, it's hard to believe we were intended to live any other way.

~ Alan Rankin

A response to Reality Hunger

2010-04-20T17:46:00.006-05:00

1) The novel is deader than God once was, and there's no rebirth in sight. Just in case, though, take this stake and mallet with you to the library. 2) "Shields," says my friend Sylvia, "wants everybody's dirty laundry hung on lines of literature for everyone to see. Wrinkles, stains, and – ugh – skid marks and all." She shakes her head. "Me, I like a little more Maytag action, you know?" 3) You have confused the true and the real. 4) The author of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, whose previous work for Knopf was the genre-defying The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead, hereby kicks the dead horse of literary fiction in its rigor-mortis'd ass, the spikes on the end of his rugose jackboots made of mash-up and sampling, appropriation and aggressive mimicry, gambits ganked from the novelties of rap and DJ culture, 4chan, recombinant DNA, The Daily Show. 5) You might think that Sylvia didn't actually shake her head at that point, that it was fabricated to impart an emphatic rhythm to her speech. You'd be wrong: She shook her head, and she shook it right then, and I've got the video to prove it. 6) Destroy his fib or sophistry in vain; the creature's at his dirty work again. 7) "Shields," says Sylvia, "doesn't care if what you write about yourself or your friends actually happened, only that you say it actually happened. He doesn't want the usual fictions but insists that much of the writing in memoirs can be – almost helplessly – made up. But that's what he likes." She. Shakes. Her. Head. "He doesn't want to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to eat his cake and have that cake be a fucking hot dog at the same time." 8) Shields has a point. He gives a damn. He's trying to make a difference. He's using the best of his formidable talents to do that. 9) Bigmouth strikes again. 10) "Now I know," says Sylvia, "how Joan of Arc felt."

How Minerva Got Her Wreck

2010-04-20T01:46:00.008-05:00

Whole lot of everything going on, Best Beloved.

More than ~ what is it, now? Some number we can't hold a significant portion of in our mind's arena? Six billion, the almanacs suggest. More than six billion of us, then: Cleaving the air around this whirling ball of mud, and many of us making things.

From Sheboygan to Shanghai, from Malmö to Mombasa, from Laos to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, from ~ well, you get the idea: So many of us, everywhere, and so many of us creating. Or, at least, copying and modifying others' creations, thus commenting on current events and whatever's fueling the zeitgeist; or commenting on what we've just modified; or commenting on our own personal lives; or commenting on the act of creating; or commenting on commenting, sometimes, for fuck's sake.

And sometimes there's no copying or modifying involved at all.
Sometimes it's just commenting.
A lot of the time it's just commenting: Everybody's a critic.

The amount of creating and commenting had been increasing, of course, and its churn-rate accelerating, long before what we worked went digital. Before Tim Berners-Lee set the www to dancing a voodoo hipshake boogie via hypertext transfer protocol, thwarting time and space and joining our globally scattered selves in ways that can still boggle those not born alongside a world built on nothing but nothing and one.

But now? These days, with the weather on the change and the metaverse morphing all territorial in our meatspace wake?

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We are already in a culture in which the cultural logic of information has shattered any comforting notion of order.
Non-linear principles of form, in fact, are the signifier of a culture accustomed to fragmentation and montage. Information
in this environment comes as an array rather than a sequence.

~ Timothy Druckrey, Information, Interactivity, Neurotechnology

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Still, barely daunted, we do our damnedest to consider and describe all that we've known in the past, to encompass both the particulars of what we're dealing with now and what, possibly, is left to come in the years before we nuclearly or biologically ragnarok ourselves to mythic smithereens. Some of us, reaching beyond omphaloskepsis, seem drawn to arrange the complex flora of le tout de monde into a single, coherent bouquet ~ nightshade, tansy, triffids and all ~ as if its subsequent presentation would win us the heart of whoever's heart is worth yearning for ... or reward us our own relief. It becomes apparent, though, that to try to singlehandedly wrangle the whole megillah is to court an obsession indistinguishable from madness.

A guy could go all Lovecraftian.
A guy could hallucinate Illuminati among the aspidistras.
A guy could pull a Johnny Truant and start nailing tape measures to the walls.
Jorge Borges, pudding and pi ~ y'know what I'm sayin'?

So what I'm doing here, with this unwieldy device yclept Minerva's Wreck? I'm considering and describing just a few scattered parts of the totality: The parts that come into contact with me, via whatever agency, and which I have the time and desire to go on about. It's a sort of value-added waggle dance (as famously performed by our hymenopteran friends, apis melliflera) potentially leading to your greater edification and entertainment. And ~ inasmuch as one can better understand one's own internal territories by mapping them textually ~ leading to a little edification for me, too.

Your comments, especially, will help with that last part.

Please: Don't hesitate.