Things I Read Wait When the Hell Are We Now?

[roadrunnertwice]

To Infinity And Beyond!

The Remainder of Things I Read in Whenever the Hell

Kip (kiplet) Manley - City of Roses: Gin-Soaked (8/5)

Upon reading back over this one in December to get a few plot points straight, I think it's probably the most confusing episode of the story so far, and I'm not convinced that it needed to be as disjointed as it was.

Still. Important shit happens, and it is extremely fun and also badass.

Darths and Droids (webcomic, complete archives to date, 8/20)

This is much funnier and more interesting than it should by all rights be. I've kind of lost track of the current arc, but that Episode 1 material was solid gold.

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Return of the King (8/29)

Dude man remember back in 2007 when I said I was going to read LOTR for the first time in my adult life? Yeah.

Anyway, ROTK was stalled out at Many Partings, and at some point during my Infinite Jest re-read—right at the Randy Lenz-centric middle portion, to be specific, and I just couldn't handle it that night—I decided that the Scouring of the Shire was exactly what I needed, and inhaled the entire rest of the book including appendices.

So I dunno about this "review" thing, man. It's the continental plate of my little literary landmass, and I'm not really sure what to say. It's not that I consider it the Best Of All Books or anything, but it's built-in to my world, you know?

Things I did not know:

• Apparently Aragorn has the same birthday as my brother and sister.
• Valar? What? (<-- has not read the Silmarilion)
• I'd forgotten that Legolas and Gimli canonically go off into the West together.
• I'd also forgotten that the whole Smaug unpleasantness got retconned as early maneuvers in the War of the Ring! (Gandalf was worried about what Smaug would do if Sauron made a good offer, so he basically rounded up a posse to assassinate him ahead of time.)
• The whole translation conceit is fucking silly. You've got Bilba and Froda, and then I guess Meriadoc is actually Kalimac, Sam and Ham are Ban and Ran, Hobbits are actually Kuduk, the Shire is Sûza, ad nauseam WHAT. But I do kind of like the idea that everyone's real names are fresh off the boat from Fantastistan while the names they're known by sound like they came from the English countryside, simply because I've read so many books that appeared to have done the exact opposite.

Keiko Takemiya - To Terra vol. 1 (comic, 8/29)

This was exactly what it said on the box. Which it turns out is not really what I'm looking for! No harm, no foul. Maybe it's what you're looking for, especially if you're looking for overheated, operatically emotional space dramas about psychic kids rebelling against an oppressive universal regime, with a crazy halfway-between-Tezuka-and-Star-Blazers old-skool manga style. And girly boys, lots of girly boys.

David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest (re-read, 9/3)

Infinite Jest! SO GOOD. Still so good, actually. I was kind of worried I'd overestimated its charms when I read it back in high school, but nope, still solid.

Things:

• So this book was science fiction the last time I read it, and now it's alternate history, because near as I can orient, it seems to be taking place, like, right now. Also, there is a long and weird discussion to be had about whether DFW's imagined era of paranoia and terrorist conflict was worse than what we actually got.
• Crossed wires, hypertext, and endnotes vs. footnotes. Something I realized on this pass is that de-coupling the notes from their pointers turns the book into two parallel streams (one somewhat more disjointed than the other), and enables a sort of optional short-circuiting of the narrative. By which I mean, having the endnotes all in one place means you can batch your endnote excursions, or keep reading and wind up five or ten endnotes ahead, which can do all kinds of unexpected things and is sort of the literary equivalent of winding up in the Minus World or poking around behind a pointer to freed memory.
• I'm not of the same opinion about the ending, this time. My old sound-bite was that the story progressed right up to the point where no one involved could conceivably have any sort of happy ending and then stops, but that's not quite it, is it? For one thing, I'd forgotten about the Year of Glad entirely, and there's all sorts of confusion in there. (Hal actually meets Don Gately? And they dig up James Incandenza's skull? WHAT? And what happened to John Wayne? What do you mean, "I have become an infantophile?" I could write any amount of this off as hallucinatory, because The Boy clearly Ain't Right, except for I mean Hal doesn't even know Don Gately exists by the end of the book, right, and meeting him even once would still require for Don to've survived a great deal longer than I thought he did last time around.)
• And oh yeah, I had totally forgotten about the mode switch in Hal's sections, where it goes to first person near the end when he stops smoking herb. Except that it switches back to third for the segment with Kevin Bain and that horrific teddy bear scene. What's that about.
• Reading this in tandem with Eric Stary was pretty great, because the dude has a killer ear, and I hadn't realized how funny—for example—the scene with Ken Erdedy and the bug in the shelving was until he started riffing on it.
• Man, do I love these characters.

The One Thing I Apparently Read During October

Linda Medley - Castle Waiting (vol. 1) (comic, 10/17)

Castle Waiting starts out as a story you already know. And then it veers off into the weeds and never comes back, and I love it for it. It may be the most complete subversion of the fairy tale form I know, because it doesn't just do its own quest story while ostensibly thumbing its nose at individual tropes; instead, it hijacks the trappings of fairy tales while ripping out the entire spine and central nervous system, telling small tales about people who have thrown over questing entirely and are just living small and complicated lives.

Things I Read During November

Kip Manley - City of Roses part 8: "Beauty" (11/17)

YAY, new City of Roses! We loves us some kiplet.

So them stakes, they keep on getting higher--parts of this one were positively nerve-wracking, and the fight in the supermarket was completely wonderful. But, uh, I'm kind of glad I didn't find time to read it until all six chunks had posted, 'cause some of those entr'acte hangers would have resulted in tooth-grinding.

T.A. Pratt - Bone Shop (11/18)

Well, I read the whole thing, and it got through my whole "fiction, grrrr" mood I've been in (I usually don't notice the "fiction, grrrr" until I'm already a month or so into it; I do not know why that is), so there was obviously something attractive going on in there. But I don't think it was actually good, per se.

Item one! The plot was a big hot mess. Stuff happened, then some other stuff happened, then amnesia. AMNESIA, PEOPLE. *shake shake slap slap*

Item two! All of urban fantasy's worst habits. If I get started on this, I will go all day, and we do not want this, and plus it would probably require me to read a lot more bad urban fantasy than I want to and take copious notes and become insufferable for a month while I get my argument in order. I'm just saying that there is a type of urban fantasy we probably only needed two or three people writing, and instead we have a bazillion, and it's gotten a little airless in there.

Item three! I hereby dub this syndrome: "Prequelitis." You want to have your heroine running around doing cool things before she was famous! Except you don't want to cause any paradoxes once the actual stories start. So what you need is two or three formative problems that have already been discussed in the series proper, plus bunch of disposable character and action that'll all get cleared off the board before we reach square one. This results in an unsatisfying mixture of flesh and cardboard, plus a whole lot of unjustified gankings because the story is being constantly deformed by considerations external to its own logic and drive. Alternately stated: the story proper started where it did for a reason.

I can see the prequelitis being an artifact, and maybe the plots get better, but item two is pretty much suppressing any desire to read the rest of this series. If it's anything like this, it is incompatible with what I want from urban fantasy. On the other hand, I really liked that story he did about the catfish, so I guess Pratt's one for two.

(And on the third hand, hey, it was free, right?)

Yoon Ha Lee - "The Pirate Captain's Daughter" (11/27, short story)

Wow! You wouldn't expect a recycled John Cage gag to be quite so... exhilarating. But wouldja lookit that, thar she blows.

And what a curious way to sail.

(Also, I hadn't ever heard of this magazine before, and it looks dang neat.)

Hobart # 10 (11/31, lit rag)

"Another Literary Journal," it says on the tin, and ayyyup. I quite enjoyed some of this, was indifferent to a somewhat larger portion of it, and was thoroughly charmed by the medium itself. (Their art and design are pretty killer, and the mag is pleasing to the hand.)

Also, I thought this was adorable:

When we pass other cars, our tires and their tires swap raspberries of street water. Rain is made of water and blame. Okay. You've seen rain before. Let's not get carried away. We can see the pitch of things just fine.
—Mike Young, "Stay Awhile If You Can"

I got this and a couple more issues at Wordstock, at a booth that was selling five literary journals (additional haul: South West Review [the Modern Fiction From Arab Women issue] and an issue of Conjunctions) for five dollars. And see, while sifting through their piles, it occurred to me that I've been down on "Modern Literary Fiction" for so long that I actually don't know what the hell it is anymore, and that maybe I should be keeping an eye on it just in case it's up to anything shady.

Hobart was maybe not such a great choice if that was really the plan, since the folk therein mostly seem out to have fun, impress people I don't know, work through their neuroses, and/or draw pictures of burning RVs, so I should probably admit that that is not, at this moment in time, the actual plan. Still. Don't you start thinking no one's watching, Modern Literary Fiction. Don't even.

Comments

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

I was kind of worried I'd overestimated its charms when I read it back in high school

Jesus. And I thought I'd read it early, back in my sophomore year of college. Of course, I didn't start reading on my own, for pleasure, until after I'd graduated high school, so I guess if I'd been so inclined earlier on I could have easily run into IJ.

Anyway, IJ was the first of DFW's things I read. I haven't gotten around to re-reading it since (I've done the first few dozen pages a couple of times, but I always stop and put it aside), but I remember thinking it was the most surreal, f-ed up thing I'd ever read, this sparkling hyper-realized dream world, inching along in excruciating detail towards disaster.

Damn those footnotes. I read an interview where DFW admitted he wanted to annoy the reader. To what end, I don't remember, but mission accomplished :/

I never understood what happened to Gately either. Isn't he beaten to death at the end of the book? I forget where that falls in the chronology. I didn't think to suspect Hal's story about digging up his dad's skull w/ Gately. As I recall, they were led there at gunpoint by the wheelchair assassins, who wanted to find the master tape, which was rumored to be inside James Incandenza's head. I think. Isn't this something Hal recounts in the first chapter (the end of the story, chronologically (?))? True, Hal is seriously messed up here, but like you said, he hadn't met Gately at any other point. Nor do I remember Hal being aware of the existence of the wheelchair assassins, but I could be wrong. Anyway, Hal's life is so f-ed up by the end, that the whole climax-worthy event (the head-digging) is basically just one tiny thing in a long string of ridiculous shit that's going on with Hal, alongside his being an infantophile and bleating like a goat at college entrance interviews. It's an annoying tease, though. I definitely would've liked to know more. Also, I'm still not clear on what messed up Hal so bad in the first place. Did he watch part of the tape, or was it all because of the mold he ate as a kid?

Coincidentally, I busted out A Supposedly Fun Thing last night to start reading DFW's essay on David Lynch, which I'd never gotten around to before. It was the first DFW I'd read in months, and a page or two in, I got hit HARD with nostalgia, and realized how much I miss him. Dumb bastard.

Yeah, I miss him too.

[roadrunnertwice]

Gately got shot, and spent the rest of the book in the hospital. It's just that the first time I read it, I figured he got more and more delirious from complications and eventually died, probably somewhere around the extended flashback to hitting bottom with whossface and Mount Dilaudid. Except that he evidently survives to the Year of Glad, or near to it, so.

With Hal, I don't really know. It never occurred to me that the mold had anything to do with anything, other than being a revealing anecdote re: Incandenza family dynamics. I figured either Pemulis got him to take the DMZ (or he ingested it some other way, 'cause remember that no one knows where the DMZ is at the end and it may have been grabbed by a bored ghostly James Incandenza), or it was a post-traumatic stress thing from either the AFR maneuver on the tennis match (which is where I figure John Wayne met his fate) or some further AFR-related trauma, or maybe he had an encounter with the tape or with the fabled only-mentioned-like-twice probably-didn't exist antidote tape. Who knows.

Re: Yeah, I miss him too.

[fozwalla.livejournal.com]

Aside from Pemulis, I hardly remember any of the people and things you just mentioned, though they ring a bell. I looked up DMZ just now, and Wikipedia says Hal might have synthesized it using the mold he ate earlier. I guess I'd heard that theory before, but didn't remember what DMZ was. I am old.

...

Whoa, they're publishing parts of an unfinished novel, Pale King. I knew I remembered hearing something about his working on a novel.