57 posts tagged “363”

I was gonna make an oh-so-witty post about this brilliant idea I had called Rocktober, but then I decided that joke had been done to death. Unlike some of the people I know (Hotrrod, Crunch, Daby), I know when a joke has seen better day and then come up with new material.

Anyway, now I am tired and got no ideas. I do, however, have a job interview on Friday. I think I actually want this one so there might be much begging for juju and good vibes and crossed fingers.

• My stomach hurts
• Lately I talk to myself in Allen Ginsberg's voice
• Sometimes I walk about Supergenius HQ and update my Facebook status in my head. For example: Jodi is opening the refrigerator; Jodi is looking for the turkey; Jodi is doing a dance in front of the dishwasher
• I always lose the twisty that closes the bread
• I am getting my hair cut and colored on Thursday, you know what that means, don't you?
• Instead of continuing this list I should go read Philip Roth and then get a good night's sleep so that I can get up tomorrow and finish all the writing that I didn't finish today
  

Now that I've finished a second draft of my ghost story, "Lane Six," it's everything I can do to type these words with my eyes open. I always forget how tense writing cane get and how emotionally exhaustive it is. Phew.

My cheeks are still wet with tears. I've had to blow my nose twice, and now as I type I just start crying all over again.

At 4:22 p.m. today I stopped and posted a quote on I Will Dare.
“If you’d asked me five years ago — let’s say five years and seven weeks — where I saw myself, five years and seven weeks into the future, I would not have mentioned a husband, children, living in six different countries. I was thirty-five and had never had a really serious romance. This mostly didn’t bother me. I liked living alone. I would never have called myself single. The word suggests a certain willingness to flirt in bars or take out advertisements for oneself on the Internet: single people are social in hope that they won’t be single forever. I was a spinster, a woman no one imagined marrying. That suited me. I would be the weird aunt, the oddball friend who bought the great presents and occasionally drank too much and fell asleep on the sofa. Actually, I already was that person.”
–Elizabeth McCracken, An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination, page 21

I kept telling myself one more chapter and then I'd get to my own writing. Then I'd tell myself I'd start at five and then at six and then when it got too dark to read without a light. I am not ashamed to say that I have not moved from this chair for the last three or so hours. I could not move until I had finished every last word in Elizabeth McCracken's memoir. It's a slim volume, only 184 pages. But it is by far the most emotional, devastating, and beautiful book I have read so far this year.

This is a book I want everyone in all the land to read. Some men might dismiss the memoir because it is about a woman who has a baby die in-utero at 41 weeks and then must give birth to her dead child. That would be a grave mistake. Because this is book that has a bigger lesson, one that everyone could benefit from. It is about grief and grieving, and how to deal with people who have suffered a tragic loss. 

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is bitter and funny and sweet and riveting and you should do whatever you can to get your hands on a copy right now.

Show us your favorite coffee mug.

Charge Sarah Palin $5 everytime she uses the words energy, maverick, or reform. I'll totally get rich quick.

What word or phrase drives you absolutely nuts?
submitted by, revolt

Douche and douchebag.

I really love that M-----l has this monthly column about books. Since I am always scrabbling about for ideas, I am totally ripping off this idea. I hope he doesn't mind. I will give him the props each month, because despite some questionable taste he deserves it.

BOOKS ACQUIRED (I am not saying bought since I am fortunate enough to have people give me books, and I use Bookmooch a lot):
The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
When I Grow Up, Juliana Hatfield
Black Postcards, Dean Wareham
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
What Was Lost, Catherine O'Flynn
Downtown Owl, Chuck Klosterman
Personal Days by Ed Park (has since been bookmooched along with Joseph O'Neil's Netherland)
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction Since 1970, Michael Martone
Dear Everybody, Michael Kimball
Indignation, Philip Roth

BOOKS READ:
Y the Last Man (books 1-7) by Brian K. Vaughn and Pia Guerra: This is a comic book series about a strange plague that strikes earth killing off anything with a Y chromosome -- human men, male animals -- except for Yorick a 20something dude and his monkey. Chaos ensues. While my feminist undies got a little bunchy at times, this is a fascinating series about what life on earth might really be like if women ran the world.

The Alcoholic by Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspeil: A sort of autobiographic graphic novel about an alcoholic author named Jonathan A. It's a quick, engaging read but gets a little muddled and annoying at the end. There's some nice post-9-11 stuff but really not anything to get too excited about.

Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman: Yeah, do I really need to say anything else about this?

When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris: An ultimately disappointing collection from one of the funniest humorists writing today. This one just gives you that uncomfortable feeling you get when someone tries really hard to be funny and fails. If you're that interested, go read most of the essays for free on The New Yorker's web site.

Personal Day by Ed Park: Blah. This was another life in corporate America "satire" in the same vein as the awful and overrated Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris. Not even a great, great James Joycesque final chapter could save this big, dull dud.

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami: So there's talking cats, a teenaged boy named Kafka on an Oedipal quest, and a mysterious accident that happened in the hills of Japan during WWII. Probably one of the most challenging and moving books I've read in a long, long time. It took awhile to get cooking, but once it did, it was fabulous.

CURRENTLY READING:
What Was Lost, Catherine O'Flynn
The Wordy Shipmates, Sarah Vowell
The Scribner Anthology

In a Pop Matters interview Chuck Klosterman says, "It was harder to write fiction, but maybe that was only because I’d never done it before. I can’t remember if writing Fargo Rock City was hard or easy."

The fact that he's never written fiction before is painfully, achingly, stupefyingly, annoyingly obvious. First, there is the problem with the adverbs, which I won't go into again.

To start off Klosterman can't even answer the question of who is telling this story, one of the main tenets of all fiction, even the most experimental. My best guess, after finishing the book, is that it's Chuck Klosterman himself.  The mystery narrator seems to have all of Klosterman's patented schtick down. There's tons of weird lists, parenthetical asides, pop culture references coming at you a mile a minute, lots of repetition to really make his point in case you missed it the first three times. Sounds like Klosterman, right?

Chuck Klosterman Reading
7:30 p.m., Thursday, October 2
Triple Rock Social Club
629 Cedar Avenue, Minneapolis, MN
Tickets $8 available at Magers & Quinn

Like I said, I'm only guessing that Klosterman is narrating. It's never made clear. At one point the narrator, who is telling the story of small-town North Dakotans in 1983 and 1984, goes on a little bit about the Pixies. So all we ever really know about the mystery narrator is that he is from the future, and he doesn't really care about these people too much.

Downtown Owl is mostly told through three characters in alternating chapters: Mitch, a seventeen-year-old mediocre athlete who has no sense of humor and hates everything most notably music (as though Klosterman is shouting "Look, look this character is nothing like me because I love music. See? Totally fiction.); Horace, the most interesting person in the book, a seventy-three-year-old widower who likes to hang out and drink coffee with his friends; and Julia, a twenty-three-year-old first time teacher from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

It doesn't seem like Klosterman cares for his characters because he doesn't imbue them with much intelligence or emotional depth. Nor does he trust them to tell their own story (hence the odd godlike narrator). For the most part they want nothing and whine a lot. Downtown Owl is a very slice-of-life, so this happened kind of novel. There are no emotional journeys, no conflicts, or tension. A page turner it is not.  Oddly, the three main characters never even interact, except when Julia says hi to Mitch in the hall. Two sentences, that's it. It makes the reader wonder why the author picked these three people to write about.

Reading the book you get the feeling that Klosterman keeps forgetting he's writing a story set in 1983 and the first months of 1984. Or maybe Owl, with a population of less than a thousand, is just really advanced when it comes to home computers and computer games. It is possible, but still fishy.

Another thing that makes me think he forgot when his novel was set is the math. Klosterman can't do it and in not doing it brings up a lot of odd questions about his characters. For instance, in 1983 Horace is 73. His wife Alma died in 1973 at the age of 44 after they had been married for 25 years. Nowhere is there any mention of why Horace at the age of 38 (and who would have been considered an odd old bachelor at the age of 38 in 1948) decided it would be a good idea to marry a 19-year-old. But then again this is Owl, North Dakota where teachers routinely sleep with teenage girls without repercussions, so maybe it wasn't a big deal for Horace to marry someone nearly 20 years his junior.

But still it causes you to stop reading and think, "woah, what the hell is going on here, did I miss something?" That's never good.

These are all rookie mistakes and if Klosterman ever took a fiction writing class he probably could have avoided them and written a pretty decent book. Or at least a more decent book than Downtown Owl, which is not without its charms. This is what makes it so frustrating.

He does a great job of nailing down the North Dakotaness of North Dakota (which is charming in and of itself). In the last four or five pages, he lets all his hipster bullshit schtick and his overbearing personality fall away and finally gives the characters a chance to tell their own stories. It's good. However, is it good enough to slog through 260 pages of absolute bullshit and amateurish fiction to get to it? Hell no.

This book makes me really angry. It will sell a lot of copies because it has Chuck Kloserman's name on it. It will get good reviews by people who do not care about the craft of writing or the beauty of story telling because Chuck Klosterman once wrote something funny back in 2004. Klosterman could scrawl "I will not talk during class" across every single one of the 270 pages and people would think it was a fascinating diatribe on the chilling effect the Republicans have had on the media or a hilarious pop culture take on mainstream media vs. the Internet.

Meanwhile beautiful, moving books like Ethan Canin's America America or Gina Frangello's My Sister's Continent or everything Stuart Dybek has ever written will be ignored.

For a completely different point of view see Christa's review of Downtown Owl.

Instead of doing anything of value, I watch this opening from SNL over and over and over again. I think if McCain had actually chosen Tina Fey as his running mate he'd have a shot.