Tag: fiction

With Our Fear

/ dmueller

Another from Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation, what somewhere has been called series whose figments bear strange shadowforms of H. P. Lovecraft:

“Should we go back?” the surveyor would say, or I would say.

And the other would say, “Just around the next corner. Just a little farther, and then we will go back.” It was a test of fragile trust. It was a test of our curiosity and fascination, which walked side by side with our fear. A test of whether we preferred to be ignorant or unsafe. The feel of our boots as we advanced step by careful step through that viscous discharge, the way in which the stickiness seemed to mire us even when we managed to keep moving, would eventually end in inertia, we knew. If we pushed it too far.

But then the surveyor rounded a corner ahead of me and recoiled into me, shoved me back up the steps, and I let her. (58-59)

Dog-eared, a page and its few lines I at first associated with initiates, treacherous descent, down a squish stairwell, footfalls better lace up your boots. But the shambles memory cast as “I would say” or “the other would say,” a whatever dialogue, both of them knowing forward means down deeper and down deeper means longer back. Or end. End in inertia. And with this it’s not only initiates down a staircase into the unknown below but a tandem pursuit-non-pursuit, a companionable procession whose interruption–please someone shove–they both seemed to be ready for, to welcome when, let’s return, let’s go back up again, it came.

A Dimensional Hiatus

/ dmueller

The latest bedtime storytime jags come from Moers’s The 13 1/2 Lives of Captain Bluebear, a fantastic slingshot across Zamonia, equal velocity-measures zany, smart, and surprising. Tonight, Bluebear began his transition away from the Nocturnal Academy and out of life, what is it now?, six?, The Gloomberg Mountains. To leave the school, he has to make his way through an especially disorienting labyrinth. Bluebear walks on and on until walking gives out, Fitbit.

For several hours I remained lying on my back, spreadeagled with my gaze fixed on the roof of the tunnel. I had made up my mind to dematerialize, vanish without a trace, rust away like a piece of old iron, and thus become an integral part of the Gloomberg Mountains. It seems that rusty tunnel walls have an unwholesome effect on overtaxed brains. I would never had entertained such an idea under normal circumstances, but anyone who has brooded for hours will feel, in a truly physical sense, what it’s like to rust away. It’s a strange but far from unpleasant sensation. You surrender to the forces of nature, utterly serene, then slowly turn metallic. Your body becomes coated by degrees with fine, rust-red fur and starts to crumble. The rust eats into you, ever deeper. Layer after layer flakes off, and before long you’re just a little mound of red dust to be blown away by a captive puff of wind and scattered along the endless tunnels of the Gloomberg Mountains. That was as far as my dire imaginings had progressed when my shoulder was nudged by something soft and slimy but not unfamiliar. It was Qwerty Uiop.

‘What are you doing here?’ he inquired anxiously.

‘Rusting away,’ I replied. (175-176)

Rusting away, I replied. Rusting away. But his school-friend Qwerty, from the 2364th dimension, comes along, sort of glop-bumps into him, and mentions that he has found a dimensional hiatus–a portal he knows by smell will, when he plunges into it (if he can summon the courage), jump him to another dimension. But Qwerty hesitates to jump, afraid of the unknown.

I won’t spoil it. It’s enough to take a quick snapshot of this rich bedtime reading, of Bluebear’s post-Nocturnal Academy disorienteering, his will to dematerialize, to rust, and his friend, Qwerty’s, rescue-interruption, motivated by his own crisis about risking a known dimension for an unknown dimension.

Reason enough to continue reading.

The City & ytiC ehT

/ dmueller

Late last week I finished China Mieville’s latest,
The City &
ytiC ehT. TC & CT is a detective story,
but
it’s not just any detective story (what
Mieville calls
a "police procedural"). In terms of theoretical richness, this one holds
even with Perdido Street Station and The Scar. Mieville creates a
pair of cities fraught with boundary in.discretions. Citizens from Beszel and Ul
Qoma pass by each other every day, but as they do so they must unsee people and
things from the other city. Even where the borders become confusing
overlaps, in cross-hatched zones likely to draw heavy traffic from autos and
pedestrians, unseeing remains a necessary tactic (sort of the opposite of
panoptic conditioning; unseeing here as deliberate, uneasy negligence).
Political, jurisdictional consequences are of course tied to this cities-wide
condition. Within this intricate third-spacious scene, Mieville works up a novel
that jets along with surprising acceleration: mystery elements, hazy figures,
and ethereal domains, also detective work that relies on the knowledge available
even while deliberately unseeing and smudge-remembering what is present
(that is, a kind of audiovisually unconfirmed felt sense).

I’d say more, but I already returned the copy to
Collin, who both recommended it and lent
it to me, and since it was a borrowed copy, no margin notes, no dog-eared pages.
But this entry is to say, pick it up. It’s a lively, quick read, very much the
sort of thing you still have time for even if you feel summer fading to fall.

In Bad Decline

/ dmueller / 2 Comments

If you bumped into me on the sidewalk or in the hallway, I might have
mentioned that the visit—now one month ago—to
Gettysburg on the Fourth of July was, um, thought-provoking in all sorts of
unanticipated ways.  The places—war
memorials, battlefields, and the famous cemetery—struck
a chord with me. I was intrigued by being there.  But I thought some
of the re-enactment stuff was odd—odd dialed
beyond historical fetishism and into a new range of fantastical dress-up geekery.  I
recovered and was more or less
granted amnesty, I think, for what was a glaring foot-in-mouth moment during which I
compared the degree of geekery between Civil War re-enactors and the Lucas-heads
who attend Star Wars conventions dressed as Chewy and C3PO. 

In one of those subsequent, casual, "we went to Gettysburg" hallway conversations, I
mentioned how the re-enactments left me with a lingering uneasiness about what
was happening at those sites now. Re-enacting war is a strange brew: a half-and-half
concoction blending parts of the worst of Hollywood spectacle and adult
play-acting (no matter how seriously) in the grim, horrific, and atrocious
war-deeds perpetrated on those now-hallowed grounds. Chilling, but hard to pin
down because I didn’t openly object to it (the geekery comment was never meant
to disparage anyone), and I don’t have any problem with gestures of tribute,
respect, and commemoration.

Eventually, in that hallway conversation, the person I was talking with asked
me if I’d read George Saunders’ short story
"CivilWarLand in Bad Decline." 
I hadn’t read it; hadn’t read anything by Saunders, even though his name is the
first one that pops up when I mention Writing Program and Syracuse U. to anyone
who has lived in Central N.Y. for a few years (and then I have to explain how
Saunders is in the creative writing program, which hangs its colorful hat in
English and Textual Studies, and ‘no I’ve never met him or studied with him’,
and so on, until the perplexed looks give way to a change of topic).  "CivilWarLand
in Bad Decline," if you haven’t read it, is a dystopian romp through a
gang-plagued, run-down, underfunded Civil War park.  At breakneck pace,
Saunders writes of a great range of escapades as the ethic of historical
preservation gives way to a relentless assault by modern forces.  Reading
it did not make me feel better about the re-enactments; neither did it make me
feel worse.  But I laughed, and I also thought more carefully about that
profoundly difficult balance between celebrating war and properly reckoning with
the horrible mess it always (and to this day) makes of lives.

Here’s Saunders, a point where the new gun-loving employee joins the staff at
CivilWarLand:

Just after lunch next day a guy shows up at Personnel looking so
completely Civil War they immediately hire him and send him out to sit on
the porch of the old Kriegal place with a butter churn. His name’s Samuel
and he doesn’t say a word going through Costuming and at the end of the day
leaves on a bike. I do the normal clandestine New Employee Observation from
the O’Toole gazebo and I like what I see. He seems to have a passable
knowledge of how to pretend to churn butter. At one point he makes the
mistake of departing from the list of Then-Current Events to discuss the
World Series with a Visitor, but my feeling is, we can work with that. All
in all he presents a positive and convincing appearance, and I say so in my
review. (14)

The Steep Approach

/ dmueller

I finished up Iain Banks’

The Steep Approach to Garbadale a couple of days ago. Took me
about a week, and it felt like a faster-than-usual read, though it’s not like I
spend all that much time reading fiction for the sport of it (at least not these
days). Faster than expected, a surprisingly engaging novel, a story well
told–exactly as promised in the approbative cover matter.

The upshot: Alban Wopuld deals with a hiatus from the family circle,
resurfacing at the behest of a cousin who recruits him to stir up dissent among
family members in favor of approving the sale of their rights to a popular game,
Empire!. Alban re-emerges as an influential presence in the family, all
the while coping with two formative events from earlier in his life (and, in
different degrees, these events are at the root of his alienation): his
mother’s suicide and a cousinly love affair.

This little summary doesn’t ruin it. And I fully intend to be getting
along with other novels by Banks just as soon as…one of these days. I only had
time for this one because I am purposefully neglecting the diss for a couple of
weeks while on a back-to-back conferences jag (seriously, it must appear that I
have been shitting around for a couple of weeks now; lazing through some books
about maps, etc.). Anyhow, by this point, I sure I have done enough to pique
your interest in The Steep Approach that I should give a little bit more,
so, then, two passages from dog-eared pages:

Also, third, she tried to quantify how hopelessly, uselessly,
pathetically weak she felt. It took a long time–she was a
mathematician, after all, not a poet, so images were not normally her strong
suit–but eventually she decided on one. It involved a banana. Specifically,
the long stringy bits you find between the skin and flesh of a banana. She
felt so weak you could have tied her up with those stringy bits of banana
and she wouldn’t have been able to struggle free. That was how weak she
felt. (220)

This comes as VG–Alban’s other love interest–remembers swimming near
a reef when the disastrous tsunami welled up from the Indian Ocean in ’04.

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