Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him

The Henry Brothers have done the world a favor with this beautiful book. It is a work of history, sociology, a critic of pop culture, and a prose poem, and it is very readable with poetic moments. It is unsentimental about its subject, the brothers are unapologetic though in their defense of Pryor’s genius though. They are equally unapologetic about Pryor’s dark side, his damaged psyche, abuses of woman and drugs. This book enters some almost terrifying moments, but it never feels exploitive, just the bitter truth. Paul Mooney as usual almost steals the show. The book in the end is a celebration of an American genius and his brief fulfilling of his promise and his long decline and neglect of his vibrant and important voice. He spoke a truth and then silenced himself with money and terrible movies.  This celebrates that short moment when Pryor showed us something about our country, the people he worked with and knew (and abused), and the world that created him. This book is must for fans of Pryor, standup comedy, pop and social culture of the 60’s and 70’s, and historians of those turbulent decades. It also stands as terrific literary artifact worthy of its subject.

Matt Taibbi

Taibbi’s reporting drips with caustic humor and intelligence. I picked up several of his books and worked through them and found an account of current history from the Kerry Bush election up until now through the lens of that reporting. Elections, the financial crisis, war, Katrina, immigration, stop and frisk, and corruption of our political order and imbalance of our legal system are all given a review. We can see the transition from a democracy to an oligarchy.  People may find Taibbi’s voice cynical and anarchist, but I find it mostly refreshing as he takes no prisoners and finds both parties at equal fault.

The Divide is the most current and the most important as it shows, to crudely paraphrase Taibbi’s thesis, the move of America towards a dystopia. An oligarchy that is criminalizing being poor by intertwining the social safety net with law enforcement and at the same time refusing to prosecute financial crimes criminally (only seeking fines). Taibbi gives us a tour of the bureaucracy of welfare, stop and frisk, immigration laws of Georgia, and other idiocy. He uses situations that seem worthy of the fiction of Heller and Kafka, a largely computer and statistical model  referencing bureaucracy gone amuck, serving only its illogical needs. Then he counters this with the inadequate prosecuting of financial crimes. HSBC bank can launder $100 million for the mass murders in the Sinaloa cartel without a single person going to jail but a homeless man caught with a single joint gets to serve 40 days in jail. The grotesque onslaught of short sellers on Fairfax Financial is particular bizarre episode. Case by case Taibbi goes through this surreal tilting of justice. A country where violent crime is on the downswing but prison populations are exploding. Those who suffer mostly are blacks and Latinos and some whites, but main the trend is towards the poor being the brunt of this upside down world of justice where crime is only prosecuted for one population. a population without a voice, a population the majority of Americans despise and fear. Fear that they will be there soon.  Whole communities are turned into occupied territory where the stupidest little mistakes that all kids make during adolescence, can pull you into a system that can grind you into nothing. 

Griftopia is Taibbi’s sour take on the financial crisis and its aftermath. He reviews what he calls the “grifter era” where everyone in government and business have moved towards seeking a fast buck instead of long term planning. Pennsylvania attempts to sell its turnpike, and Chicago does sell its parking meters to fill a one year budget gap(for a 75 year lease)  This resembles the sacking of a crumbling empire rather than a plan for continued business. He treats the bailouts, the Tea Party, Affordable Care Act(which has done nothing to break up the insurance cartels and is many ways a gift to them) with scorn, disgust and also compassion. The consensus between the two parties to back up business at every turn while keeping people squabbling over social issues is creating a culture of cynicism and corruption, truly alienated from democratic impulse.

The Derangement is about the loss of a collective public narrative during the Bush era. People on the right and left started to use Taibbi's wonderful term “reality shopping”  to find their own narrative. He explores and infiltrates Pastor Hagee’s megachurch and the 9/11 truth movement. He finds an America disenchanted with its political options, seeking easy superhero narratives (the Matrix and V for vendetta being common touchstones), and mostly very lonely. I found this book deeply sad, the optimism of the conspiracy theorist (even though they think they are facing a truly evil and murderous foe) versus the cynicism, disinterest and shabbiness of reality is deeply depressing. Taibbi finds humanity in both of these camps and avoids easy humor, even though he exposes some troubling beliefs and subtexts in the current era of popular movements.

Episodes or dispatches from the disasters of Bush’s second term. Taibbi retains interest whether reporting on the corrupt do nothing congress, or reporting from where the thin veneer of civilization is wiped away to reveal the uncaring face of reality. For these later parts his trip into post-Katrina New Orleans with Sean Penn is a piece of reporting worthy of Heller or Thompson, a piece of apocalyptic comedy equal parts satire and deadly serious, and three surreal days in Abu Ghraib.

This earlier work covering the 2004 election is his busiest writing, filled with skits, jokes and lots of gonzo antics like drug taking and wearing silly outfits. Its thesis, that Taibbi delivers in more nuanced fashion in later books is of the presidential election as an elaborate version of the third world military parade. He heaps endless scorn on all the candidates and both parties, and the reporters who give it such an air of importance. The only politicos he retains any love for are Dennis Kucinich and Bernie Sanders, which seems about right.  This book is cynical and disgusted, but in the end whom is more cynical, the pageantry or the one who exposes it.

  

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

I was a little worried for a while reading this book, the seemingly overly precious title (which when explained in the book is a pretty effective metaphor), the heavy leaning on past masters such as Heller and Marquez (despite the interplay of the text with Tolstoy I didn’t see much of him in these pages), the really awkward POV switches where we suddenly get the future story of an incidental character, and the whole baggage of an outsider writing on a conflict that he wasn’t personally connected to. These concerns disappeared as I read the book though, the unbearable tragedy, humanity, sadness, and brutality of this novel were impossible to deny whatever rickety framework the author presented it in, and thankfully delivered with enough humor and wonder to ease the sourness and bleakness. The ending may attempt a bit of crowd pleasing note and tries to pull off as happy as an ending as possible, but for a debut novel this a very impressive work, a work that shines light on the dead and departed of a totally ignored conflict, a witnessing that alone makes this book worthwhile. This book is filled with humanity and humor but be warned it contain horrifying scenes of torture and general bleakness of a cruel war so this is not one for the fainthearted, but is beautiful enough to deserve reading.

Bleeding Edge

Pynchon presents a book somewhere between his lighter cartoony romps (Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and Inherent Vice) and his more epic works. A strangely accessible work that parodies some recent crime fiction and cyberpunk, but is still recognizably Pynchon and shows off his obsessions with paranoia, secret worlds, and the fading of promise. He fixes on the dot com crash, the internet and 9-11 as the moments where an irreversible change occurred in our world and I find him profound as ever if a little goofy in the virtual reality parts. The cultural references were strange in this one I could have been convinced a Gen x writer wrote this or maybe William Gibson. The conspiracies surrounding 9/11 made me fear for a second that Pynchon was handing us a “truther” manifesto, but as usual resolution and clear political agenda are not Pynchon’s game, and every clue and hint is another sign in his labyrinth of elusive meaning and shadows. A book easier to digest than most of his work and one as filled with little shards of dissonance to ponder over.

The Fun Parts: Stories

Lipsyte is hilarious, he also carves out exquisitely arranged prose and has characters that exist and something close to clarity of vision that will go as close to genius as we are probably going to get these days. Whether or not these characteristics always lead to fictions that balance right is pretty superfluous when experiencing his whirlwind of quips, failures (the character’s not the writer’s), and excruciating well-chosen phrases and words. I think maybe one story was a failed experiment and the rest might benefit from being read separately than as a piece and I still prefer him at novel length, but I will heartily endorse and recommend this collection.

Dana Spiotta

Lightning Field :Spiotta gets constant comparisons to Delillo and Didion and these aren’t imprecise, she offers the almost clinical dissection of the objects and anxieties that define our modern condition of the former and spare and stark style of the latter. Her first book features her at her murkiest, operating in a Bergmanesque fog of confused identity and enigmatic scenes, very detached and opaque most of the times and then almost humorous at others. It is cold book that offers up plenty of satire and surrealism but little cohesion or warmth, with the three main characters interchanged in my mind in way that was either purposely or accidently confusing. It has great moments but I recommend it a little less readily than her other two available books. Many of her traits are present first here, the brother suffering from mental illness, the extensive grasp of pop culture, old Hollywood movies (and the watching of an actor’s complete filmography, esp. James Mason), and people on film, these and many other elements pop up in her later work but it suffers more in comparison to those books than on its own, an author though is present with a distinct vision and style and almost painfully sad things to say about our present state. Her odd and condensed style is welcome in an era of doorstoppers and overreaching please all narratives, more reminiscent of the opaque and fierce movies of Michelangelo Antonioni, Godard, Fellini, and Bergman than any recent fiction.




Eat the Document :This book could be intimidating, addressing the cultural division between the 60’s and the 90’s, the failures of leftist protest in America, cultural obsession, and a critique of an overly medicated and corporatized society. A book handling that sounds bloated and unapproachable, but not in Spiotta’s hands, her vision is almost clinical but somehow remains human. She is despairing but understanding and her characters live and breathe and don’t exist to provide punch lines. Her understanding of record geek obsession shows her has a true audiophile, I can recognize a music geek, her placement of Captain Beefheart, Skip Spence, Beach Boys, the cult band Love, and Funkadelic’s beautiful and desolate “Maggot Brain” in the text in ways that are more than name dropping show her capability to critique and analyze our culture.





Stone Arabia :Many of Spiotta’s preoccupations appear here, obsessively watching movies, mentally ill siblings, cultural fixation to the point of psychological, our visions of reality versus the grim mortality of it, an almost surreal examination of the objects of our culture, and trying to find real emotions in a society built on spectacle. This book revolves around a sister and a brother. The brother has over the years obsessively (can’t help but use that word a lot when discussing one of her books) created a rock and roll stardom for himself. This book is about much more than that simple description can hint at. Spiotta’s insights are painfully exact but necessary, her vision is satirical but compassionate, odd but recognizable, and she will make you examine your life and face what makes a life in an over mediated and under caring world. Questions of what is fame, what is compassion, and what is life for are handled in an odd but compelling book with little fat or self-indulgence, Spiotta has an eye for the failures and triumphs of humanity and a voice to articulate it.

Death and the Penguin

Post-Soviet Ukrainian existential and absurdist noir is new genre for me and one I think Andrey Kurkov owns, Kurkov crafts tales worthy of Kafka but with warm humanity and humor and plotting that are definitely his own. The hero is a writer with writer’s block and a pet penguin (gotten from a defunded zoo) and while this combination at first seems a little bit precious but their melancholy day to day is described with well-placed rhythms and details and is never too cute. The events get both sinister and humorous as the protagonist accidently gains a family, writes obituaries for living people that then die, and is forced to attend gangster’s funerals with the penguin in tow. Death and the Penguin is a beautiful and amusing book with a sad sack sense of humor, affection for absurd and ominous situations presented in clear language, and humanity.

Empty Space: A Haunting

The finale to Harrison’s trilogy is as confounding, obtuse, and beautiful as the rest of the series. His prose is crafted so impeccably and relentlessly it is hard to resist chewing over each line and word choice (it is also very discouraging for the amateur writer) and occasionally losing the plot. But with Harrison you know you are going to read it again, soon I might restart the trilogy and see how they work together. His imagery, imagination, and prose are on such a level that they put much science fiction (is there anyone else who writes in the genre recently that is comparable as a stylist, Wolfe, Mieville, Shepard, or Gibson?) and other fiction in its shadow. Jodorowsky and Lynch should have skipped Dune and waited for these books to adapt. Quantum physics, Gnosticism, and dream imagery mixed with cyberpunk, noir, depressing near future science fiction, and space opera for a dense, cinematic, and surreal nightmare.

The Interrogative Mood: A Novel?

Like David Markson’s wonderful late fictions, Powell takes you on a similar reckless adventure in pure thought and language. Just questions after questions but every page and every line is remarkable; it is wickedly funny and deeply effecting in ways many more structure bound fictions are rarely. Powell along with Markson takes the spirit from Beckett and Barthelme and crafts darkly funny, evocative fictions, crafted in impeccable language that without even a hint of plot keep you turning pages drunk on the language alone. This is Literature without an ounce of fat, perfect in most of the ways that you want it to be, just an enigmatic text that forces you to contend with it but so funny and entertaining that pretentious thoughts as I have just voiced never comes to mind.

Predator Cities #1: Mortal Engines (Predator Cities)

Harry Potter and Dark Materials started the recent movement of YA titles that could be enjoyed by adult audiences as thoroughly as their target audience, but no title deserves this distinction more than Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve. A thoroughly unsentimental, cliché rebuffing, and occasional brutally dark novel that still revels in wild adventures, crazy machines, Dickensian names and characters, and the full screen sense of wonder that belongs in a YA title. This book came out in 2001 not sure if before or after the events of September but it seems infused with the crazed atmosphere of that year, the mad march for war, the feeling of besiegement and blind trust in misguided leaders. Philip Reeve wrote the book that Mieville probably wanted too with Railsea, in fact the future wasteland of Reeve’s work is undoubtedly an influence on that book. Reeve creates a book that evokes Gilliam, Dickens, and Vance, and is overflowing with puns, references, and jokes about our time (my favorite being a character named Nancarrow and an airship called the 13th floor elevator), and filled to the brim with undead killers, giant machine cities, pirates, mad, old tech from an insane era of war, desperate atmosphere, villains that are ruthless but still human, an airship piloting spy named Fang, and two believable, unlikely young heroes. Reeve knows the trick to keep audiences on edge, make every character a full and believable character and be willing at any moment to kill one of them. The myth of protagonist’s invulnerability, revenge seeking, happy endings, the idea that a character has a destiny, and other atrocious tropes and clichés of fantasy/adventure stories are thoroughly skewered by Reeve along the way. He has created a unfriendly world ruled by force, accidents, and chaos that the character have to fight for survival in, but he has filled it with the warmth of a realistic view of humans, they can be cruel, selfish and self-involved and live in desperate times but they are recognizable human. If this series retains half the success rate of this initial volume it will be the YA series I point to above any other.

Tenth of December: Stories

Saunders was a remarkable fresh voice when I first encountered him. His combination of surreal settings and technology mixed with the dirt and grit of human experience and an absurdist vision of American life and workplace mores placed him in the pantheon of American satire alongside Matt Groening, Nathaniel West, Twain, and Vonnegut. His double punch of Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Pastoralia signaled an impressive career. He has never made the move into novels and has concentrated on his short pieces and essays. His stories have occasionally moved towards realism which may be necessary but could render him indistinguishable from many other contemporaries. I would like to see him stretch his core vision into a novel; I know we should treasure the rare writer that concentrates on the neglected form of the short story but the results are getting increasingly spare. “Home” is the best story here where his dialogue resembles the zing of such masters as Charles Portis and Joy Williams. The story itself a despairing state of the union, could be criticized for hitting so many obvious points of contemporary American life (war, home foreclosures, health problems, domestic violence), but the story itself doesn’t feel like a polemic and is fresh, lively, comic, and humane. I will probably keep enjoying these occasional short story collections from Saunders but will keep hoping for more from him.

Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

It starts with a riot and ends in an elegy, a deep feeling of loss. In between is almost nonstop frantic energy and bad moods. This is not a biography of Nixon, though he broods and connives throughout like Milton’s Devil, this book is a panorama or Boschian landscape of the era that brought this deeply paranoid, inferiority complex plagued man to power. The title of Nixonland is taken from an Adlai Stevenson quote, “a land of slander and scare, of sly innuendo, of poison pen and anonymous phone call and bustling, pushing, shoving-the land of smash and grab and anything to win.” Civil Rights, and populist backlash against it, the restlessness of the baby boomer generation, the reckless and worthless escalation of the war in Vietnam created a confluence of factor that led to a civil war within the Democratic party, breaking the back of the New Deal (though ironically elements of it still continued in Nixon’s domestic policy). A revolution was also brewing in the Republicans as Barry Goldwater’s failed campaign left in its shattered wake a takeover by the conservative elements of the party. Arguably Perlstein is presenting nothing new in this book but he synthesizes seemingly everything in a thoroughly novelistic narrative. My Lai, race riots, the start of the culture wars, terrorist attacks, Attica, The Siege of Chicago, Nixon’s brilliant campaigning and crippling doubt, LBJ’s hubris, the turbulent presidential campaigns of 68 and 72, the assassinations, hippies, political trials, all get pulled into an entirety. He makes some mistakes along the way (the New York and L.A. Times reviews are good sources on these), but when juggling this much I will forgive him for a dropped ball or two. He is very fair when addressing all the various political factions and personalities in this narrative. He in the end has provided a riveting history of a turbulent era whose mistakes and children are still with us.

The Rise of Ransom City

Following up his Half Made World, Gilman does so in unpredictable style. Or maybe predictably unpredictable as Gears of the City his follow-up to Thunderer went totally postmodern. Here following Jeff Vandermeer’s Shriek: an Afterword and he presents a memoir that is edited by another, a mix of Nabokov’s unreliable narrator and Borge’s faux non-fiction with a healthy dose of Mark Twain’s picaresque wit. This is also one the most aggrieved skewering of Horatio Alger since Nathaniel West’s Cool Million. With references to Twain, Alger, and the continuing quasi-western milieu obviously this is fantasy novel with its eyes set on American myths. Some would argue that the style would keep much of action distanced from the reader, but I found this an interesting literary gambit that paid off more so than Vandermeer’s similar book. Gilman remains one of the most fascinating of contemporary fantasy writers to me. Where will he go next? I’m interested. On a side note how did he get Gordon Lish to blurb this? Weird. On another side note, is there a revival of the Western going on right now?

Red country has been labeled as Abercrombie’s take on the western. This partially true, as Abercrombie has managed to squeeze as much of the tropes and furniture of said genre into this book. Showdowns in bars, scouts, wagon trains, native attacks, cattle stampedes, frontier towns, a stagecoach chase, ravaged homesteads, kidnappings, last stands, and others are all gloriously skewered and given homage. There are references to many of the classics, The Unforgiven, Outlaw Josey Wales, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Searchers, Blood Meridian, but the atmosphere most resembles Leone or Kurosawa’s similar grafting of westerns tropes onto a Samurai milieu.  I say only partially true as this essentially at its core nothing but yet another prime piece of Abercrombie fiction, a writer so thoroughly on the top of his game that it is kind of disappointing to read anyone else. This book is another rollicking black comedy with existential dread and skewered moralism and terrifically drawn characters. He has always skewered genres. His original trilogy was just his take on the classic fantasy trilogy, followed by a revenge/thriller, and then war fiction. These paint by numbers genre frameworks are just place for him to splatter paint all over. He is getting better and better and this is my favorite by him yet. He brings back many of his characters from his previous books. I will not give any spoilers by revealing which ones (one is barely disguised, one receives an ending I felt a little anti-climactic, and another is well disguised but I think I guessed who.), but while this will bring smiles to long time readers I believe you can read this book without any introduction. Waiting for his next book is going to be tough, but unlike Martin I know I won’t have to wait that long.

Brian Evenson Fugue State

Fugue State by Brian Evenson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Fugue State is another worthwhile collection of Evenson’s brilliant, angular, and disconcerting takes on fiction. He uses short fiction in way very few contemporaries do, Ligotti definitely comes to mind though. Beckett’s desolate spaces and comic narrators, Poe’s diseased and obsessive minds, the suffocating traps of Kafka are Evenson’s peers, but his collection of mutilations, plagues, amnesiacs, liminal spaces, and bizarre rituals are distinctly his own voice. Zak Sally the cartoonist and former bass player of the wonderful band Low provides some stark little illustrations and one full on collaboration with Evenson.

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Crackpot Palace: Stories by Jeffrey Ford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ford has the keys to the landscape of our dreams. Taking the ephemera of our pop culture such as comic books and strips, pulp science fiction, the drudgery of day to day living, our dreams, our myths, and turning them into a startling dreamscape filled unsettling evocative images, characters, wonder, and terror, a rich and occasionally quite horrific world. Each of his short fiction collections is a wunderkammer, a cabinet filled with curiosities, grotesques, and eerie beauty but presented with an earthy sense of humor. His novellas like Relic and the Wish Head are the most consuming and realized but shorter pieces like Dr. Lash Remembers and Daddy Longlegs of the Evening manage to create whole universes, and really the only story that felt a little half-baked was Ganesha.

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Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea along time ago in a Woman’s lit class and liked it. This is my second book by her, and it is bleak. A woman stripped bare and empty by despair, wishing for annihilation, prowls the cafes and darkened hotel rooms of Paris preyed on by the puppets and jackals of humanity. Fits on the shelf next to Celine, Henry Miller’s Parisian rants, Camus’ The Stranger, and Djuna Barnes’ nutty Nightwood, but is a little grimmer than any of them.

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The Curfew by Jesse Ball
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Curfew by Jess Ball is a fable somewhere near the intersection of a fairy tale, European political allegory, and hipster cuteness. Not entirely successful but the most effective I’ve encountered by the author and possibly an indication of future successes. He has mixed cuteness and the ominous before but the usual result has been dreamy, poetic dribbles. The narrative in this one derails in its last third and doesn’t quite pull itself together for an effective end. This author could produce something if got his tone, narrative, and language working as one. A frustrating but readable novella.

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The Great Lover by Michael Cisco
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The title is both hilariously provocative and slightly embarrassing to read in public. This book finds Cisco presenting his most disorienting outing yet. In some way it seems like it could be his most accessible, resembling both a Frankenstein story and a dark urban fantasy where bizarre worlds and creatures exist in a gritty, recognizable urban tableau. This basic outline won’t help much when you are reading it. Cisco’s writing is at its most art damaged and discombobulated, and inventive and beautiful. Tim Powers remixed by William Burroughs. Weird rituals, alien worlds, and surreal mayhem are what you get. This resembles another beautiful book I have recently read, Grace Krilanovich’s The orange eats creeps, and in a just world this book would get the praise that book so deservedly got. Rhys Hughes intro alone is worth the price of this book.

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Zone by Mathias Enard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Mathias Enard’s Zone is a novel that while it can’t be said that it is breaking new ground, but it is synthesizing various threads of narrative experimentation and presenting them in a maximalist style that resembles a grand claiming of new territory. W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey, David Markson’s later work, Bernhard’s endless paragraph and symphonic repetition, Pound and Eliot’s poetry, Joyce’s dreams, and even contemporary journalism on the middle east(Robert Fisk for example) are evoked here. This book if it resembles anything it is a meditation on the bloodstained history of the Mediterranean region, a panorama featuring its killers, victims, fascists, dreamers, artists, and writers. History as a gore stained daydream of a man with a very conflicted connection to that history, a daydream experienced on a train journey, the train taking the place of one of Sebald’s country walks or Bernhard’s museum benches. The World Wars, the Lebanese and Algerian Civil War, Cervantes and the battle of Lepanto, the fall of Yugoslavia are among the many subjects that haunt this book. The brutality of much of it, the book’s length, and the lack of much of the furniture of the realist novel might turn many off, but I found it compulsively readable and a book of prophetic resonance.

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