Friday, August 3, 2012
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
Beautiful Ruins: Liz and Dick on the rocks
Beautiful Ruins
Jess Walter
HarperCollins
EDMONTON - The wistfully lovely dust jacket for Jess Walter’s latest novel — tiny blocks of houses piled on top of each other on the teetering summit of an oceanside cliff — should have a protective plastic cover, not just to preserve the picture but to keep out beach sand and lake water. But in this case, “beach read” is a compliment.
If summer readers want high entertainment, they’ll find it here, for Beautiful Ruins has a quality of spectacle, the epic journey of people who enthrall us with personalities that are bigger than reality. But because Spokane-based author Jess Walter knows his way around a novel (The Zero and, most notably, The Financial Lives of the Poets), his extravaganza teeters atop a bedrock of hard reality, speaking uncomfortable truths about the frail, often narcissistic nature of identity.
The gorgeous ruin on the cover is Porto Vergogne (“Port of Shame”), a tiny Italian fishing village completely isolated except by boat. This is a misty Brigadoon of a place that does not appear on the map and which some people say does not even exist. Presiding over the one dingy hotel he inherited from his father is Pasquale Tursi, a dreamy young man waiting “for life to come and find him.” The cramped, uncomfortable place seldom draws guests, but on a certain day in 1962, all that changes — and so does Pasquale — startlingly, and forever.
If the dreamlike atmosphere of the Hotel Adequate View is not cinematic enough, it’s about to burst into Technicolor with the arrival of a lovely young woman, Dee Moray, a movie star, they say, working in Rome on the set of the most talked-about picture in decades, Cleopatra.
Yes, that Cleopatra – the overbudget epic, the disaster-in-the-making already guaranteed a huge audience by the raging scandal of Liz and Dick. Moray is only marginally connected to the movie, and has come to Porto Vergogne — or rather, has been sent there — because she has just been diagnosed with “cancer” (i.e. a scandalous pregnancy).
Just as we sink into this complex, delectable story, suddenly there is a jerk away from the romance and bubbling eroticism of 1962 to present-day, and a completely different scene involving the nasty world of Hollywood deals and pitches. Michael Deane, a producer in his seventies from a different sort of Hollywood, looks “prematurely embalmed,” a stooped old man “with the face of a nine-year-old Filipino girl.” He signs a ludicrous deal for a movie called Donner! about the cannibalistic Donner Party of 1849, just to get himself out of a studio contract.
As we’re batted back and forth in time and place like the balls in Pasquale’s imaginary cliffside tennis court, threads begin to tie the different scenarios together. An elderly Italian man appears to confront Deane, not with a gun but a dog-eared business card that Deane gave him 50 years ago. Pasquale has never forgotten Moray, the lovely blond actress who spent just a few days at his hotel in 1962, and demands to know what happened to her.
The answers are not so simple, because by then several more storylines have leaped to the forefront, most taking place in different times and locations. As if that weren’t enough, there’s Richard Burton drunkenly spouting Shakespeare as he tools off by boat to the Hotel Adequate View.
Performing, posing, spectacle, disguise, the subversion of the true self ... it’s all here, especially in the story of Moray’s son, a mediocre rock musician who seems to be on a rampage of self-destruction. But like everything else in this novel, his existence is intimately linked to that surreal dockside arrival in 1962. Though the switchbacks in time and place can be disorienting, what pulls us back into the book’s core is the characters’ earnest search for real happiness, an intrepid desire to embrace “the sweet lovely mess that is life.”
Margaret Gunning is a writer and reviewer based in Port Coquitlam
Performing, posing, spectacle, disguise, the subversion of the true self ... it’s all here, especially in the story of Moray’s son, a mediocre rock musician who seems to be on a rampage of self-destruction. But like everything else in this novel, his existence is intimately linked to that surreal dockside arrival in 1962. Though the switchbacks in time and place can be disorienting, what pulls us back into the book’s core is the characters’ earnest search for real happiness, an intrepid desire to embrace “the sweet lovely mess that is life.”
Margaret Gunning is a writer and reviewer based in Port Coquitlam
Sunday, July 29, 2012
East River Monster Mystery: SOLVED (already!)
Now, I'm as easily petrified as the next person. Maybe more so, because I somehow need to jazz up my super-boring life.
But when I see pictures like THIS one, of bizarre bloated hairless things washing up on shore, things with human-looking fingers and toes, well then. . .
I get a little disconcerted.
Scientists have already done one-o-dem things, you know where you go in that tube? An MRI, or an IBM or something. Or a Cat Scan, only this isn't a cat.
Here is what they found.
It all seems to match up, even if they had to fill in the missing half of its head.
Though it's obvious that this ain't no pig, another possibility reared its snouty little head. . .
Ooo.
Not too friendly, is it? And as for being the "wrong size", they ought to live around here where they can get to be 50 pounds, easy. Those bastards can leap fences and ruin your newly-sodded lawn in a few minutes by rolling it up like a bloody carpet and eating the grubs underneath.
OK, so it might be a slightly deformed raccoon, but a lot of things do seem to match up here, even the long bony tail. So I don't think there's any human DNA here, unless humans like to eat grubs at midnight.
Shee-yiii-iiiiit. And here I thought I was on to a good one.
Saturday, July 28, 2012
FOUND!: Cujo's rogue DNA
It was getting
dark, and getting lonely sitting out on the rickety old back porch. Sam threw
his live cigarette-butt on the grass, watching a small plume of smoke rise
above it. Shit, he hated his life! Why didn’t he just admit it? He hated
to be “one of those”, one of the people who’d given in, who’d let the whole
world see that they had given up on the human species and had turned to
something very different.
Something that
had never quite been seen on this earth before.
Oh, but we’d
seen them all right. From the dawn times, when humans were barely human,
slouching and grunting and smelling as bad as Bigfoot, we’d recognized Wolf,
yellow eyes flashing in the moonlight. We’d coaxed that wolf toward tameness
with enticing scraps of food, and gradually Wolf learned to be a companion and
guardian, a protector of human safety. So were things really any different now?
Didn’t protecting one’s sanity from the horrific effects of social alienation
count as guardianship?
And look at all
the dog breeds that existed now. Hundreds, probably, and all the result of
deliberate genetic tampering. So maybe this was just taking the next logical
step.
Really, not so
many people minded any more. Not like years ago, when it was an abomination even
to think of mixing things up like that. Now that cloning your dead pet had
become standard and even affordable, things like the “Up, Boy!” breeding program were
slowly grinding their way into respectability.
It had become
almost a status symbol to have someone like Flash. Well, almost, like tattoos
and piercings and things. Though really, he shouldn’t have given him that silly
dog name, what with his innate (or rather, engineered) superiority. This dog
was no canine; anyone could see that. He was just a little bit More.
Flash trotted
into the room, tail waving. An ordinary German Shepherd, except for the size. Don’t look for long
into those eyes, which were too blue even for a husky’s.
“Flash,” Sam
cooed, scratching the ruff around his neck. Without even being asked, Flash
lifted a front paw. But instead of “shake-a-paw”, he did something else.
He began to
massage that tender place in Sam’s knee, the old football injury he used to
call it, before everyone caught on to the fact that he got it falling down the
stairs after a big pissup. These were no ordinary dog-paws: the toes were long
and fingerlike, supple enough to know just where that tender spot was.
“Funny feet,”
people said about Flash. They didn’t look too closely at his back paws, which
were most un-doglike and even freaked Sam out sometimes. Their tracks made him think of a barefoot baby.
“Rururwwww,” he said.
“Yes, big
buddy.”
“Irur wooo.”
“I know.”
“Ur are you?”
“I’m great,
old pal.” Flash had cost him plenty: had to sell his bike and take out a second
mortgage on this dump, but who cared when every female he had ever cared about
had stomped all over him like he was nothing.
He saw one of those reality shows the other day called “But They’re my Babies!”, all about how a
large segment of the population now cared more for their dogs than they did for
humans, any humans, even their parents, spouses, children.
They’re my
babies. Ar-rur-rur-rooo. How are you?
His cat
wouldn’t go anywhere near Flash and hissed and arched and spiked alarmingly if
he even saw him across the room. Flash would shake his head and say, “tsh-tsh-tsh”. Too
bad. So far the scientists had left feline DNA alone, and perhaps that was
wise.
This
interspecies stuff – why was it considered so controversial? It didn’t cost
that much, did it? Of course he’d only gone for the minimum, the ten per cent.
Ten per cent
of human genes inserted into the DNA of a dog. A handsome dog. The human, well,
not so handsome, it was really just Sam, but now he had a son just like he had always
dreamed about. He even saw a bit of a family resemblance. Not just to him, but
to his parents and his old Uncle Charley.
“Flash. Get me
that – “
Flash ran over,
his paws making that odd barefooted scurrying sound, and retrieved the remote,
then, carefully setting it down, depressed the Guide button.
“You always
know what I want, Flash.”
“Rur-roooow.”
He knew people
knew, knew something was Different, that this dog carried himself differently,
like it was striding along beside him, with a certain human kind of
companionable gait. He knew its predatory side had been somewhat watered down –
or not? Maybe just substituted with a different sort of predator.
People really
were narrow-minded about “Up, Boy!” and the huge strides it had made in genetic
research. The company advertised their services as a “step up” in pet
ownership, an upgrading of a simple canine into something “so much more”. And
if you had turned your back on your fellow humans, as so many people had done,
the possibility was even more attractive, even essential to your emotional
survival. In fact, though it was
strictly illegal, they were willing to go as high as 30 per cent if you were
willing to fork over the quarter-million in cash.
Oh, all this
had been illegal, illegal as hell for quite a long time. But just as the
two-headed baby that would have been strangled fifty years ago eventually had
its own reality show, the culture had learned to embrace the unusual. “Why do
we do this?” the “Up, Boy!” brochure asked. “Would it surprise you so much if
we said – because we can? Would it surprise you even more to learn that
– you can, too?”
It was now
possible to insert human genes into practically any species, any strand of DNA.
One of the scientists joked that he wanted his son to look like a birch tree. Some
of the early experiments were a bit creepy, of course, chimps being born with only
ten per cent concert pianist DNA who could play Rachmaninoff with no lessons,
or cows with hands, well, sort of hands, fingers anyway, but who the hell cares
if a cow has hands or not? It just made for some great jokes about a
self-milking cow. What difference does it make to the larger scheme of things,
so long as human curiosity is satisfied?
But then there
was the other side of it. Out of all this wonderful, groundbreaking research, a
highly stigmatized group of “citizens” had arisen, so shady and secretive that
many people said they didn’t exist at all, that they were merely an urban
legend. These were the “down, boy” dogs: half human and half dog, or even
mostly human, walking around with hocks facing backwards instead of knees, pads
on their hands, forward-thrusting faces and gruff voices that elongated their
speech into a series of groans.
Humans were
mixing it up, all right. And why not? Hadn’t the color palette been predictably
drab for long enough? The next experiment was inserting resurrected dinosaur
DNA into frogs. Or was it humans? Imagine having that sort of Godzilla-like
power! Talk about a roar! Or maybe you’d just end up with a certain reptilian
ruthlessness, an absolute, utter, stone-hearted, glacial disregard for anything
approaching decency or – Oh, it was Flash again! It was amazing how he had learned to carry a
plate without dropping anything or even salivating on the pastrami sandwich.
And how had he
known he was hungry? And for what?
“Hello, boy.”
“Roarw are
you?”
“Not so great,
old pal.”
“Roarw you
roanly?’
“Yeah. That’s
the word, Flash.” He threw another live cigarette butt into the garbage can.
Fifty Shades of Grey Elephants: Janet goes berserk!
Janet has had ENOUGH! Don't stay in your seats, folks. . . RUN!!!
Friday, July 27, 2012
I'm sorry to have to show you this: the East River Monster
But I'm doing it. I'm doing it in the interests of SCIENCE.
Things keep washing ashore - oh, not here, mind you, and I'm bloody glad, cuzzadafact that just thinking about all this makes me want to shed my skin and jump right out of it.
Y'see, well. Things wash up. . . not here, but under the Brooklyn Bridge (this time - then there were all the other times too, but we don't talk about them.)
People are saying it's just a pig, a dead pig that someone threw overboard (overboard - over what? A pig boat?). But pictured above is a closeup of its "hand", which looks distressingly. . . human.
Anyone who has seen dead cattle (and I haven't seen any lately) will be aware that after they die, they bloat up and their limbs kind of stick out every-which-way. So we can eliminate that particularly creepy effect as a normal aftereffect of being dead and decaying.
But OH, this isn't a pig. Isn't a pig. Most definitely isn'tapig.
Isn't. A. Pig.
But it's a "something", that much is certain, and theories abound: a very large dead rat; a very large dead racoon. . . some kind of dead "canine". . . but none of those theories fit this creature's fearsome physiology.
Please hang on to something now, for I am about to show you something even worse, something that washed up on shore in 2008.
I don't know why I do this. Why do I do this? I can't help myself. I look through my fingers, but I look, my scalp prickling with horror.
This is called the Montauk Monster, and nobody knows what-the-fuck-it-is or even wants to.
What I think is happening is this: somewhere, someone is doing experiments. Before you write this off, just think what is already possible with hybridizing, genetic engineering, gene splicing and dicing, and all that stuff.
This isn't a question of "an animal crossed with a human". "Crossed" is no word for what is happening here. Minute amounts of human genetic material are being insinuated into the genetic structure of certain animals, perhaps pigs, perhaps gigantic rodents like capybaras (except their teeth are different).
No, I don't jest because I think it's happening now and that there exist in labs or hideous farms somewhere, hybrids that contain maybe ten per cent human genes. Just to see what will happen.
So the pig has a little twist of intelligence along with his tail. Might be useful for certain research. How intelligent can a pig become? How human? Will it suddenly begin to talk in a squealy, irritating voice?
What if one gets away from the evil lab some time, such as now? What if one jumps onboard a cruise ship and someone sees it and freaks out so much he chucks it overboard?
Jesus!
Something scares me, scares me so much I won't bother to turn off the italics: someone is going to insist that this "thing" be genetically tested to see what it's really made of, and what percentage of it has been tampered with. What percentage of it might in fact be human.
Human.
This thing? There is no such animal. Yet here it is, right under the Brooklyn Bridge. Woody, don't leave the house.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
The Sacred Sweater, Vol. II
Shit on a stick, did I ever have a hard time with that last post. Trying to convert the text into something my blog would accept took forever.
But I persevered, mainly because I thought this piece was so astonishing. The actual text goes on for ten pages or so, and covers most of the Bible, even the Old Testament, in which the "teacher" says all the little Hebrew boys were being slain because "those Hebrews were just breeding like rabbits".
This thing reeks of fundamentalism, not to mention racism, with even the most innocent act (knitting!) dragged in to illustrate scriptural precepts. The thing that astonishes me is how long I fell for this. I was "in" this milieu for something like fifteen years before I came to realize that somewhere along the way, it had come to mean almost nothing to me.
It wasn't so much scripture, which can be interesting if contradictory (as is Jesus). It was the people trying to convey the messages. Hardly anyone I encountered in all that time seemed to have anything more than a superficial knowledge of what this was all about.
You see, the old-time message behind the Bible is that we're basically no goddamn good, if you'll pardon the language. We're selfish and hard-hearted and besides that, we have sex! We have sex. Do you know what people actually do when they have sex? And they enjoy it. Could it be worse?
So it's very important either to not have sex, or, if we do have it, not to enjoy it due to guilt, shame and a smothering feeling of sin that will never go away.
We were always controlled by guilt, not to mention shame and a sense of fundamental unworthiness and irredeemable filth that could "only" be cleansed by Jesus. Trouble was, we had to keep doing this over and over and over again, pretty much every Sunday.
We never quite "got there," as if the goal was to become some saintly figure that no one else would be able to stand. We always had to go against, against, against our true nature, or God wouldn't love us any more. Certainly, the pecksniffs at church wouldn't - that is, if they ever loved us in the first place.
So. We have the Biblical teddy bear sweater, and later on in the 10 or 12 pages of this drivel she uses the term "bear" in the most groaningly punning way. We "bear with" our sorrows, etc. I have to say, though, that though I may just try that little knitting pattern, I found her theology not so much unbearable as a complete sack of shit.
Holy cow (or bear): it's the Sacred Sweater!
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