Engine Empire

Dear Ana,

I’m currently in a very sketchy Best Western in New Jersey contemplating the life choices that have led me to this point. I haven’t updated in fifteen years and what was supposed to be a short break due to school work became a lengthy hiatus, so I am deeply sorry about that. On the other hand, I read a book today, which shouldn’t be something I’m boasting about, but that’s where I’m at now.

Engine Empire by Cathy Park Hong, is a short volume of poetry trisected into three parts. As the backcover attests, it’s a trilogy in one work. In Hong’s revelatory words, the worlds of the wild west, pre- and post-industrial china and the nebulous realm of the internet come together to make a whole that works somehow. Hong is a phenomenally insightful and hugely creative poet; her poems vary widely in form and style, from prose poems to sonnets to ballads to more abstract fare. Within each form even, there is playful exploration of the sounds of words and something that touches at the very heart of what poetry is.

For instance, in section one, a poem entitled “Ballad of I” is…well I’ll let you read a sample for yourself:

O Boomtown’s got lots of sordor:

odd horrors of throwdowns,

bold cowboys lock horns,

forlorn hobos plot to rob

 

pots of gold, loco mobs

drool for blood, howl or hoot

for cottonwood blooms, throng

to hood crooks to strong wood posts.

…

The best way I can describe the volume as a whole, is that it hurtles. It’s something that lends itself easily to a one-sitting read, yet it is also one that makes you want to stop and savor.

The poem that left the deepest impression for me is probably “Of the Zoo on 6 Chrysanthemum Road”: (in its entirety)

The farmers used to worship the giant pelican which would open its pouched maw to drop down rain. writers worshipped spotted little men who would whisper fantastic plots in their ears while they slept. We now worship animals that exist. The porcupine. The civet cat. The snake. Even the ant. Our forests are vast empty chambers. Hike to the deepest heart of our mountains and you hear nothing except for the wind’s hiss of all that has shamed you. The zoo is the most popular attraction. One zookeeper cares for the only two sea turtles in the world. They are both 100 years old. Everyday, she snaps on gloves and then she gently massages the male turtle so that he may seed one day.

Also, I agree that we should slow this review train down to once a month. That seems doable in college, if you still want to continue it then?

Sincerely,

Crystal

The Bluest Eye

Dear Ana,

This is a bit of a Flashback Friday, if you will. I read The Bluest Eye for an English honors project & maybe almost March feels like a time of reflection or maybe I haven’t finished the book I’m currently reading. Regardless, we ought to always talk about Toni Morrison when possible.

Toni Morrison’s writing reminds me of spoken word poetry. The prose has such a thrillingly descriptive way of stating ordinary things. Example:

They come from Mobile. Aiken…From Marietta. From Meridian…When you ask them where they are from, they tilt their heads and say “Mobile” and you think you’ve been kissed…You don’t know what these towns are like, but you love what happens to the air when they open their lips and let the names ease out…The sound of it opens the windows of a room like the first four notes of a hymn.

Wow.

And through the channel of this phenomenal writing, The Bluest Eye explores the heavy topics of race and the ways certain sectors of society views race-based concepts of beauty. The Breedloves have accepted society’s definition of ugly. They take the belief that black equals ugly, and don’t bother looking for another answer. This unquestioning conviction that society’s views are the gold standard cements their perceived aesthetic immobility. Thus, Pecola is almost forced into believing that a miracle granting her blue eyes is the only solution to a lifetime of ugliness. Whereas Claudia, a foil for Pecola, sees this fundamental injustice and gets angry about it.

If you haven’t read it, I hope you do. Of all the books I’ve read in my four years of HS (almost over!) this is easily one of the best.

Sincerely,

Crystal

All the Light We Cannot See

Dear Ana,

I’m so sorry this is late! I’ve had a heck of a week. The scioly competition was today, and the mad scramble leading up to it is kind of breathtaking to watch (and participate in). Though we did make States! So.

Anyway, I recently read All the light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.

It has grown something of a huge following among critics, not disimilar to Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

And I have to say that overall it really does deserve all the hype. It is superbly written, and Doerr is tremendously gifted at description. Ordinary events become, through Doerr’s words, a swirling, intensely chromatic, dynamic picture. You can taste the gun-smoke tang of Paris during the dusk of Hitler’s regime. You can hear the melodious French of a sheltered blind girl growing up too fast in the midst of war.

Which is all to say that yes it’s beautifully written. But I suppose the general problem is that the opportunity cost of such detailed and delicate and finely wrought description is a well paced plot. Doerr ends up with a hundred or so more pages than really necessary or pertinent.

The novel follows two different children into adulthood during the years leading up to and past World War II. Marie-Laure and Werner have two different experiences, one being a blind French girl and daughter of a museum curator and the other a German orphaned boy. There’s a maybe-magical blue diamond involved. Radios feature a lot as well.

They meet like 80% into the book or something, which I found a little ridiculous because prior to that meeting the book read like two completely disparate books contained in alternating chapters.

Also, what happens to one of the children seemed really emotionally cheap to me. But if this was supposed to be reflective of life, then I guess that’d be the point?

This isn’t the ending we deserve.

But this is the ending we get. (Is that how it goes?)

Sincerely,

Crystal

When Mystical Creatures Attack!

Dear Ana,

It is a week before the last midterms of our high school lives and I feel not even a whit of nostalgia.

Anyway, I recently read When Mystical Creatures Attack! by Kathleen Founds, which is a title I saw on some NYT ‘Top New Books!’ list or something.

It’s nothing like what I expected, with a cover like this:

and a title with an actual, honest-to-God exclamation point. I thought I was settling in for some whimsical light reading involving giant squids and unicorns. And though unicorns and giant squids do feature, Founds blows all my preconceptions out of the water.

WMCA! chronicles, through various means (mediums I suppose?) like letters, emails, advice columns, journals, essay assignments, transcripts, and character-written short stories, the lives of Ms. Laura Freedman and a few of her former English class students. It comes a bit close to The Wayside Stories in texture, if not tone.

This book explores, as I think eventually all good books must, the meaning of life. It’s funny and yes, sometimes whimsical, but essentially it’s about despair and mental illness and sadness and struggle and poverty and the strange humanity of hope. But the hope is not, as it often is in novels, cloying. Here, despair can sometimes just be despair. Not something meaningful or a prelude to contentment or anything else.

Sometimes you get pregnant at sixteen or your mother kills herself when you’re four or your father leaves or you have debilitating bipolar disorder or you drop out of school or you get addicted to pills. Sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes we let them happen.

Kathleen Founds reminds us that that’s all part of the human experience. We try to keep living and it’s hard. There’s no moral to the story, except that in the process of living we might find some measure of grace.

“And I was like, okay, Ms. Freedman, you failed. Why couldn’t you have been the teacher from one of those movies where a nice lady with good bone structure stands on her desk and reads a poem and the kids are all like, fuck poverty, we’re going to college!”

“Dear Laura,

I was moping around the living room, doing half-hearted wheelies in my electric wheelchair, when my dad tossed The Brothers Karamazov in my lap. It was hard to get into, and I mostly just flipped through laughing at his dorky marginalia. Then I read this passage:

Love every leaf, every ray of light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love.

Then the dead skin shattered off the living room furniture and underneath was a love so unbearable I wept. I realized, suddenly, my heart bursting, that there was no heart of darkness at my center, and there was no heart of darkness at the center of anyone else. The wallpaper shone like the sun.

Then this morning, it was gone. While waiting in the rain for the bus to lower the wheelchair ramp, life felt meaningless again. What happened?

~Lucy in San Francisco”

If we could answer that last question, we’d have unlocked the secret of the universe.

This is a phenomenal book.

Sincerely,

Crystal

The Zahir

Dear Ana,

So, funny story. (Well, not really. But I thought the following was a little strange and my life is not nearly bizarre enough and I’ll take what I can get thanks.)

A while ago, I read the short story “The Zahir” (which I thought was) by Jorge Luis Borges. Today, I was ruminating, as you do, on Borges and wanted to revisit the story, when I stumbled upon a completely different version. I’m sure you can imagine my confusion. Both were titled “The Zahir” and allegedly by Borges. After some googling and a helpful goodreads forum thread, it became clear that the first was in fact by Mark Jason Dominus, and not Borges, though it was heavily influenced by Borges’ story of the same name. Both stories are charming and a little unsettling, but this was all a long lead-in to the review of the Borges story.

A Zahir is essentially an item that cannot be forgotten. The real Borges’ story is one where another Borges (a narrator with the same name?) finds a Zahir in the shape of a coin, or perhaps a coin in the shape of a Zahir. The coin, as Zahirs do, will eventually take over his mind. But in the meantime, Borges thinks about the meaning of dreams, reality, and God. It’s written the way a scholarly paper would be written, with a great number of references to outside works, most of which are completely fabricated by Borges. The presentation blurred the line between fictional and non-fictional and served to heighten the drama. To my shame, I actually went and googled “are zahirs real.” Results were mostly about some celeb baby named Future Zahir Wilburn (…it’s creative, I’ll grant them that).

There’s a lot to be unpacked in this short story:

When every person on earth thinks, day and night, of the Zahir, which will be dream and which reality, the earth or the Zahir?

…

In order to lose themselves in God, the Sufis repeat their own name or the ninety-nine names of God until the names mean nothing anymore. I long to travel that path. Perhaps I will succeed in wearing away the Zahir by thinking and re-thinking about it; perhaps behind the coin is God.

“The Zahir” is chilling and delicate and relentless and straightforward. I definitely recommend that you read it.

Last notes: what incredible power it is to drive someone to madness by sheer thought.

Sincerely,

Crystal

P.S. I use the word ‘Borges’ 10 times in this one post (well, I guess 11 including this last one) and I’m not sorry. He’s pretty much a deity.

Frankenstein

Dear Ana,

If you asked me to describe Frankenstein by Mary Shelley in two words, they’d be: Massive Disappointment. The novel is something of a cultural keystone, or at least a sci-fi keystone. It’s become a trope in and of itself, and has spawned countless spin-offs, retellings, movies, plays, and other such media pieces.

And yeah, the plot is original. And okay, Shelley was nineteen when she wrote it. Which, incredible. And I guess it is the first of its kind and added a whole other dimension to monster theory etc etc. But it’s also quite poorly written for a book hailed as a ‘classic.’

Shelley didn’t make Victor’s motives/thoughts/actions convincing. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that she understands the meaning of words like ‘suspense’ or, you know, ‘logic.’ So much does not make sense. This is a book with a great deal of unrealized potential.

Here are some notes I took while reading this book:

• There’s a little bit of suspense at first and then the minute Victor sees something in the foothills, he automatically assumes it’s his monster, because WHO HAS EVER HEARD OF PROOF OF GUILT?? NOT VICTOR. And immediately after that, no more suspense. Zero. Shelley moves forward as if it’s definitely the monster–put your hands down, no arguing. Me: But where’s the eviden–? Shelley: Don’t worry about it.
• In a more philosophical and less obnoxious vein, this all begs the question: how much of what we create ends up being our responsibility? If we create something and set it loose in the world, be it a song, a novel, a painting, how much of how it is interpreted, ultimately rests on our shoulders? If someone is inspired by a violent video game to commit violence, or a drug-filled song to do drugs, how much of this is the creator’s fault? And how much of it is the person who does the interpreting?
• By having the monster narrate for a while, we can see exactly what the monster experienced and also realize that the monster speaks like an accomplished English major/linguist. (Because again, that makes sense.) And this language he acquires by (being a supergenius, I guess) simply listening to the family speak it, and later on, in a very deus ex machina move, from the lady who comes to the family and who happens to also be learning English…okay Shelley, someone’s a lazy writer.
• Has no one ever heard of the saying ‘no such thing as coincidence’? Obviously Shelley hasn’t. These coincidences are ridiculous. Some person thoughtful enough to enjoy Plutarch, Paradise Lost etc., just left their entire satchel of books in the middle of the forest? And just at this critical juncture where the monster’s education was stalling/at a plateau? Are you serious. This monster guy could sweep the casinos. That’s the kind of luck he has.
• Victor seeks revenge by following a superhuman daemon across the arctic tundra. In what fantasy universe does he think he will come out of this on top??

Again, kudos to Shelley for writing what is now read in Lit classes at the tender, spry age of nineteen, but that doesn’t preclude the fact that, stylistically, this book is at least a little bit garbage.

Cool idea though.

Sincerely,

Crystal

The Song of Achilles

Dear Ana,

Ah, The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller.

If you haven’t guessed by now, this book is a retelling of the story of Achilles. And it’s just like the original but with 200% more gay! Ie. Achilles and Patroclus are young lovers instead of simply being young implied lovers. (You may have furrowed your brow in thought, wondering where you’ve heard that before. That’s right–sounds like fanfiction.)

Anyway, the novel is written from Patroclus’s point of view, which is a refreshing change. This little adjustment allows Miller to tweak a quintessential war story and morph it into a love story.

It is beautifully written, reading the way your rich aunt’s Pantone-color-of-the-year Valentino dress looks. The phrases are modern-born, with a grand, ancient, lineage; they could have dropped from the mouths of kings.

However, as pleasing as the word use was, I didn’t like the way time was utilized/formatted. Two years in the earlier days of Patroclus’s life was covered in as many words as like seven years of the war. In magnifying the love story aspect, and still making the book a manageable length, Miller made it so that time no longer moved in a consistent manner. Time skipped and paused, flowed like molasses and then suddenly like arterial blood.

I also could not get over nine-year-old Patroclus speaking like twenty-nine-year-old Patroclus?? Nine year olds don’t talk/think like that?? I have siblings. Trust me, I’m an expert. I guess this way the style of speaking is consistent, but in solving one problem, Miller creates another, this one of dissonance.

I also appreciated the fact that the author knew what she was saying, mostly. She obviously knew stuff about Ancient Greeks and their culture/language. (And maybe comparing people like this is a little petty, but Miller still comes nowhere near Donna Tartt’s mastery).

Last notes: The romance was sweet and you might be all like no! I don’t ship Patroclus/Achilles romantically! They were best bros! Platonic life partners!

But I guarantee that the way Miller writes the story, you’ll end up shipping it.

And though the luuurve got a little bit cliche at times, love itself is a giant cliche. So. You know. Whatever.

Very worthwhile read.

Sincerely,

Crystal

No Country For Old Men

Dear Ana,

A few days ago I read No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy, who wrote such classics as The Road and Blood Meridian. It’s about a man who finds 2.4 million dollars clutched in the hands of a corpse, his subsequent run from various gangs/hired assassins/overall baddies, the policeman on the case of the murders, and said hired assassins. I’ve heard of the movie, and actually had no idea it was a novel first. Anyway, I’m going to dispense with the meet-cute (where the meeting was between me and the book), and jump straight into its gritty wind-swept Tex-Mex borderlands.

And man is it gritty. This book is as gritty as a bowl of grits. Or a piece of grit gritting up your eye. Right about now you might be saying, Crystal, I don’t think that word means what you think it means. And you’d probably be right. But the point is, the atmosphere McCarthy manages to develop in this novel feels almost hyper-saturated. This is the Fabio of Westerns. It’s every Western movie’s wet dream. It’s what Breaking Bad wanted to grow up to be (Okay, I may be exaggerating a little on this last one. Especially since I’ve never seen Breaking Bad).

Back to the ever important point: McCarthy manipulates his words really fricking well. He does something tremendous with the language here. The prose is colloquial and punctuationally sparse (no quotation marks ever, the rare apostrophe, and he’s something of a comma-phobe) yet exhilaratingly immediate. I was there. And though I understand this is the whole point of books duh, rarely have I seen it done quite so well. Perhaps because the setting is so integral to the storytelling format. Perhaps not. Either way, driving motivations don’t change outcomes: while reading, dust swirled around my feet, and blood pooled beneath yet another gunshot victim.

McCarthy also throws in clever&humorous dialogue, glinting aphorisms and gems of wisdom that add even more dimension to the rich setting.

You think when you wake up in the mornin yesterday dont count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the days it’s made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I dont know what all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who’s layin there?…Ever step you take is forever. You cant make it go away. None of it. You understand what I’m sayin?

Sincerely,

Crystal

The Anatomy of Closed Doors

Dear Ana,

I’m reviewing another poetry chapbook, which should come as a surprise to exactly no one. (Damn my weakness for obscure Tumblr-originated, self-made young poets). “The Anatomy of Closed Doors” by Lu Vola–which, if I’m not mistaken is actually a pseudonym–is much more impressive & palatable than the previous chapbook I reviewed. While I understand that it’s unfair to compare works this way, my range of experience with regard to said poetry collections is so narrow, it’s…pretty much inevitable.

The poems are of a consistently high quality. Which, awesome! And though there is repetition of imagery and words, it never becomes grating or tedious. The reiteration simply acts like glue, it threads throughout all the individual pieces and forms a coherent whole. Themes include: love & the loss of it, death, cultural tensions and family.

There are still some flecks of pretentiousness present (a common enough trap for young writers to fall into) but for the most part everything is grounded and delicately wrought.

Here is an excerpt from her poem, “this user is no longer available”:

i’ve stopped being happy

for my friends. my heart

has grown hard and tiny

and it has evicted warm memories

like noisy, unwanted tenants. i’ve hit

the panic button and the door

is ironclad. i’ve locked me in

with myself in the dark and

only one of us will make

it out alive.

…

so now i am a house with twenty-two floors

and none are vacant. anger creaks

the floors. bitterness flickers the lights.

whatever has been buried in the basement

has crept up the walls, blackening the windows,

blocking out the light.

I love the rhythm she’s got going. And like, everything else.

Her tumblr is at: basicaquatics.tumblr.com, if you want to check out some of the poems she has up online.

Have a nice weekend!

Sincerely,

Crystal

P.S. I am not getting paid and/or compensated in any way by the author, for this endorsement.

Charm & Strange

Dear Ana,

Happy three day weekend!

I recently read Charm & Strange by Stephanie Kuehn.

Kuehn is the master of unreliable narrators. The protagonist, Andrew Winston Winters isn’t unreliable because he’s necessarily lying to the reader, but because he doesn’t even know himself. The narrative has alternating chapters titled Matter or Antimatter (this physics theme, also referenced in the title: Charm & Strange quarks, threads throughout the novel). One is of Winters’s past life, and one of his present life. They merge into something coherent and haunting.

The writing is okay, a little bit heavy-handed sometimes and does occasionally fall into cliched territory, but the way that Kuehn layers the plot is absolutely stunning. In the first layer, and what the reader assumes is the only layer, Kuehn drops hints the size of greenland pointing to a certain idea of Winters. And so, I went through the book thinking something like, ‘Psh, I totally know what’s gonna happen.’

I didn’t.

Spoilers would ruin the book. But the central question is this: What is (wrong with) Winters?

Read it. It’s an experience, and the ending is astonishing. I couldn’t stop thinking about it for days.

Sincerely,

Crystal