Your Very Own Ghost Knocking at the Door: On Mat Gould's A Blackbird Sings the Blues With Laughter

A Blackbird Sings the Blues With Laughter is a book of poem that suits the mantra. Where is the end to all of this? Whatever this may be, there is no end, it is just the daily deluge of reality . . . simple, suggestive, poignant, natural, and at times plain fucking funny and yet full of gospel sensibility. I don’t want to throw names at it, Gould may borrow, mimic, denounce, or battle but all that matters is that he writes and owns these poems.

This collection of poetry will put you in the place, push the dust and grit up your nostrils to the point where you’ll have to blow it out at seasons end. You’ll feel your own meditations in these lines, you’ll recognize your own ideals, your own cures, your own perversions, and the inevitability of what may be your very own ghost knocking at the door or be it window.

Gould puts us in his vision, keeps us in his flagrantly pounding heart, shows us the view from his porch and pronounces to us in many forms that if we must do anything than we must do what it takes to survive this barrage of existence and what that takes, is everything. Sometimes he tells us in those exact words and in other words with other ways he tells by strapping on the loincloth and taking us out into if not beyond the wilderness to hunt jackal, to seek jackalope, and begs us to not forget the myth nor dismiss reality . . . the very reality in which all of these poems enrich.

Gould should be read in sacred places. Gould should read when you are half buried by burden. Gould should be read when you are in no need of options. Gould should be read when you are imbibing. Gould should be read when lackluster and clutter will not do. Gould should be read, and you might as well start with A Blackbird Sings the Blues With Laughter.

The New Book Trailer: An Interview with Adam Cushman

Popular wisdom holds that the movie is never as good as the book (with allowances, perhaps, for the adaptations of Stanley Kubrick and a few others). But an emerging genre is challenging and re-imagining the relationship between film and literature. Red 14 Films, founded in 2011, makes “literary short films. They also call them “cinematic book trailers,” to distinguish them from the low-end, slideshow-style trailers currently in vogue in indie circles.

The films capture the core of a book in just a few minutes. They are often used as part of an online advertising campaign, but they also stand as artworks in their own right. “Through film,” the company says on its web page, “we offer the chance to spread the idea of your book in a way that’s engaging to readers and expresses the plot and tone of your book without compromising the reading experience.”

On July 15, Red 14 Films will launch a Kickstarter campaign to fund films for Jason Ockert’s Neighbors of Nothing, Matt Bell’s In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, Scott Dominic Carpenter’s This Jealous Earth, and Monica Drake’s The Stud Book.

Co-founder Adam Cushman was kind enough to answer some of my questions over email.

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Nathan Goldman: What inspired the founding of Red 14 Films?

Adam Cushman: It was entirely accidental. My background is in fiction writing and filmmaking. About two years ago, a friend asked me to direct a book trailer for his new novel. I had no idea what he was talking about. So I researched online and found they’d been around for a few years, but were universally, maybe even intentionally bad. My partner Mike Sandow and I enjoyed the creative freedom of working within a new form. So we did a few more book trailers for friends with novels. Pretty soon we had writers asking to hire us, and the company was born.

Nathan Goldman: The Kickstarter campaign video defines the “literary short film” as “a 1-3 minute film that spreads the idea of the book much like a music video.” When making one of these films, what’s the process like for determining “the idea of the book”?

Adam Cushman: It depends on the book, really. We read the book and come up with an approach. Very often what we shoot is informed by a passage from the book or the back cover synopsis. Other times the writer has a solid idea of what they want, and if that vision is realistic, we adapt it that way. It’s similar to a film adaptation in that sense, because you’re translating one medium to another. The question becomes how much do you translate? How much plot is necessary to include in the trailer in order to interest readers in the book and the author? My feeling is these films are better as sense impressions than direct film adaptations, giving readers just a taste.

Nathan Goldman: The Red 14 Films website describes the literary short film as an art form in its own right, as well as a part of an advertising campaign for a book. How do these two aims work together? Do they ever come into conflict, and if so, how does Red 14 Films negotiate between them?

Adam Cushman: They haven’t really come into conflict. There are three strains at work here: cinema, literature, and advertising. To me these literary shorts are most closely related to music videos only in the sense that we’re not using them as direct ads. Music videos, for example, don’t feature the album cover at the end or ask you to buy the album. They use the song as a vehicle for a new work of art that hopefully creates an interest in that album and that band. To me direct advertising is dead. No one is going to share a spammy “book trailer.” No one’s going to click on your banner ad. So you have to give people something that spreads. You can’t do that by talking down to people. You can ask them to buy the book, and who knows, some of them might. But why not give them something that’s visually and emotionally pleasing?

Nathan Goldman: How do you think book trailers fit into the changing publishing industry?

Adam Cushman: Well, it’s an interesting time. Book trailers are everywhere. And they’re for the most part really terrible. Most publishers have gone along with using them begrudgingly, and that’s evident when you watch the trailers. It’s clear from the work that publishers wish they didn’t need book trailers, so they throw a slideshow together and say, “It’ll do.” But it won’t do. And this gives book trailers a bad name (rightfully so). There’s no doubt that you need online video as part of your marketing plan. So why not make it awesome? I hope, if we’ve accomplished anything in two years, we’ve proven that these trailers can be high quality and affordable at the same time. And there’s no doubt that book trailers are here to stay. So the question becomes, do big publishers prefer mediocrity? I think the answer is no. Over the last year I’ve seen a bunch of amazing book trailers pop up. So it’s definitely beginning to get better, although the really bad ones still make up most of them. Right now it’s all still new, and the typical response from publishers is, “Well, the numbers haven’t been proven, so….” But there’s no way to measure the numbers. Music videos have no way of measuring how many sales a video generates. And that’s really not the point anyway. The point is to increase the interest in books and in reading. The success of the eReader ought to tell you that people want to read. How you compel them to do that is a different story.

Nathan Goldman: The Red 14 Films website says, “We’re not creating typical ‘book trailers,’ amateur slideshows using an iMac, still frames from the web, and maybe some scrolling text. This is neither our product nor something we are interested in being involved in.” What do you think high production value contributes to this emerging art form?

Adam Cushman: I think what it comes down to is quality and care. The bottom line is that most authors spend one to two years writing a book. That anyone would then advertise the book with one of these still frame montages or anything less than stellar makes no sense to me.

Nathan Goldman: What inspired this Kickstarter campaign?

Adam Cushman: Two things. First, we want to use Kickstarter the way Kickstarter was meant to be used: collaboratively. We feel that the Kickstarter platform is a way to bring legitimacy to this new form and for people to feel like they’re involved in creating it. Second, we’re hoping to create a platform that indie publishers can use in the future. The idea being that if you take four of your titles and create a campaign, offering books, eBooks, workshops, etc., as rewards, everybody wins. The authors and publishers get a cool book trailer. The supporters get awesome and affordable rewards and a chance to connect with authors. Plus, you’re automatically building your fan base and marketing your titles. The best Kickstarters are ones where everyone wins. I hope that our campaign lives up to that. I think it will.

Nathan Goldman: If someone hired you to produce a literary short film for any work you wanted by any author, living or dead, what work would you choose?

Adam Cushman: It’s my dream project to do a series of these for the classics.

Nathan Goldman: What classics do you have in mind for that series?

Adam Cushman: Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, the Black Rider poems, Walden, Last of the Mohicans, Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination, to name a few. I imagine doing them in a similar vein as the Criterion Collection covers, just with video.

Nathan Goldman: Does your background in fiction writing inform the process of making these films, since they’re inspired by and tied to texts? If so, how?

Adam Cushman: I don’t think my fiction background informs the filmmaking so much as it makes me passionate about finding and filming awesome stories, and often getting to work with fiction writers I admire.

Nathan Goldman: You’ve made films for many kinds of books, from novels to short story collections to a book on writing. Does your approach vary according to these different genres? What different challenges do the different genres present?

Adam Cushman: The non-fiction books are trickier because you have to find different ways to communicate the idea of the book than you would if you were filming a novel. With a story collection we focus on one story, usually the title piece. With the book on writing, we had to express the idea of the book using imagery that isn’t necessarily in the book itself, so that was a different process as well. But the truth is every book presents its own challenges, and the fun part is figuring out how to use those challenges positively. For example, we did a trailer for a book called Executive Command. It’s a political thriller with lots of characters and action. Every time we sat down to figure out the approach, it ended up being too expensive. That’s the thing with these, they’re not actual film adaptations and there’s often the temptation, either with the writer or the filmmaker or both, to treat it as such. This can end up being prohibitively expensive. With Executive Command, we ended up shooting a small scene from the book as a found footage piece, a scene that happens to encapsulate the plot and conflict of the novel. So sometimes it’s about finding new and creative ways to say more but show less.

Nathan Goldman: Would you be interested in working with wildly different kinds of books—cookbooks, textbooks, coffee table books, doctoral dissertations—or do you think that there are certain genres for which this medium doesn’t make sense?

Adam Cushman: I can’t think of any genres that we wouldn’t take on. I’m not particularly interested in religious fiction, but that’s me. So the answer is definitely yes. I think the difference is that with a cook book or a coffee table book you’re limited in the sense that it will serve one purpose, and that purpose is to be a book trailer. With the literary shorts we make for novels. they exist as a film first and happen to make for good book trailers as well. With the novels and collections there’s also the opportunity to use the films to promote the movie rights, something you wouldn’t really need to do with a cookbook or dissertation.

Nathan Goldman: Who are some of your favorite living writers? Filmmakers?

Adam Cushman: Aside from the four brilliant writers in our Kickstarter campaign? Right now I’m into Alissa Nutting, Denis Johnson, James Ellroy, and Patrick Dewitt to name a few. My favorite writers change all the time though. On the film side, I really like some of the Australian filmmakers like David Michod, Andrew Dominik, Cate Shortland, and Justin Kurzel. I could go on.

Nathan Goldman: What would you say to someone considering contributing to the Kickstarter campaign?

Adam Cushman: That apart from the rewards, you’re helping pioneer a new art form that can benefit established writers, new voices and filmmakers worldwide.

The Destruction and Violence of Identity and Identification

It’s probably not true that I met Jordaan Mason by Google image searching “two headed boy.” But that’s how I remember it. This was back when I was in high school, for shivermouth’s sake. Jordaan was pretty much my age and he was doing a record label called Oh! Map. They put out haunting twitches, hopeful folk, scream cream. Then I remember driving up California foothill Black Bart madrone and straw-colored highways to Nevada City to see Jordaan and his friends play music in a theatre that smelled like silver dollars. Jordaan and his friends hugged each other and knew how to play the saw. It was maybe the first time I ever wore my favorite cowboy shirt in public.

Years later, in October of 2007, I made a to-do list that included “clip your toenails” and “buy chips and shit for Jordaan’s show.” Jordaan showed up in an essay I wrote for Nervebut they cut most of him out, even though he made the essay sadder and more nuanced and less huckstery. He is always doing that kind of shit to the world. Like one time he told me he wrote a novel, and I was like, “Oh? Can I read it?” And lo and behold: The Skin Team is that novel, here with us now maybe three years after I first read it, and it is as good at itself as Jordaan is good at every room I’ve ever known him to sing his way through.

The Skin Team concerns the interloopings and intercouplings and mind habits and drastic measures of three people. Two boys, one girl, all young. Plus there’s a Power Company, but that catches on fire. The Skin Team is one of the most honest books about sex I’ve ever read. There are horses and maps and light-bulb vomit and tag teams. This is a thick book rioting all over itself with skin and shaking its head at science and stomping/sobbing pretty much every time the world tells it to shush. What I’ve been telling people is that it’s like if Dennis Cooper rewrote The Virgin Suicides. What Dennis Cooper says is that “it’s about as beautiful as fiction can ever be” and “you would never suspect how difficult it is to write even fairly about such things, much less with Jordaan Mason’s radiant emotional grace and super-deft detailing and flawless style.”

This isn’t just a novel I published because I’ve known Jordaan for like ten years; it’s more like the only reason I’ve been friends with some random dude in Canada for ten years is because he has one of the truest throats. Jordaan is double-talented, what a jerk. Playing his high school songs on my high school radio show or adult-putting his adult book out in the world are two things I’ve done because of the same feeling. Which is this feeling: Jordaan Mason is hollering so much real-talk through this all around fucknut dark that he makes our crooked faces feel not so apart.

Here’s some talking I did with him:

Mike Young: You’ve been working on The Skin Team for a long time. This book has traveled with you through a lot of crazy singing-saw time on the road as a musician and now into your homey plaid domestic life as a filmmaker/student/husband. Can you completely ignore my oversimplification of your life and tell us about The Skin Team‘s genesis and process?

Jordaan Mason: I started writing what is now The Skin Team around the time that I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I was in my first year of university, but I was traveling a lot, playing music, and my ability to focus on school was diminishing. During that time I went through a series of medications until I found the right balance or whatever. One of the medications I was taking early on made me feel really detached from everything and that detachment was a big part of where the text originated from: trying to describe this complete separation of my body from everything around it and from itself. And trying to figure out how or even if this had any effect on my sense of identity, how does having this illness inform it, how do we get named and categorized through these intangible things through medical discourse. This detachment from my sense of self turned into these three characters who then stuck around in my head even after I sorted the medication stuff out. I kept picking at them, gradually, wondering why they had taken up residence in me. I wrote as a way of trying to figure them out even if they refused to be figured out, even if they didn’t want to be categorized.

I dropped out of university before entering my third year. I wasn’t in the right head space for academic thinking and was much more interested in traveling and playing music, in losing myself in creating things for a while, and so I did. I devoted a lot of my time when I wasn’t traveling to this text until it grew into what seemed to be something like a novel. It took about two years of writing until that’s what I realized I had been writing. But just as it was starting to really come together, I lost the majority of the book in a thunderstorm computer crash. I was left with a document of hieroglyphics and symbols and sentence fragments. I also had a very early draft on paper that was about twenty pages long. I had to start over (and also learn to back things up).

During this time I was living at a house/art space called The Oxford Hotel and I was working on a record called Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head with my then-band, The Horse Museum. When it was nearly finished, I took a break from touring to save up some money so we could release the album and worked a shitty telemarketing job. I rewrote most of the book during my time there. In between phone calls, I would write. I would then come home and work with what I’d been able to jot down between calls, expand it. After two months or so, I was back to a working draft of the book’s narrative. I spent the next year editing and working on structure until it became essentially what it is now. And then I went back to school.

MY: The Skin Team has three main characters and a lot of heft placed on the idea of threedom. Even the cover image was sewn in three parts: the cover fabric, the spine fabric, and the back fabric, which—hey, look at that—has three boxes on it. These three fabrics overlap and shove together in interesting and even somewhat violent ways, just like your three main characters. Can you introduce those three main characters to us?

JM: Since the novel is largely about the destruction and violence of identity and identification, the characters in the book are generally nameless and devoid of physical description. Their identities are fluid and bleed into one another but they still stand alone as separate entities through the structure of the book. The characters are:

1. A boy who has a series of physical ailments which doctors cannot detect, including but not limited to the feeling that he is swallowing fire in his sleep and that he is being magnetically drawn to True North. He begins to believe that his illness is caused by the distribution of energy through electric wires which spread throughout his town and, in turn, through him, and the genesis of that energy is the Power Company Building. He has varying sexual experiences with both of the other characters. His sections are called “The Power is Out, Sing.”

2. A girl who is called Sarah (despite the fact that this is not really her name). After the death of her mother, she spends most of her time with horses in the stables and sneaks out of the house at night to be with boys at the Power Company Building. She still believes in singing but does not want to admit it. Her section is called “Of Moving Water, Erosion, and Other Alterations.”

3. Another boy who is slightly older, who spends most nights wandering the woods, who builds up conspiracies in his head, who thinks often of fire and destruction. He acts as a kind of guide to the others; the voice of unreason. His section is called “Of Thermal Energy, Continuous Operation, and the Efficient Use of Land.”

MY: This is the portion of the interview where I pretend to be really dumb and use the word “stuff” a lot. For example: I began falling in love with this book after meeting my way around the three characters we just talked about, but what really drove my heart into my knees was what I’m going to call “all the science stuff.” So what’s the deal with all the science stuff (Continuous Operation, Thermal Energy, True North) in the book?

JM: Science is the realm of naming, so I had to wrestle with that in this text. I wanted to destroy the logic of science, to unname things and start over. So while I was writing I started reading science textbooks instead of poetry and discovered that they aren’t that really that different somehow. I tried to write science textbooks but it sort of came out backwards. I ended up writing the kind of science textbooks that make sense to people like me who think that science textbooks don’t really make any sense. Science is the kind of the thing where if you explain it to me that this is the reason why the earth is tilted on an axis it’s like, yes, rationally I understand that, but also really why is the earth tilted on an axis? It’s like when you’re a kid and you ask adults questions and they give you the answer but you keep asking why. The characters in this book keep asking why.

So all this science stuff really started to infect the world of the book. Fragments of language and concepts from the textbooks I was reading turned into characters. They grew bodies and they spoke out and took up space on the page. They interacted with these three people I had been trying to figure out. And the science stuff kind of makes it feel like sometimes the book is really grounded in a kind of real-logic of the real-world but then it refutes itself, it asks why again, and it does so from its own mouth, with its own language. I basically almost failed all my science classes in high school, so there you have it.

MY: Where/who does the “map is not the territory” stuff come from and what does that stuff have to do with anything?

JM: My partner and now-husband Jason introduced me to the work of Alfred Korzybski, who wrote the dictum “the map is not the territory.” It came up because I was trying to explain my book to him, all this stuff about Map North versus True North versus the body versus our identities etc. etc., and he was like, “You should read about structural differential.” He had taken this class that his professor jokingly called Science and Unsanity and he gave me all of his notes. I read them and got really lost in those ideas. They were basically the theory-version of everything I had been writing, this denial of identity, this distantiation between spoken or written language and what we really mean. It was basically the only science-related stuff that I read during the writing process that actually made sense to me and it became really integral to the project.

MY: Poker and the game of tag going on in the woods with color-named teams and horse racing—what’s the deal with games and stuff in this book?

JM: Games are a big part of the language of children, and I wanted to puncture the text with reminders that these characters aren’t actually adults yet. I’m particularly drawn to how games all have their own language, their own structure of rules. And they’re so ingrained that we forget that the fun we are having is actually being regimented and controlled, that we’ve been out in the woods playing tag for hours even though it wouldn’t really matter if we got caught. I’m also just a big games person.

MY: You and I both have a lot of affinity for Leonard Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers, which he has called more of a sunstroke than a novel. I feel a little Beautiful Losers in your book too, and I don’t just mean Leonard Cohen via the “the room just filled up with mosquitos / they heard that my body was free” allusion. What are your feelings about Beautiful Losers a) as a writer, b) as a lilac tree, and c) as a Canadian?

JM: a) I think in terms of writing articulately/inarticulately about the body, Beautiful Losers is the book that really has stuck with me most. It’s scattered occasionally but I admire how much he tries to pack in. It’s insanely ambitious and really gets my gut. I knew pretty immediately that I was in the wrong creative writing program when I brought in Beautiful Losers to read aloud in class as an example of “good prose” and everyone else brought in very straight-forward realist stuff. My professor later called me out on trying to provoke the class by reading something so “shocking.” This should reveal a little bit more about why I dropped out of university the first time around.

b) Beautiful Losers is a book that’s told in fragments that all come together even when it doesn’t feel like they are going to. It works so well on both the small-scale sentence level and as a larger project. I feel like I’m still returning to this book and still learning so much from it. It grows larger in my heart with each re-read; I pluck it from the shelf often.

c) My super-anglo-basic-French-skills have helped me to understand all of the untranslated French portions of the book, which is a very Canadian thing, I guess. There’s a lot of Canada in that book even though he wrote in Greece and even though he doesn’t really write about Canada in the way that most Canadian writers generally write about Canada. My book doesn’t mention Canada once by name but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere.

MY: I know you’re someone who invests a ton of energy and love toward your friends and collaboration with them. You helped run The Oxford Hotel, a now legendary old house show spot in Toronto. And, in fact, I met you at an awesome theatre in Nevada City, CA in 2003 where you were playing music with a whole menagerie of friends. Plus I think America wouldn’t let you bring your accordion over the border because we’re dumbs. What does collaboration mean for/to you?

JM: Collaboration has always been important to me but it has become even more-so with time. I played music alone for a number of years but it was always within a community so it never felt like I was doing it alone-alone. Touring and meeting people and sharing spaces and opening The Oxford Hotel eventually led to The Horse Museum, a band that I was in from 2007-2010. Even though I technically wrote those songs they were completely transformed when my friends started to play them with me. That was really a community project, a lot of people were involved in bringing that together. We all really inspired one another and it was during that time that I was also writing the book. Everyone was going through a lot of heavy shit and we were all there for one another through it. I had to talk out these ideas and I had a lot of support and time and energy from my peers. Writing a novel is a pretty solitary thing I guess, but again, it didn’t feel like I was doing it alone-alone. Those years were tough, too. I wouldn’t have made it through without those people.

Lyrical Self-Help: The Compassion of Sugar

The first Dear Sugar column I read was “How You Get Unstuck,” in which Sugar consoles a woman devastated by a miscarriage. Those who expect her to move on gracefully from the trauma, Sugar tells her, “live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died.” I was 18 and in my senior year of high school and I must have read the column three times in fewer days. Overnight I joined the huge following devoted to this then-anonymous advice columnist redefining the form.

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar collects more than 50 columns by Sugar, aka novelist/memoirist Cheryl Strayed. It includes a well-curated selection of the pieces originally published on The Rumpus and a handful of columns, some very brief, not previously published. Steve Almond, who originally had the Sugar gig, contributes a tender, exultant foreword, and micro interviews with Strayed introduce each of the book’s five themed sections.

These columns are unusual because many are as much about the adviser as the advisee. They’re part advice, part personal essay. But it is not simply Strayed’s inclusion of her own stories that makes her singular in her field. Rather, it’s the delicate way she interweaves these stories with the pieces. She makes it clear not only that advice and anecdote are not discrete components of each column, but also that all advice bears one’s own stories in it. When we ask someone, stranger or friend, “What are my options? What should I do?”, implicit in the question is another: “What has your life taught you about living that might help you advise me?” Our lives inform our choices and thus our counsel. By writing about herself, Strayed imbues her advice with a rare transparency, authenticity, and credibility.

Strayed’s openness also fosters a potent intimacy, though a strange one: an intimacy in one sense shared between two strangers (most of the letter writers are, like Sugar was, pseudonymous) but in fact shared with anyone with Internet access—and now anyone with this book. That Strayed has now gone public alters but does not diminish this complex relationship.

So Strayed’s take on the form is inventive. But her patience and tenderness distinguish her, too. She is direct and sometimes severe, but she never condemns. Her empathy is infectious, and it’s needed. Many if not all of us are gossips, hungering for others’ stories and secrets. One of the advice column’s appeals is the promise of nosing into someone else’s business, often to gawk and mock and judge. Rather than nourish that prurient want, Strayed’s columns transform it. Removed leering becomes involved listening. Judgment gives way to compassion.

Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of these columns and it is more than that. It has an integrity all its own. Though organized thematically rather than chronologically, the book feels like an epistolary memoir. It is a fractured look at Strayed’s life as filtered through others’ lives, and in that sense it becomes a kind of collaborative memoir, too. In terms of the advice itself, though Strayed never exactly repeats herself, the more you read the columns, the more you can anticipate what she’ll advise. Ethical principles emerge as themes reoccur: Strayed emphasizes honesty with oneself and others, gratitude, boundary setting, humility, and unreserved empathy. Nothing revolutionary, but plenty that is vital.

Tiny Beautiful Things ends up being something far less systematic or rigorous than an ethical treatise, but far more lyrical than a typical self-help book. It is practical but also meditative, a salve and a call to self-examination, an elegant ode to the troubles we face and our luck at not having to face them alone.

It's Madness, but There Is Method: A Review of Bill James's Parnucklian for Chocolate

By way of background, I do know Bill James. It isn’t like we hang out and get hammered on the weekends, but we both attended the University of Nebraska MFA program. We hung out and chatted there from time to time and do still talk over Facebook and email once in a while. Bottom line: I know the guy.

My impression of Bill has always been one of a quiet and intelligent guy. Almost laconic, he talks well when he speaks up but doesn’t necessarily speak up that often. At least, that was my impression.

The only reason I mention all of that is how utterly bizarre it seems when I hear Bill read or get a chance to read his work myself. For such a calm and soft-spoken guy (at least around me), the craziness of what he tends to write is flabbergasting. Quite seriously, it surprises me every time.

However, though I know this about Bill’s writing, I was unprepared yet again when I picked up Parnucklian for Chocolate. Let’s just take a quick peek at the very first paragraph:

Three weeks before his sixteenth birthday, Josiah was allowed to move back in with his mother, who had been impregnated with him during an alien abduction her freshman year of college. Josiah did not move back into the home he had grown up in — the home he had lived in with his mother — but rather Josiah moved into the home of Johnson Davis, his mother’s new fiancé. Johnson Davis, with whom Josiah’s mother had been living for the past four and a half months, also had a child: a girl, seventeen, fully-human, named Bree, who also lived in the home of Johnson Davis, but only on weekends.

Keep in mind; this is a relatively sane paragraph for this book. You will notice how the alien thing is just slipped into a fairly mundane seeming paragraph, almost as an offhand note. If it weren’t such an odd thing to have as an offhand remark, the fact that Josiah hadn’t been living with his mother and the fact he was moving into a stepfamily home would suggest menace and take precedence. However, put together the way James does it, we just can’t be sure how to react.

The book only picks up from there. You see, Josiah’s mother has told him all his life that he is special. He is special because he is the son of a ranking government official of a planet called Parnuckle, a place where the only food is chocolate. Obviously, there were some home environment problems and Josiah was removed. Now he is moving in with his delusional mother, her overly controlling though well-meaning fiancé, and her fiancé’s wild-running daughter. A complex situation becomes even more complicated.

In short, the book is insane. It is wild, imaginative, and original . . . but also completely and utterly mad. Even the language of the prose has a certain amount of madness; it’s own rhythm that sucks the reader in:

Josiah, who was twelve years old at the time, had his own room at the psychiatric facility — unlike his room in the group home he would be sent to in less than a year, which he would have to share — and each day a tall woman who smelled weird came to Josiah’s room and led him down a long hall and a flight of stairs and another long hall to a room where Josiah met with a man who would ask Josiah a lot of questions. The room where Josiah met with the man was much different from Josiah’s room at the psychiatric facility. Josiah’s room at the psychiatric facility had been only a bed, a dresser, a table, a lamp, and a chair, but the room where the man asked the questions was filled with photographs of people hugging and photographs of people smiling — all in different settings, such as sandy settings and grassy settings and snowy settings — and some of the people in the photographs were the man who asked the questions and some of the people were not, and on one wall was a picture of an old house in a rainstorm and on another wall was a picture of a pink tree, and there were also several different types of chairs in the room, and two different couches, one long and one shorter, and both couches were the color of the walls, which were the color of wet wood.

Many more things in the room seemed to be made of wood, or to be the color of wood, unlike Josiah’s room, where more things seemed to be made of metal and plastic, and the room where the man asked the questions was not as bright and not as cold as Josiah’s room.

Strange choice and timing of detail, sentences that seem to go on forever or cut off abruptly, almost musical repetition–the above paragraph has it all. All that should be a mess, but it isn’t. Just reading through it, you can feel how perfect the rhythm is. It’s madness, but there is method.

Looking at the book as a whole, Parnucklian for Chocolate has to be one of the most surprising reads I’ve come across in a very long time. It is wild and crazy, but it is well crafted and touching as well. I think any writer would be justifiably proud to have created this work and it is interesting to think that this is coming from an author who is really just getting started. I’m sure there will be more, but you’ll definitely want to check Parnucklian for Chocolate out.

People are going to be talking about this one.

Millions of People Feeling Every Human Emotion

how our tongues

unhooked the vowels of this

language that never dreamt of us.

A fierce testament and testimony, Nomad of Salt and Hard Water is poet Cynthia Dewi Oka’s first collection, published by Dinah Press. It manages to be simultaneously cinematic and intimate, much in the way a large metropolis like Los Angeles or New York City can be — millions of people feeling every human emotion while somehow as a whole, the city is so much larger than the details.

Each poem in Nomad is an important detail in that landscape. While embedded in personal specifics, the poems tell us something about gender, motherhood, abuse, and loss. From “Vulture”:

            because the door bolted

behind rabid eyes  six foot two

            shade of apple blossom  my oesophagus

                        a vice of pink knobbed claws

             so it took three weeks to taste

                                                      sugar again.

As the collection progresses, the reader witnesses introspective moments, self-reflection, and rebirth — invoking strength, solidarity, and beauty. For example, in “Roads to a Dance,” Oka crystallizes a rich, youthful moment:

in the age before

crushes and stilettos,

I made my body

silver tambourine,

ready for God’s clap.

Nomad packs a kaleidoscope of impressions into short spaces. It is anchored by persona poems of various nomads — daughter, warrior, oracle, moon, midwife — which take the collection into mythical, archetypal realms, from the “sky where I come from water” to “declaring war on encroaching rock,” to “tongues / of aloe peeled open.”

Throughout, the narrator demonstrates a keen love for herself, a kind of looking back and wishing well while not flinching away from the hard details. It is also framed by reflections on history, especially Indonesian — in the time “before bows and backs were snapped alike” as well as Dutch colonization, Japanese invasion, Sukarno, and Suharto.

Nomad is a litany of survival, a personal dialogue between past and present, and a stirring reflection on histories and legacies.

You Will Never Understand

I.  BEN MIROV IS MOVING THROUGH YOU. THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM.

Ben Mirov is a mirror placed roughly at chest height. Ben Mirov cuts a hole in the sunshine layer and disappears momentarily at times. Do not be alarmed is what Ben Mirov says to you. Ben Mirov then becomes a second mirror, a highly polished reflective window, which Ben Mirov affixes to the tops of his shoes, which I am assuming for the purposes of this text, are probably brown and pleasantly relief-map textured — worn in; not shabby or overly distressed.

SIDE NOTE (mine):
it is sometimes necessary
for Ben Mirov to look down
in order to see up.

When the speaker of Ben Mirov — a human head hologram made of snow that is also Ben Mirov — talks, both of his mirrors become electroacoustic transducers, oscillating and modulating, their operator manipulating phase and static as discretely separate instruments so as to obscure the nature and direction of sound itself, effectively rendering it difficult to determine which Ben Mirov the momentarily stunned viewer is experiencing at any given time.

SIDE NOTE (mine):
it is sometimes necessary
for Ben Mirov to look up
in order to see down.
this is not a problem for Ben
Mirov. in short, this is not a problem.

TEXT UNIT EXAMPLE (a)

an excerpt from Light from Dead Stars Doesn’t Lie (p. 19)
I dream all of my friends at once
are Amy. Amy injects me with a vial
of Joseph Conrad. She says it will help me travel
the crooked line to the point where I do not exist
on Earth. All of my friends exist on earth
and if you punch their face for long enough
it will become a common type of gem.

As the speaker of Ben Mirov continues, Ben Mirov wishes more for his friends, and perhaps more from himself. Ben Mirov is deconstructing/rebuilding Ben Mirov again. The speaker views his ever-mutable world from inside of Ben Mirov, too insignificant and helpless to save those most cherished by the aforementioned Ben Mirov:

I am trying to tell you about my friends.
The way they have no body or face.
The way they cannot save the Great Barrier Reef
or the people in the cities or anything.
They cannot even save themselves.
They walk slowly into the thunderhead.

TEXT UNIT EXAMPLE (b)

an excerpt from Instructions (p. 70);
wherein the reader is gifted an eyeball)
When you have carried it far enough
give it to the next person you meet.
Or bury it in a pile of shards.
Or smash it on a rock.

III. CONCLUSION: BEN MIROV AS A FORCE CARRIED BETWEEN TWO OPPOSING POLES

Ben Mirov is a complicated cycle of oscillation between existence and its opposite state, consisting equally of both reflective and refractive physical parts. Should the reader happen to glimpse his inner working machinery, it should be noted that said reader should experience no cause for fear. The intricate parts and gears necessary to the movement of Ben Mirov might at times suggest the brutal violence of rigid metal and wire; however, these gears are made of cloud meat, lubricated and drunk with the common blood of ours. It is recommended that the reader allow Ben Mirov to move uniformly through them; to allow both Ben Mirovs passage through the fingers, the mind, and ultimately, the heart.

TEXT UNIT EXAMPLE (c)

an excerpt from Hider Roser (p. 11)
rearranging the letters in horse rider
you get hider roser, which means something
you will never understand