I Am Beside Myself: A Review of Ashley Farmer's Beside Myself

Recommender’s Note: I haven’t read a whole lot of microfiction in printed, collected form. For the most part, what I’ve read in this genre — or in short shorts, flash fiction, whatever you’re calling it today — has come through digital media, through an online lit mag or journal’s website. Ideal in the digital space, microfiction is short enough to read ‘like a poem’ (obvious generalization) but feels a lot more like reading a short story without putting in the time commitment — something I can’t always be bothered to do online. But what happens when the microfiction is taken out of its natural habitat and collected in a printed volume? PANK sent me a copy of Ashley Farmer’s book of microfictions, Beside Myself. This is what I thought about while reading it. . . .

I remember the first time I read Jo Randerson’s microfiction. I was on a bus, probably going to the job I held at the time as an after school carer in Thorndon, a neighborhood in Wellington. Thorndon is past the CBD, but only just, and sometimes in winter if I was feeling rushed or it was raining hard I would take the bus to get there, but Wellington is small and the bus ride from the bottom of Courtenay Place to the final stop at the train station is only about 15 minutes long. Anyway, I remember reading Jo’s book The Spit Children on the bus a couple of times that week and getting through four or five stories, maybe more, just in that bus ride. The first time or two I did this, I’d get out of the bus and be thinking about the last story I read, or maybe the most vibrant one, but never all of them. I’d lose at least 80% of what I read pretty much right after I’d read it. And it wasn’t just bus rides that would do this to me; it would happen any time I picked up Jo’s book.

Eventually, I started reading each story two, three, four times right in a row, back to back to back. If I was on the bus, I would spend the whole bus ride on just one or two stories. This was better, but I still wasn’t remembering everything. What was the problem? I wanted more from the worlds of the stories, more on the page, more from my imagination, more more. But it simply wasn’t there. I wasn’t going to find it because it wasn’t there for me to take. If I want to think about The Spit Children now, I go back to the book on my shelf. I can’t carry it around with me in my mind like I can with the stories from The Lottery or, The Adventures of James Harris, another short story collection I read and loved that same year. The Spit Children wasn’t meant to be read in the same way as The Lottery.

Microfiction isn’t meant to be mentally carried. In the way Google has taken the place of my childhood obsession with memorization, pocket-sized microfictions endeavor to remove my desire to preserve fictional worlds in my mind. I still carry my first impressions of Jane Eyre (age 15), The Secret Garden (age 8), King Bidgood’s in the Bathtub and He Won’t Get Out (age 3), despite the decades separating me from them. But there is a certain luxury in the microfiction: a back pocket-sized book meant to be picked up and carried with you like an external hard drive for your brain. Read Parker Tettleton or Lydia Davis and you’ll see what I mean. Stop thinking about it like a longer narrative, and the attraction grows.

Pick up almost any Tiny Hardcore Press title and not only will you feel this change in your brain as you read, you’ll feel it immediately in the shape of the book in your hand. These books are small and square, perfectly tailored to fit in your pants or your coat. The stories inside are a little bit weird and a little bit relatable. Ashley Farmer’s Beside Myself is no exception; her stories contain quick flashes of horror and siblings, relationships and occasional creatures from the black lagoon. They sit comfortably between xTx’s Normally Special and Brandi Wells’ Please Don’t Be Upset, filling equally important spaces in the external hard drive I now carry as a part of myself.

Stay Close, Little Ghost Is Like the Modern Day Fairytale, A Love Story of this Generation

The TNBBC blog is a place for every book nerd, especially the book nerds who like books written and created by Indie writers. One day, Oliver Serang took over the blog and I watched the videos, read the blog posts, participated in the giveaway contest, and that was how this book ended up in my hands. It seems like a cute, lovable book, short, and the title itself. But the book doesn’t really give you any hugs, it’s all an illusion.

The story goes like this, the narrator, who also happened to be named Oliver, failed a lot at relationships. They never lasted, his heart broke, and he broke others’ hearts. There was something missing in this equation — he was a mathematician that never seemed to find the solutions for his heartbreak. He never found the right piece that fit with his. The whole story was a letter written to a nameless person, referred to as “you” and a bunch of asterisks, which was somebody that he must’ve dated in the past. There was no clear evidence over whether or not this “you” was dead or alive or lived somewhere else. I figured that maybe she moved away and died eventually. Maybe that person didn’t exist at all, since throughout the book, this was where the magic realism kicked, the main narrator experienced these hallucinations, and these fever dreams.

These fever dreams seemed to be messages for the impending dooms of any of his relationships. The first one was Yuki, a flirty girl he met in the elevator. She was insecure, a constant crier, and couldn’t make up her mind. She loved Oliver, or claimed to, but she hung around and flirted with any man that caught her eye, including her friends. This caused him to break up with her, every time she cried, she shed her eyeliner. Eventually, while chasing after him in a train, she disintegrated into a shadow on a train station wall, becoming a sort of black silhouette stain. There was also another girl he had been with, that disappeared into a snow storm. After Oliver had broken into a room that she kept closed off, to hide a secret. A hand behind a large grate near a vending machine reached out for him. A young girl scratching messages into walls, a young boy who drowned and continues to haunt the lake. Those are some of the odd summer fever dreams and oddities that he experienced. From talking strange hobos that predict your future, that seem to move at light speed, disappearing girlfriends forced out by his betrayal, and the sparks that faded away. Then there was the wolf in his stomach or mind. For some odd reason, I imagined the wolf being in his belly, a dark cavern, hidden away from everyone. This wolf seemed to be the narrator’s repressed emotions or more like what repressed his emotions. Every whimper, howl, and growl seemed to be the wolf’s defense mechanisms, the narrator’s defense mechanisms of what he truly felt, feared, or desired.

Stay Close, Little Ghost is a novel of loneliness and that aching feeling of being betrayed, yet you feel this sort of guilt deep within you, questioning whether or not it was your fault. Even if it is, you still feel this pain that could never be put back together again; nothing can be returned or regained. This comparison seems kind of silly, but I felt like this novel was sort of the birth child of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I’m not sure why, but the prose sort of has this childlike, doe eyed innocence, with a sprinkle of fairy dust, combined with the drug, sex, wild youth of the 60s, that has continued on today. There’s this strange sort of feeling of isolation, where connections with others feel more like brief flashes of light. This whole story is a love story and the fever dreams are his responses to his fear or acknowledging the fact that it will indeed, all end. He seemed to accept this at some point.

Stay Close, Little Ghost is like the modern day fairytale, a love story of this generation. At first I was quite unsure of myself when reading this. In the beginning I was reading it slowly, not because I didn’t like it, but because I wanted to absorb the prose little by little, because despite its simplicity, the words were filled with a new story, a new face of the character. I felt that if I missed a word, I would miss a piece of the character. So I had to latch onto each sentence. Here’s a sentence I underlined with a pencil, it doesn’t really fit with what I am saying, but there were so many other sentences that I would like to underline, that it would ruin the book.
“Being irreplaceable confers the greatest value that anything can have. Deciding that a person will be irreplaceable to you is the greatest thing you can ever give them. Knowing that you are irreplaceable to someone else is the only way to truly feel loved.”

So I had to slow down my reading a bit and absorb it as much as possible. This prose is quite a beauty though, one of those observances of life, the words of the people who question the reason why their cells float on the universe. What’s the point of being some random mound of cells that interacts and looks for the affection of other mounds? We’re so easy to replace, yet the act of replacement is so hard to deal with, the previous can’t be erased.

I Suggest Slippers for Elsewhere Be Read As a Manifesto for Queer Optimism

Matthew Burgess’s Slippers for Elsewhere is a buoyant and colorful debut. Much like the rainbow beach balls bouncing off of the book’s front cover (courtesy of an untitled Joe Brainard collage) Burgess’s poems cheerfully recall the unrepeatable summers of suburban childhood and Joan Collins crushes amidst “the shirtless huddle / of sexy extras.” Sustained by a boyish curiosity for American pop culture, and the ever-perplexing heteronormativities that frame the queer child’s experience of everyday life, Slippers for Elsewhere is a festive Technicolor romp punctuated with fisticuffs and red polka dots.

The imagery of the book’s first section, “Lift Off,” evokes the bizarre and deliriously exciting sense-making process characteristic of childhood. In the poem “Theme for a Pulse,” the speaker, as in so many of Burgess’s poems, is a precocious young boy; he writes:

when the red x in EXIT splits
and becomes Walt Whitman’s chopsticks,
I unfold the napkin and crease it
into a scorpion

which stings my ankle
then vanishes behind a golden
podium: Ladies and Gentlemen . . .

At what moment during the family outing does the poet-child “tune-out,” as it were, or begin to imagine the lively elsewhere beyond the dull, starched restaurant napkin? For the child, boredom may prompt bemusement, but for the poet, it is the familiar and its uncanny ties to the familial which cues the poet to begin making.

Stanza by stanza, in his short poems Burgess displays a keen sensitivity for the peculiar ways in which reading and recognition become inevitably intertwined with the queer world of touching feeling and writing being. In this way, Slippers for Elsewhere breezily treads across the lyric space foregrounded by Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s essay, “A Poem is Being Written” (which in turn looks back at Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten”).

Recalling Sedgewick’s legendary and erudite treatise on spanking and poetry, Burgess’s “Theme for a Pulse,” explores the disciplinary impulse that shapes so much articulation. Subtle (queer) refusals, often recognized as evidence of a stubborn child-like resistance, therefore, stand out. “Yellow There,” a meditation on the various shades of American summer yellows, transports readers “to the place where / the pencil reigns—” in the decisive private mind of the child. There, “a million crayoned suns and mustard on buns” hold court, far away from the abysmal adult napkins and menacing older brothers who control the weather. Similar to most of the other poems in Slippers, “Yellow There” is an invitation to the secret tree house of association, and other shadow puppets. In such houses, as in so many of Burgess’s poems, rhythm rules all.

And yet, Burgess is careful to remind us the poet is not always a child; he is also a conflicted adult turning to look back, often in fondness, and sometimes, in forgiveness, as in the poem “Childish Things.” While he recalls the lesson, “A dog is not a pony,” the poet also reports, “Sometimes the shame of scrambling for the piñata’s contents outweighs the impulse to pounce.” The first admission is fairly benign: didn’t everyone learn that lesson at some point when we were still small enough to try and innocently fail? The second disclosure, however, carries the added burden we seldom couple with childhood shame: desire. “Sensitive Machine,” the book’s second section, wrestles with this theme to liberating effect. In “Morning Poem,” for example, Burgess flirtatiously ponders, “Am I/in trouble? Do I want to be.” Yes, please: lines like these make it wholly impossible not to envision Eve Sedgwick smiling somewhere in the background.

For these reasons, I suggest Slippers for Elsewhere be read as a manifesto for queer optimism, which, according to Michael Snediker, “doesn’t aspire toward happiness, but instead finds happiness interesting.” Alongside the anxiety, embarrassment, and scenes of adolescent trepidation resides an ebullient outlook in Slippers, best appreciated perhaps with a Cuba Libre on the ferry to Fire Island.

Real Life Shit

Lantern Lit. Volume 1 is a cool little book. Here’s the format: poets James H. Duncan, Mat Gould, and John Dorsey each contribute chapbooks comprising the three sections of Lantern Lit.’s first outing. The result is remarkably consistent in terms of theme, style, and even form, though each poet offers a unique voice and perspective.

Duncan’s “The Darkest Bomb” serves as the first section of this anthology, and immediately sets a tone that will carry through the remainder of Lantern’s pages. Stylistic choice made in Duncan’s first poem carry through the other poets’ sections to some extent: a preference for the lower-case, sparse punctuation, breathless line-craft, and serve as hallmarks of the moment and the mode in which these poems are delivered.

“Seasick on 46th / …and then crossing Fifth Avenue as / big dollop raindrops hit the pavement like / face slaps falling from a seasick green / sky…”

These are urgent poems, which live resolutely in the modern landscape. There’s a quality of resilience about them, of vivacity in spite of urban decay— “those great whales full of bones / decaying with the sunlight in their guts”.

Mat Gould’s contributions to this volume inhabit the same epoch as Duncan’s and employ similar formal conventions. They sing a world in disrepair, but they sing in nonetheless. Gould’s are grateful poems, full of creation out of rubble: “and to think, all of this from wet dust”.

In “The Universe Itself Laments,” the introductory poem to Gould’s section, “the sky is full / full of whatever else there is / a gallery of pastel prints-”. Elsewhere, the poet reconnoiters the edges of his frame of reference, writing towards “lanterns / above / the sea / out / of reach”.

If Duncan and Gould’s sections survey a contemporary landscape through the lens of each poet’s essentia, Dorsey’s “Happy Hour Madrigals” “sing the gospel of real life shit” (to quote the publisher) through recollections of characters living real life shit. In poems named “Drunk John,” “Sarah,” and “Creepy Steve,” the poet reaches perhaps toward Gould’s lanterns above the sea. In a bout of booze-fueled poignancy, though, “…he just kept drinking / waiting for a happy hour / that never came.”

If you’re into sunsets, couplets, and grand allusions to heroes of Greek mythology, look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you’re looking for “real life shit,” you’ll find all you need in Lantern Lit. volume 1. Reach out above the sea, sip warm beer, and read good poems. “Hang the hide,” indeed.

Fear and Loathing in B-Horror Movies: On Peter Grandbois's Wait Your Turn

Peter Grandbois has presented, in novella form, a double feature of B-horror-film-based stories. Wait Your Turn and The Stability of Large Systems are strung out from the movies The Creature from the Black Lagoon and The Fly, respectively.

He takes these movies and creates stories from them. In the first story, he depicts an actual creature, not a man, who was cast in the movie. He shows a monster who desires, and fails, to be human.

When exploring stories structured around B horror films in his double monster feature novellas, Peter Grandbois pinpointed their motive to incite fear.

“What brings you here?”
“I wanted to be afraid.”

If horror movies cause fear, then the behind-the-scenes story is the absence of love. In both of his stories, Grandbois depicts monsters that approach humanity or depart from humanity on the hinge of love. They are monsters because of their failure.

The Creature falls in love and has a child, but he cannot become fully human despite reconstructive surgery in that direction because he has destroyed the ability to love within himself and the object of his love between his strong hands.

The Fly becomes less human as his wife observes a change inside of him. “’You’ve changed,’ she said. ‘You’re not the person you once were. Something about you is different.” Helene says these things to her husband before his change. And it is these words that cause him to transform. “I wanted to say I needed her to see me as I once had been, to tell me I was the man she’d fallen in love with, perhaps then all would go back to normal.”

“I didn’t know which was more frightening. The fact that one month ago she no longer loved me because she thought I’d changed, or the fact that now that I really had changed, she seemed to love me more than ever.”

There is this pull on each monster to love and be loved, and it is not necessarily that they are not capable of love, merely that they just don’t. They don’t love their wives and they don’t love their children, and this is frightening.

This is what the author wants the audience to take away from these stories, maybe, but I don’t know if he believes it. “Movie magic is all about illusion. How easy it is for us to deceive ourselves, to be deceived. . . . With time, we see clearly.”

“Love’s illusions are as powerful as any manufactured by movies.” (Wait Your Turn)

“It is difficult to see things clearly in the present… Only with distance can we understand.” (The Stability of Large Systems)

There is this sense of distancing, like how one writes fiction to get at certain truths that feel too close to be spoken of honestly. Love is an illusion, Grandbois writes, no matter how monstrous the opposite of love may be. Time and space are the antidotes, it seems, to both love and fear. Both fear and love are catalysts to keep the human species alive. But what if you don’t feel human? What if you want to do something other than merely survive?

In the end, both monsters have escaped from society, but they can’t escape from themselves. They each try to hurt what they have tried to love. It is an effort to bring that spectrum of love and fear together and make the distance between them negligible.

Grandbois has presented two excellently-crafted novellas, and they definitely made me want to read more of his work, especially the rest of this series.

Kate Chooses Our Focus, And Her Lens Is Sharp: A Review of Kate Durbin's E! Entertainment

I work as a transcript typist. Every weekday I go to work, look at the queue, load up audio or video files, and type them, one after the next. Mostly, I’m typing dialogue from New Zealand and Australian radio and televised news programs. But imagine for a second that I came in and typed from the American cable television networks E!, Bravo, and MTV, and my day job would be writing E! Entertainment.

Or would it?

In reality (lol, okay, got that out of my system), Kate Durbin’s E! Entertainment is a lot more complicated than verbatim transcription. While her book is made up primarily of transcribed text, Kate makes active decisions that move E! beyond what a reader might reasonably pick up while viewing these shows. When I transcribe, I’m just typing what I hear. When you watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, you might choose to ignore what Lisa Vanderpump says and just watch her unimaginably small dog run around in the background, or her husband’s gravity-defying hair, or her live-in pool boy, or. . . .

In E! Entertainment, Kate chooses our focus, and her lens is sharp. Told in 8 channels, presentation is everything. Access to some channels, like the “Wives Shows”, is deep:

“A strip of flat, tan stomach peeks between her white tank top and distressed Armani skinny jeans.”

‘Why is there four places?’ asks Wife Drita, moving around the table. She picks up her spray-painted woman wine glass, wrist clinking with gold chain bracelets. The woman on her wine glass has long, flowing red hair. Wife Drita shakes her red hair.”

while others are limited. “The Girls Next Door” describes room after room, unbound by dialogue. “Anna Nicole Show” turns dialogue into soliloquy. “Lindsay’s Necklace Trial” scrolls like a live feed. “Dynasty” is compressed into screen caps.

I’ve watched most of these channels before — 7 of the 8, at least in part — so for me, it wasn’t the content that felt fresh so much as the means of telling. Camille Grammer becomes ‘Wife Camille’, Allison DuBois ‘the Medium’. Kris Humphries becomes Kim Kardashian’s ‘Not-Husband’, his body made up entirely of television static:

“‘Where we – where we sitting at?’ the Not-Husband asks. He picks up the entire piece of beef and put it in his mouth. It falls through his static body and onto the floor. He sucks his thumb loudly. Jungle Print Woman puts her hands on Stuttering Man’s shoulders and massages. She looks at Kim and smiles.”

When I asked Kate why she chose to put Kris into this incredibly strange body, she said one way she likes to think about it is that she didn’t actually make any changes to his character: “Kris H is already TV static. I just made this obvious.”

The reality stars are highly self-aware. Describing her guest appearance on the sitcom S#*! My Dad Says as a recently divorced reality star named Camille, Camille Grammer said, “My character Camille is basically a parody on myself, obviously, from Housewives of Beverly Hills. Just making fun of it, you know, making fun of all the quirky things I do and say.”

It is we who tend to forget, and it’s in these details, these choices Kate has made in the telling, that E! reminds us. As Kate says, “Transcription itself is inherently subjective and changes the source material. I didn’t want the reader to get too comfortable with the thought that this book is ‘just’ transcription of what they’ve already seen. Nothing is ever ‘just.'”

People Who Might Inhabit This Place: On Michael McGriff's Dismantling the Hills

From the opening poem, “Iron,” we read:

I could say I left town for both of us…

and for the first time felt illuminated before the sight

of water as it rushed beneath the massive turbines

spinning on the beige and dusty hills, powering a distant city

that would set me free.

The speaker says he could have left, but at the end, he “can turn away from nothing.” From here, the reader is introduced to the speaker’s world, a “great series of inadequacies.” McGriff’s poems range from the ways in which his father informs the speaker’s beliefs, to how the daily act of domestic work replaces any sort of religious practices; his father “never read anything he couldn’t touch.” The physicality of the language draws me in, especially in “Silt,” where the speaker compares the “mineral strangle/of roots, clay bleeding down,” to “silt like meat ground by a woman/whose eyes have taken the color/of basement cinders.” In the poem, the house is “taken by silt,” and there’s a repeated use of “pulling,” a motif he continues in the next poem, “Coos Bay.” Here, we get a glimpse of the city, in a list of images, ending in “…the last of the daylight,/a broken trellis falling into the bay.” This series bombards the reader with images of a hopeless place. McGriff uses this list to transition to a series of poems about the people who might inhabit this place.

Some of the poems center around people like Tanya, with deep connections to this homeplace, the dust and “chuff” of king salmon, connections so deep that they cannot leave, always entering some sort of “kingdom,” a word that McGriff uses in multiple poems. The use of this word creates a sense of holiness, so much that even the dust of this place’s earth is eternal.

McGriff’s description of Coos Bay is effective and powerful due to a reliance on more than mere description. These poems are populated. They explore the world of the roofer, the worker, people who know life in this “kingdom” created, where these people’s connection to the landscape is strengthened. The poem “Mercy, Tear It Down” seems to underline McGriff’s project. In it, a prison crew is contracted to “take the ridge. Tear it down.” In this poem, daylight “breaks its bones across the ridge,” a point from which “you could see/the whole town.” From here, he writes, “Tear it down, tear it down.”

In the last poem, “Cormorants,” McGriff brings an end to the book’s arc, tying in previous themes. He echoes the sentiment in the opening poem:

Watching the breakers

stack against the early light

I remember my old desire

to wear the house

of the hermit crab

and skitter under the riptide

past the town’s

invisible border

to the rolling foam

and quiet fires.

The speaker of the poem proceeds to walk a suspension bridge formed by his fears, upon which he finds his father, and in the wind, his mother’s wrists, and leaning over the rail, he hears his brothers. This bridge is only imagined, but on the bridge, he contemplates his town:

each suffering lies stitched

to the wing of another,

death rises

and death recedes, the mouth

of this life threaded

to the voice of the afterlife.

In the end of the poem, the cormorant’s flight path measures his love for his town, and yet heavy with “the remarkable freight” of our lives, surrounded by cliffs.