Over at i09 they've begun their book club on Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl.
The book meets a categorical need in science fiction for novelty, which I appreciate particularly after the last decade of relatively trouble-free and bodiless singularities, (not to mention the still-popular warhorse starship captains living out their midlife crises among weird galactic fauna). The Windup Girl, by contrast, is willfully Earthbound, set as it is in a grimy, superflorid Thailand, which is itself an uncommon enough setting in science fiction to fulfill the fickle standards of novelty. Most interestingly, Bacigalupi's novel deals with the special mash-up of political and scientific anxiety represented by current concerns over global warming, peak-oil and AgriGen profligacy, and which is not really represented anywhere else in science fiction. There is no question of a singularity occurring in Bacigalupi's future. There is hardly any electricity. Instead, joules are counted to the last, and are most powerfully produced by genetically modified megodonts and by high powered mechanical "kink-springs."
I'm on the fence regarding his style, and from the look of i09's message boards, I've got company. On one hand, he's a great handler of SF wonkiness. Lines like "mounds of durians fill the alley in reeking piles and water tubs splash with snakehead fish and red-finned plaa" practically squiggle with undergrowth. On the other hand, the prose becomes laden with this stuff. One solution to world building in SF is to glide past the particulars elegantly and to leave some things mysteriously unexplained. The other tack is Bacigalupi's: leave no info undumped. One character will say one thing, there will be some exposition about the manufacture of kingsprings, and then a few pages later he will get an answer. This is not Proustian recall, either: the dude's meticulously cataloging the world. Nonetheless he owns this world, and is not only proud to display it, but wants its constituent parts underfoot and overhead. His style betrays a desire to wed life with the information we use to explain it.
Still, what a world to own. To say The Windup Girl is resolutely Earthbound is not to say it doesn't have a beautifully realized unreality. The cheshires and megodonts and genetically modified humans in this world should delight any SF fan in need of something strange to snack on. Aliens abound here, and betray the fact that Bacigalupi's achievement is defiantly unliterary, in a context in which the literary is synonymous with the dull and apparently unfashioned. Which is to say that the political responsibilities charged to any reader of The Windup Girl still remain political and not confused with the author's inventions, even when the book garishly reminds you of them. Apocalypse should be so much fun in every fiction.
The Windup Girl Thursday, February 25, 2010
Books recieved Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Consider the mail and how often you don't want what comes through it. Now consider that I received a bunch of great new books this week, many of them unexpected. Imagine my delight.
Simone Muench's Orange Crush is already on shelves: it features her fantastic suite of poems dealing with the iconography of the Orange Girl.
Dottie Lasky has a new book, Black Life, coming out from Wave Books. She can be added to my list of pals who have been published in The New Yorker ever since Paul Muldoon took over. Find the poem here.
Also from Wave we've got Geoffrey Nutter, who's Water's Leaves and Other Poems was one of my favorite books of the last decade. I say "decade" instead of, say, "last year or the year before" because it's been awhile. A happy thing that his new book, Christopher Sunset, is coming out in April, too. Here's something to tide you over until you run out a pick it up.
I want my 63 minutes back Saturday, February 20, 2010
At 75 minutes long, Shutter Island is a great little homage by Martin Scorsese to one of his heroes, Val Lewton.
Huh? What's that? You say it's actually 138 minutes long? And that it's fleshed out by a bunch of corny dream sequences and hallucinations which are then redundantly recounted by the characters after they've been shown? That it features gratuitously explicit flashbacks to the protagonist's liberation of Dachau in the middle of what is essentially a corny, preposterous movie about soap-opera schizophrenia?
I've been waiting for Scorsese to make a picture like this for a long time--it's too bad he had the clout to make it exactly the way he wanted it. It could have used a little more RKO front-office interference.
The Elcor Monday, February 8, 2010
Mass Effect 2 is now one of the best reviewed video games of the current generation, and even if the provenance of some of those reviews can't withstand close scrutiny, the game deserves it.
I've never been fond of the vast accretion of item management tools that have dogged RPGs since they moved from the tabletop onto the screen, even in the case of Bioware RPGs. Finding stuff, jettisoning stuff, acquiring stuff, most of it undifferentiated, except by increments of power and efficacy the gameworld's conflict engine scales to match; this is the sort of zero-sum game electronic entertainment too often mistakes for depth. RPGs are like crack to the meritorious, and the "experience point" is among the most ideologically suspect conventions in video games. XP suggests that money does not quantify our experience enough on a paycheck-to-paycheck basis--the RPG player wants it dribbling around her head, instantly quantified, for every conflict resolved either by word or by hammer. In Mass Effect 2, however, advancements in weapon load-outs and powers make sense and jibe rhythmically with the justifiably praised conversation system Bioware has produced. It's the same wish-fulfilling reward system of absurd responsiveness, of course, but it doesn't keep you constantly counting, selling, counting, as happens in a game like Fallout 3. Mass Effect 2, in short, is an incredibly fun and addictive experience.
Yet video games are quibble machines, and I have one: where are the Elcor?
I met my first Elcor early in Mass Effect 1. He was arbitrating a dispute in The Citadel, which is Mass Effect's galactic United Nations. The Elcor are the type of creature that never get a line in most science fiction movies. They look as if they weigh the better part of a ton and have the rhinocerine skin to match their heft. This one was standing behind a computer console, which was strange, as they appear to be quadrupeds; their front legs, though massive, are long and nearly elegant, but probably not fine enough for a computer keyboard. No matter. He had a voice like Eeyore, lugubrious and sad. He was doing something arbitrative between another member of his species and a small, temperamental Volus.
The best thing about the Elcor, however, is that instead of mouths they have something like a cross between a cabbage and the flume of a violin. In order to express emotion to non-Elcor sentients they very thoughtfully append their emotional state verbally to their conversations-- as in, "Annoyed: I cannot help you right now, human," or, "Pleasantly amazed: Thank you for the gift, human," or "Venomous sarcasm: 'What a piece of work is a man...'"
The particularly economic problem of filmmaking made it so that all film aliens are either bipeds or sacks of cloth and rubber. The Elcor represent something that could only exist in video games--an elegant solution to an overworked animator having one more mouth to sync to a vocal track.
Where did they go in Mass Effect 2? The only Elcor I've been able to talk to so far has been a short exchange on a criminal waystation called Omega. They are entirely in the peripheral in this new iteration of the franchise. I miss their gentle ways.
Urs Fischer Saturday, February 6, 2010
Finally made it to the Urs Fischer show, due to close this Sunday at the New Museum. I got many interesting impressions from it. Most of them had to do with being in a large, sunlit space full of large, conceptual objects; not a bad impression, but not significantly different from similar impressions. I suppose it's worth paying for. I had a guest pass.
Fischer has an interesting anxiety about organic form. One room features massive, Serra-sized sculptures, yet these sculptures are made from flighty aluminum rather than Serra's earthy leads and steels, and mostly hung from the ceiling rather than mounted on the floor. These are expanded from shapes formed from the modest dimensions of the artist's hands; they are as shapeless and absurd as the negative space of a hand when in pursuit of leisure or the flailing grip of small-hours indigestion. They are comforting in the way that King Kong's hand is a comfort to Fay Wray.
On another floor, you step off the elevator and are greeted by a 3-and-a-half foot long lighter with a picture of an underdressed lady on it. Further down, a similarly-scaled box of matches, half-opened, lay on its back. Closer inspection reveals that the mount for these blown up reproductions is a mirrored box; the mirror only pokes through behind the lighter's sparkwheel, where the thumb would ordinarily connect, or at the collapsed, rounded edges of the matchbox.
The gallery space is full of a few dozen of these Brobdingnagian objects. Many of them fit the 90 degree angles of the box; a VCR tape of Love Streams, a CD head cleaner, even a stomach-churning Froot-Loop-and-marshmallow dessert cube exploded to the size of a bus. More interesting are those things that do not fit the box; a pear, the artist's shoe, a motorcycle helmet, the seams of which objects become entire mirrored surfaces reaching forward into faceted, three-sided corners. The negative space of the artist's giant hand is once again represented, this time in the reflective surface surrounding a fizzy fluted mimosa. This is fun, but the message as I see it is self-evident: products tend toward a squareness the human form cannot mimic.
Funny, then, that he decides to open one of the exhibition's two reproduced books, an Italian collection of 19th Century nudes, so as to allow that negative space to shimmer through what it would not otherwise. After all, the book is the first reproducible and marketable media produced in the square format. Why the enforced organicism? And why not include a gun in this collection of objects?
Poetry in its places Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Building a context in which to write is dull work, yet it's the only work available to poets now. We've been watching--we poets are the last ones watching-- epistemology and ideology bat one another in a bloodless Punch and Judy show that reveals and inspires nothing equally. Poetry moves fast because it has no one to account to; if we as poets decide to erase history and replace it with radical epistemology we do it, boom, and the generations of poetry flash by with all the undifferentiated movement of a strobelight. If we continue on, no one will notice. If we pull back, no one will notice. Neither capital nor human solidarity nor the beasts of the field. So perhaps what is interesting about poets to the outsider, if it is interesting (and I am becoming more like an outsider to poetry every day) is in the way we flail around. After all, jobs are starting to look a lot more like poetic post-experimentalism every day, the product of libertarian dreaminess and anxiety.
What I'm saying is; poets lack context. It's hard to review.
Now, if geography as a theme could replace the specific context poetry has lost everyone would be doing it. It's been done often enough, though; it's a great context to borrow. Geography has a staid meaning; and, bonus, its boundaries become supple and weird upon inquiry (read Names On the Land from George Stewart to find out how). This is what a lot people think poetry is, or want it to be. Alas, maps do geography better than poetry. What geography lends us instead is a distorted mirror that's fun to look at but unhealthy to depend on.
With this caveat that I introduce, briefly, two new books of poetry. They are both from Ugly Duckling Press; they are Kevin Vallone's g-point almanac: passyunk lost and Rick Snyder's Escape from Combray. Their combination of poetry and geography are both worthwhile: better, I think they are both playfully done.
I nearly passed on Escape From Combray for the same reason that I passed on Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Yet it had a cover that looked a lot like the early, slim edition of The Maximus Poems from The Figures press. Except in this case the map was not of Glouchester (nor, thankfully, of Combray) but Chicago, a place I spent nearly a decade of my life. If this were a novel, I'd say he captures well both the gray, cozy eternity of its winters and the sterilizing creep of its commerce ("Gold Sounds" begins, "Having become/ the type of person/ who will walk/ to the Shell station/ on a Friday night/ to buy a KitKat"). This is a book of poetry -- a very comfortable, very nice book of poetry, refreshing mainly because the stuff around it is so sharp and niggardly-- that does much of the work that a novel or a short story does. This is not a bad thing, especially since few novelists I know this side of Aleksandar Hemon have have captured as Snyder has what it feels like to actually live in Chicago rather than go on bogus adventures there. This is a book of poetry in which the author goes out and does stuff. The reason "I do this, I do that" was so interesting when Frank O'Hara did it was that he lived at a time when middle-class, intelligent Americans could live interesting lives and write interesting poems without getting blown up by airplanes or mortar fire. Rick Snyder seems to know this but tries it out anyway, with all the requisite KitKats--and passive observation-- that approach implies. This is mostly a guy watching his city change, not someone changing his city. Still, a pastoral that begins "Somewhere between the wine and the nightmare/ my ex-girlfriend's cat/ comes to work with me" has a lot of charm, and charm is good for something.
Keven Varrone's book is the third of a tetrology; I haven't read the first two parts, though I've seen his work around. It's of interest to me because I've been spending time in Philly lately (Passyunk is a town outlying Philadelphia) and talking to some Philly poets in preparation for our upcoming event. I do not know Philly well. Having said that, I do not recognize Philly in these poems--streets are just streets and go unnamed, coal is burned here and there, gulls are displaced, "inland." It could be Gary, Indiana or someplace in West Virginia. Varrone definitely drinks from the postexperimental fountain, and so vague things float by on puffs of the author's intelligence and words go unmoored on the page (and, really, no caps? A la e.e. cummings? Why?). Still, there is too much here to like to pass it up. This is less a meditation on place then on time; in the long, continuing sequence, poems are numbered by season and date and have the literalness of a day captured half at work and half at rest, as most days are. "among the laterals, amazing upward structures" begins one of the poems for some unannuated January 11th. It is not only literally describing a spreadsheet, but has a similar cadence. A week later, "the birds made a dappled panic on the bocce court." Which strikes me a much livelier and in debt to Hopkins, which one never sees.
Buy these books and see for yourself.