Perfection / Termites / Books

by Weston Cutter

The Perfection Point by John Brenkus

John Brenkus’s The Perfection Point is a hell of a fun read, the sort of breezy and hell yes of a book some of us may need these grayer autumnal days. The host of ESPN’s Sport Science, Brenkus has written a book which is one big glance out to distances unlikely to be attained: what’s the limit of human sport capability? How far could a baseball be hit, a golf ball driven? How about the longest someone could hold her breath under water, or the fastest one could swim a 50?

Here’s why this book ends up being fascinatingly readable: Brenkus begins chapters with false newspaper stories set in the future, speculative fictions which cover the imagined narratives Brenkus is breaking down the numbers for in present tense. What’s strange about that little ploy is nearly everything: if I were to tell you there was a great book which, on page 34, included a story set in Russia in the year 2344, you’d likely not be guessing the book was written by an ESPN guy, yes?

An emphatic indeed is what I’m hoping you’ll be now mouthing. What these little fictions (which thread through each chapter; the stories begin each chapter and, usually, end each chapter as well) accomplish is the tricky, fascinating task of gounding sports accomplishments in historical contexts. Most of us are pretty keenly aware of the more overt ways these things are manifest (see Bonds, Barry), but there are smaller, less-overt ways things like these come up, too (LZR swimsuit; carbon fiber golf clubs, etc.).

Maybe best about the book? It weds its futuristic speculations with Brenkus-penned absolutes—that no one will ever swim a 50 faster than just more than 18 seconds. Is there a single reader, anywhere, who won’t automatically think I want to do that or (much more likely) I’d like to see someone else do that? There is not one single reader anywhere who won’t feel that way. Read on.

 

Termite Parade by Joshua Mohr

 

Oh good lord. Do you remember Some Things That Meant the World to Me? From last summer? How Mohr, with his madfurious language and the ground shaky undernearth Rhonda as he made his strange and hallucinatorially freaked way through certain worlds? Remember how nothing else came close to that novel for sheer is-on-fire language (Blake Butler’s stuff, certainly, actually, up there and close)? And how it was this fantastic new-ish press, Two Dollar Radio?

Of course to all that. Of course to another year, another Mohr book, this one, Termite Parade, even better if scarier (Blue Velvet/Mullholland not Scream scary), if less holy-shit-that’s-one-flourescent-life and more wait-wait-I-can-imagine-that. Is anyone else lobbing sentences which feature such fragmentingly wild ordnance? Is any other press putting out such dynamite, gorgeous, suck-you-in books? No and no. Final question: what more will it take for you to get this book now?

 

Bound To Last, edited by Sean Manning

 

This is strange: Manning’s got a bizarre little niche for himself now, having edited several nonfiction collections (and written a memoir as well, which I’ve not read). The cool thing is, he’s editing anthologies which are fairly fun and interesting to read—famous folks (mostly writers, though also Craig Finn of the Hold Steady) writing about their favorite baseball players, for instance—and this latest anthology might be the best, though “best” deserves some unpacking. What it is, in simplest terms, is exactly what it’s cover claims: 30 Writers on Their Most Cherished Book. Take a second, when you get to this cover, and note two things: 1) Catcher in the Rye doesn’t show up in-text, but this anthology’s cover is the ultimate in homage, and 2) take careful note of that word cherished. You’d be surprised how slippery it’ll be.

What do I mean? Well, the thing starts with Jim Shepard, whose piece is not just phenomenal but fantastical—much like all of what Shepard writes—and the books he cherishes (Crying/49, Heart/Heart/Country) come through strange channels. There’s the phenomenal Terrence Holt talking about his Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy, there’s Hadju talking about his copy of Ellison’s masterpiece Invisible Man, there’s Jim Knipfel’s entry on Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which entry is the second-most emotionally compelling entry of the bunch. What’s the first most compelling? Here’s a line from it: “I was asked to contribute to this anthology because I am the widow, via hanging, of the writer David Foster Wallace.”

Good lord.

So that’s in there, which means this book’s got a guaranteed audience from all the DFW-heads out longing every minute for some new bit to chew: here’s KGreen talking about Amy Hempel and grief. Maybe there’s no need to say much else: certainly if you’re here, looking at book reviews on a tiny book-review site, you already love books; this book’s made for all of us who do so.

Physics + Imaginary Objects, Cold Water

by Weston Cutter

The Physics of Imaginary Objects by Tina May Hall

 

I don’t suppose I’m the only one with an old beloved hardcover of Renata Adler’s Speedboat, or that I’m alone in being real interested in books which are contest winners judged by writers I admire. Regardless: whoever you are, you should be reading Tina May Hall‘s Drue Heinz Prize-winning book The Physics of Imaginary Objects, and here’s why. First, this may be one of the prettiest, most satisfying books to actually hold and see that I’ve come across in some time–stuff as banal and pass-over-able as the pagination betrays how cared about and for this book has been in all stages.

But layout’s never exclusively why we go to collections of stories. Here’s why we go to stories:

 

We will know each other by the way our watches slip from our wrists, the bruises on our knees, our winged shoulder blades tenting silk dresses.

We eat; we eat. We eat like wild boars, like wolves, like cyclists in training. We love the bloody shreds that cling to the T. We suck the gob of marrow that floats to the top of the soup. We gnaw the chicken down to splinters.

Everything is bone, bone, bone.

 

That’s the start to Tina May Hall’s “The Skinny Girls’ Constitution and Bylaws,” and if you’re more into combos, the right hook to go with the left jab of that story is “All the Day’s Sad Events,” the book-finishing novella which features mundane banality crossed with a casual bewitching that’s all the more creepy for being somehow both threatening but not malicious. Here’s the truth: this book’s worth getting exclusively for “All the Day’s Sad Events,” though with stories like “Skinny Girls’” and other dazzlers like “By the Gleam of Her Teeth, She Will Light the Path Before Her” and “This Is a Love Story, Too,” you’d maybe be hard pressed (or silly) to try to narrow a list of reasons for getting this book. There’s a great hunger at large wolfing through The Physics of Imaginary Objects, and I’ll say this, as somebody who occasionally gets pissed off or let down or both by contest-winning things: this one absolutely, absolutely deserves the Drue Heinz Prize, and it absolutely deserves readers.

 

By Cold Water by Chris Dombrowski

 

The world is more than you believe it is. Here’s one reason: sometimes you can get really excited about a certain book, and talk a bunch about it, and, later, someone else will come and see what you’ve written, and that someone will have written something else, and he’ll maybe send you a copy of what he’s written.

Here’s another reason:

 

Old dog October arrives

half blind and wheezing,

limping its track

through ruts along the road.

 

I want to be worthy

of this waking dream:

my mother, before my birth,

kneads clouds at the counter.

Floured, rain-scent thick

as balm, they rise

in the far room and feed

no one. My father

walks the markey, buys

hollow loaves, calls them

little worlds, little nothings.

 

These are the first two stanzas of “October Suite” by Chris Dombrowski, from his By Cold Water, which is just a brick to the head of a gorgeous collection of poetry, though that’s hardly fair. It’s not that By Cold Water‘s beautiful, though it very much is, page after page. No, what the book’s doing, in ways I find miraculous, is working at the root level of both the natural world around us and the wonders that our heads are full-time stuffed with. Meaning what? Meaning here’s another swath of “October”: “What if we learned to treat / each other as if a music / were barely playing?” Here’s further evidence, the end of “Woodkate, Hackmatack”:

 

While the creek takes its time, meandering

out of sight the way a dialect disappears from language,

privy or not to its own distinction. So that anymore

to say woodkate or hackmatack is to hold

a former way of life in the mouth,

which is to hold what was in the body—

breath,

snow, glipse of light between the larches, drum

of unseen beak on wood. Brief undulating

flight of what is and is gone.

 

Look, much like humor, often the quickest and most lethal way to deflate whatever joy a piece of art’s offering is to run it through rough analysis, noting its tendons and meat. The magic and awe of Dombrowski’s work is evident in every poem in the collection, and the brief bits excerpted here should light up the mental pinball display of close readers. I’d like to make this abundantly clear, though: Dombrowski’s work is that rarest sort (or it seems rare, or getting more rare, as poetry fights with larger-toothed and -voiced communication animals), his poetry’s delicate. I don’t mean fragile and I don’t mean fey or wimply or anything like that. His stuff’s light: he sets a thing down on a page, drags elemental bits into light, sets another thing down, drags more elemental bits from that, and then, in the conjunction of these two (or more) things, he lets the reader get light and fuse-blown by the gorgeousness. If you think this isn’t a big deal, read more contemporary poetry. If you know how big a deal this is, get yr hands post-haste on By Cold Water.

The Walkmen’s Lisbon

by Weston Cutter

Despite 2010 being a freakishly good year for music, we’ve covered it almost not at all here at Corduroy. Let’s correct that, starting now, by talking about one of the year’s best and most satisfying albums: The Walkmen’s Lisbon, which has now been out plenty long enough for everyone to know just how amazing this thing is.

Before anything else, though, a video. Here’s “In the New Year,” from their last album, You and Me.

If you don’t already know The Walkmen, knowing that song’s critical just to have a sense of who they are and what they do. That shiningly blocky guitar work, and the propulsive, lose-yrself full-speed-ahead of the drums and bass, and Hamilton Leithauser’s upper-register yowling (and his yowling about something coming up, about something impending, not necessarily about what’s going on directly in front of him)? These have been key Walkmen ingredients.

Here’s what sort of shitty, I think more for The Walkmen than anyone: the track that’s getting the most play on Lisbon is “Angela Surf City,” which they recently played on Last Call with Carson Daly. Check it:

Could “Angela” be an outtake from any of their earlier albums? It absolutely could. Does the song have the same sort of hang-on-tight energy as “The Rat”? Indeed. Why could it possibly be a bad thing that this song’s the one getting the most attention? (Let’s rephrase: it’s not that it’s bad—The Walkmen are one of a dozen or so bands that make American music worth believing in at present; any attention they get is a good thing—it’s just maybe, in this case, too bad.)

It’s too bad that “Angela’s” such an attention-grabber because Lisbon‘s a quieter, less-rushed beast of an album—it is, in fact, the perfect two to the one of the band’s last album, You and Me, which found the band taking steps away from the jagged brightness and occasional associative goofery (“Emma, Get Me a Lemon” for instance) of its first two albums and into a murkier, less clear, more gray, woolier sound and life (read a phenomenal interview with the producer for the last two albums here).

Which wooliness is furthered even more on Lisbon; here’s an in-studio at legendarily great KEXP of the album opener “Juveniles”:

Take a moment and just dig how the song closes: “Could she be right / when she repeats / I’m the lucky one…” Note the (intentional) ambiguity of just who’s the lucky one–the song’s she or its speaker. Note how, immediately after this nice if ambiguous moment, Leithauser’s cheery, mayhemic voice brings the song to close with a repeated You’re one of us or one of them, yet can’t you hear that smile? Look at the video: see that smile? Doesn’t there seem an ironic feel to that moment, as if, no, there isn’t polarity, there isn’t this dichotomy of us v. them: there’s both sides, and all of us, and we’ll claim to fall at one end of the spectrum or the other, but the comedy is that the categories we so fervently like to believe in and cling to, those are false.

More evidence? Check the lyrics for “While I Shovel the Snow”:

 

Well they say, can’t please everyone

Well I’m stuck on a winning streak

Well today there’s clarity

And tonight I see tomorrow.

 

All at once, the winter’s here

All the locks have frozen over

As I look in back of me

See a shape beside the walkway

 

Half of my life I’ve been watching

Half of my life I’ve been waking up

Birds in the sky could warn me

There’s no life like the snow life

 

So for now, I’ll take my time

For now, I can’t be bothered

But I learned a lot of things

But I fudged a lot of numbers

 

Once again, the winter’s here

All the locks have frozen over

So I look in back of me

See a shape beside the walkway.

 

Half of my life I’ve been watching

Half of my life I’ve been waking up

Birds in the sky could warn me

There’s no life like the snow life

 

Download the song below to hear how its music and lyrics conjoin, but the song all but screams lack of clarity: there’s no life but the snow life? If you’re reading “snow life” as something covered, something with its lines erased and its features uncleared, doesn’t the song feel like awfully high praise for the ambiguous, gray life? It’s all over the place in here, too: sure, he’s learned a lot of things, but he’s fudged a lot of numbers. Meaning he’s learned from making mistakes? Meaning he hasn’t learned anything at all—the fudged numbers undercutting the lessons he’s just claimed? Plus right from the start: today‘s he’s got/had clarity, but, already, tonight, he can see tomorrow: whatever clarity he’s got is fading fast, is gone as he gets it.

Look, this goes on an on, and I admit getting in too deep with this more philosophical stuff re: the Walkmen and their lyrical ambiguity may not be the best way to serve these guys and their work—it is, after all, rock and roll, and what you should do is go see them live and get yr ass lit up by how phenomenal a live band they are.

But, as important, especially for those of us who’ve either already or will soon make our way from our twenties: The Walkmen, with their last two discs, are evidencing remarkable growing up, are allowing their work to push further and further into gray, further from the fist-tight black-and-white that’s so seductive and youthful and, often, 100% wrong. The Walkmen are not a grown-up band: they’re, rarer than that, a growing-up band. Let’s end at the beginning: for all the great music that’s come out this year, I can think of very few albums which so gorgeously and sing-along-ly treat maturing, treat accepting the fuzz and slow indistinction of all those things which, not so long ago, seemed simple as hell to be totally, totally sure about. You want music you’ll still be interested in in five years? In ten? Nab Lisbon, then You and Me, and then buy whatever these guys do next.

Download:

“Woe is Me”

“While I Shovel the Snow”

Among the Year’s Best: Skippy Dies

by Weston Cutter

Skippy Dies by Paul Murray

I’m not sure what’s the best way to begin talking about this book. One of the publicity pushes seemed to be about trying to locate the book as a sort of Harry Potter­-ish-meets-Infinite-Jest-ish type monster, and that’s fair enough, in ways (certainly there are Jest echoes: the all boys school [Seabrook College], the mightily funny/crude/honest dialogue, the fact that several characters in here are almost entirely dialogue [they do stuff, they're not just disembodied voices, but we know them largely only by what and how they say things]). But the Potter/Jest schema doesn’t really do justice to what Murray’s done in and made with Skippy Dies. What he’s made, overtly, is a bildungsroman about a kid named Daniel “Skippy” Juster, though you know what growth/development the kid’s got in store for him right there from the title; what Murray’s actually made, though, is a whole populated world, with at least a dozen memorable, instantly-recognizable characters, and, most critically, he’s made a world into which you enter, just reading it.

That, actually, is one of my favorite aspects of the book: Murray’s refreshingly un-MFA-ish in his catholicism of voice and taste, and he’ll regularly begin a scene with you, a scene in which you wonder about Ruprecht, Skippy’s roommate, or a scene in which you are playing a video game and listening to your mom argue with your dad…but then the scene shifts, and you find out that you’re Skippy, or you’re Skippy’s rival-for-Lori-affection Carl, or you’re someone else. It’s hard to overstate what this tricky pov-shifting Murray does so regularly and easily accomplishes. Sure, fundamentally, the reader gets into the story more completely or fully or whatever. However, the narrative slipperiness of it accomplishes a larger thematic need: everything gives way; nothing’s solid.

Slipperiness and/or duplicity, the way in which nothing stays just what it is: that’s where this book’s heart beats. Ruprecht, Skippy’s roommate? He’s a physics-obsessed genius, prattling on about M-theory and, eventually, building a dimension-travel device (the dimension-travel’s one of the most satisfying plotlines in the book; it’s eventually lost, and spawns a mission which, momentarily, is almost called Operation Immaculate Penetration), but, eventually, Ruprecht’s Ruprect-ness slips fully away as he gets crushed once too often and gets lost, depressed, whatever, eating donuts and refusing to properly take part in a classroom (“A hydrogen atom has two dads, the main export of Russia is C sharp, Jesus instructs us to diffract sunlight“). Skippy himself: alive or dead (plus also: should he be on the swim team or not? Does Lori, the frisbee-girl hottie he’s into, really like him or not? Is that some weird love-level ruse?).

This stuff’s endless, page after page. There’s Howard the Coward, a former Seabrook student and now a history teacher, a feckless thumbhead whose convictions end up just as compromised as everyone else’s. There’s Father Green, a priest who’s not nearly as bad as the reader fears (that Fr. Green turns out to be one of the most compelling, strong-of-conviction folks in the book is not only significant, but it’s fucking awesome at a narrative level: Murray gets to offer the reader some adult who’s got some Code he’ll not break, yet the reader can’t help but understand Loud and Clear just what such a code will cost). There’s Tom the swim coach, who suffered an accident while a student at Seabrook, and who therefore was, in that accident, knocked from the athletic-star path he was on, and who is all sorts of compelling in this book in the sneakiest of ways. There’s The Automator, the temporary head of the school, and he might actually be the only non-slippery character in the cast: he’s a dic at the start and he’s a dick at the end, and what transpires between start to finish are increasingly awe-inducing levels of dickness reached on the part of the man. There’s Carl, the budding psychopath who is just terrifying, terrifying, the blackest-souled character I’ve read in years.

There is, most critically, Dennis, Geoff, and Mario, the three who, with Ruprecht and Skippy, make up the core group of the book, and it is through these three characters that most of us will sniff Jest traces: you know exactly who these boys are (even if they’re cartoonish at times, which they are)—you know Dennis, the cynic, the comically acidic prick of each scene, and you know Mario, the sex-obsessed Italian who’s carried a lucky condom in his wallet for three years, and you know poor, sloppy, earnest Geoff, who wants more than anything to believe in the world as a place in which good things happen to good people, and bad follows bad.

Which, of course, is the definition of a coming-of-age book—notions of good/bad and causality get challenged, shifted, clarified, beaten, etc. What’s amazing about Skippy Dies is, depending on how long an answer you want, one of two things. First, for brevity, what’s amazing about Skippy Dies is everything. However, if you’re looking for a longer, more nuanced version: Second, what’s amazing about Skippy Dies is how, as each character toggles and shifts, as each bit of innocence is lost of yearned for or destroyed or mutilated, as each drug’s ingested or beating administered, the book again and again wrestles with notions of going back: of snatching that innocence back from experience, of retrieving that former self once disaster’s forced fundamental shifts. That the book allows, not a once, no easy answers isn’t just a testament to Murray’s skill as a writer, but as a story-teller, as someone who understands how powerfully precious such a full, thorough, human story he’s got, and how great his responsibility to do it full moral and artistic justice. As if it wasn’t obvious: he’s succeeded, wildly, gasp-inducingly. Read Skippy Dies as soon as you can: page-for-page, there’s more magic in this book than any other I’ve read this year.

Blackness of Several Sorts

by Weston Cutter

Black Mask Stories, edited by Otto Penzler

 

Look: I’m trying to expand. I don’t know which navel-gazer of a white-dude-penned literary novel that finally did it to me, but I’ve gotten interested in mysteries. Not genre writing: I don’t care (yet) about fantasy and sci-fi, but a good mystery? I’ll take it. I’ll at least try it.

And here’s why life sometimes is excellent: because I decided to get into mystery maybe 6 months back, and have been taking tentative steps in that direction since, and now Vintage’s come out with the Black Mask Stories, which feature more mystery stories than, as many Minnesotans I know would say, you could shake a stick at. Was Black Mask a magazine? It was. Was it the magazine which first published The Maltese Falcon? It absolutely was. Is there a strange alchemy available through this book as well, one which allows the reader to realize how profound the shittily stupid lack of pulp/noir/genre work is? Yes, the alchemy’s right here, right around page 1.

 

The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino

 

Does Sorrentino even need pimping anymore? What possible inducement do you need to read Sorrentino? Have you not already tried Mulligan Stew? Are you not okay with just buying anything the man wrote, or of just buying everything that comes from Coffee House? If I tell you this book comes in 50 sections, the first only a couple paragraphs, the final several pages, and that the writing’s the common-enough Sorrentino car-crash of thought, black comedy, and day-to-day-ness that this master long ago marked as his own?

In short: what do you possibly need to convince you to buy Sorrentino’s latest, last book? And then, if you haven’t already, all his earlier ones?

 

Dante’s Divine Comedy, adapted by Seymour Chwast

 

The desire/hope/compulsion to get into other genres? Along those lines: graphic novels (which seemed for a moment to be just everywhere and the constant buzzing Next New Thing; maybe they still are, or maybe now they’re the Established New Thing; whatever), which genre seems, to this reader, to have about one shockingly great example every 6-9 months and which, otherwise, is only okay. This period’s holy-shit-is-this-great work: Chwast’s adaptation of Dante which, as reviewing luck would have it, features a noired-up Dante and Virgil, making visual way through Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise. What’s shocking about the story, like lots of old books, is how much of it is basically political stone-throwing: Dante’s taking crap out on/against folks with whom he disagrees; the original’s subtitle could well be an Italian Enumerates his Beefs. What’s shocking about the book, this just-published thing, is how easily rad it is to read about old score-settling, and how omnivorously huge Chwast’s eye seems to be: to see this story, across pages, splashed in a format this big, is a massively cool treat.