[Books] thoughts + spoilers

[De-Con-Struc] Childlike Life Of The Black Tarantula // Kathy Acker

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Title: The Childlike Life Of The Black Tarantula

Author: Kathy Acker

Premise: meshing of historical women killing for good/dubious reason with Acker inserted sometimes in brackets pushing on from within ecstatic self-destruction/paranoia.

Publisher: Grove Press

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How much can be unleashed before exhaustion?

Euphoria > exhaustion > guilt [at exhaustion]

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I become a murderess.

I’m born in the late autumn or winter of 1827.

Troy,  New York.

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Acker was born in 1947, 1948 and 1944.

Into wealth yet refused to act that way acted exactly that way that some act when they’re born into wealth and can’t stand it want to escape do porn stripping file clerk work.

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Everyone hates me they just want to fuck me they don’t want to fuck me.

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Contradictions bold in the same sentence suffocated commas this paranoia laid out can be mesmeric at times a kind of truth [I load up Japanese father fucks daughter at mum’s wake let it run on no skips to penetration shot work myself up slow lethargic strokes faintly bored blur out father aspect not on purpose she’s too old to be real daughter better than watching genuine teen fuck finish up wipe off machinate sit there dead cold stare out at hawk flying past window know that it knows yeah let it be don’t have a gun anyway wasn’t her real father doesn’t mean anything watched a dog fuck a girl once not that immoral] truth that can be permitted doesn’t hollow Acker out in a way that might make her truly uncomfortable/abject. Go too wretched or too Id, or the layer above the Id with partial control on your part, and only way left is suicide.

Counterpoint: confession permitted Acker to keep going, keep writing, bracketed her.

I don’t know.

What else was there, if not this?

Continue reading →

Ubik [Page 107]

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          107

Joe Chip leaned back in the boss chair and thought about what had just happened. Was it possible? Him, a resonator repairman, CEO of the whole company?

On his desk was a note from Pat Conley:

‘Hey Joe, I just want to let you know that, even though I haven’t done much in the first 106 pages, I plan to use my power in a big way starting from now. If anything bad happens to you, if anything dramatic comes along then I’ll just skip back to the past and make sure it doesn’t. Cool?

Pat’

Joe re-read the note and smiled. Everything was going great all of a sudden. But what about Runciter? Was he still on the phone line? Would he want his office back?

He picked up the phone and heard static. Runciter was gone. Great. Well, not great, but okay. Runciter was a good guy, but it’s not like he was the most amazing person who’d ever lived.

Give it a year, thought Joe. Then I’ll be the new Runciter.

The door opened and the wisp-form of Wendy Wright appeared.

“Wendy! You’re alive!” shouted Joe, shuffling off the repairman jacket.

“I hope so.”

“But…last night…you looked like…”

“A mummy? Yes, I noticed that too. Suppose it was…entropy?”

“Yeah, entr-…” Joe paused. “You wanna have sex?”

“With you?”

Joe stood up and started taking off his belt. He wasn’t usually this forward but the pink vibes from his newly-fixed resonator were telling him things might just go his way.

Continue reading →

The First 106 Pages Of Ubik

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There was once a theory put forward by cultural theorist Skadoj Capper [1871-1812], that all you needed to read of a book was were the first 106 pages. What happened on page 107, unimportant. All other pages, including the ending, unimportant. Most disagreed, but Capper stayed adamant. The only thing that annoyed him was a book less than 106 pages long. Like Automatic Assassin. Or The Brothers Kolinski. These books he would not read.

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Ubik [106 pages]

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1. Joe Chip is introduced in the third chapter, struggling to enter his own apartment. Why the third chapter? Is he not the main character? Yes, but the world must be accounted for first. Then emetised.

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World > characters

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2. The old Fitzgerald trick is utilised in Chapter Two – instead of following Runciter from the end of Chapter One into the beginning of the next chapter, we are put into the headspace of the moratorium mausoleum owner, who thinks about irrelevant things for two pages before Runciter re-invades the narrative. Then we switch back to that mind. Why?

 – it establishes a world separate from the main characters’ world
 – it gives Runciter a chance to take a break from the narrative
 – it suggests time follows its own track, not the characters
 – the mausoleum owner has no reason to exist as an ‘investigated individual’ in this world so, following the theme of the text, he must exist in that exact way.

Continue reading →

[De-Con-Struc] FrankenCop // Tyson Bley

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This is not a review but my method of reading experimental work, which is, in basic form:

Examine context/premise.

Go through the text and see what flows and what jars, which lines spark some kind of reaction.

Try to pull out the allusions, intended by the author or invented by myself.

Head off on tangents.

Speculate what the meaning might be.

Stop about thirty pages into the text to avoid spoilers.

I am not an expert, or an academic, or even anchored in reality half the time, so a lot of this could be way off.

But could also be way on too.

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Book: FrankenCop

Author: Tyson Bley

Publisher: Schism Press

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[Background/context]

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I’ve read a lot of Tyson’s poems and sent zines to post offices in Germany that may or may not have existed and listened to his song Gertrude’s Knees, so I usually know what I’m in for.

Body horror

Machinery gone wrong [or right, depending on your views]

Extreme juxtaposition of cultural references with anything conceivable

A bizarro, unforced sense of humour

Dada-style off-lyricism [or maybe zaum]

Continue reading →

Compartment No.6 [To Murmansk] // Thomas Stolperer

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You know why people live longer than most animals? It comes from the fact that animals live based on their instincts and don’t make mistakes. But we humans create reason and botch everything all the time. Half our life goes to screwing up, another part to recognizing our idiotic actions and the rest to trying to fix what’s fixable. We need all our life’s years just for that circus.

Cause I encountered what I’ve feared. And what I’ve dreaded happened to me, Vadim Nikolajevitš.

the man and the girl from the Book not the Film,

the Book, and the Film, the man older the girl young, and the man young the girl young, late soviet russia, and early post soviet russia, she carried, used a 90s personal video camera (90s personal video cameras what an annoying idiotic phase of personal camera development. As I’m hopeless now drowning in crushed under consumption, existing for consumable things that people live on by creating them so I need them to live – I would never make them and wouldn’t even need them if they weren’t created for me to need — now as I’m existing in apps and gadgets and usage models and commands and appliances and comforts that are really no comfort, I remember old heavy 90s cameras and VCR players and realize, assert that those were even worse than current suffocation under consumerisms and gadgets, than current extinguishing of a personality, of personalities, under consumerism articles, under gadgets, under articles heavy and light complex and simple, drowning and suffocating and watching my flat existence slide along, although there are more consumerism articles now and more types of articles now, and the articles and their types have multiplied exploded exponentially bc of technology, and the inundating now is more crushing, more suffocating to natural instinct life than the 90s inundation and it makes me more miserable now bc there are fewer existence alternatives to defraying misery or lame existence with miserable unsatisfying consumption now than in the 90s or so it seems, or seemed —  even still, I’m glad I don’t have to use, learn to use VCR players anymore, don’t have to use big camera recorders from the 90s anymore, those were shit annoying, shit unintuitive, bulk, dumb.  Well I know, that makes me a consumer, a consumer seeking benefit from the progress of consumer items nonessential consumer functions gadgets programs functions. Everything is flat, consumerism makes every direction flat and the same direction)

Continue reading →

Horrorlandia

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Got a good feeling about this one.

Synopsis on the back, maybe three words I don’t know, the rest fully comprehensible.

Either the translator is slumming at my level or those three back to back exchanges chatting about Halloween are about to pay off. Hopefully they go easy on the idioms. Or I can probably just skim over them now. Long as I recognise they’re idioms then things should work out.

Goosebumps itself?

The beauty of reading Chinese is that I have no standards, no gauge of the actual quality of the writing. Though I suspect Goosebumps is pretty basic in all languages. Best-selling series in history? Maybe cos there’s about seven hundreds books in said series.

Probably too harsh, I’m sure it’s decent.

Anything with a horror element is okay for me.

Bonus Spanish on the cover too.

I’ll let you know if I make it past page 5.

Galaxies // Barry N. Malzberg [Thoughts & Spoilers]

ANTI-OEDIPUS PRESS: Galaxies

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Author: Barry N. Malzberg

Setting: his living room

Plot: Malzberg can’t be bothered writing a novel so writes the notes for one

Subplot: Malzberg can’t stand whichever sci-fi writers he’s criticizing [Heinlein?], but sees them at conventions sometimes so doesn’t want to use their names

Sub-subplot: A ship falls into a black ‘galaxy’, where narrative descriptions are endless

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Notes:

The cover is good, the plot description is good, the 4 and 5 star reviews on Goodreads make good points, but the 2 star reviews are closer to how I feel about this.

Basically, the novel is a series of short chapters that function as notes on a future novel as well as Malzberg’s feelings on the state of 70’s sci-fi. Straight away this brings up two problems. 70’s sci-fi is era specific and, although some of the points remain valid [e.g. writing filler to bump up the word count, hard sci-fi writers hiding their lack of writing ability behind hard science], the era itself is long gone.

The second problem: if you’re going to write notes for a novel, you have to a] make sure the concept of that novel is interesting and complex, and b] keep your novel length down. Even at 180 odd pages, Galaxies is exhausting.

In fact, I haven’t finished the book yet.

Don’t know if I will either.

I’m on page 68, I think, and Malzberg is currently writing out potential dialogue between Lena, the main character, and another character who isn’t on the ship, it’s a flashback, a potential flashback, and I don’t really know either of these characters, I don’t care about them, and if this is the case then you better at least make the dialogue interesting.

It isn’t. Continue reading →

Virgin of the 7 Daggers // Vernon Lee

Related image

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Vernon Lee = Violet Paget, claimed by some to be the best writer of supernatural fiction in the 19th Century and infinitely better than Henry James.

Having read this collection of stories and having never touched a page of James, I can say this is undeniably true.

First off, when I started reading the first story I thought it was a very long opening chapter of a novel, not a short story, so the structure really blew me away. I had no idea where the story was going. It was only when the plot seemed to be reaching a dead end that I flicked forward and realised the second chapter was a whole different story.

It was a bit deflating, not enough to forget that the main character was in love with a mystical snake lady and his granddad was strangely immortal, but it still would’ve been better if the story had gone on to another location, perhaps an alternate dimension or the Oort Cloud.

In future, should I read all short stories thinking they’re novels?

It might help.

Should writers write novels as if they’re short stories?

Anything to add something new.

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There’s something about 19th Century fiction, or authors, the way they write their characters. Psychologically, they’re weird and deep, they have active minds and they think in a way that seems almost like a foreign language now. Even Sherlock Holmes has this style, though most people are used to his shtick. Continue reading →

The 3 Body Problem // Cixin Liu [Thoughts + Spoilers]

Related image Related image

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Plot: The Cultural Revolution is laid out for 50 pages and characters that no one knows nor cares about die/suffer. The only one left standing is a woman who will eventually sell out humans to aliens living in the Alpha Centauri System [off-camera]. In modern times, a scientist/nanotech engineer[?] called Wang forgets his family so he can focus on a video game called The Three Body Problem. It’s not a hard game, not as hard as the original Mega Man, and he quickly comes across the alien plot to take over Earth. Luckily, it will take 400 years for the aliens to arrive. Unluckily, they’ve invented nine dimensional protons that fly to Earth and do their best Stasi impression, which in effect limits humans to doing nothing scientifically for the next 400 years, which in turn will allow the aliens to land on Earth and do what?

Subplot: Disregarding the blurb on the back of the cover, 100 odd pages are dedicated to flashbacks of the traitor scientist figuring out how to send a signal to aliens without telling us that’s what she’s doing even though we know that’s what she’s doing cos we’ve read the blurb on the back cover.

Subplot: Wang’s wife asks for a divorce.

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The above summary of the plot may come across as negative, but I enjoyed about half of this book, especially the parts focused on the video game and the three body aliens themselves.

However, it takes a long while to get there.

The biggest problem is definitely the opening 50 pages or so. If you’re gonna write a sci-fi book that starts with some historical context, at least write it well. Or organise it well. Or make it involving, either emotionally or concept-wise. What Liu has done is write a succession of scenes that involve characters we don’t get to know at all and then kill them off. Continue reading →

Space [Manifold] // Stephen Baxter [Spoilers]

Image result for space beyond solar system

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Title: Space [When I search for it online, it has a ‘Manifold’ added to the title].

Characters: Reid Malenfant [a name almost beyond parody]

Nemoto [Japanese scientist]

Gaijin [Alien robots]

Plot: Spanning almost two millennia, the story begins with the gaijin and their asteroid belt scam being rumbled by Nemoto, who spots them from her shoebox on the moon. Reid Malenfant borrows Stephen Baxter’s brain, figures out that the Gaijin are actually sailing in from the solar focus, which is somewhere out past the edge of the solar system, and goes to investigate. Other characters flit in and out, avoiding depth and other hobbies. The hobby is science. There is nothing else.

Better than Event Horizon?

This isn’t a bad book, but it isn’t a good one either. It’s hovering somewhere around average. Starting with the Fermi Paradox hook and then failing to keep my attention for more than seven pages is not a good sign [for me].

I’m sure there’s a better way to write that, but I’ve been struggling with English for a while now, especially when it comes to reviews. Something’s not working right in my brain. Feels like I’m parroting other sources. Or simplifying words to primary school level.

Still, this is not a bad book.

It’s about space, aliens, exploration…it has a page on different, theoretical ways we can travel to the next star…so why didn’t I like it more? Continue reading →