Book Review: Raping the Gods by Brian Whitney

How many ways can one write about an asshole?

I first heard about Brian Whitney from a review of his book 37 Stories About 37 Women at I Read Odd Books. I had intended to pick it, but just never got around to it. So when Whitney offered a review copy of his new novella Raping the Gods, I had to take a look at it.

The narrator, named Brian Whitney, is a down-and-out author who has written some books under his own name and ghostwritten memoirs for others, former porn star Summer Starr being the most famous.

So now I write books. After I got divorced the last time I wrote this book that I thought was this overwrought view into my soul. I sent it out to hundreds of different publishers. An erotica publisher picked it up. My pain is another guy's orgasm, I suppose.

He finds out that a rich man by the name of Dylan Porter is looking for a ghostwriter to help him write a book about his spiritual journey. Dylan wants to share the story of how, during a "vision quest" in Samoa, he met and raped God. Brian takes him up on the deal, knowing it could be very lucrative. Dylan has some conditions though.

So here is the deal, you can come out here and hang out with me for a couple of weeks and we can do this shit. I like the fact that Brad is on board with you because that will make my family feel safe with it. Also I would like a photo of Summer Starr passed out, naked and wearing a moose hat.

Dylan is very stringent on these conditions.

A lot of this book is very funny. For example, before Brian even arrives in Samoa, Dylan sends him a few surreal e-mails that suggests he may be completely insane. He also sends a diary that he claims is from his high school days. Given the stories the diary is full of, it's likely a pack of lies.

Just in time too, I'm totally broke, my business took a mad hit. I was selling these kids in junior high school Oxycontin. Well really they were Flintstones Chewables I painted white. I'd be playing "Animals" by Pink Floyd really fucking loud and I'd be swaying back and forth a little to make them feel like they were tripping their balls off. It was all good until Tad's brother told him that oxys weren't chewable.

When we finally meet Dylan, it's a bit surprising how lucid he actually seems. It's clear he just likes to mess with people. The way he treats the "slave girls" who live with him makes it even more apparent. This is the kind of thing I don't like reading in public, because people walking by tend to wonder what the asshole with the book is giggling at.

Eventually Dylan starts to open up truthfully about his life and his past. Here the book starts to become more "serious" in tone, but the change in tone is handed masterfully. Dylan's stories about his first marriage, his time in rehab and his past relationships gradually slide from hilarious, to hilariously pathetic, to just pathetic and sad. This is a pretty short book, so that Whitney managed to change the tone this quick while having it feel as natural as it did is impressive.

It fits well with the main theme really. Everyone in this story, Dylan, Brian, the slave girls, are all undone by pursuing their own desires to the point of compulsion. Sex especially. It's far too easy to show the bottom of the barrel. In all those damn after school specials and Lifetime movies, you wonder why people get into the shit in the first place. It doesn't look fun at all. The problem is, it is. The slide from a good time into self-destructive compulsion is a gradual slide, and you can't tell when the healthy fun ended until you don't care anymore.

I stopped reading. I heard myself sigh heavily. I sounded like a tire with the air leaking out of me. I felt that way, too. This was my life. Nothing but crazy people as far as the eye could see. 

I'd already gone in expecting to like this from the summary of the story and that fact it bills itself as "A Tale of Sex and Madness," but the book was even better than I expected. I highly recommend this and I'm bumping 37 Stories About 37 Women up the wishlist.

Buy Raping the Gods by Brian Whitney here. 

Book Review: In the Sky by Octave Mirbeau

Earlier this year I read The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. Part satire of European imperialism and part Sadean fantasy, it's a great read. By coincidence, Nine-Banded Books ended up releasing Ann Sterzinger's translation of Mirbeau's earlier book In the Sky this year.

In the Sky seems to have been a very passed over work of Mirbeau's. While it was originally published in installments in a French literary journal from 1892 to 1893, it wasn't published as a whole until 1989 in its home country France. This translation by Sterzinger is the first English edition.

In the Sky begins with a prologue of an unnamed narrator visiting a friend he takes delight in abusing, referred to only as X, at a mountain cabin where he's been staying. X seems to have lost his mind from the solitude. He had gone to the mountain to write in seclusion, but has given up and instead spends his time contemplating the sky and getting drunk. He sends his friend off with what writing he was able to accomplish, which makes up the remainder of the novel.

X begins by recounting his unhappy childhood with his bourgeois family.

I was born with the fatal gift of acute feeling, of sensitivity to the point of suffering, to the point of being ridiculous. 

He finds himself crying at the drop of a hat and incapable of putting his feelings aside long enough to learn anything. Were this character born in the latter half of the 20th century, he would probably be medicated for depression.

X holds nothing but contempt for his family. He views them as a bunch of selfish assholes who don't care about anything but money and status. They treat him like he's retarded because his talent for observation does nothing for their status in the community. At one point, he learns the drum and the family supports him only because he's asked to lead a church parade, which makes them look good in front of the rest of the town.

X finds his days at school even worse.

And I can't describe the intolerable boredom that emanates from the pack of absurdities, lies, and ridiculous diplomas that is a teacher. Instead of piquing your interest in the lessons he assigns by giving them some life and zest, the teacher makes you feel disgust, as you would for something ugly. He fills everything with his stiff, fake gravitas, a proudly stupid dogmatism that kills the curiosity in a child's soul instead of developing it.

It's 120 years later and shit hasn't changed at all.

His sisters' marriages are likewise more like economic transactions than anything else, and after his parents die they care more about swiping his inheritance than consoling him. He allows them to take almost everything just to have them out of his hair.

My sisters were cautious and orderly women. They wanted to rob me, but they wanted to do it legally and respectably.

Mirbeau's contempt for bourgeois society is on full display here. It's no surprise that he was an anarchist. It's also clear that Mirbeau believed that this society held back individual creativity. When X is finally free of his family, he goes to live with his friend Lucien in Paris, who encourages him to take up writing. After all, his gift for feeling and observation makes him perfect for art. It's the first time he has any real direction.

As a side note on the structure of the book, Lucien is really the main character of the story. Yet we don't even meet him until over halfway into the book. Mirbeau did this in The Torture Garden as well. We don't meet the main driving force in the narrative, Clara, until several pages in and don't arrive at the titular Garden until almost halfway through. This doesn't hurt either book, however. There's a clear purpose to the structures that serves the themes in them.

Lucien, who is clearly based on Vincent van Gogh, is a painter whose art wasn't supported by his family until he achieved some degree of fame. Like X, he's a very sensitive person but channels most of his energy into his art. It doesn't help though.

Lucien works harder and harder to improve his art, yet he can't seem to capture ineffable beauty on his canvas. At one point he leaves X in Paris to try to work at a remote mountain cabin (the same that X was staying in during the prologue) but it only hastens his spiral into insanity. He comes back to Paris in a sorry state.

"Do you remember, I told you about that dog who bays endlessly, a dog you can't see, and whose voice rises toward the sky, like the very voice of the earth? That's what I want to do! A vast sky...and the cry of that dog!"

I was a bit taken aback. "But you're insane, Lucien! You want to paint the bark of a dog?"

Lucien wants to convey things that can't be directly portrayed visually, but just can't find a way to do it. He starts to believe that he's a fraud who can't paint at all.

"Do you you know why I drive myself to find out all these complicated things, what others call "rarefied sensations," and which aren't anything but children's games, and lies...Do you know why? It's because I'm incapable of painting what's simple! Because I don't know how to draw, and I don't know how to renders the shadows and the light!"

Lucien persists in trying to improve his art, but his madness finally gets the best of him. Like van Gogh cut off his ear and then eventually shot himself, Lucien cuts off his own hand and bleeds to death. X's final fate is never given, but we can only assume he won't end up much differently.

Some of the themes in this book remind me a lot of Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel. Mishima argued in that book that the biggest problem with the art of writing is that it's an attempt to wrangle the chaotic and ever-moving real world into a still and ordered manner. In body versus mind, the body always wins and an author, for whom the mind is primary, needs to make peace with this and find a way to reconcile the two. Mishima did so through weight-training and other exercises to "befriend" his body, hence the "sun and steel" of the title.

In another bit of synchronicity with my reading, I happened to start this book as I was finishing up Sexual Personae by Camille Paglia. Her main thesis in that book is that the whole of western art is based on conflict of the masculine (synonymous with order, civilization and the Apollonian) and the female (synonymous with chaos, nature and the Dionysian) and the attempts of artists to synthesize the two into an "androgyne."

Considering how Mishima ended up, he's probably the most relevant of the two. Neither X nor Lucien are ever able to reconcile the chaos of the world around them into something bearable through the order of their art. They're both destroyed by their attempts.

A great example of this is a romance that X begins with a concierge named Julia while Lucien is away. At first he's head over heels for her.

How I loved her, the first time that gaze rested upon me, like a bird perching on a dead branch!

Yet after he has sex with her, he finds his feelings for her completely drained.

She really did touch my heart, but that emotion couldn't overcome the disgust, the pitiful and painful disgust for her, that I suffered after the physical act that drowned my love, and all the poetry of my love.

X is incapable of reconciling his idealized love for her with the physical act of sex with her. Sleeping with her brought her from being a goddess to being no different from the whores at the brothels he and Lucien visit.

Mirbeau, who was also a supporter of van Gogh's work, creates an insightful look at how an artist like him could collapse under the weight of their own ambition. This was originally written only 2 years after van Gogh died. Even the title and the sky motif come from van Gogh's most famous painting, The Starry Night. With this perspective and the popularity of van Gogh, an artist who even people who know nothing about art know, I'm surprised that this novel was so overlooked.

As you can see, there's a lot going on in this short book (under 200 pages even including the preface and the translator's note). It's an engaging story with excellent prose with a lot to chew on. This story of artists working in the 19th century avant-garde remains as relevant as ever with its mockery of middle-class values, its portrayal of the frustrations of the artist, and the search for one's place in the vast, hostile sky. It's great that this book was brought to the English language, and I hope it receives the attention it deserves. I highly recommend this. Be sure to check out The Torture Garden as well.

Buy In the Sky by Octave Mirbeau here.

In Which I Eat Shit

So recently my story, "John Walks Into A Bar," was published on the webzine Trigger Warning. The editor of the webzine was Ann Sterzinger, a writer whose work I admire. I also gave a plug to Trigger Warning's Indiegogo campaign, both here and on my Facebook and Twitter. Unfortunately, there was some behind the scenes bullshit going on that I wasn't aware of. You can read all the unpleasant details at Matt Forney's website.

I want to apologize for everyone who donated to the campaign because of my promotion of it. My audience is very small, but if even one of you donated, I helped you get fucked over. For that, I'm deeply sorry.

Because of how worse for wear this whole shitstorm left Sterzinger, I strongly encourage you to support her by buying her books. If you need convincing, check out my reviews of The Talkative Corpse and NVSQVAM (nowhere)

GET TRIGGERED

My story, "John Walks Into a Bar," is now up at Trigger Warning. Check it out, along with the other great pieces in this issue.

If you like this story, please consider contributing to Trigger Warning's Indiegogo campaign. As of this post it's still up, but ending soon. So hurry if you want to help out this new webzine.

Book Review: Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler

Blake Butler is one of those writers who've been on my radar for a while, but it took some time to get around to reading one of his books (though I have read some his work published online). I decided to start with his second book, Scorch Atlas.

Scorch Atlas is a novel in stories. Each of the thirteen stories and thirteen vignettes are about a different set of characters, but they all take place in the same world. In this case, a world being destroyed by a series of thirteen plagues.

The vignettes in the book describe the different plagues destroying the world. There are normal disasters like flooding and dust storms, but most of the plagues are bizarre occurrences like rains of blood, teeth, glitter, manure and static.

The earth had learned to scratch its back. In massive columns same as what we'd seen on TV during our worst storms, stretched check-pattern, warbled splatter. As well, the sound of a billion needles wheedling, tearing their tips against the grain.

The stories don't relate directly to the plagues in the vignettes. Instead, the stories focus on people dealing with the destruction of the world in general.

For example, in "The Ruined Childhood," a couple's baby becomes infected with some sort of strange and possibly supernatural disease. The baby's skin becomes covered with gunk and dogs start trying to invade their home to get at it. Finally, they decide to bury the baby and leave it for dead. When the father comes home, he finds that it somehow found its way into the attic and its body has swollen up. The father tries to deal with his wife slowly going insane from her loss and the undead child still growing in the attic.

This was probably my favorite story in the book. A surreal horror story about the destruction of a family and a very atmospheric take on the "evil child" trope.

The child's mother shouldn't see this, the father thought. He turned away and hid his eyes. He went back downstairs and locked the door behind him. He tucked a towel under the crack. Though for hours, through whatever insulation, whatever the silence, the child's voice still slammed his head.

Family disintegration is a major theme in the book. In "Disappearance," a boy's father is arrested after being falsely accused of abusing him and missing a free throw. With his father gone, he completely throws himself into searching for his missing mother. Even with the world falling down around him and eventually being quarantined in his school's gym, he persists until he finally finds her in a very strange place.

I sat on the floor in the neon light with stomach rumbling and sounds of flame and stink of rot. I saw things moving toward me and then gone. I couldn't remember where or why I was. I couldn't find my name writ on my tongue or brain-embedded.

Butler's vivid prose creates striking and relentless images of destruction and rotting. In "Seabed," a man named Randall walks among the ruins of his city and meets a little girl who seems to be the only other survivor. They stumble on a beach and find that the ocean's gone dry. On the ocean floor, they find a house.

The sand cracked beneath their feet. The shore sat scummed over and pile-driven down, pale combs of foam dried at the farthest point where water'd lapped. Cracked shells of land-struck jellies and uncased conch flesh sat overcooking, dried out, picked apart. Whole gulls with their skulls pecked in and post-ravaged by sand mites and worms.

The book also conveys the narrative of the world's destruction through other means besides straightforward stories. For example, "Damage Claim Questionnaire" tells us about a woman's loss of her family through an insurance claims form.

Have you undertaken methods to protect against future loss?

I often think of pastry. My joints creek when it drizzles. The windows have been painted over. I'd never kiss another man. The baby calm inside me, his kick stilled off to numb.

The constant rot in Scorch Atlas is even present in it's design. The pages are covered in burn marks, water damage and smoothed out crumpling to make it seem like a document from a now gone world.

I highly recommend this book. It's a wonderfully written and beautifully designed collection of surreal stories. It has a unique take on the speculation of the end of the world as we know it. While it focuses mostly on personal loss, it still manages to show the scale of death and destruction in such a scenario. I also have Blake Butler's 300,000,000 on my shelf and I look forward to reading that.

Buy Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler here.

Book Review: Everything's Fine by Socrates Adams

I bought this book without knowing much about it. I think I saw it mentioned by some other author I follow on social media and bought it on a whim. I can't say I regretted picking it up.

Ian's job is selling PVC tubes. He's not very good at it. His boss tries to light a fire under his ass by giving him a piece of tube, naming it Mildred and making him raise it as a baby. When that doesn't work, he demotes Ian to the position of Tiny Shit Head, a job that consists of being strapped into a chair and forced to watch a monitor count down numbers. In between his job and taking care of Mildred, he plans and saves for a vacation in the French Alps. He ends up developing a crush on the pretty travel agent, Sandra, in the process.

Although I am not earning a great deal of money, I feel as though my new job is going pretty well. It is a demanding position which carries a large amount of responsibility and is high powered and executive. 

Ian is clearly unhappy with his life, but is clearly in denial about it. He tries to console himself that his sale skills are important, even though he clearly has none. He doesn't even have basic social skills. His denial is very thin however, his unhappiness with the world around him peeks through very often. This scene where he's pushing Mildred in a stroller and it begins to rain, for example.

I imagine the water rising so fast that I have to struggle to keep moving, all of the filth of the pavement licking at my skin. The water will rise all the way up to the bottom of the pram. The water will carry on rising upwards.

Ian feels like the world is drowning him.

He doesn't get much respect either. His boss treats him like dirt, people laugh at him behind his back and even Mildred has some choice words about him.

I don't understand him. I can't work him out. I don't understand why he would come and get me. I am a tube.

What I do know is that he has made me so miserable today that is is almost certainly the worst day of my life so far.

Whether the digressions into Mildred's thoughts are really the tube thinking or Ian projecting himself on to it is rather ambiguous. While Ian plays the role he was given and treats the tube like a baby, it's clear he knows how stupid the whole thing is. It also serves as a metaphor for Ian's own situation.

A tube's natural state is to be part of the plumbing, or more specifically, to carry something from somewhere to somewhere else. When it is not part of the plumbing it will roll about and get in the way and be a nuisance, because it is not doing what it is meant to be doing. It is not doing what it was made to do.

The problem with humans is they don't know what they were made to do. None of them knows what their natural state is.

Ian's pathetic state would be really annoying if he made no attempts to better himself. He does, however, work hard to save money to go to the French Alps. He loses a lot of weight by eating less food, but also gets roped into a ridiculous pyramid scheme. He also makes bumbling attempts to get with Sandra, which ends up landing him in even more trouble.

My two major complaints is that for all the time spent building up Ian's absurd and awful life, he seems to snap out of his complacency rather quickly. When he finally goes on his vacation, his epiphany feels rather forced. There is also a lot of repetition in the book that seems to be trying to help show Ian's trapped mindset, but doesn't really end up contributing much.

All in all, I think this is a solid novel. It's a funny and enjoyable absurd comedy about the emptiness of modern work life. Anyone who's ever worked a shitty job will sympathize with Ian's plight. This book is Socrates Adams's debut, and I think it's a good sign he'll be coming out with something even better in the future. I definitely recommend this, and I look forward to reading Adams's future works.

Buy Everything's Fine by Socrates Adams here.

Brief Thoughts 6

I've got a couple reviews coming down the pipe at Adventures in SciFi Publishing and at least one on here. Here's another entry in Brief Thoughts until then.

If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino 

Calvino quickly became one of my favorite authors after I read Invisible Cities and Cosmicomics. This was his first novel that I read, and I love it as much as his short stories.

The book is told in the second person for the most part. You, the Reader, are tying to read Italo Calvino's new novel If on a winter's night a traveler. You discover your copy is defective and exchange it at the book store. You find that your replacement copy is actually an entirely different novel. You set out to find the complete novels and stumble on an international book conspiracy made up of duplicitous translators, overzealous academics and a beautiful fellow reader that you fall in love with.

This is one of the most readable "postmodern" books that I've read. A lot of these types of books intentionally alienate and confuse the reader. This one's not much different, but the main story is a straightforward enough thriller that it keeps things grounded. It's pretty funny too.

The most interesting thing I've found in the book was the dynamic of reading as a form of personal enjoyment vs literature as a social and political force. While Calvino makes fun of the latter with the goofy academic characters, he doesn't dismiss it altogether. It's clear, though, that Calvino believes that literature is an individual experience to the reader, and that should be primary above sociopolitical considerations.

As he demonstrates in this very novel, it's very possible to create books that work to satisfy the reader as an individual without being completely asocial, apolitical or amoral. Being this is a novel about reading, the fact that people are not free to read as they please in many countries comes into play. The later chapters mock censorship of literature without being didactic or preachy

If you haven't read anything by Italo Calvino, you're missing out on a lot. This clever novel is as good a place as any to start with him.

Buy If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino here. 

Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

I randomly picked up this book without knowing much about it or Hermann Hesse, but I'm glad I did. This is a beautiful novel.

The story is about the spiritual journey of an Indian with the same name as the Buddha, who he meets along the way. He finds himself taken by the Buddha's teachings, but can't bring himself to become his disciple. He believes that in order to fully grasp this knowledge, he has to learn it himself as the Buddha did.

I'm hardly an expert on Buddhism. The only things I know about it comes from a few articles and Osamu Tezuka's Buddha series. This novel conveys the basic teachings of it (to my knowledge) very well, however. In an very poetic way too.

Even people who don't gravitate to Buddhist teachings will get a lot out of this book. It packs a lot of emotions in it's short length (only 122 pages in my New Directions edition). The basic lesson that true wisdom can only come through thinking for one's self is probably the most important theme in the work. It sounds trite, but I've never seen it presented so well.

This is a book who's beauty and importance I don't think I can properly convey. Highly recommended.

Buy Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse here.