Wednesday Wrecking Ball
The Horse's Mouth is another book I don't know if I'd have bothered with if it hadn't been on a list, but which I ended up being really glad I read. Gulley Jimson is a great narrator, despite being a trainwreck of a human being, somehow simultaneously a bullshit artist and a man without filter. The scenes between Gully and Sara, his ex-wife and ex-model, are particularly good: warm, contentious, sad and cruel. Gulley is cruel a lot of the time in petty, pointless ways, and his random flares of randy, sentimental misogyny are uncomfortably convincing. He can't stay kind for two minutes together, and every time he touches brush to canvas, or chalk to wall, his compulsion to paint gets a little more compelling.
Gulley doesn't have noble goals or a suffering spirit or whatever it is artists are supposed to have; he just gets pictures in his head and in his hands and has to get them out where he can see them. I was impressed by how Joyce Cary was able to draw such a sharp, pervasive, matter-of-fact portrait of a creative drive, without ever falling into the trap of pretending that that drive makes Gulley a Man Set Apart who deserves special clemency, or that his talent makes his rottenness "worth it" in some way, or that he's been driven to cheat his friends because No One Cares About Art Anymore and/or This World Was Never Meant for One As Beautiful as You.
Gulley may fall into that trap sometimes, but that's a different story.
Gulley Jimson is an awful human being who also makes art. When he dies, he leaves a handful of remarkable paintings, some sketches in private collection, part of a mural in rubble, and a pile of unpaid debts. "Was it worth it?" isn't the question. I don't know what the question is, and I couldn't answer it if I did. It's a good book, I think.
I didn't read as many short stories as I intended to read this week, but maybe I can catch up in the next one.
Ixtab Takes a Day Off, by Jennifer Dornan-Fish
http://www.abyssapexzine.com/2013/12/ixtab-takes-a-day-off/
The goddess of suicide decides to save a life. Unfortunately, she has no clue how to do that. The language is a little wobbly, especially at the start, but it's good-hearted and funny, and hopeful in the way a good evocation of despair can be sometimes.
Procosin, by Ursula Vernon
http://www.apex-magazine.com/pocosin/
Death's granddaughter helps to hide an old possum god from those who would claim his soul. Great narrative voice, very dense and grounded, so Southern you can feel the mosquitoes swarming.
Slamnesia, by Ronald D. Ferguson
http://www.abyssapexzine.com/2013/12/slamnesia/
The narrator is struck down with slamnesia, a condition in which his own mind is crowded with the memories of others. At first, the main effect of this condition is that the narrator is an asshole to his girlfriend. Later, he embezzles a large amount of money and learns to use his new personalities to his advantage. Then it turns out his girlfriend likes him better with slamnesia because one of the personalities is good in bed. Possibly she has slamnesia, too? I wasn't really sold. A couple of funny moments, some pretty clunky writing.
Folding Beijing, by Hao Jingfang
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/
Beautiful vivid City of the Future story in the Metropolis tradition, with dreamlike visuals and a literal underclass. A messenger risks arrest to sneak a message into the First Space of the wealthy from the massive night city of the waste management workers, in exchange for enough money to send his daughter to a good kindergarten. The mechanism of the folding city was hard to picture, but the details were good enough that it read as a realistic problem of scale, like walking through the gates of an oil refinermey for the first time, rather than a writing issue. Great pacing, suspenseful and heartbreaking and sharp and humane.
Kia and Gio, by Daniel Jose Older
http://www.tor.com/2015/01/06/kia-and-gio-daniel-jose-older/
This is a good ghost story, creepy and sad, full of unanswered questions and unsettling images. The best parts for me were the everyday things: Kia working in her uncle's botánica and her memories of hanging out with her cousin before the night of the cockroach men and his mysterious disappearance.
Anarchic Hand, by Andy Dudak
http://www.apex-magazine.com/anarchic-hand/
A woman who was cryogenically frozen in the late twenty-first century wakes up in an Antactic slum in the twenty-second, where homeless consciousnesses like her pay "instance whores" for the privilege of controlling a body for a little while. But too much instance-whoring leaves the mind open to further infection by the ghosts the air is rank with. I liked the McMurdo slum a little better than the premise and wished we had a little more of it; I thought both deserved a tighter story with a little less infodumping. Then again, what can you really do if you wake up bodiless in the future, except try to get someone to explain the situation at length?
What I'm Reading Now
Still making my way through My Wars are Laid Away in Books, the Emily Dickinson biography. It's fascinating and a little uncomfortable; Emily is becoming more and more clingy, and she and her brother are both making way too many emotional demands on her brother's fiancée, who is QUITE REASONABLY full of doubts about the wisdom of joining the Dickinson family. I keep whispering, "RUN, Susan!" at the page, though she's probably not going to run. Meanwhile, Emily's brother Austin has finally had a religious conversion, making Emily the last remaining "unchurched" member of her family -- and leading to a flurry of pointed references in her letters to the sting of treachery. I'm cringing and glued to the page at the same time. Oh, and also there's poetry.
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham is next in line for 99 Novels, and it's all right so far! It's so much lighter and less relentlessly circular than The Horse's Mouth that it probably feels a little frothier to me than it actually is. It's hard to say yet. The author is a character in his own book and the other characters all confide in him or tell him their gossip. It's an interesting approach.
I've been dipping in and out of a book called The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America 1900-1918, and it's ok -- more information than I was expecting based on the very generalized introduction, but still suffers a little from the shortcomings common to dissertations that get turned into books: too little specificity, too much theory, a certain amount of reaching. But there's still time for it to pick up, and I don't actually know whether it was a dissertation or not, and it'll be worth reading even if it stays the same throughout.
What I'm Reading Next
WHO KNOWS. I have so many things stacked up and no viable plan. I thought it would help to put the books I wanted to read next, or finish reading, in a little pile on the floor, but now the pile is a tower and I need another approach. Probably at least Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat, since I'm considering nominating Pat for Yuletide.
Gulley doesn't have noble goals or a suffering spirit or whatever it is artists are supposed to have; he just gets pictures in his head and in his hands and has to get them out where he can see them. I was impressed by how Joyce Cary was able to draw such a sharp, pervasive, matter-of-fact portrait of a creative drive, without ever falling into the trap of pretending that that drive makes Gulley a Man Set Apart who deserves special clemency, or that his talent makes his rottenness "worth it" in some way, or that he's been driven to cheat his friends because No One Cares About Art Anymore and/or This World Was Never Meant for One As Beautiful as You.
Gulley may fall into that trap sometimes, but that's a different story.
Gulley Jimson is an awful human being who also makes art. When he dies, he leaves a handful of remarkable paintings, some sketches in private collection, part of a mural in rubble, and a pile of unpaid debts. "Was it worth it?" isn't the question. I don't know what the question is, and I couldn't answer it if I did. It's a good book, I think.
I didn't read as many short stories as I intended to read this week, but maybe I can catch up in the next one.
Ixtab Takes a Day Off, by Jennifer Dornan-Fish
http://www.abyssapexzine.com/2013/12/ixtab-takes-a-day-off/
The goddess of suicide decides to save a life. Unfortunately, she has no clue how to do that. The language is a little wobbly, especially at the start, but it's good-hearted and funny, and hopeful in the way a good evocation of despair can be sometimes.
Procosin, by Ursula Vernon
http://www.apex-magazine.com/pocosin/
Death's granddaughter helps to hide an old possum god from those who would claim his soul. Great narrative voice, very dense and grounded, so Southern you can feel the mosquitoes swarming.
Slamnesia, by Ronald D. Ferguson
http://www.abyssapexzine.com/2013/12/slamnesia/
The narrator is struck down with slamnesia, a condition in which his own mind is crowded with the memories of others. At first, the main effect of this condition is that the narrator is an asshole to his girlfriend. Later, he embezzles a large amount of money and learns to use his new personalities to his advantage. Then it turns out his girlfriend likes him better with slamnesia because one of the personalities is good in bed. Possibly she has slamnesia, too? I wasn't really sold. A couple of funny moments, some pretty clunky writing.
Folding Beijing, by Hao Jingfang
http://uncannymagazine.com/article/folding-beijing-2/
Beautiful vivid City of the Future story in the Metropolis tradition, with dreamlike visuals and a literal underclass. A messenger risks arrest to sneak a message into the First Space of the wealthy from the massive night city of the waste management workers, in exchange for enough money to send his daughter to a good kindergarten. The mechanism of the folding city was hard to picture, but the details were good enough that it read as a realistic problem of scale, like walking through the gates of an oil refinermey for the first time, rather than a writing issue. Great pacing, suspenseful and heartbreaking and sharp and humane.
Kia and Gio, by Daniel Jose Older
http://www.tor.com/2015/01/06/kia-and-gio-daniel-jose-older/
This is a good ghost story, creepy and sad, full of unanswered questions and unsettling images. The best parts for me were the everyday things: Kia working in her uncle's botánica and her memories of hanging out with her cousin before the night of the cockroach men and his mysterious disappearance.
Anarchic Hand, by Andy Dudak
http://www.apex-magazine.com/anarchic-hand/
A woman who was cryogenically frozen in the late twenty-first century wakes up in an Antactic slum in the twenty-second, where homeless consciousnesses like her pay "instance whores" for the privilege of controlling a body for a little while. But too much instance-whoring leaves the mind open to further infection by the ghosts the air is rank with. I liked the McMurdo slum a little better than the premise and wished we had a little more of it; I thought both deserved a tighter story with a little less infodumping. Then again, what can you really do if you wake up bodiless in the future, except try to get someone to explain the situation at length?
What I'm Reading Now
Still making my way through My Wars are Laid Away in Books, the Emily Dickinson biography. It's fascinating and a little uncomfortable; Emily is becoming more and more clingy, and she and her brother are both making way too many emotional demands on her brother's fiancée, who is QUITE REASONABLY full of doubts about the wisdom of joining the Dickinson family. I keep whispering, "RUN, Susan!" at the page, though she's probably not going to run. Meanwhile, Emily's brother Austin has finally had a religious conversion, making Emily the last remaining "unchurched" member of her family -- and leading to a flurry of pointed references in her letters to the sting of treachery. I'm cringing and glued to the page at the same time. Oh, and also there's poetry.
The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham is next in line for 99 Novels, and it's all right so far! It's so much lighter and less relentlessly circular than The Horse's Mouth that it probably feels a little frothier to me than it actually is. It's hard to say yet. The author is a character in his own book and the other characters all confide in him or tell him their gossip. It's an interesting approach.
I've been dipping in and out of a book called The Lost Sisterhood: Prostitution in America 1900-1918, and it's ok -- more information than I was expecting based on the very generalized introduction, but still suffers a little from the shortcomings common to dissertations that get turned into books: too little specificity, too much theory, a certain amount of reaching. But there's still time for it to pick up, and I don't actually know whether it was a dissertation or not, and it'll be worth reading even if it stays the same throughout.
What I'm Reading Next
WHO KNOWS. I have so many things stacked up and no viable plan. I thought it would help to put the books I wanted to read next, or finish reading, in a little pile on the floor, but now the pile is a tower and I need another approach. Probably at least Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat, since I'm considering nominating Pat for Yuletide.