(That title refers to the good kind of chains, the kind that link things together, not bind people. Get it?)
Of the books I read last year, two of my favorite were Geoff Cochrane's Tin Nimbus & Poe Ballantine's 501 Minutes to Christ. I wrote about both of them somewhere else in these pages, so I won't go into detail about how I loved them again now.
(Yes, that is my book in the center. It's not a matter of ego; I was taking advantage of the goodwill I had earned at the shop to show what & who I was under the influence of. I don't think a single book sold from this display)
I sought Cochrane out in Wellington last year and, after telling him how much I enjoyed Tin Nimbus, gave him a copy of 501 Minutes to Christ. A couple of weeks ago I finally got around to sending Poe Ballantine a copy of Tin Nimbus.
Haven't seen Geoff Cochrane since then, but last week I got a package in the mail with a Chadron, Nebraska post mark, a letter from Poe Ballantine saying how he enjoyed Tin Nimbus, along with a signed copy of Ballantine's first book, Things I Like About America.
If anyone reading this hasn't read these books, dammit, what are you waiting for?
05.31.09 - American RustUnity recently hosted a reading for an American writer named Philipp Meyer. His debut novel has been hitting all the right buttons in the States, which has led most recently to a whirlwind tour of Australia and New Zealand.
I read the book out of a sense of duty then, or anyway I was moved to pick it up out of a sense of duty, but it was not duty that had me burn through it as quickly as I did. I enjoyed this novel more than any other I've read in a good long while.
There is an American poet named Jack Gilbert who used to write poems about Pittsburgh. He wrote passionately about the wabi sabi of the place, borrowing an idea from the Japanese that describes how the flaws that develop over time provide value for an object, value that has its roots in emotional history and personal relationships rather than sheer aesthetics.
I appreciate that Meyer, writing about the same region, chose to call his novel American Rust. The rust of the factories of Monument Valley is maybe the most visible sign of the community’s age and decline. Taken on its own, that rust might be seen as purely ugly, lamentable. Certainly some of the novel’s characters see it that way. But there are also those who are compelled to stay in the valley, or who leave and are drawn back, and for them the relationship is more complicated. Rust is a reminder of what made the place remarkable and is inextricably linked with the people’s history. Factories were closed and jobs were lost, and the decent hardworking Americans who had been told that they would always be able to get ahead if they did their best, suddenly found themselves struggling to hold onto the homes they had made.
The Publisher’s Weekly blurb on the cover of the book likens Meyer to Cormac McCarthy and Dennis Lehane. But Meyer writes about crime and its effects without resorting to the manipulative plot twists of a Lehane novel, and he fosters a compassion for his charatcers that McCarthy’s grim emotional detachment often fails to elicit. The murky moral compromises those characters find themselves making carry more weight as a result. For all its moments of bleakness, the novel has running through it a tone of hope. It finds value in loyalty, in community, and in sacrifices made for the love of others. Maybe the future of the new America will have us less concerned with being the strongest, the fastest, the best. Maybe we’ll recognize that being on top is not a requisite for happiness.
Not to get rid of all the rust, but to recognize the significance of the story behind it.
This little crevice of New Zealand gets more than its fair share of abuse and mockery, but the other morning as I was walking to work I looked out over the harbour, toward the distant Tararua mountains, and the way the mist came up from the river made it look like God had poured molten silver into the cleft of the valley. No picture can do it justice, but I hope this can give you some idea of how striking it was...
04.13.09 - Lawrence & Gibson's next international besteller Coming this winter, Wellington publishing collective Lawrence and Gibson will be releasing my [eagerly aniticpated?] follow-up to Without a Soul to Move, My Tender Jaw and Other Stories.
As the title might suggest to the terribly savvy, this's going to be a short story collection. The details are still getting hammered out, but you can expect to see "The Man Who Played Krapp," "The Reader's Story," and "Two Gallants in a Small American Town," among several others.
Keep your eyes fixed here for future developments.
(Sorry, I didn't mean that. Don't keep your eyes fixed here. Go get something to eat. I'll let you know when anything changes).
04.08.09 - The writer who writes better than 37% of graduate school aspirantsMy GRE scores came in today. I did about as well as I expected on the silly little verbal section, slightly better than I expected on the...ah...whatever it is they call the mathematics section--"Quantitative reasoning" or some such thing--and I did much, much worse than I epxected on the Analytical Writing section.
About five years ago, when I was preparing to get rejected by the University of Montana's writing program, I had to arrange for the scores of the test I had taken two years earlier to be sent to the school. Some bit of poor programming in the ETS's automated customer service line led to my sending the wrong scores (This was before the general test had a writing portion, and if you wanted writing assessment you had to take a subject test. I opted to take that test and famously wrote a long digression on instant oatmeal that garnered me a score of naught. Since the writing test was not required for admission to the University of Montana, I intended to send only my general test scores.)
So. The automated phone system functioned wretchedly, and I had to pay twice to get the correct score sent. When I called the ETS's customer service line featuring real live people, I was told more or less that I was a fool and that it was only fitting that I was parted with my money.
In those days, I used to sell my blood to buy whiskey. I made regular meals of the Burger & Beer for a Buck deal at the Buck's Club. I don't remember what the cost of the score report was, but any fee would have seemed exorbitant. Probably somewhere in the realm of fifty burgers & beers. Maybe only ten.
I wrote an angry letter to the ETS explaining my grievances, hammering home what an injustice it was to expect me to pay for what was obviously a flaw in the system. I bet the letter was full of fiery wit.
And it did the trick. The ETS refunded my money. Thing was, I had already asked my credit card provider not to pay the fee, so the refund was for money not sent. I called my credit card provider and explained the situation. I was told they had paid anyway, since the fee was considered too insignificant to contest with the ETS. They had paid out of their own coffers, without charging me. If you're paying attention--if you can do the maths as well as I did in that last test--you'll notice that I ended up making money on this deal.
It occurs to me now that if the woman with ETS who read my angry letter had been the same woman to read my test, I might have made out okay. She thought I was a compelling writer. I reckon the ETS should fire their readers and just get the customer service team to do double duty.
