Comics, Movies, Fighting Games, and Pop Culture. 3 New Podcasts Every Week!
Hey audioshockers! I've been in New Haven all week to visit my family (and Dad's Day / Mom's Birthday are adjacent). Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to read anything new - so this week I must place the onus squarely upon you to get this forum going. So let's blow the doors off the book club this week and get it crackin!
I am considering picking up this new joint, Robopocalypse - by Daniel Wilson, since the first chapter/intro were good and Stephen King cosigned it.
Welcome back paper sniffers. This week I bring you The Sisters Brothers by Patrick Dewitt. What caught me first off was the genius book cover design. I went from cover to PW review to Kindle in all of 30 seconds, and I was rather pleased throughout. If you don't like this book, you just don't know from fun.
Eli Sister and his brother Charlie are hired guns working for a shady Character called the Commodore out in Oregon City. Their last assignment left them with dead horses and bruised egos. Their latest involves tracking down a rogue prospector named Kermit in San Francisco. Throughout their journey, Eli discovers oral hygiene, Charlie gets drunk, and the bodies pile up.
Told from Eli's point of view, the book is full of family tension and a humorous self loathing due to an outsized reputation for violence. My favorite part would be the rather caustic description of San Francisco and the Gold Rush. As someone who is constantly being harangued about mission style tacos, the bay area tech scene, and SF coffee - I found it all rather fitting.
I don't know much about Westerns or frontier joints, but The Sisters Brothers is a fairly quick read, you won't get mired in umpteen characters, and the narrative rarely skips a beat. The plot may be sad, but the journey is hilarious.
And with that, this week's open forum book club is officially open. What up?
Welcome back chum chums. As mentioned last week, I will be using this post as the official open forum for our summer book club. I hope yallz had a chance to visit your local library and check out something awesome. Since we don't have a real agenda or any unanswered comments from last week, let me kick off this week's post by giving you a quick review/brief on what I read last week.
This past weekend I finished Kyle Smith's Love Monkey. The run down: our protagonist, 32 year old Tom Farrell, works at a tabloid called (har har) Tabloid as a robotically uninspired hack. Tom drinks too much. He exercises too little. He loathes himself just the right amount. Unsurprisingly, he has girl problems. He pines for a woman he can't have and is surrounded by others who are looking for something better. So, he takes life lessons from his dubiously successful friends, and music legends of old (Michael Stipe & Mick Jagger). Somehow he gets a bunch of these women in bed, juggles them, and then he fucks it all up. Excited yet? You really shouldn't be. Tom sucks. I hate Tom.
What strikes me about Smith was how quickly he and his protagonist simultaneously draw inspiration from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and then trashes it at the same time (seriously, it is all but called out by name) -- all within the first 40 or so pages. Given how quickly Smith returns to musical references and plays up Tom's preferences for this album over that album and how much he talks about music, it seems hypocritical to be so down on Nick.
What the book does well is embody Tom's personal desires and aspirations in his closest friends. His desire to get married. His desire to settle down. His desire to have a kid and be happy. And his diametric opposite: his desire to be a tall, black, cut, rich, casanova who doesen't give a shit about any woman (but who ultimately is just as personally tortured by a lost love as Tom is). There's this scene in a strip club where shit just goes haywire. I read that whole section as the inner workings of a really bad drunk/depression/breakdown.
It doesn't surprise me that Tom's self described 'manboy' personality is as detestable to me as it is to all the ladies he meets. He tries to internalize all the lessons thrown at him, and he learns from each of the ladies he gets involved in, but ultimately he satisfies none of them. He's too busy trying to be all things to all people.
In the aftermath (and well worn territory) of Sept 11th, Smith addresses things like terror sex (first identified to me via a now defunct [but VERY cool] blog called The Black Table) and how unrealistic we are. Are we trying to have it all -- and is that even a reasonable expectation? Tom couldn't - but if you need a funnier, more uplifting depiction from a female's POV, queue up any recent season of 30 Rock.
--- Ok, that's what I read. Now please, tell me what you are up to, literarily speaking.
Since Nick and I finally got around to doing the YDS Awards, I started thinking about other features we have neglected/are coming up -- most notably the AudioShocker Book Club. Last year, we petered out in July. This is unacceptable. In fact, it is downright criminal. Book clubs are like the OG social media. You read the book and then you talk about it with people. Boom.
That said, I know the AS audience is nowhere near my level of progress with 2010/11 novels. So, here's what we are going to do. I am going to give you a big list of recent books (emotional, scifi, weird, bad, comedy, prize winning), and every Friday I am going to use this space to host an open book discussion form. Any title. Just start commenting and I will respond. Hopefully Pete will contribute, but I'll do my best to spice it up with brief related edititorial content. Maybe a link to amazon or an alternate book cover or something - I don't know, I'm just winging it here. I may have discussed some of these books on the main podcast, but you probably weren't listening.
The point is, summer is a great time to pick up a book and read - and with plenty of sunshine and weekend reading time ahead of you - you should all be tearing through at least one book a week. For those of you who think books are heavy, cumbersome, or don't provide enough secondary distractions, Kindles & Nooks are cheaper than ever, so there really is no excuse. Hopefully I will see some of you back here next Friday.
And now, without further adieu, the AudioShocker 2011 Open Forum Book Club reading list:
Wow. So what a month of poetry it was (check out the documentation at www.omiami.org)! Not one to let all my responsibilities constantly slip by, the month of May brings a return to my culturological musings, and my vainglorious quest to make it to 100 posts. So this one might be a bit scattershot, as I pick up some pieces from the past month, but I'm really thinking that maybe, just maybe, I might make it back to my form of yore and drop some serious cultural science all over these here internets. Let's see...
During O, Miami, I met many incredible poets. I also met Kool Moe Dee and Monie Love, both of whom turned out to be incredibly caring and eloquent people.
I also met James Franco, which probably means something to all you fans of the Spider-Man movies. Here's pictorial evidence :
This, I think, would officially be the closest I've ever gotten to an encounter with pop culture. I think you can tell from our facial expressions that it really meant a lot to both of us.
The next most recent encounter, before the festival, was a time two winters ago, when I was walking down the street in Chelsea, Manhattan, just after a large snowstorm, and walked past Willem Dafoe (I know, the other Spider-Man actor!, crazy!), and I was looking at him, being all, like, "I think that's Willem Dafoe!" and he looked right back at me and without even nodding, acknowledged the fact that he was, indeed, Willem Dafoe, and that no words or body language need pass between us.
And one of my best friends kind of looks like Elijah Wood, who is easily confusable with Tobey Maguire, and my mom used to watch Wings a lot, so I feel like I've pretty much met all the important actors from the Spider-Man movies. And Kirsten Dunst. Kirsten Dunst.
I know I've been erratic with my Culturologying for the past few months, but by way of an excuse, I present a link to the thing which is my full-time job: O, Miami. It's a brand-new month-long county-wide poetry festival in Miami-Dade County, inaugurating this very April. Please check back to that site often, as we'll be updating information on it from this point forward up through and during the run of the festival.
And maybe, just maybe, I'll have time for some Culturological bulletins here and there in the meantime.
Last week's column got me thinking, since clearly neither The Frank Sanchez Band nor AxCx was first responsible for shouting "fuck yeah!" in song, who had done it first? I didn't find out the answer, but I did find the first-ever printing of the word "fuck" in English arts & letters! It was by the 15th Century Scottish poet, William Dunbar, in his (bawdy Scottish) poem known as either "A Brash of Wowing" or "A Secret Place." You can read it here.
The glorious stanza is this one:
His bony beird wes kemmit and croppit,
Bot all with cale it wes bedroppit,
And he wes townysche, peirt, and gukit.
He clappit fast, he kist and chukkit
As with the glaikis he wer ouirgane.
Yit be his feirris he wald have fukkit -
"Ye brek my hart, my bony ane."
Pretty evocative. Fuck Yeah! There's another classic stanza in there was well, in the history of racy verses:
Quod he: "My kid, my capirculyoun,
My bony baib with the ruch brylyoun,
My tendir gyrle, my wallie gowdye,
My tyrlie myrlie, my crowdie mowdie,
Quhone that oure mouthis dois meit at ane,
My stang dois storkyn with your towdie:
Ye brek my hairt, my bony ane."
According to his Wikipedia entry, Dunbar is also a forefather of printing the word "cunt" as well, but I really think that both "tyrlie myrlie" and "crowdie mowdie" (especially the latter) are better.
You know something is wrong when Pete is on the verge of having more posts than I do. And I wish I had a real excuse other than "school work" or "job hunt" or whatever, but I don't. Instead, how about we discuss book trailers?
First an example:
That's a big budget example, while this one was cheaper. These bad jackson's are becoming increasingly popular with entire sites devoted to aggregating/curating them (i.e. Book Screening)
Book ads aren't new - but book ads that are even remotely engaging are. The two most common formats I am aware of are the wan single column ads in the New Yorker and the kitschy urban thriller ads on the subway. Both are terrible and I can't remember the name of a single title or author that advertises this way.
Book trailers are a cute gimmick for YA - but the last thing I want to see is a trailer for Dan Brown's newest rag. And do adults really need to be wheedled into reading via video? I know selling books is tough and attention spans are short, but is compressing a book down to a 60 second trailer really the approach we want to take with readers? Books, even e-books, are not impulse buys. Are independent authors and academic presses going to have to start producing these things in hopes of getting titles picked up by majors? Will a Publisher's Weekly starred review still have any cachet? And how do librarians feel about this? Any residual value that librarians add, (at this point mostly recommendations to curious readers), is cut off at the knees by flashy videos.
I blame social media for this. At some point in the last 3 years, agencies and marketers decided that earning exposure without spending a dime on promotion was the ultimate goal. That is incredibly risky and stupid, especially since agencies rely heavily on media commissions. Retainers and other compensation structures may be changing this slowly, but by and large media commissions pay the bills.
But I can understand why it is so appealing to publishers. Even the major houses have extremely limited marketing budgets. I asked a sales rep this summer about book ads and he basically said that publishers can't come up with the scratch to do big ad campaigns, even digital/mobile campaigns which are typically much cheaper print. I find this all rather puzzling. Publishers are willing to use their scarce resources to create these risky trailers - but not to promote them. Considering how quickly poor week 1 sales will get a book pulled off the shelf, marketing really is the name of the game. You can't rely on social/viral media - you have to use it to augment your media strategy. And without an integrated conversion/preorder/sale option, these trailers may never lead to a sale.
There is so much cool/ interactive stuff you could do with book ads, but no one seems to care. How about an ad unit that expands, pushes the page content over to the side (these already exist), and allows you to read a chapter from the book? It could have direct links within the unit to purchase the book and continue reading, download directly to your e-reader, or order the physical copy? Or why not have an ad that shows you where the closest library or author signing is using IP geo-location? A lot of this stuff is already available, but the majors are content to ignore what's right in front of them.
If anyone has a good counter example, I'd love to see it. Things change everyday afterall.
Ok, rant over.
I like to read short stories. I wouldn't say I am a terribly well informed reader, but I read WSJ articles when I am at my parents' place, The New Yorker when it is sitting around, creative non-fiction to pass the time, and short fiction as a break from novels.
Collection and series such as Best American are great because they curate my whole experience and take the work out of subscribing to thousands of journals and blogs just to find something decent to read. I get to read across a range of authors and themes. However, as of late, I have a serious bone to pick with the editors of these collections: every story I read is depressing as hell.
Have any of you seen Wendy and Lucy? Imagine a film festival where every entry was like that. How about an endless loop of the last 10 minutes of Nights of Cabiria and The Bicycle Thief? That's what these anthologies seem like: a broken record of hopelessness and heart ripping grief.
I know that some amount of conflict is necessary to drive a story. Obviously a 100% positive narrative would not make a compelling story - but why does every anthologized short story that I read leave me with a pit in my stomach? Lee Gutkind's Becoming a Doctor, a collection of creative nonfiction written by doctors, almost had me crying myself to sleep. Three of the first five entries in The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories made me feel so dejected that I lost my appetite.
In my high school Spanish class, we read a lot of Mexican literature, There too, all the stories followed the same pattern: tragedy besets family (vital livestock/family member dies), youth goes on a journey to better his circumstances, tragedy befalls youth again, tragic end. I wish I could find the book we used so I could quote some of the examples to you, but I recall one story where a cow was killed by a snake, another with a recurring comparison of a man's hands to worms, a long drawn out tale documenting the aftermath of a grand mothers death. There was just no positive message anywhere. In fact, these may be the most terrifyingly depressing stories ever.
Editors - I'm not asking for a cute romantic comedy (I have bittorrent for that) - but would it kill you to include a few chuckle worthy tales in your neatly collected volumes? Can't the guy get the girl every now and then? Does fire/war/pestilence/disease/CANCER have to ruin every narrative? Why even bother foreshadowing or irony when your peer authors have already extinguished any possibility of optimism?
The Bottom Line: Who decided that short stories can't end in anything less than general malaise?
One of the nice things about being 6 hours ahead of the East Coast (I'm in Berlin doing location scouting for the Time Log Web Comic) is that my "oh shit it's Friday and I forgot to write a culturology report!" moment, even as it happened at 6pm, really only happened at noon, and now I've still got a few hours to sneak in a post within some fine modicum of ontimeliness. So how about that. Now, of course, the problem is that, as per usual, I don't have all that much to write about, it still being 2010, one of the worst years for movies ever.
But I do want to mention, I suppose to Nick & Neal, that I can take a hint, guys. How, now on the side bar, under "Current Features" I'm no longer listed on my own, but instead lumped in with "and books." Now, certainly, most of the (non-comic) book-related material on the blog comes from Culturology. But not all of it. But is there really enough stuff about books on Audioshocker that it deserves to have it's on little link there like an annoying shadow cast by the awesome obelisk of Culturology?
And well, I guess I'm not really gonna add any content other than that little snippet of griping, 'cause I don't have a whole lot else to say for myself, except that Hesse's Siddhartha, in the original German, is great reading. And South Park, dubbed into German, is a fun way to bone up on one's language skills.
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