The Mind of a Chef; Writing; Reading

THE MIND OF A CHEF. Been watching a lot of this show over the past few months, not on Netflix, but on my local PBS station. The thing I like about The Mind of a Chef is how the episodes – mini-documentaries, really – are generally so well done that I find myself investing in the lives of these various chefs, who I might not otherwise care that much about if they weren’t swaggering around the world on semi-drunken, binge-eating travelogue shows.

WRITING. Taking a cue from Warren Ellis’s newsletter, I’m going to talk about my current works in progress by giving them code names. Not because of any contractual obligations about confidentiality, but because I’m superstitious. I’ve always felt that talking too much about what I’m writing takes away some of the urgency to write it. It's just possible that I'm just so lazy that I'll look for any excuse. Either way, I’m going to make more of an effort because I’ve been told lately that people like knowing what writers are working on. And so…

• PROJECT RUST: An essay for an anthology series I’m trying to crack into. It's about 800 words about a certain sanctuary in my hometown. Gonna give it another pass or two and send it in.
• PROJECT FLOSS: Novel that’s currently in index cards, hidden under a blanket on a table in my lab. The toes, chest, and nose are poking through. Gonna have to suck it up, switch the Jacob's Ladder back on, and make it walk.
• PROJECT FIELD: A short story I’m wrestling with from an idea that won’t go away. Just as well because my problem has always been follow-through. It’s been on the back burner, but I just saw a call for a story anthology for which this piece could work.

READING. Just finished Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology from Belt Publishing, because Cleveland Rocks. It's a little frustrating though that I'm going through about 10 books simultaneously, and this one I picked up and devoured this essay collection in three days flat. Will probably read Car Bombs to Cookie Plates: The Youngstown Anthology next because it has pieces from, among others, Ed “Al Bundy” O’Neill and Christopher Barzak. And then I really need to get back to my reading queue before I start Gabrielle Hamilton’s memoir Blood, Bones & Butter: the Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef, but it’s tempting, since it’s her episodes currently showing on The Mind of a Chef.

And so turns the circle…

World Fantasy Convention 2015; Borgesian Philippines; What I'm Reading

WORLD FANTASY CONVENTION 2015. Took a hop northeast from Ithaca to Saratoga Springs last weekend, despite the Piss Poor Harassment Policy kerfuffle. Managed to not only keep my running streak of being on WFC programming (3 for 3), but I actually appeared on two panels: “Real World Nomenclature, Taboos, and Cultural Meaning” (There’s a pretty good summary here.) and “Bibliofantasies.” Or, as I call it, “Bibliofantasies 2: Electric Bugaloo” since I was also on a panel of the same name at WFC 2012. After all, how the fuck else I could I sit on a panel with Michael Dirda, John Clute, Robert Eldridge, Paul Di Filippo, and Gary Wolfe? The socializing, always the best part of any con, was more targeted now that I’ve been at enough of these things not to fanboy over everybody in the room, and to instead spend the time with people – old and new friends – that I want to spend time with. Okay fine, I finally got to meet Jeffrey Ford and squee about what a big fan I am. Happy?

Not a hoax. Not a dream sequence.

BORGESIAN PHILIPPINES. Missed a talk by Gina Apostol, author of the upcoming novel William McKinley’s World on the Philippine-American War. In it, she makes the disturbing observation about how hard it was to find first-person Filipino voices in records of the period, and where she did find it “…occurring mainly in captured documents within military records, the Filipino voice being a text within a text, mediated, annotated, and translated by her enemy.” There's a bittersweet Romantic tragedy about how this mediated story of the Philippines casts it as a place that’s as fantastic as Borges' Tlön. This is relevant to a project in progress....

WHAT I’M READING. My personally inscribed copy of Mary Rickert’s collection You Have Never Been Here, worth the cover price for the single previously unpublished story “The Shipbuilder.” Pieces of The Best American Travel Writing 2015 edited by Andrew McCarthy, for another project in progress, Laszlo Bock’s Work Rules!, and when I can, Felicia Day’s You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost). Yes, that’s an awful lot of nonfiction, I know. What's your point?

Quickie Review: SEVEN GOOD YEARS by Etgar Keret

The Seven Good Years: A Memoir by Etgar Keret
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I used to read essay collections for facts, details, or wit. And if I stumbled across the occasional bit of truth or wisdom, so much the better. Now this could be my bias towoard Etgar Keret (#2 on my I'll Read Anything They Write List), but this collection is brimming with both. Okay, maybe more of the former than the latter... but I think even Keret would say that.

Remove the surrealist and speculative elements from Keret's writing and you're still left with his sense of the absurd, with keen observations of (by way of projections onto) other characters, and not surprisingly, his friend Uzi who, just like in the stories, offers advice such as...

What you need isn't a bunch of lies from a PhD in clinical psych. You need a real solution: a nest egg in a foreign bank account. Everybody's doing it.

Not every essay reached me; there were a couple that left me scratching my head. But I'm used to that experience reading Keret's short stories, so I'm okay with it.

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Quickie Review: RIVETHEAD

Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line by Ben Hamper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I read Rivethead from the perspective of someone for who lived through the time period this book was written in. Very little of this touches my direct experience except vicariously though the stories of people I've known who have lived a version of the life described herein. I mention this because, as in my reading of Nothin' But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America's Industrial Heartland, I do have a slightly stronger connection than someone reading this to get off on Rust Belt Chic ruin porn hipsterism.

Those sorts would paint Hamper as a working class revolutionary, an embedded journalist exposing the truth of life at the bottom of the American auto industry in Flint, MI in the late '80s and early '90s. Certainly, the book's blurbs lead you to that line of thinking. But Hamper's and his cohorts' enemies weren't really General Motors, its then-Chairman and CEO Robert Smith, or even the shop foremen of the Truck and Bus plant. Hamper writes, "Our only adversary was Father Time", that is, the interminably slow second hand of the clock, plodding toward the end of your shift, during which your only choices are to either occupy your mind with plots to sneak out of the plant, inventing workplace-unsafe and semi-violent games like "Rivet Hockey" and "Dumpster Ball", or numbing your mind with chemicals. Anything to escape the tedium of the "unskilled labor" for which men like Hamper were programmed. Hamper doesn't (intentionally) expose a corporation's secret agenda; he's writing about what he's living, with skills he gleaned from Catholic high school education, reading and writing poetry, listening to Mothers of Invention albums, and taking LSD. The result is prose that simultaneously delights even as it shames you for thinking, "This, from a shoprat?"

Hamper is very much a product of his time and place, a Boomer writer using WWII and Viet Nam War references to talk about the Midwest cultural clashes surrounding him: Salaried employees vs. hourly employees. Foremen vs. the shoprats. Fathers vs. sons. Mars vs. Venus. Art rock vs. Classic rock. Living and writing within his comfort zone vs. the life he could've had, and actually sampled through his association with filmmaker Michael Moore. (The book is worth the price of admission just to read an account of Moore outside of Moore's narrative.) Thing is, you wouldn't think a book of pieces written in the late '80s/early '90s would be as even-handed as it is about the US auto industry's competition with Japan, and so you learn things like about how GM didn't just try to instill a fear of Toyota in its workers, but of Ford, as well.

Consequently, being a product of his time and place, the writing shows Hamper's exposure to the background radiation of racism, classism, misogyny, body-shaming, slut-shaming, homophobia, and ableism you'd expect from someone who grew up the Midwest in the '60s and '70s. (One plus: the use of the word tranny in the book only ever refers to an automobile's transmission.) I have no reason to believe Hamper would espouse or display the above; I doubt he would in this day and age where he continues to do the occassional reading. But neither does Hamper try to disabuse you of the notion that some of his family and coworkers might.

Hamper is often referred to as Flint's answer to Cleveland's Harvey Pekar. Hamper's output and subject matter certainly bear a resemblance, from life on the job right down to the unique cast of secondary characters from the line. Neither men particularly want your praise or your pity. But even Pekar's observations occasionally had bright, if rare, moments of optimism. Harvey wanted to show profundity hidden in the quotidian. Hamper, on the other hand, shows you absurdity hidden in the drudgery.

In the end, Rivethead is the story of a man embracing his destiny, for better AND for worse, and ending in a place you don't expect but by which you shouldn't be especially shocked.

The truth was loose: I was the son of a son of a bitch, an ancestral prodigy born to clobber my way through loathsome dungheaps of idiot labor. My genes were cocked and loaded. I was a meteor, a gunslinger, a switchblade boomerang hurled from the pecker dribblets of my forefathers' untainted jalopy seed. I was Al Kaline peggin’ home a beebee from the right field corner. I was Picasso applyin’ the final masterstroke to his frenzied Guernica. I was Wilson Pickett stompin’ up the stairway of the Midnight Hour. I was one blazin’ tomahawk of m-fuggin’ eel snot. Graceful and indomitable. Methodical and brain-dead. The quintessential shoprat. The Rivethead.

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Quickie Review: NOTHIN' BUT BLUE SKIES

Nothin' But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America's Industrial Heartland by Edward McClelland
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Lest anyone think I read this just to latch on to the hipsterish aspects of the "Rust Belt Chic" trend, know that I was born in Cleveland a mere four years after the Cuyahoga River burned, and I grew up through most of the events in the "Burn On, Big River" chapter of the book. Take McClelland's writing on Dennis Kucinich's various rises and falls, for instance. No matter how much prominence he gained after reinventing himself as a national politician, and regardless of how many of his views I might share, I'll always know him as "Dennis the Menace" because in the late 70s/early 80s, even a six year old like me could read a political cartoon in THE PLAIN DEALER and glean from how the grown-ups talked that that's what everyone thought of him. We were reading USA TODAY in grade school when the whole the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing came up. And I had one of my first underage drinks just as the Flats was transitioning from a hotspot to a hive of scum and villainy. (I'd left before it finally turned into a "Scooby Doo ghost town".)

All that to say that if McClelland, a native of Lansing, MI, did enough of his homework to get those sorts of Cleveland details right then it seemed likely to me that his notes about life in post auto industry Youngstown, Detroit, Flint, Lansing, etc. also has a genuine ring of truth. In fact, reading about the stories of these other places and some of the people in them felt like a rediscovery of sorts. I can imagine this is what it feels like for someone who has some weird personality quirk that never made sense to anyone until some previously hidden fact of biological or social history was discovered and gave you the context. I'd never heard the terms "bathtub Madonna" or "Mary on the half shell" before reading this book, and never knew how prevelant they were in other places similar to Cleveland, and yet I'd grown up seeing these little homemade grotto shrines to the Virgin Mary in every neighborhood I ever rode through inside Cleveland.

The book succeeds in giving me what feels like a thorough background about subjects I already knew, or at least in filling in the gaps about things I witnessed from a short distance. I was familiar with the socioeconomic patterns and movements of White Flight and gentrification, but this book clarifies the mechanics of it, particularly with respect to the decrepit housing and infrastructure it left behind (neither of which was really all that great to begin with). McClelland also lists a few examples of what happens when movements born of social justice to serve people crash and burn when they start becoming unsustainable, which many times has to do with internal personalities and politics, as much as whatever the latest company outsourcing or international trade plan is.

I was startled to learn exactly how much politicians in other regions of the country are looking over the carcass of the Rust Belt and still see a couple of things worth stripping even now, like Great Lakes water. A part of me cheered when I read about the political pushback these efforts get; Michigan representatives basically saying, "You wanted to go live in that sand box [i.e places like Georgia, Nevada, Arizona, etc. which have lured people and jobs from Michigan]. Don't come crying to us when you can't find anything to drink."

The one nit I have is that McClelland does a little too good of a job integrating various regional idioms of, to put it mildly, an insensitive stripe. It's one thing to quote, or report a quote from, various sources and stories, like one in which a Daley political operative tells Chicago Latino voters, "We want you guys to be our minority, because we're already sick of that other minority [emphasis mine]." But it's another to uncritically mix them into your own narrative. The author writes, "[Latinos in South Chicago] had their own church -- Our Lady of Guadalupe -- and they were tolerated by Stosh and Chester [i.e. code for "men of eastern European descent"] at the ironworkers' tavern, who figured it was them or the colored [i.e. the other minority]." And while I'm fairly certain McClelland himself doesn't espouse these beliefs, that contention might be a tougher sell for people to whom I might recommend this book. I theorize (but could be wrong) that I'll have to deal with this in the next book in my Rust Belt reading queue, Ben Hamper's Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line.

But then, personally, I'm a little (too?) used to it. After all, I grew up around that; hell I'm a Filipino-American who grew up in it. And if nothing else, this book goes a long way to telling me why.

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Currently Reading, Backyard Fracking, and Filipino Rondalla

CURRENTLY READING: All of my reading lately has been on the non-fiction tip. The last fiction I've read was a slog of a collection that I haven't finished yet. (It has some incredible craftsmanship, but damn if most of the stories just don't do it for me.) Anyway, what HAVE I been reading? I've made it into the Dark Horse years of AMERICAN SPLENDOR. I'm about halfway through NOTHIN' BUT BLUE SKIES: THE HEYDAY, HARD TIMES, AND HOPES OF AMERICA'S INDUSTRIAL HEARTLAND by Eric McClelland which I discovered while perusing BELT MAGAZINE's website. And lest you think I'm just now jumping on the whole "Rust Belt Chic" bandwagon, I'll just say that I grew up during most of the stuff in Chapter 4 of BLUE SKIES (i.e. the Cleveland chapter). It's been enlightening nonetheless to look at the historical context of my early life.  And, I just picked up BIOPUNK: SOLVING BIOTECH'S BIGGEST PROBLEMS IN KITCHENS AND GARAGES the other day at a bookstore discount table for $4, because there just has to be a story in here somewhere.

BACKYARD FRACKING: Something I forgot to mention when I wrote up having seen the short documentary BACKYARD at FLEFF. During the Q&A with the filmmaker, someone asked if she attempted to get any comments from the fracking industry. She says she did, and that it was rather easy to. She was granted tours through various rigs -- sans her camera crew -- and interviewed workers who apparently only had the same pro-fracking talking points. She reported being unable to find anyone with a unique pro-fracking story, which she attributes to the industry's powerful propaganda machine. Power that was corroborated by an audience member with an account of the presence of energy companies in the independent film business and festival circuit. Know thy enemy and co-opt. Basic, really.

FILIPINO RONDALLA: Of course they'd have a Filipino Rondalla group at the Ivy League for which I work. To paraphrase the motto, "Any person, any extracurricular activity," apparently. It brought back some childhood memories of my first visit to the Philippines when I was about four. I remember a candle dance and a tinikling demo, just like what I saw at the group's concert last Saturday. That said, I have to acknowledge that this student display of Filipino culture--the culture of my parents--isn't the culture of everyone in the Philippines. I fear for the non-Filipino audience members who may have left feeling armed with a proper overview of "Filipino culture", and then trying to share this knowledge with, say, someone from the Visayas or Mindanao. They may not be received well.  After all, Filipinos have stabbed people for far less....

Next time, I'll probably talk about the lung pox I'm fighting.

Quickie Review: IN SEARCH OF AND OTHERS

In Search of and Others by Will Ludwigsen
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I share the author's obsession with the old In Search of... series starring Leonard Nimoy, and Ludwigsen does a wonderful job writing pieces that resonate with that vibe. It also seems he and I share some other interests and experiences in common: with Appalachia, the mental health profession, and--if the multiple appearances of dead people in rivers are any indication--Raymond Carver's story "So Much Water, So Close to Home."

My issue was that, with exceptions, my general reading experience was that of being told. Yes, I realize that may even have been the point. Heck, in the story "We Were Wonder Scouts," we're told a story which has a scene in which a secondary character tells a story. But the approach is double-edged. There's no question Ludwigsen has mad storytelling skills. But I didn't always feel the sort of tension I like to feel in short-short stories.

The exceptions really touch me, though. "Mom in the Misted Lands" had such a poignancy in its telling and in its theme. "The Ghost Factory" hit a different spot, giving me a (pleasantly!) sickening "There, but for the grace..." feeling.

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Quickie Review: BEFORE THE INCAL

Before the Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The book almost defies your expectations of a prequel for The Incal. Still, you get the origins of pathetic Class "R" detective John DiFool, you see the byzantine and surreal chain of events that push him directly to his role in that story, and you see in the last chapter--which I personally could've done without--wherein Jodo feels the need to show every other character in The Incal and how they're positioned to take up their roles in that book. But that doesn't take away from how brilliantly the Jodoverse was fleshed out by Zoran Janjetov in true Moebius-like fashion. And while this story is a significantly lighter on spiritual concepts than The Incal, Jodo does a great job highlighting the existential and practical suffering of a world which lacks the spiritual.

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Quickie Review: IF I WOULD LEAVE MYSELF BEHIND: STORIES

Just thought I'd start 2015 by catching up on some reviews...

If I Would Leave Myself Behind: Stories by Lauren Becker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The writing in this collection of flash pieces captured me. I got so caught up in the moment by the oft-times brutal economy of language, of the images of despair, ferocity, hope, and survival that I was pretty breathless by the time I was done with it. So much so that when I try to sit down and wrote about the collection in aggregate, I feel like I somehow missed the forest for the trees and so I'd reopen the book, go back over a few pieces, only to find myself breathless again. I've done this three or four times now, so here, 5 out of 5 already!

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Quickie Review: SYLLABUS: NOTES FROM AN ACCIDENTAL PROFESSOR

Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor by Lynda Barry
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first sought out Barry's comics years ago because Filipina! Okay, part-Filipina but enough to hook me with a panel of an elderly woman, sitting on a couch with one elbow resting on her raised knee, declaring "Ay, nako!" But Syllabus was my first encounter with one of Barry's artistic how-to books. It's a compilation of syllabi, courses, and exercises she's used in the various classes she teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Other artistic how-to books emphasize the importance of play, but this is the first one I've read that has shown me exactly how to leverage that idea. Barry's thesis is that when we were drawing or writing as children, the last thing on our minds was whether or not we were creating works of art; at least in my case, she's right. And thus, I get something extremely valuable from this book: a method for RE-training myself to suspend any judgement at all about writing as I'm writing. (That stuff is for editing and polishing later.)

Syllabus gets 5 stars because after a mere two weeks, the exercises within--more or less in practice; definitely in principle--have already yielded dividends as far as filling some of the gaps in my writing practice that I've been struggling with since the day I started. I can feel the techniques reshaping my artistic process the way I used to feel muscles being shaped while working out (another experience I haven't had in awhile), and it feels great!

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Quickie Review: BITE: AN ANTHOLOGY OF FLASH FICTION

BITE: An Anthology of Flash Fiction by Katey Schultz
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good number of pieces here actually didn't hit me the way I like flash stories to hit me. Possibly I'm a little inured to that these days. And yet when I considered each piece and what I took away, I discovered a few stories with layers of subtlety. Yes, I realize not every piece of flash fiction has to slap me in the face to be effective. And yet, it was a little difficult for me to distinguish some of the slower-burning pieces with pieces that only fit the flash rubric in terms of minimal word count. Those latter pieces might be complete stories, but they could've been told--might as well have been told--in two or three or five thousand words. There were gems from some of "the usual suspects" in flash fiction that I like to read: Bruce Holland Rogers, Tara Masih, Sherrie Flick, Tom Hazuka, et al. But my joy at reading those stories was tempered by the ones that didn't impress so much. I'm rating this 4 stars, but it's really closer to 3.6 for me.

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Quickie Review: THIS WON'T TAKE BUT A MINUTE, HONEY

This Won't Take But a Minute, Honey by Steve Almond
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

An opinion about a book of 30 microessays and 30 flash fiction stories shouldn't be very long. The essay half is on writing; it's now in my top 5 of writing resources. Not every flash tale resonated with me but "Unfriendly Cashiers" is any indication, each story holds a grain of real truth.

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Quickie Review: THE EYES OF THE CAT

The Eyes of the Cat by Alexandro Jodorowsky
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Pure impulse buy at my local comics shop. I've been on a Jodorowsky kick lately (I'm working my way through his films and have already read The Incal and some of The Metabarons) so this shouldn't surprise anyone.

The first graphic novel collaboration between Jodo and Mœbius gives us twenty-four full page illustrations with minimal dialogue, as part of Jodo's attempt to do something unconventional while trying to subvert commercial constraints. (He says as much in his introduction to this 2013 edition.) While the story is short enough to warrant grumblings about the collection being overpriced, it has everything you'd expect from any Jodorowsky/Mœbius tale in Métal Hurlant magazine: surrealistic sci-fi illustrated by a master. On top of that... again, we're talking about full page Mœbius here, so while the collection could've (should've?) been cheaper, I was happy to pay what I paid.

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Quickie Review: STORIES FOR NIGHTTIME AND SOME FOR THE DAY

Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

There's no way a reader and writer like me was going to pass up a story collection from someone whose work appears in The New Yorker, The Antioch Review, decomP, Monkeybicycle, PANK, et al., and whose book is blurbed by Ray Bradbury and Gary K. Wolfe!

I get the accusations about the book being "gimmicky". I get that some readers require characters to have things like names other than The Man, The Woman, or The Octopus. I get that the structure of these stories can seem repetitive. While the language, characterization, and descriptions of setting are stripped-down, it's done so strategically. There's still enough sense of character and place for relatively whole stories. Stories that are as instructive as any fable, complete with a moral--but which are as subject to interpretation as any myth.

When a story ends, so endeth the lesson. And while the lessons might not be profound necessarily, I think that's the point. The lessons are truths we (should) all know. What's profound is how Loory illustrates these truths with a mix of the real and unreal. Loory deftly places his character and the reader in all sorts of fantastic worlds. And what they find there is what we find here: the Kabat-Zinn truism of, "Wherever you go, there you are."

I know some writers and critics in speculative fiction for whom this would absolutely stick in their craw. And some of those folks intersect with those I know who don't much enjoy short stories, let alone short-short fiction. They tend not to be people I drink with, anyway.

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Quickie Review: THE MEMORY GARDEN

The Memory Garden by M. Rickert
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This review is probably biased. I've been a fan of Rickert's writing for almost a decade. As far as I know, I've read her entire published oeuvre, and have gone on record talking about how much I love it. I even had the pleasure of telling her face to face a few weeks ago!

A lot of Rickert's shorter work is often populated by the walking wounded. Characters who are often terribly aware of whatever darkness (some kind of guilt, trauma, tragedy, maybe some secret) pervades their lives. It often isolates them, as those who might share that grief--well-meaning lovers, family, community--move on. And while sometimes (not every time) I'm left with a sense of a character's transformation, of some tiny newfound strength or hope in the future, I would fear what tomorrow could bring them.

The difference in Rickert's debut novel The Memory Garden, is that Nan and her friends Mavis and Ruthie made it through to the other side of their darkness. They lived past a shared tragedy some sixty years into old age. Not unscathed, of course. The damage to their lives is done, and they drift apart. But one way or the other and with varying degrees of success, they each soldiered on to eventually move into and through their own individual guilts and traumas--and occasional blessings, too. Nan was given the care of Bay, an unexpected, maybe even undeserved miracle. And Nan chooses to raise Bay, even if it meant doing so in the shadows of everything that came before. Even if it meant more secrets.

It's the sort of situation one falls into once life becomes about more than survival.

The Memory Garden's peculiar cast of characters gathered under even more peculiar circumstances shows us what any of Rickert's short story characters' lives might be like sixty years after a given tale, about a time when the past will, despite whatever life you might have lived in the interim and whatever you've done to put distance between you and it, demand to be reckoned with. And this is, at least as far as my memory of Rickert's other work goes, fresh ground.

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Quickie Review: THE INCAL

The Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'll be honest, I finally got around to reading this classic only after having seen Frank Pavich's documentary Jodorowsky's Dune. I'd heard of Jodo and his El Topo, and you can't be any kind of comics fan without having at least heard the name Mœbius. Still, I came late to this particular party.

It's absolutely true what people have said--you can literally pick out the bits that have been used in any number of sci-fi films over the past 30 years. I'd never read The Incal, but every one of Mœbius's meticulously drawn panels seemed familiar. Jodo's writing didn't disappoint either--it's a good example of a writer weaving his beliefs into a story while avoiding, IMO, turning the work into a tract.

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Quickie Review: JAGANNATH

Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This review is technically incomplete. I finished this book back in September ('13) but didn't write about it until now (January of '14). I felt I couldn't write about it because I didn't (and still haven't) rated the story "Some Letters for Ove Lindström." (I'm still too close to the subject matter of that story.)

I know almost nothing about the Swedish/Scandinavian myths and didn't think I necessarily had to in order to see the heart of these stories. Nor could I tell which stories were translated and which were written in English. It's testament to Tidbeck's writing, I think.

The collection started strongly and ended with a bang. The stories that didn't move me were generally the ones where Tidbeck revisits certain themes without, at least as far as I could tell, adding anything new. Those aside, the ones that did move me are positively gut-wrenching.

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Coca-Cola Comic Book Orgy, or Quickie Review: HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR

Horse of a Different Color: Stories by Howard Waldrop
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

5 out of 5, with the caveat that I cannot be objective about this collection. Howard Waldrop is one of the few writers whose work I'll buy the day it comes out, unseen and unreviewed.

If all Waldrop does is cleverly hide all sorts of historic/pop culture Easter eggs into most of his stories with barely any telegraphing, it would be a feat. Indeed, it's a point of pride for me when I catch them. I immediately recognized bits of the Bird Man of Alcatraz in the story of the "Wolf-Man" of the same. But, here's Waldrop's trick: as always, there are moments I fail to spot the references, and it doesn't affect my enjoyment of the stories one bit!

More importantly (to me at least), Waldrop's characters almost always convey some sort of bittersweet piece of truth or wisdom that can only be gained from going around the proverbial block a time or two.

I did let a sliver of objectivity creep into my reading, but I won't mention it here (you can find it in my story-by-story comments on the actual goodreads review page). It's more of a technical quibble, anyway. Whatever.

Also, "Coca Cola comic book orgy" is now my favorite Waldrop line. If I had a band, I'd ask his permission to use it as a name.

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Quickie Review: North American Lake Monsters

North American Lake Monsters: Stories by Nathan Ballingrud
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Plain and simple, if this collection doesn't win the Shirley Jackson Award or the World Fantasy Award for 2013, there really is no f**ing justice in the world.

I hung on every word in this collection. I was enthralled by every story, something I haven't felt since reading M. Rickert's Map of Dreams. Ballingrud takes some rather standard horror tropes and gives the readers more palpable and disturbing reasons to fear them. In a lot of stories, the horror/speculative element serves as a possible pathway that can be chosen by a given character. What's disturbing is that often times that pathway represents a viable, sometimes even a preferred, life option.

I found myself giving each story a 5* rating. But that isn't to say the collection didn't have it its... well, I'm so reluctant to say "flaws." That's much too strong a word, in my opinion. Let's say, "Things that took me out of the story for a micro-second, of which I took note before re-submerging myself back into it." There were two.

In the cover blurb, Maureen McHugh calls the collection "Raymond Carver territory." There's definitely a "K-Mart Magical Realism" thing going on here. The opening scene in "The Good Husband" would've made me think of "So Much Water So Close to Home" even if Carver wasn't referenced in the blurb. One of the tiny, tiny problems I had, though, was being so effectively grounded in each main character's POV--very Carver-esque characters--that I couldn't help but notice when these characters, as they're written, would think in un-Carver-esque terms. A construction worker seeing something "in a rictus of pain." An ex-con encountering something "soporific." A homeless man smelling "the ripe, deliquescent odor of river water." (Maybe it's more accurate to substitute "Raymond Carver" for "Gordon Lish," but that's another debate altogether.)

The other matter depends on how cynical a reader one is. What I might, and in fact DO, interpret as this collection being an examination of a singular theme from multiple angles might be interpreted by another reader as "the same story over and over again."

I feel like I've given too much time to these issues relative to the actual impact on my reading experience. But it's important to note that even despite them, the quality of the stories is such that I unreservedly give this collection a 5* rating.

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"I'm gonna take the stone of Sisyphus. I'm gonna roll it back to you."

Alternative Alamat: Stories Inspired by Philippine Mythology by Paolo Chikiamco
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In his introduction, editor Paolo Chikiamco spells out the payoff and the problems involved in putting together an anthology of remixed Filipino myths. "We are a nation of many indigenous cultures--numbering anywhere from sixty to over a hundred, depending on who you ask--with distinct oral traditions." There are resources and strategies aimed at sussing all this out (see the appendices at the end of the book); guideposts to avenues of research in which even some Filipino scholars fear to tread. In the end though, the most meaningful way to relate to these myths (or those of any culture's, for that matter) is through story.

Some stories were weaker than others, as can be expected, but even these had something to offer--one in particular that I thought might've been the weakest might have had the best writing. These stories seemed to share a similar overall flaw IMO: the focus on the inscrutability and strangeness of the supernatural characters who didn't seem to be too bothered by it one way or the other. (An attitude that seems distinctly un-Filipino).

The anthology really picks up steam in its latter half, though. The better stories weren't just simple retellings, but remixings and straight mash-ups of various myths, time periods, genres, and even modes of storytelling. One of my favorite pieces has an ending which cleverly hinges on the blending of Christianity and folk belief for which the Philippines is famous.

All in all, an easy 4 stars for me.

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