#61 War Game- Philip K. Dick

#61 War Game- Philip K. Dick

It’s holiday shopping time and the new toys from an advanced extra-terrestrial world have to be tested. The Ganymedean products contain potentially dangerous technology and cannot be released until we know they are safe for children. 

There is a suit that tricks the brain into seeing made-up realities, there is an alien version of Monopoly (monopoly is always just monopoly they posit), and there is a war game.  The war game has highly adaptable soldiers trying to take a Citadel.  As the structure defends itself, The toy soldiers fight back, but ultimately loses:

“It has to, psychologically speaking, it symbolizes the external reality. The dozen soldiers, of course, represent to the child his own efforts to cope. By participating in the storming of the citadel, the child undergoes a sense of adequacy in dealing with the harsh world. Eventually he prevails, but only after a painstaking period of effort and patience…at least that’s what the instruction book says.”

The test team is worried that the soldiers might: “…make a ninety degree turn and start firing at the nearest human being.”

Their concerns increase as it appears that the game could be programed to slowly make a bomb, or some kind of Ganymedean Trojan Horse.  In the end the true danger may be just under our nose and could be in the most tame and ubiquitous item.

Rating: 7-8-8-7 Total= 30

#60 Mixed Breeding- Nicola Barker

#60 Mixed Breeding- Nicola Barker

This one’s a bit out there. Lenny’s new rebound girlfriend seems to have a sexual canine fetish:

“Had Lenny realized that Cassandra’s interest in him was based principally upon a sexual fascination with Pike, his German Shepherd/Labrador cross, he would definitely have reconsidered his good opinion of her.”

Her sexual preclusions with dogs remain unspoken but her liberal feelings towards sexual pleasure as a whole are wide open for discussion.  Doll, Lenny’s mother, doesn’t like Cass at all and the tension between them is the whole story.  Oedipal feelings abound but not in the way one my think.

These topics are spoken of in a matter-of-fact style and not as perversions, which make the story read normal, until the final envelope is pushed at the end. Barker has the reputation for the occasional “shock topic.” This probably falls in that category. Overall, It’s an ok story, worthy of a read, but not one good enough to warrant its inclusion in a collections subtitled: "100 of the finest short stories ever written."

Rating : 7-6-5-5 Total= 23

#59 The Nose- Nikolai Gogol

#59 The Nose- Nikolai Gogol

This is kind of a ridiculous tale, although not without its merit.  Ivan the barber finds the nose of an acquaintance has been baked in his wife’s freshly baked bread. It’s the cut-off appendage of Kavaloff, a member of the Municipal Committee. No explanation is offered as to how it was cut off, or how it came to be baked in a loaf of bread.

Apparently the nose can dress up in official garb, go about town, converse with his former face and even use a stolen passport! In fact it “can be seen walking everyday at three o’clock on the Neffsky Avenue.”

Kovaloff is eventually reacquainted with his nose but cannot reattach it. He must live with the embarrassment.  Perhaps he cut off his nose to spite his face, or maybe he’s not himself anymore, nobody (k)nose.  If you are tsk-tsking my puns, get over it, even Gogol made light of his silliness:

“But the most incomprehensible thing of all is, how authors can choose such subjects for their stories. That really surpasses my understanding. In the first place, no advantage results from it for the contrary; and in the second place, no harm results either.”

Notable Passage: “But nothing is permanent in this world. Joy in the second moment of its arrival is already less keen than in the first, is still fainter in the third, and finishes by coalescing with our normal mental state, just as it circles which the fall of a pebble forms on the surface of water, gradually die away.”

Rating:7-6-6-6 Total= 25

#58 Mister Squishy- David Foster Wallace

#58 Mister Squishy- David Foster Wallace

Oh-boy-oh-boy-oh-boy!  I’ve been waiting for this since I started this project.  David Foster Wallace is such a pleasure to read.  Since his death in 2008, I’ve been reading or re-reading his catalogue of work.  This collection of short fiction, Oblivion, is one of the only things he published I have not yet read.  So, with absolute joy and without trying to temper my impossibly high expectations, I plan on reading one of these a month until the book is complete.

DFW is truly a singular figure in literature. There is absolutely nobody who understands, or can craft the english language as fully as he does. He once wrote an in-depth book review of a new Dictionary edition…and it was truly entertaining in a completely non-ironic way. 

Mister Squishy isn’t really a short story (perhaps short for a man who wrote an 1,100 page novel) This short fiction is a 6o-page, small font, wide-margined, novelette-sized satirical running dialogue on the buffoonery that occurs during a product test focus-group to choose the next great sugary snack cake, and of course, all the adjacent tomfoolery and hi-jinx attached to such an endeavor. The new snack cake in question is called:

“Felonies—a risky and multi-valant trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern health conscious consumer’s sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin…”

It’s the brilliance of DFW that such a long descriptive work can be so engaging, but it is beyond that.  Nothing escapes the eye of the narrator, nothing goes past the lens without comment and clarity. If this whole view looks like a image distorted through a fun-house mirror, its only because that’s what we’ve become in a all-consumer-all-the-time world.

The piece reads as a longer and smarter George Carlin Skit. It’s Satire at its finest.  I wish I could print the whole thing, but here is just a random sampling of DFW’s brilliant description of modern commercialism:

“…the familiar Mister Squishy brand icon, which was a plump and childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity with its eyes squeezed partly shut in an expression that somehow connotated delight, satiation, and rapacious desire all at the same time. The icon communicated the sort of innocuous facial affect that was almost impossible not to smile back at or feel positive about in some way, and it had been commissioned and introduced by one of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt’s senior creative people over a decade ago, when the regional Mister Squishy Company had come under national corporate ownership and rapidly expanded and diversified from extra-soft sandwich breads and buns into sweet rolls and flavored doughnuts and snack cakes and soft confections of nearly every conceivable kind; and without any particular message of associations anyone in Demographics could ever produce data to quantify or get a handle on, the crude line-drawn face had become one of the most popular, recognizable, and demonstrably successful brand icons in American Advertising.”

In case you were wondering, that last sentence is 126 words, which for DFW is miniscule.  The reader of pieces like this must keep focus. If you lose the thread all could be lost, however, follow along and the entertainment is endless.

Rating:  Unrated*

*It is unfair and impossible to rate these pieces. The quality, scope, craft, and impact of Wallace’s writing is unlike anything else. If I had to rate it, clearly it would be 10’s across the board.  But since i don't want to ruin the curve for everyone else, lets just set these aside as something different.

#57 Mammon and the Archer- O. Henry

#57 Mammon and the Archer- O. Henry

What’s the power of money? What is better than money? Love? Well we’ll see.

“I bet my money on money every time. I’ve been through the encyclopedia down to Y looking for something you cant buy with it…I’m for money against the field.”

This is a perfect archetypal example of an O. Henry story; good premise, a complete plot, and stylistic, clean writing. Textbook short story here.

Word of the Day: Contumelious (adj)- scornful and insulting; insolent

Notable Passage: “They say it takes three generations to make [a gentleman]. They’re off. Money’ll do it as slick as soap grease.”

8-7-8-7 Total= 30

#56 The Crossing- Henry Dumas

#56 The Crossing- Henry Dumas

Three children, Bubba, Jimmy, and Essie are walking home from Sunday School. It’s hot noon in Louisiana and the group stop to horse around near the old bridge, the talking bridge.

This is as Americana a tale as you will find, as good and real as Mark Twain.  Dumas captures the essence of childhood with uncanny feeling.  The back and forth, the exaggerated stories, the physical hi-jinx, egging each other on. Slow and ambling like the country lane they’re on, sounds of nature punctuate the narration. The story they tell each other isn’t told as a political point, its just idle talk between playmates, because kids talk about stuff they hear.

As with most of Dumas’ stories there is a spiritual bloodline that make these stories almost parables. There is so much truth here, and soul that oozes out of Dumas’ pen. This collection should be required reading in schools, as a good juxtaposition alongside Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

Notable Passage: “It was a quiet area. The feeling one got was like the feeling that comes when one is standing besides a still pond staring at a school of hungry minnows. Here, where the rotting planks stretched over the life in the green water, distance broke through, and for a while, north and south and east and west filled the eye.”

Rating: 9-8-8-9 Total= 34

#55 Ghosts- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#55 Ghosts- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

“Today I saw Ikenna Okoro, a man I had long thought was dead. Perhaps I should have bent down, grabbed a handful of sand, and thrown it at him, in the way my people do to make sure a person is not a ghost. But I am a Western-educated man…and I am supposed to have armed myself with enough science to laugh indulgently at the ways of my people.”

That opening paragraph of Ghosts, is a common theme of this collection. The older educated class of Nigeria battling old culture with new, African vs. the west, etc.  Both proud of living through war and corruption to better their families and lamenting the erosion of their heritage, even the narrator’s name, James Nwoye represents this dichotomy.

James is a retired professor, a widower, a father and a grandfather of children not born in Nigeria and losing their native tongue in just one generation. He runs into a man he thought long dead, and they share the tales of the past years.  Although not friends during the war years, they have too much in common to harbor bad feelings.

“He had forgotten [his wife’s] name and yet, somehow, he was capable of mourning her, or perhaps he was mourning a time immersed in possibilities.” Ikenna was “a man who carries with him the weight of what could have been.”

In retirement, James holds onto connections of his past, and the old ways despite the manner in which he lived his life, educated, well-traveled, progressive: “We are the educated ones, taught to keep tightly rigid our boundaries of what is considered real.” The ghost of his wife visits him often.

Word of the day: Harmattan – A dry dusty easterly or north easterly wind on the west African Coast occurring from December to February

Notable Passage: “It is our diffidence about the afterlife that leads us to religion.”

Rating: 9-7-8-7 Total= 31

#54 Beauty’s Sister- James Bradley

#54 Beauty’s Sister- James Bradley

This is a fantastical tale with witches, and spells, and towers and a beautiful maiden. It’s a re-imagining of Rapunzel, the girl in the tower with the long hair. In this version, she has a sister Juniper who lives near by with their mother, both wish to see her sing from the window.

As Juniper gets older and befriends the witch, Jinka who keeps Rapunzel trapped away from the world, the sister’s become acquainted. Juniper slowly grows into an independent woman and sees herself as some of the town does, similar to the Witch.  But unlike, Jinka, Juniper doesn’t seek power or spells:

“I wonder now exactly why I gave myself to Jinka. Was it for Rapunzel’s sake? For my own? Or was it because I saw in her a way to harm my mother, to make her suffer for coldness, her lack of love?” “Beneath it all, though, I suspect she was just cruel, and took pleasure in people’s fear of her, in the power that it gave.”

Beyond the things they all covet, each character gets what they deserve in the end:

“We want what is forbidden, yet we have to take what is available.”

Notable Passage: “…it was that there seemed to be an absence in our lives, a space that could neither be identified or acknowledged.”

Rating: 9-8-9-7 Total= 33

#53 Tell Me What To Do- Joe Frank

#53 Tell Me What To Do- Joe Frank

Joe Frank has been called the “apostle of radio noir.”  At least that’s according to the dust jacket for his short story collection, The Queen of Puerto Rico. The first tale, Tell Me What To Do, is a dark sad world filled with booze and infidelity. Nobody is happy with what they have or who they’re with and everyone is looking for an escape. I guess it’s in a noir-light style. 

The plot is not really important and the characters are relatively cookie-cutter.  These are some of the themes:

Insecurity:

“He had the feeling if he didn’t stay with her, he’d never see her again.”

Misery:

“She had gotten everything she wanted, and she was miserable.”

Submission:

“Tell me what to do.”

And like every noir tale:

“They drank, they fought, and they fucked.”

That about sums it up!

Rating: 6-5-5-5 Total= 21