#877 Kafka’s Last Stand- Vagabond

#877 Kafka’s Last Stand- Vagabond

This opens up in New York during a protest on Wall Street. The writer does a great job painting a picture of the intensity and emotions of a real-life street protest. Being at more than my fair share of NYC protests, I immediately recalled all the sounds and smells of such an event.

                     

“The protestors stood their ground, shouting their demands. Some of them shouted because their lack of voice had been building in them, some because their patience had finally run out, some simply because they found that the sound from their throats converted fear into courage.”

Our protagonist was beaten within inches of her life and woken up inside a hospital after three days, only to find she was arrested and facing three years in jail. In the story’s reality, the seventh version of the Patriot ACT she was:

“…charged with 680 counts of seditious conspiracy to overthrow legitimate business interests.”

Without her consent or input, the court appointed lawyer took a plea deal and she is sent to prison and a life of prison-sponsored slave labor. There is a lot in this that is outright hilarious, like calling the prison: Sunny Day Prison, or the punishment program Corrective Retail Operation Confinement (CROC). The latter is a program where those that protest against capitalism are required to work retail jobs to rehabilitate their wayward minds.

Like I said there is a lot of hilarity in this, but then there is a lot of outright terror in them as well. As much satire that is in here, there is an equal amount of truth. These programs and laws, and punishments aren’t all that far off from what happens now in our criminal justice system. Protecting commerce over human rights is nothing new of course. When the world equates capitalism with democracy, being against harmful commerce becomes treason.

Notable Passage: “As long as you could find a way to laugh at the madness, they couldn’t reach you. And if they couldn’t reach you, then they couldn’t beat you.”

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

#332 Loser- Chuck Palahniuk

#332 Loser- Chuck Palahniuk

It’s Zeta Delta pledge week and as is tradition, the fraternity brothers all get dressed in ZD t-shirts, goes to a taping of the Price is Right and—of course—eats tabs of Hello Kitty blotter acid.

One of them gets selected as a contestant and wins his way on stage. Just when the acid kicks in, he has to try and make sense of what exactly is going on:

“They make you spin this doohickey so it rolls around. You have to match a bunch of different pictures so they go together perfect. Like you’re some white rat in Principles of Behavioral Psychology 201, they make you guess which can of baked beans costs more than another. All that fuss to win something you sit on to mow your lawn.”

Anyone who has ever seen an episode of Price is Right—and like this kid, most people of my generation know it from days we are home sick from school—knows that too many details of the game are off. That’s ok though, lets just say this is a satire on all televised TV game shows. In any case, this college kid, nearly spinning off the planet on acid, makes it all the way to the Showcase Showdown (trademarked I’m sure).

“It’s just you and the old granny wearing the sweatshirt from before just somebody’s regular grandma, but she’s lived through world wars and nuclear bombs, probably saw all the Kennedys get shot and Abraham Lincoln, and now she’s bobbing up and down on her tennis shoe toes, clapping her granny hands and crowded by supermodels and flashing lights while the big voice makes her the promise of a sport-utility vehicle, a wide-screen television, a floor length fur coat.”

“And probably it’s the acid, but it’s like nothing seems to add up.” Nope, sure as shootin’ it don’t.

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

#266 The Migratory Patters of Dancers- Katherine Sparrow

#266 The Migratory Patters of Dancers- Katherine Sparrow

Five men are about to embark on an adventure, a cross country migration. Like birds, the season calls to them: “When the change comes there’s nothing for it but to start moving. That’s what birds always did, and with how they modified us, we’re no different.”

They have been genetically modified into bird-like creatures and along their migration perform dances of extinct species like sandhill crains, tundra swans, American kestrals, black terns, and California condors. “They’ve genemodded us into gods.”  

This is a crazy view into a world that has destroyed it’s wildlife gleefully and now celebrates a fake look at that wildlife, hero-worshiping falseness.  It’s also a story about being true to yourself, no matter what that self is; that no matter how much of yourself is owned or controlled by something else, you are still an individual controlling your own fate.

To a lesser degree and maybe one I’m making up, this looks like a satire on modern athletics, performance enhancing elements, sponsorships, and integrity. The migration they go on is by bicycle and, similar to the Tour De France, is 2,000 miles long and 22 stages. The dances are like the post-stage press conferences, with the winners dancing and pretending to be an extinct species…a clean, honest, athlete.

“No matter how slick our bikes are, when it comes down to it they are still one-hundred percent powered by our legs and nothing else. So we’ll do anything we can to make it easier. We’re lazy like that.”

Notable Passage: “It’s a big sky in Montana, everyone knows that, but the way it makes me feel lonely is all my own.”

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

#231 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature- David Foster Wallace

#231 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature- David Foster Wallace

This is among the shorter pieces that David Foster Wallace published, but no less brilliant. Simple concepts and plot buried in a spider-web (literally in this case) of context and character layering.

“Mother won a small product liability settlement and used the money to promptly go get cosmetic surgery on the crow’s feet around her eyes. However the cosmetic surgeon botched it and did something to the musculature of her face which caused her to look insanely frightened at all times.”

The rest of the piece are the son’s thoughts while riding the bus with his mother on their way to the lawyers office; the attempts to obscure her face to oncoming riders are particularly funny, as is the DFW-esque macro lens on the miserable life of the drivers:

“I have evolved the theory that the driver peruses his newspaper and reluctantly refolds it and replaces it in the hutch on green to signal the paralyzed dislike he feels about his paid job and a court-appointed psychologist might diagnose the newspaper as a cry for help.”

The son has just been released from jail due to an incident caused by an accidental release of his poisonous spider collection, a collection he now carries with him on the bus as a weapon to fend off potential attackers.

Fun Stuff!

Rating: 10-9-10-9 Total= 38

#175 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote- Jorge Luis Borges

#175 Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote- Jorge Luis Borges

Ok, I found this odd at first, but its genius quickly revealed itself. Writers writing about writer’s writing is always a touch-and-go technique that can fall prey to gimmick and hackishness. However, this was pretty amazing.

Borges imagines a fictional author, Pierre Menard penning a re-write of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. It wasn’t going to be a newly imagined or a polished version, or even a sequel. He was going to re-write it word for word…but as himself therefore giving it a fresh take.

“To be a popular novelist of the seventeenth century in the twentieth seemed to Menard to be a diminution. Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote—that looked to Menard less challenging (and therefore less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experience of Pierre Menard.”

This is great literary satire, poking fun at meta concepts and over-thought criticism and analysis. Such a great concept, it reads at first like an academic piece. That kind of threw me off center until I saw what he was doing. Then I wished it was longer. This passage I found laugh-out-loud funny. I can picture some dusty, bookish, professor that looks like he shits tweed say this at a pompous campus cocktail party:

“Menard has (perhaps unwittingly) enriched the slow and rudimentary art of reading by means of a new technique—the technique of deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution. That technique, requiring infinite patience and concentration, encourages us to read the Odyssey as though it came after the Aeneid.”

Perhaps this is just funny to book nerds, but I found it hilariously brilliant.

Rating: 9-10-10-9 Total=38

#160 Panikhida- Anton Chekhov

#160 Panikhida- Anton Chekhov

This could be both a satire of religion and conformity or one on the conformity of religion. Andrei Andreich gets in hot water with Father Grigory when he misuses a passage in the bible about Mary Magdalene.

“Don’t get too clever! Yes, brother, don’t get too clever! God may have given you a searching mind, but if you can’t control it, you’d better give up thinking…Above all don’t get too clever, just think as others do.”

He has just lost his daughter. They were separated for most of her life and do not know each other. When she visited once as an adult he was embarrassed to find she had become a low-moral actress, a famous actress so far removed from his religious life that he likened her to the harlot in the bible needing redemption upon her death.

“Terrified though he was of going for a stroll with his actress daughter in broad daylight, in front of all honest people, he yielded to her entreaties…”

The Father and the Deacon help perform a ritual, a Panikhida, for his daughter, but it is actually him that needs redemption.

Notable Passage: "Bluish smoke streams from the censer and bathes in a wide, slanting ray of sunlight that crosses the gloomy, lifeless emptiness of the church. And it seems that, together with the smoke, the soul of the departed woman herself hovers in the ray of sunlight. The streams of smoke, looking liker a child’s curls, twist, rush upwards to the window and seem to shun the dejection and grief that fill this poor soul.”

Rating: 7-6-6-5 Total= 24

#133 Report on the Shadow Industry- Peter Carey

#133 Report on the Shadow Industry- Peter Carey

This is an interesting little story about the obsession with a mysterious product called Shadows, that come in unmarked boxes or “large, lavish boxed which are printed with abstract designs in many colors.”

It’s a commentary on consumerism, on our obsession with things, our need for objects and our rationalization for why the damage they cause is alright. The Shadow factory emits a possibly carcinogenic smoke, but the smog it causes:

“are a wondrous sight, full of blues and vermillions and brilliant greens which pick out strange patters and shapes in the clouds…others say that the clouds contain dreadful beauty of the apocalypse.”

The satire is funny and truthful We are what we buy in manner of speaking.

“this has been explained by those who hild that the shadows are merely mirrors to the soul and that the man who stares into a shadow box sees only himself, and what beauty he finds there is his own beauty and what despair he experiences is born of the poverty of his spirit.”

The author offers one final thought, that even writing like this is a form of shadow:

“For here I have manufactured one more: elusive, unsatisfactory, hinting at greater beauties and more profound mysteries that exist somewhere before the beginning and somewhere after the end.”

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