I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell

Tucker Max

This book is alternately horrible and hysterical, and it often turns on a dime between the two.  Tucker Max is, straight up, an asshole.  Much of the book serves to illustrate this.  I’m fairly sure that the suggestion to read this book was made sarcastically, since I’m a proud femmenist…yes, I spelled that wrong on purpose, the image of modern feminists is decidedly butch and I am most decidedly femme…and I don’t like douchebags.  (My last zillion boyfriends notwithstanding, I don’t like them.)  The image of Holden Caulfield just popped into my brain, with his entitled jackassery.  (I’m possibly the only English literature snob in existence who can’t stand Catcher in the Rye.  I’ve tried many times, and I can’t get through it.  It’s excruciating to read.)  The girl-power side of me didn’t have much of a problem with this book, which I’ll explain shortly. 

I have nothing against assholes as long as they’re honest about it.  Quite a few of the earlier stories in this collection deal with the consequences of not being honest about your intentions, and he’s self-aware enough to realize that those consequences were predictable outcomes of his behavior.  Telling a girl “I love you” when you just want a fuck buddy is a dickish thing to do, and he openly admits that it contributed to being stalked by girls who bought the line and now love him back. 

I’ll admit that I hate the use of the words “slut” and “whore” and how often they appear.  It’s they way that he describes the girls who act like he does, and the double standard makes me want to spit.  On him.  A lot.

One of my favorite stories is about a girl who comes over and gives him a blowjob before going on a date with another guy, and he realizes he’s probably been the second guy at some point.  He’s completely losing his shit over girls who act like he does, and it makes me happy.  (Another one of my favorite stories is about someone telling him that he’s probably slept with a post-op transsexual at least once.  I like when people get slapped in the face with their own closed-mindedness). 

This passage struck me as absolute truth, albeit in a “he stumbled across it, idiot-savantly” kind of way: “Ladies, let me give you some advice.  You can throw all your stupid fucking chick-lit, self-help, why-doesn’t-he-love-me books out, because this is all you need to know: Men will treat you the way you let them.  There is no such thing as ‘deserving’ respect; you get what you demand from people.”  This is a zillion percent gospel truth, and it was missing from a lot of 2^nd-wave feminist thought.  Having equal capability with men means that we should be held to the same standards as men.  Assuming that women “deserve” some extra measure of anything suggests that we’re frail or delicate or easily broken.  Fuck that.  He says later, “…if you demand respect, he will either respect you or he won’t associate with you.  It really is that simple.”  Also a zillion percent true, and something we all probably needed to hear in high school.  And college.  And last week. 

Quite randomly, there were quotes that convinced me that he and I know the same people:

“If you EVER speak ill of the McGriddle again I will personally force-feed you one while I fuck you in the butt using the wrapper as a condom and then donkey punch you when the infused syrup nuggets explode in your mouth.”  (I know two people who talk like this.  It’s terrifying when the two of them are in the same room.)

I have wanted to say this to people: “It stops talking to its intellectual superior or it gets the hose.”

And finally, I would put this bumper sticker on my car: “The pen may be mightier than the sword, but the vagina is stronger than both.”

Love and the Eye

Love and the Eye

Laura Newburn

I typically don’t like narrative poetry.  I don’t “get” it, in an emotional, visceral sense.  This really is just personal prejudice, a function of my OCD that says things need to be observed, analyzed, broken down and then consumed in order to understand them.  I look for detail, I want to know what the world smells like, tastes like, before I feel like I can enter it.  (To be fair, I know a few narrative poets who can capture that sense of place, but not many). 

I read through Love and the Eye quickly, but mostly because I didn’t linger in the world.  Newbern’s writing often felt myopic, like she was looking at an object or a scene in a dark room without context.  In Apartment Elegy, “A table, a blue / glass pitcher. Flat // black of the table, / forget. The roundest // of blues, forgive. / Then a small rain; // then silence, silence / like earthenware.”  I follow her connection between the black of the table and the verb “forget,” and also the connection between the blue curve of the pitcher and the verb “forgive,” but those connections are intellectual rather than emotional. 

Similarly, in “Motel, I have difficulty emotionally attaching to the descriptions: “Flat motel bed. / Flat brown / expanse. Car // outside and yet / another new life / doing its tanta- // lizing dance on the / ceiling.”  In this case, “flat” doesn’t seem expansive to me, in the way that the Texas landscape is flat; it seems small, insignificant, defeated.  I understand it, but I don’t know whether I care.

However, I find her line and stanza breaks delicious.  It’s hard to see the impact of the stanza break between “tanta-“ and “lizing” in the paragraph above, so here’s how it appears on the page:

“outside and yet

another new life

doing its tanta-

lizing dance on the

ceiling.”

The break in the middle of the word becomes onomatopoeic; the word sounds the way it means.  (“Pop” and “squish” are textbook examples, when you say them, you feel what they mean.  I learned that from Reading Rainbow when I was like 5.  PBS fucking rocks!)  “Tantalizing” evokes a sense of eager anticipation, an intake of breath, which is exactly what the stanza break forces you to do. 

I’ve always connected very short lines with imagistic poetry; I didn’t connect short lines with narrative work.  In the poem Death, Fifth Avenue, her use of short lines, often hanging at the end, serve the motion of the story in a very interesting way: “I saw two old women / moving through time / through the huge // lobby of the building / I work in, through / the gold doors too / heavy to ever truly / open, or close. They were moving” Leaving “through” to hang at the end of the line pauses the reader for a split second on that action, reinforcing the transitory feeling of moving from one place to the next. 

Like any other poetry reader, I am a collector of lines I love.  I’m simultaneously jealous and greedy; I want to steal the lines and live inside them.  My favorite lines in this collection appear in Little Bird: “What is a child but dark. / What is a child, if not a pocket of dark.” 

52 Books

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.  Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

…Groucho Marx

I was one of those little girls who consumed books like air.  I once decided I wanted to read every book in my elementary school library; I didn’t finish, but I made a sizable dent.  I used to spend my birthdays at Changing Hands…this amazing indie bookstore in Tempe…back when it was on Mill and you really could get lost in the stacks. 

I used to literally walk around with my nose in a book and, given that we’re now afraid to let kids leave the house for fear of UV rays, strangers with vans and candy, and death by lack-of-elbow -pads, I was probably one of the last kids every told to go outside and play, goddammit!  (Okay, maybe my mom didn’t say the last part, but I bet she wanted to). 

I put inappropriate books in different jackets.  I’d find where my parents hid my books so I could sneak them back when I was finished reading them. 

Books were such a huge part of my life, but I haven’t read as much lately and I hate that.  Because I’m about to turn 30 and I haven’t yet turned into the person I want to be when I grow up, and because I still have an irrational and quite possibly unhealthy love for deadlines and homework, I’m giving myself an assignment.

One year.  52 new books. 

I want to read them, then discuss them.  And by discuss, I mean say something that may or may not be at all related to the book.  I’m fairly associative and tangential when writing in my own voice.  Non-linear, even.  I’ve decided that, while writing This Sucks in crayon on a napkin does not constitute a book review, writing it and publishing it in my own little corner of the digital ‘verse does. 

If I had a list of 52 books in mind that I wanted to read, I’m hoping I would’ve read them already.  I don’t, so I’m asking my well-educated and literate friends to help.  (If I have any undereducated, illiterate friends, they’re are probably not reading this anyway.  I have faith in my friend group…we’re all smart-as-hell-type people).  So…please give me suggestions!  I’ll add to my list along the way, but I’d really love help filling out my list. 

My rules and requests:

*The list is more of a suggestion, kind of the way I used to think about syllabi for classes I didn’t really want to take.  They’re not numbered in anything resembling a relevant order.

*I want to read new books I’ve never read before.  Books I pretended to read in college but didn’t actually read…like Moby Dick…count as new.

*I’m not reading Moby Dick.    

*I prefer fiction to non, although I’m also partial to biography.

*I love old school, Bradbury-style sci-fi, but have found that most modern sci-fi writers spend more time defining their worlds than playing in them.

*I love magical realism.  Love love love it.  Neil Gaiman, Francesca Lia Block, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

*I prefer my fantasy in the J.K. Rowling, modern magic vein, not so much with the swords and the dragons.

*Did I mention I love Neil Gaiman?  I also love John Steinbeck, but I’ve read almost everything from both of them.

And here’s the list…

1. The Volcano, Norman Dubie
2. Some Nights No Cars At All, Josh Rathkamp
3. Smoke and Mirrors, Neil Gaiman
4. Love and the Eye, Laura Newbern
5. A Caress of Twilight, Laurell K. Hamilton
6. Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
7. Seduced by Moonlight, Laurell K. Hamilton
8. Fragile Things, Neil Gaiman
9. The Prophet, Kalil Gibran
10. I Heard God Laughing, Hafiz
11. Norse Code
12. The Doomsday Book
13. I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, Tucker Max
14. Fault Lines, Nancy Huston
15. The Confession, John Grisham
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