No One Should Ever Read a Thing

No one should ever read anything by anyone. Controversial? Perhaps. But I didn't join the blogging game to sit idly by and play nice. Oh no. I joined it to do otherwise.

But let's think about my blaspheme for a second, won't we?

What can you say you've honestly taken from reading anything? Besides nothing? Maybe you've taken thoughts from it, but were those thoughts you wanted to think? If you wanted thoughts you didn't want to think put into your head why not just go watch TV and some great advertisements? Not writing rife with thoughts you didn't want to think. What a waste of your thoughts. What about the ones you did want to think? Where'd those go?

Have I just blown your mind? I apologize, but it must needs be done sometimes.

Oh and I don't care about the irony here, reading something by me. I think of myself as much more like TV, in that the true endgame of my words is to subliminally get you to desire McDonald's or maybe Nike shoes, depending on my mood. So don't throw that in my face, because like Yahoo! "comments section" denizens who most often comment on stories of a politically charged nature and are named things like "THUG" or with single letters like "P." I don't have much desire to sit here and explain what I'm thinking. I just do. And what's more, think about how right I am if I just believe it. I think Stephen Colbert has vocalized something to that effect, if nothing else then subliminally.

Do you see how none of this is explained very well? That's fun to do!

A Brief Exchange

The day buoyant met curmudgeonly. Of course. How could I forget?

“Ha ha ha, I have found you! I was looking for you and now I have found you!”

“Do I look like I give a care? Do I look like I give just one single care?”

“Yes! Yes, you do look that way.”

“Fine, now let me take you out for a cup of coffee and some sausages.”

“You’ve got yourself a done deal!” sprang the middleman, ready to shake hands, bring hands together.

And no one was killed or otherwise harmed for the most part, i.e. aside from one stinger to one member of the party’s left arm, following his being thrust down on his head very hard and purposefully!

If you think that I am smart

Ever think I'm a really smart guy, as in me, Matt Rowan, is a really smart guy? Worry no more! Here's a perfect example of how I am not, and how actually I'm a moron just like the rest of us.

Dear MATT,

Thank you for your submission of "Surveil " to SmokeLong Quarterly. We gave the story careful consideration, and though we are not accepting it for publication, we hope you find a better fit for it elsewhere.

Thanks again for trusting us with your work.

Best,
Editors
SmokeLong Quarterly
http://smokelong.com

***

Dear SMOKELONG QUARTERLY,

You can change the setting on your submishmash account so a submitter's first name isn't all caps in your automatic replies. It'll preserve a modicum of your giving the story an honest read. I know this is a bit snarky in tone. I just find that to be one of the more irritating aspects of these rejections, and an easily correctable one. I hope my next rejection by your publication comes with my name in the standard capitalization.

-MATT Rowan

***

That's actually the way you spelled your name when you submitted the story, not an automatic setting on Submishmash. So if you submit your story to us with your name spelled the way you prefer, then it will appear that way on any correspondence we send you.

Thanks,
Tara

Editors, SmokeLong Quarterly
www.smokelong.com

TA DA!

HAHAHAHA, sigh, well I sent a very contrite email, acknowledging my mistake (and it was my mistake). Somehow when my account was set up, the default profile name was in all caps (either I did this or it's automatic). If you have a submishmash account you can alter your rejections email name (or acceptances) under your personal settings. All you have to do is investigate them, rather than jump to a conclusion of error on the part of an external source.

Or maybe I'm the only one who's had trouble with that, too.

P.S. SmokeLong is a good publication that's fun, so go read it and have fun. They put up with me and my snark, so there's something.

xTx is (AB)normally Special

My title really ruined that oxymoron belonging to xTx's latest story collection "Normally Special." I've not read too many contemporary writers with nom de plumes, but of them, I like xTx best.

Frankly, I wasn't so sure that'd be the case. I mean, xTx reads like the title of a Vin Diesel movie (fitting, since he too is operating under a nom de plume, thank god). Happily, there's where similarities end because xTx doesn't tell stories as they might be by The Diesel. She tells visceral stories that make you feel something, sometimes something terrible (an emotion you weren't sure you understood / weren't sure you were capable of having), but, hey, if that's the effect, that's the effect. And these effects are enviable.

I've actually enjoyed the pocket-size quality of a lot of these various indie books I've gotten my hands on of late. (They make for great, surreptitious reading while I'm at work, for example.) Others, which I'll have further comments on, no doubt, are Ethel Rohan's "Hard to Say" "Artifice 3" (a great indie literary magazine), "Big World" by Mary Miller and "AM/PM" by Amelia Gray.

These are books by lesser known but equally worthy writers as those you'll find in prominent places like The New Yorker, Paris Review, Harper's, Granta and so forth. A Patrick Somerville to match a Gary Shteyngart, a Roxane Gay to match a Z.Z. Packer, a near-every late 20s-early 30s female writer (namely, Alissa Nutting, Amelia Gray, Lindsay Hunter, Jill Summers, Faith Gardner, Mary Miller, Frank Hinton, Ethel Rohan and, of course xTx) to match Karen Russell and Tea Obreht, a Michael Czyzniejewski to every Stephen O'Connor. And you get the idea. I like and have read many contemporary authors of all persuasions / categorizations. I refuse to concede that the better known ones are of a higher literary caliber. If anything I might say the opposite is the case. (I know, I know, how very provocative / controversial of me to side with what is presumably the anti-establishment (the independent publishers) but then again sort of its own smaller, niche establishment in its own right. Well, I'm siding with somebody! Dammit!).

All right, the point is xTx. Her stories fill you with grit, ask you to get gritty, enjoy making you feel like you're being abraded by something especially coarse. And I grant that this might sound a little tongue-in-cheek, but that's only because I have trouble expressing these types of emotions. (Yep, admitting a little vulnerability here, folks.)

My favorites of "Normally Special" were "Standoff" -- which I was on the verge of tears reading, but I didn't cry mostly because of manliness and mine being what it is. But the story is fucking powerful sad. I loved it. The mother and son relationship is tortured by all kinds of emotion, by guilt and by loss and by uncertainty. "She Who Subjected the Sun" is an ambiguously dystopian vision, one in which we are able to understand women have been returned to a state of subjection, or more so, really, made to desire being made subjects, perfectly docile, welcoming their subjection. It's something akin to a normative imposition of the sex slavery trade.

Many of my other favorites were colored by a kind of ambiguity. Maybe it was ambivalence, ambiguous ambivalence. It got me to thinking and to feeling, which I like.

What this is becoming

My friends, anyone who's stuck around long enough to see this post, I'm not writing to you to say I'm changing anything. I'm saying I'm adding. I'm adding things like my writing credits. I'm also gonna touch on stuff outside the realm of literary criticism. What stuff? Anecdotal stuff. Things I find interesting. I've said I might post story fragments here, too. Thanks for your patience. My hope is that this is a place that is still worthwhile to be, once I'm done making changes.

Mini Review: "Crash" and Bang and All that Perverse Techno-Violence / Whatnot

"Crash" by J.G. Ballard is a tough slog as reading goes. I remember my first, ultimately aborted attempt at reading the novel. At the time, Ballard's prose was too vivid, too sterile, too graphic for my tastes. I don't know that I was really thinking about it at all even, just my discomfort for its language, which is rife with reference to all sorts of sex and technology and the fusion of the two. For example, engine coolant and seminal fluid are inextricably tied, so as to be one and the same admixture, concoction, what have you.

But I think this imagery speaks to some weird bridging of the primal with the artificial, humanity's most base needs and its (to date) most profound, prolific inventions. "Meaning" in any sense is cast off and completely beside the point. In fact, for as much imagery as abounds in this story I've never felt less inclined to parse meaning, to scratch beneath the surface. "Crash" is violence incarnate. It's the disgusting birth video of future as a tactile entity. It's frustratingly, transparently straightforward in its canonization of simulacra. That's why Jean Baudrillard liked it so much.

The Beginning of Something New, The End of Something Old

The beginning has to begin somewhere.

I'm serious, in a way.

I've enjoyed writing straight-up book reviews for the last year and a half or so, but, ever the intellectually whimsical, I'm feeling a bit spent on this type of (although fun) repetitive analysis. I want things that coalesce. I'd like to fuse this idea with that one, and build workable narratives to then consider that with regard to the phenomena of our present day and circumstances. Make my kind of sense of it all. More philosophical rumination.

This could be, as I see it, that outlet. And of course literary fiction will factor into the blog's new course very heavily. Maybe, also, I'll practice at storytelling of my own here. More to the point, this is to be a playground for ideas I'm teasing out. Some of these ideas will no doubt be more fully baked than others. In whatever their condition though, merely by the fact of my posting them here, I'll be looking for your reaction, as I toss ideas against the more or less sticky wall to see what sticks (stickiness depending for the most part on the idea and its solvency).

But let me just end on the homed-in literary topic of . . .

The Instructions

It is possibly fitting that I heretofore ended on Part I of Adam Levin's "The Instructions," because A.) that novel represents to me, among other things, a great example of what fiction is capable of in its sprawling many pages and B.) an impulse toward my own kind of instructions, a desire to think and be more critical about, for lack of a better term, the phenomena I mention.

But I don't want to leave anyone hanging too much. I'm not sure that there's a lot left to say about "The Instructions" on my part, though, not without ruining its very climactic ending. I go back and forth with my final evaluation of whether it was a "good" or "bad" novel. Perhaps my biggest negative criticism, one that I may have mentioned in commenting to a commenter, and the sole point of agreement I might have with Joshua Cohen's generally underwhelming review, is that Levin seems to be afflicted by the same self-consciousness that has beguiled previous long form fiction writers such as David Foster Wallace, who obsess to the point of seemingly desiring total control of their conjured world and, this admittedly a very great leap to make on my part, suggesting a desire for control of a bit of the real world by extension.

I put this upon every very intricately wrought piece of situational analysis and so forth, what happened and wherefore?, belonging to "The Instructions" and "Infinite Jest" and other notable longform works I've happened through. It is the desire for complete understanding, or perceptive "complete understanding" by, in Levin's case, Gurion, the young protagonist. And where Cohen sees DFW avoiding this pitfall by the multitudinous narrators and characters put under microscope, Levin suffers more for the fact that every character has only one thing on his or her mind in "The Instructions": Gurion Maccabee (including for the most part Gurion himself). Though this seems to have been in Cohen's view the novel's fatal flaw, I won't go that far myself. I think it's astounding how well Levin pulls off the necessary and lengthy singular focus of his novel. Gurion is flawed, certainly, but as close to all-knowing as flawed characters get. Gurion, to be sure, speaks volumes about things, about phenomena, and yet Levin somehow manages to have his cake and eat it too by creating in Gurion a believably adolescent temperment at his core.

All in all, it's a stunning achievement. And yet, still I waffle back and forth on whether I would classify it as among my favorite novels. Sometimes time and hindsight are required for the true merits of a piece to reveal themselves, and I suppose that's where I'll leave this mini-review of "The Instructions" -- at pure speculation.

END of reviewing The Instructions

I'll also end the entirety of this piece by simply remarking that you can expect me to have something in line with the poorly defined ideas I describe in the preceding paragraphs sometime very soon. I keep returning to totalitarianism and Nabokov's "Bend Sinister" -- which I must include among my favorite novels, if the criterion of its returning to my mind in a significant positive light bears any weight at all.

Thank you.