Shorthand for Nothing

I finally got around to reading Joey Comeau’s Lockpick Pornography yesterday. It is a pretty quick read, and the whole thing is online as a PDF at the link there.

He describes it as a “genderqueer adventure story,” and that is probably the best description I can think of for it. You wouldn’t expect a book about LGBT (as people or as a movement) to be light-hearted and fun, and I think that’s a lot of its charm. It’s fun without being mindless. It asks good questions and makes you think, and while it has some parts which are kind of bleak, it’s not too serious and it doesn’t moralize. It made me think about “the movement” and about gender and sexuality, both generally and specifically. It has some refreshing perspective.

It’s a pretty fun read overall. In places it definitely feels like a first draft or a first novel or something: not quite finished, a little sloppy. But it was a nice way to spend the evening and I feel like I’ve gained something from reading, which doesn’t happen often enough anymore.

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I’ve been reading through House of Leaves again recently. It benefits from being the type of book you can read through several times, at least in part due to the fact that it is fragmented and convoluted, to say nothing of being nightmarish. It’s the sort of book with encoded messages and obscure references, some of which are pointed out in the footnotes. It has footnotes. The footnotes have footnotes.

I’ve just reached the labyrinth chapter. For the first part of the book the typesetting, at the very least, is relatively normal. There’s nothing too weird going on typographically; sure, the story is a bit strange, but it’s simple. It’s straightforward. Then there’s the SOS chapter, where the paragraphs get broken up into Morse code. At the point of the Labyrinth, it starts coming unhinged. It’s difficult to describe, but there is an image online of one of the pages here. It is these pages I show people when explaining the book.

From there on the book fades in and out of lucidity. Some parts seem almost normal, others are still bizarre. There’s a chapter which concludes with a page which contains nothing but a single, enormous full stop. And I haven’t really even gotten into the contents of the book yet. The house is the sort of thing it is best to explore for oneself. (Highly recommended. Go read.)

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I never feel like I’m very good at reviews. I feel like I don’t do it right. What I want is to capture the feel of something. I want you to read what I write and say “that sounds fun, I’m going to pick that up.” And I want you to pick up Joey Comeau’s Overqualified, so I hope this review is okay.

Maybe nobody else does this, but sometimes, when I’m writing papers, when I’m frustrated, I’ll finish one of the sentences with something that is generally inappropriate. I delete it, of course, but sometimes I’m not interested in finishing a sentence which begins “Realist theory holds that” with a description of realist theory. Sometimes I want to say “Realist theory holds that the world is fucked, and they’re right. We’re lying to ourselves every day.”

Overqualified is like that–but instead of deleting it, of ignoring that impulse, Joey Comeau decides to run with it. It is a story told in cover letters where something has cracked. They are cover letters which end with things like, “Live for today, you retarded little shit, the end is near.” It sounds like it could be really gimmicky, too formulaic, when you describe it like that. It sounds like with each cover letter you’ll be thinking, “Man, how is Joey going to make this one wacky?” and it’s really not. It works, and it’s funny and poignant and shocking and sad, usually all at the same time. They’re about how amazing and frustrating and stupid it is to be human, and how amazing and frustrating and stupid humans can be. They’re about regret and longing and loss.

And there’s a story, which is kind of like putting together your favorite mug after someone knocked it off the counter. There are pieces missing. Some of the pieces just don’t fit. And maybe you’re not a sentimental person but that was yours, and you had some fun times with it, and you never realized how much you appreciated it, and now it’s gone forever. Except it’s better than that. I’d normally say it’s a cohesive narrative, but part of the fun is that it’s all fragmented.

I guess what I am saying is you should read it.

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I was searching for Joey Comeau’s Overqualified the other day on Amazon, and I saw something that caught my eye: a listing for his short story collection, It’s Too Late To Say I’m Sorry. I invite you to click through this link and see if you can spot anything wrong. The Loose Teeth Press link might help in this regard; it certainly enlightened me.

The problem? The Amazon link is selling the book for $115.24. Loose Teeth Press has it for $12.95.

I have seen items go for ridiculously high prices on ebay in the past. Harvey Danger’s original demo tape, for instance, sold for something like $300. But these collector’s items are usually rare. The price is inflated by this rarity, coupled with a demand for the product. This book, in contrast, is easily obtained for about $15, and even if it bears a signature (and this is speaking as a man who values his signatures), it’s certainly not $100 worth of rarity. I bet you could get a signature for the price of a SASE. Personalized, even.

It’s obviously just a cynical attempt to capitalize on the association, of course, and an even more cynical way to capitalize on the fact that sometimes people will buy something that is overpriced just because it is overpriced. Selling a book for ten dollars makes it sound like you can easily get it for ten dollars. Selling it for a hundred makes it sound like some rare volume that you’ll be pained to part with, and went through pains to acquire. That it’s probably used only sweetens the apparent deal: the dog-eared pages and the slightly tattered cover makes it look like you’ve just unearthed some arcane volume. If it has a signature it makes it seem like the ultimate of literary treasures.

Someone will probably snap it up eventually. They’ll might even leave the seller a positive review of how great the book is and how lucky they feel to have found it. The seller has thousands upon thousands of positive reviews, so apparently their racket is working out well for them.

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I’ve been slowly working my way back through Tolkien’s works in the past few weeks. I re-read the Hobbit, which I don’t think I’d done since middle school, and am re-reading The Lord of the Rings, which I have done more recently, but it has still been a few years. This feels like the first time I have done so since I really knew the movies well, and while for the most part I view them as different works, it is interesting to note some of the changes. In many places, the movies have taken the books and improved upon them, in terms of dramatic content and dialog; in many others, the movies have taken the books and made them significantly less awesome.

After that it will be The Silmarillion, and then, I expect, The Children of Hurin, which I actually have not yet read. This summer I’ve been craving high fantasy for some reason, and Tolkien more or less defined the genre.

From there I will probably move on to the collection of Dostoevsky I picked up in Chicago, or some of the other books I have lying around that I’ve been meaning to get to. Tolkien is almost meant to be consumed in bulk, though I wouldn’t describe it as easy reading: it’s a legendarium. It is something intended to be a lengthy period of consumption, or not at all. Dostoevsky, I’m not convinced I could consume in such enormous qualities. But we shall see!

In any case, I’ve been trying to get back on top of reading things more. It may just be a summer thing, but maybe not. It’s been nice, and I have quite the list of things I’ve been meaning to get to, both new and old. Since a lot of these are now across the country, I may have to do some exploring.

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I’ve started up another of my many projects-I-will-never-finish, and it’s very closely tied to another one, which was called Let My Sting Be Fatal, and I suspect it will bear the same title, but maybe not. I’m going to be trying new things with it, which is hopefully going to be fun. It will be a weird mix of things which are true and things which are not. It will be an autobiography that is mostly lies, a tell-all that keeps everything secret, a memoir that I mostly made up. It’s not a new concept but it’s new for me. I think I will put it up here.

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So, I’ve finished Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, in which she explores the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. She describes it as a pilgrimage–the places they died, the places they were shot, the places their assassins died. While the book was primarily concerned with exploring facts, crafting a cohesive narrative for the assassination attempts that is interesting and readable, while still demonstrating the amount of research that went into the creation of the book.

What interested me most, however, is the underlying narrative of decline. The country in which Lincoln died is not the country in which McKinley was assassinated. America fell into imperialism. There’s a wistfulness there–a love for the country as it is but a longing to have it return to what it was.

It’s a very human story, highly accessible–to myself as a historical dilettante, and I imagine to others with varying degrees of interest. Though the book is about assassinations, it’s not a book of facts. It’s a book of stories. There are too few books that are willing to tell a story, and Sarah Vowell has a unique story to tell.

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