HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: GRIM TALES, by Norman Lock

Grim Tales by Norman Lock
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The Brothers Grimm get a nod in the first of Norman Lock's Grim Tales.

Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night. His affairs were being put in order -- no matter how hard he tried to resist it.

It's the Shoemaker and the Elves. But by the end of the paragraph -- Lock's grim tales range from a paragraph to a single sentence in length -- the protagonist commits suicide rather than allow his life to be taken over by his unseen helpers. This sets the tone for the 150 tales that follow.


I have read two other books by Norman Lock, and this is my least favorite. Perhaps I did not know how to read it. It is only sixty-eight pages long, and my first thought was to spend a couple of hours with it one afternoon. That didn't work. I got burnt out by the suicides, murders, and disappearances that average two per page. I read it over three days, but the notion grew that perhaps one should read a tale per night just before bedtime.


What happens in these tales? People disappear up staircases or more often into the earth and those left behind can hear their screams. Murders occur regularly and spouses are especially lethal. A sooty cloud drifts down from the sky and erases the part of town it lights on. In one story a man dreams each night that he must deflect a comet headed for earth. The last sentence of his story encapsulates much of Lock's vision

So that he would no suffer this most mortal dream, he took an overdose of sleeping pills and died without waking,

Everything there is to admire about Lock's prose is here, unfortunately mentioning them makes all those admirable traits sound like cliches -- it's merciless, lapidary, he wields syntax like a scalpel. The ideal way to encounter this book, like the protagonist in the first tale, would be to find a story or two somewhere in your home each morning when you first got out of bed.


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MONDAY MORNING

BOOK REVIEW: THE LOG OF THE SS THE MRS. UNGUENTINE, by Stanley Crawfor

Log of the S.S. the Mrs. Unguentine by Stanley Crawford
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A drunken Mr. Unguentine falls from the railing of the barge, thus ending a forty year marriage that began with a night of love on a catamaran and was consecrated via Transatlantic cable. He and Mrs. Unguentine, who narrates the story,  have lived on their married life on the barge, sailing the seas to avoid extreme seasons, and after the first few years never touching land.  Mr. Unguentine takes charge of navigation while Mrs. Unguentine tends to their world where the composting garbage provides the basis for a Garden of Eden with fruit trees and Mrs. Uguentine's livestock. Early on they make contact with other ships and even become a sort of seafaring tourist attraction. All that fades and they spend their time speaking little and tending their domed garden. Mrs. Unguentine sums up their existence nicely not quite halfway through the short novel. "All I know," she writes, "it had been a long and exhausting decade."

As the comedy becomes bleaker and veers into nightmare, it is the density of Mrs. Unguentine's voice that keeps you on the barge. The barge provides the Unguentine's with whatever they need, although where supplies come from is not clear. She tells us early on that she would dance strip tease for the custom officials while her husband dealt in contraband elsewhere on the barge. But decades pass, all contact with the outside world vanishes, and yet building supplies and food are never in demand. They live their lives in a complete and miserable world of their own making.

Describing The Log of the SS The Mrs. Unguentine as the story of a bad marriage does it little justice. It is a literary construction as complex and fantastic as the glass dome with sailing mechanisms Mr. Unguentine buids to power the voayge. When that structure crashes down, Crawford propels his characters into an even more fantastic realm than that he has created for their forty year marriage.


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BOOK REVIEW: THEY LIVE, by Jonathan Lethem

They Live by Jonathan Lethem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Does the world need a book-length study by Jonathan Lethem of John Carpenter's 1988 alien invasion film They Live?


My answer to that will have to be an unequivocal, Yes.


This book is among the first offerings from Deep Focus, a new series from Soft Skull Press that invites literary types to write in depth on popular cinema. (The other volume currently in print is Christopher Sorrentino on Death Wish.) My only disappointment here is that I now know that I am not the only person in the world, outside of some geeky, hormonal adolescents watching it repeatedly somewhere in the midwest, who loves this film. Turns out Slavoj Zizek and Greil Marcus are also fans. But that veneer of respectability does not intimidate Lethem when it comes to discussing Carpenter's taste-defying ninety minutes of cheesy action, bad dialogue, minimal special effects, and the occasional moment of art-house mise en scene--I figure if Lethem can use diegesis, I can use "mise en scene."


I won't rehearse the plot. I will only say that reading about They Live sent me straight to the video store for the well restored DVD. Book and movie movie are both a pleasure from beginning to end.


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BOOK REVIEW: WHO WAS CHANGED AND WHO WAS DEAD, by Barbara Comyns

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The setting is the village of Warickshire around the turn of the century. When the novel opens, there has been a flood. The ground floor of the Willoweed home has filled with water and ducks swim through the windows. For the Willoweed children the house and grounds have become an aquatic playground, although the bloated dead animals strike a melancholy note. Their father finds the flood another ordeal to be endured.  For their grandmother, in whose house they live, the flood is an inconvenience that is delaying lunch.

On one level. Comyn's novel is parody of the English novel of village life, filled with eccentric characters and their rustic doings. Her characters are eccentric, but also, in the case of the matriarch, somewhat psychotic. The villagers have more pathologies than charm. Reader's know something bad is going to happen, and it's not surprising to read about halfway through the book

Within a few weeks funerals were to become a common occurrence in that village; but at this time they were rather scarce and looked forward to eagerly.

When I worked around used books, Barbara Comyns was one of those writers published as a Virago Classic whose novels sat unsold next to other remaindered Virago Classics by Christina Stead, Molly Keane, and Elizabeth Taylor. (How often did we have to say, "No, it's not the Elizabeth Taylor.") I had never looked at one and only remember the name because I remember lots of names. This book has shown up on several reader's lists with enthusiastic reviews, and I decided to take a look. Everything everyone else says is true. It is peculiar, delightful, dark, al those things. It is a perfect, preferably rainy afternoon read.


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THE PHILIP K. DICKATHON (4)

The World Jones Made by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Dick published this one in 1956 and didn't give "life as we know it" much time. A devastating world war breaks out in the 1970's, but humankind proves remarkably resilient. By the mid 1990's, when the story begins, we are already zipping around town in airborne taxis and traveling cross country in the matter of an hour or so. You may live in Detroit but you party in San Francisco. "Relativity" is the accepted philosophy of the day, and I found it one of Dick's vaguer concepts. People can not only do most anything they want, but they must let others do so as well, and they cannot, under any circumstances, express a belief in anything. This live and let live code must be enforced by an elaborate security police force, and Cussick, the central character, is on the force.


Jones threatens this world because he is a prophet, able to see into the future for up to one year. This means that the future is known, it is a sure thing, and so the Relativity world will fall apart. The mob longs for Jones's message and forms a devoted following that transforms into a worldwide movement. He can't be stopped because he already knows every move that will be made against him. Cussick's gorgeous Scandinavian wife aligns herself with the Jones movement and becomes a senior officer in the organization. There is a subplot concerning human mutants specially bred to survive on Venus, and an inconvenient but not very dangerous invasion of giant space amoebas that the Jones followers raucously destroy.


All of this does not make into a very coherent novel, and, for as nutty as much of it is, The World Jones Made is little downbeat for Dick. The characters, other than Jones, are exhausted and justifiably pessimistic, caught up in defending an world order they know is doomed and which they no longer really believe in. No wonder they go to night clubs and make concoctions of heroin and marijuana their first drink of the night.


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BOOK REVIEW: SECRET HISTORIAN, THE LIFE AND TIMES OF SAMUEL STEWARD, PROFESSOR, TATTOO ARTIST, AND SEXUAL RENEGADE, by Justin Spring

Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade by Justin Spring
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

In 1926, when he was 17 years old, Samuel Steward learned that Rudolph Valentino was checked into a downtown Columbus, Ohio, hotel under his real name, Rudolph Guglielmi. Already an avid autograph hound, Steward went to Valentino's hotel room, knocked on the door, got the autograph, gave the silent film star a blow job, and took home a snippet of his pubic hair. He kept the hair all his life in a monstrance bought at an antique store. That object now resides in a private collection in Rome.

Not many people could have that kind of story nor the DNA evidence to back it up -- nor the carefully maintained "Stud File" that chronicled some sixty years of sexual encounters. Steward was an academic and young man of promise who became close friends of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, wrote one light-weight novel, spent two decades teaching English at de Paul University in Chicago, finally left that position to become a full-time tattoo artists, and in the 1970's wrote gay porno novels under the name Phil Andros.  Throughout his life he pursued sexual encounters with hustlers, sailors, and working class men, sometimes staging group sex parties in his apartment and venturing further and further into the world of bondage and S/M. He was a significant contributor to Alfred Kinsey's Institute for Sex Research, sending them updates on his sex life and once performing in a film depicting an master/slave training session. His published memoir of Stein and Toklas did not sell well, but it was the event that eventually brought all his identities together as he became the subject, late in his life, of interviews and articles in gay publications. He died of heart failure in 1993 and was quickly more or less forgotten.

For this biography Justin Spring worked with Steward's extensive private papers that had  been stored in a Berkeley attic since his death, letters held by the Yale and University of California, Berkeley, libraries, and whatever material the Kinsey Institute was willing to open to researchers. As the author points out in his afterwards, Steward lived through every major change in American gay life except for the internet. His friends came from the arts and from the street, and  his life story, at times unbelievable, was carefully documented by himself and Alfred Kinsey. Secret Historian is consistently entertaining but does not shy away from the sadder and darker aspects of Steward's life. It is a compulsively readable and possibly important American biography.


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