The Rake Magazine

In the last decade or so, Stephen King has been winning praise from institutions that, if not reviling him, had at least brushed him off as a not-so-serious author. Lisey's Story and Duma Key, his last two novels, received overwhelmingly positive criticism from The New York Times and other reviews; in 2003 he was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters; he was selected to edit the 2007 Best American Short Stories anthology (a post reserved for ‘serious' authors, like Lorrie Moore and John Updike); and probably most importantly, his own fiction has been appearing in some of the most prestigious literary magazines in circulation.

But in practice, at least in the short form, King's recent work has been sloppy. "Ayana," which appeared in the Fall 2007 issue of The Paris Review, is a watered-down version of Chris Adrian's brilliant "A Better Angel" or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings." King's somewhat longer piece, "A Very Tight Place," which appears in the current issue of McSweeney's, is rife with narrative clichés, has an incredibly contrived plot (which one would think to be his strength), the narration is inconsistent, and the characters are the literary equivalent of stick figures.

"A Very Tight Place" concerns two men - the half-bulimic, dandruff-ridden Curtis Johnson, and his cancerous neighbor Tim Grunwald, AKA The Motherfucker, or TMF. For the most part, with a couple unnecessary deviations, we follow Johnson's point of view, and he recounts for us the bitter history between them. The two are duking it out in court over a seaside piece of real estate that both supposedly bought from a senile, now-dead third neighbor. When TMF installs an electric fence on his property that kills Johnson's Lowchen, Johnson reacts by springing another lawsuit on TMF - seeking damages of $1,200, the price of the dog.

For TMF this is the last straw. "Yes, the Motherfucker had fallen on hard times. Hard cheese on Tony, as Evelyn Waugh might have said." As we're told, TMF was abandoned by his wife, struck with cancer, and now the only solace in his life is his hot tub.

So he lures Johnson out to an abandoned condominium development, locks him in a Port-O-Sans, tips the Port-O-Sans over, and then leaves Johnson for dead amidst the drooling urine and fecal matter.

Throughout, King describes his characters' thoughts and actions almost exclusively in the most mundane, commonplace terms. When Johnson leaves his cell phone at home, he is "off the grid." As he mourns his lost dog, he has "to get his head back in the game." When he hits his head against the Port-O-Sans, "he saw stars." (Though the first two may be attributed to the close-third-person narration, the last one can only have come from an omniscient narrator, i.e. King.) This is lazy writing intended, frankly, for lazy readers. It's like spoon-feeding Gerber bananas to a grown-up - we know what these phrases taste like, what they're supposed to mean; and in this form they're made for easy digestion, and aren't nearly as impressive as something a top chef might whip up.

The narrative clichés are trumped only by the spoken ones. "Do you feel lucky, punk?" TMF asks Johnson. Later on, having tipped over the Port-O-Sans, he exclaims, "He shoots, he scores!"

The upside is that, like much of King's work, this is easy to follow, and kind of irresistible. So when TMF says, "But now you're in my power, as they say," it's as if King himself is speaking. At times it even seems King is trying to make a statement about clichés, as TMF loses his phrases a couple times. "Snug as a bug in a whatever," he stutters, as if acknowledging the pointless nature of his own words. But then, the use of formulaic language is so widespread, it becomes the story's foundation, not just a clever theme.

This is all the more disappointing when King does conjure some original similes, as when a condo unit is compared to "Dandelions popping up on an indifferently maintained lawn." He could, though, just as well be talking about the infestation of stock phrases within this very story.

Once Curtis is locked in the Port-O-Sans, the "A Very Tight Place" becomes a loose interpretation of Dante's Inferno. Several comparisons to the afterlife ensue, as the tank is called "cockroach heaven," and from below, Johnson regards the toilet hole above him as "the overworld." And just as Dante escapes hell by climbing out through its most treacherous spot, Johnson escapes the Port-O-Sans through its asshole, or bottom - where the shit is, at least.

Except that Dante's journey through hell is an allegory for his personal struggles with depression, whereas Johnson's revelation upon escaping the toilet is the made-for-TV line, "I was locked in the shithouse already and didn't even know it."

There is no subtlety here, no epiphany. (Not that every story needs an epiphany. But it seems King is angling for one.) Furthermore, it becomes apparent Johnson might actually deserve what he's getting. The electric fence that killed his dog was ten feet inside TMF's property line. Also, Johnson admits to hoodwinking the senile man out of his property, while TMF paid a fairer price. Not to mention, he's leveling lawsuit after lawsuit against an old man (TMF) who has lung cancer. We sympathize with Johnson only because we're (mostly) seeing things from his perspective, and because something bad is happening to him. But the guy has no redeeming qualities of his own accord. The revelation "I was locked in the shithouse already" holds no seed of self-realization that he might actually be a bad person. "Tight Place" might have been a much more interesting - and more powerful - story had King left Johnson in the shitter.

Predictably, though, he doesn't. Maybe the most disappointing aspect of the narrative is the plot. Though King employs typical deftness and suspense in getting Johnson into the Port-O-Sans, there's never really a question of whether he'll escape or not. Several times it's pointed out that the compartment's walls and ceiling have been reinforced with sheet metal, making them impossible to penetrate. But because we're (usually) inside Johnson's head, once he's trapped, we behave as if we are trapped, too. It should take about one minute for the reader to think, "the bottom"; King waits fourteen pages - which in the story is about fourteen hours - before allowing Johnson to have this thought. I'm reminded of watching The Village, M. Night Shyamalan's fourth major movie, and knowing there was going to be a twist at the end, because the pattern had already been established in his previous films. Even if you can't figure out what that twist is, just knowing it's there - seeing the skeleton of the structure, the drywall beneath the faux brick - dispels whatever magic there might have been.

One of Chekhov's famous dictums on writing is that there are no new stories, only new relationships. To have new relationships, one must have full characters. TMF is supposed to be deep because he's lost everything dear to him, and has cancer on top of that. Johnson is supposedly fleshed out because he has dandruff, induces himself to vomit for vaguely metaphysical reasons, and is gay. (Really I can't figure out why King chose to make Johnson homosexual, except as a means to make TMF - who uses epithets like "All gay people are lazy. It's been scientifically proven" - more evil. Or maybe because having a gay character is literary. Otherwise, within this story, it has nothing whatsoever to do with his existence.) This strikes one as Insta-Depth, especially as these characteristics all evaporate once the plot kicks into gear - personality and backstory become negligible. In the end, when Johnson confronts TMF after escaping, TMF is more concerned about having been bested by his neighbor (plot) than about his woeful life (character). The relationship, then, plays on the old standard of hostile neighbors, and offers nothing new.

Stories don't have to be ‘serious' to be legitimate. Cujo is one of the most gripping, un-put-downable novels ever written, not to mention the hundreds of millions of other compelling, suspenseful tales King has penned. And he has other narrative fortes - his ability simply to move a story forward could very well be unparalleled by any other writer, living or otherwise.

But if he wants his ‘serious' reputation to grow - which his references to Waugh and Dante, and the placement of his work in literary magazines, suggest he does - he's got some renovation to do. Right now it seems King's being applauded just for making the effort. And that's totally cool - the effort is noble, and undertaken in earnest. And if he succeeds, it would be tantamount to the Americans winning a World Cup championship in soccer - millions of new fans might be turned onto something they'd never before considered viewing (in King's case, heavy-hitting, personally affecting literature). And like the American soccer team, one might watch (read) hopefully, and even be encouraged by intermittent periods of creativity and cohesion, but in the end there's still disappointment.

(header illustration from here)

Welcome to a possibly special edition of Poem Worth Reading. The very title of this Cracking Spines segment — that is, Poem Worth Reading — is jeopardized with today's entry. But because this is a blog, and should thereby not be held to any qualitative standards (self-imposed or otherwise), and because I got the go-ahead from my editor, who said I could post "basically anything...," I've decided to go ahead and put up some of my own scribblings. I figure it's Memorial Day, so maybe there's less readership, anyway.

The back-story (feel free to skip): My grandparents own a cabin not far from the Twin Cities, and I was up there this weekend to celebrate the holiday, incidentally by myself (there was leftover pizza, there was beer, there was NBA basketball [if you know my family, you know they don't know what a tent is, let alone a cabin...yes there's cable here, but I don't have it in my regular home, and that's how I justify watching it]).

On Sunday, at about five o’clock in the evening, my aunt called, waking me up from my nap. Naturally I was pissed. She said thunderstorms were headed my way. Though normally rain has a soporific effect on me, the ringer of the cabin phone is kind of like a dog whistle for humans, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. So I said, “Screw it” — sadly, I said it out loud — and went out onto the screened-in porch to watch the gathering storm.

I may appreciate a poem from time to time, but I don’t write ‘em. Nevertheless, immersed as deeply in the woods as a member of my family can hope to get (there’s no Wi-Fi here, at least, and my cell phone is on ‘roam’), watching the boats on the lake return in unison to their docks, then watching the rain fall from a strangely low sky, I realized there was a pen in front of me, and a blank piece of paper.

"Haikus," I thought (thankfully silently). I don't mean to take anything away from the Japanese poets that have mastered brevity, nor imply that my haikus are as meaningful or worthwhile as theirs (sadly, a couple of mine tend toward Yoda-esque syntax and conjugation). But let's face it: As far as poetry goes, the haiku is a fairly accessible form — concise, quick-striking, sometimes poignant. They're kind of like puns (except sometimes poignant). So really, though Freud may say otherwise, the ultimate goal of this post isn't necessarily to get more exposure for my writing and launch a new career. Rather, I hope it's a sort of call-to-arms for all the would-be poets out there, too intimidated by meter and rhyme to grab their journals and head for their various solitudes.

And I invite all you fearless readers (I really do love puns) to post your own haikus in the ‘comments' section. (Though please refrain from the likes of "Max Ross: Egomaniac/ where's Whitman? Or Eliot?/They're better than you" and so on. Unless you have one that's really, really good.)

Also, for those interested, I found the header illustration here.

So here goes:

Fat green leaves beaten
by rain. I'd have picked them from
their twigs, anyway

At least the pontoon
has a canopy. Thank God
our boat won't get wet.

In grade school I learned
to make rain sounds with clapped hands;
microwaved popcorn.

Glass door is open,
screen door is shut; sound of rain -
but no rain - enters.

Something literary
about rain: its ambition
to rise back up

Polaroid lightning
to remember later how
hard it really rained.

I stand here wearing
my grandfather's sweatpants, and
write about the storm.

For summer reading, Barnes & Noble recommends The Diary of Anne Frank. So here's the presumed scenario: The sun is out, you're under your candy striped umbrella at the beach, children in the near distance are making sandcastles on the shore, and you are immersing yourself in the magical world of WWII-era Amsterdam, through the eyes of a 13-year-old Jewish girl whose family was forced into hiding, and who later perishes in a concentration camp. If this is a bit light for you, Barnes & Noble suggests Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales as a summertime alternative, so you can brush up on your Middle English, like you've been meaning to. Or if Objectivist philosophy is your thing, an anthology of Ayn Rand's previously unpublished writings - The Early Ayn Rand (only 508 pages)- is a welcome member of the B & N "Summer Reading" display.

Really?

By now it's old news, if it was ever news at all, but in this year's edition of City Pages' "Best of the Twin Cities," Barnes & Noble Booksellers took "Best Bookstore (New)" in the reader's poll. In a city with as many funky community bookstores as ours, this was a bit surprising to me, because in terms of customer experience, I've always found B & N a bit lacking.

I don't want to rant about how B & N is bad for the universe and promotes global warming and cannibalism and pedophilia. We've all heard it all before. So I'm going to try and make a good, old-fashioned pro/con list consisting of the chain's merits (which it certainly has) and demerits, and see if maybe one outweighs the other.

I assume there might be some crossover in readership between City Pages and The Rake - possibly even some with this blog - so I invite anyone and everyone to comment with why they like (or don't like) Barnes & Noble, and to educate me as to what I may have missed - probably a substantial amount.

So here goes:

PROS

Squatter's Rights - You can sit in a Barnes & Noble for as long as you want, without feeling guilty. (I tend to start feeling guilty after about fifteen minutes in Magers & Quinn if I don't find anything I want.) It's kind of like a library, but with newer, better smelling books.

Bathrooms - I'm pretty sure that most B & Ns have bathrooms that are functionally, if not explicitly, open to the public.

Author Events - Probably the biggest benefit B & N brings to its communities is their ability to get big-name authors in otherwise-skipped-over towns. The branches Downtown and in the Galleria are especially good at getting some writers of note to Minneapolis and St. Paul. To name a recent few: Keith Gessen, Darin Strauss, and, thank God, Mario Lopez.

Discounts - When it comes to the bottom line, B & N is the best on giving us fairly significant price cuts on our favorite magazines and books.

Kids' Sections - I suspect this may have had a lot to do with its City Pages ranking. Maybe the one thing that many indy bookstores lack is a decent children's section (though check out Birchbark Books in Kenwood). It seems B & N caters as much to youngsters as to any other demographic, fully aware that they still have imaginations to be stoked and exploited.

Har Mar - More than any other B & N I know of, the branch by Har Mar mall serves as a neighborhood hub. They have one of the corporation's rare ‘used' sections, and are willing to host a Chinese conversation group. Also, I've heard it's a good spot for singles to meet.

And the CONS.

Before I start, I want to say that I'm going to try and keep the cons to problems encountered within the actual bookstores. Whatever B & N's global ramifications may be, the CP poll was about user experience, not where we shop with the cleanest conscience, or where we shop because everywhere else has been mysteriously put out of business.

More Discounts - No, I don't want to save another ten per cent today by signing up for a new credit card. Nor give you my zip code in order to buy a magazine.

Selection - It's often hard to find the book I'm looking for. Despite their vast shelving space, B & N's management mandates that branches constantly cycle through their shelves, weeding out the books that don't sell as well as they're supposed to. Because of this, it's difficult to come across older books. A lot of the time they'll have an author's best-seller, but none of the rest of that particular author's output. Perusing the Calhoun Village branch, I was unable to find any books by Celine or Bernard Malamud, and they had only one book each of Chekhov, Grace Paley, and Proust. The poetry section is even more barren - a sort of Blockbuster video approach to stocking. Only one collection each by local heavyweights Robert Bly and Louis Jenkins, and several omissions (There were, however, several copies of the poetry collections by Jewel and Ani DiFranco.)

Books, but not Reading - This is my biggest beef: B & N promotes books, and the selling of materials bound in traditional book form, but only minimally and incidentally promote any actual reading. Their ‘Summer Reading' display, for example, is simply preposterous, and shows the company's complete lack of attention to their readers.
As is now well-documented, the books that appear up front and on the chain's various ‘favorites' tables aren't selected by staff; publishers pay to have their books in those spots. This means that advertisers determine what we see, not people that care about what we're actually reading.
Because of this, some mismatching authors appear linked together. I especially liked how the new cardboard Ernest Hemingway display is next to the display with Mary Higgins Clark and James Patterson's books. It's kind of like putting Skittles next to the organic fruits.
Call me condescending. But I assure you there is no way in Hell I'm more condescending than the Barnes & Noble executive who commands that there be a rack for "Magazines America Loves" in his stores.


I think that's all I've got. It seems the list is weighted toward the pros, though I have to say the last two cons are really the clinchers for me (I don't live anywhere near Har Mar, nor do much shopping for kids, which effectively mangles my personal pros). Again, we here at The Rake are all about opinions, we thrive on them, so if you've got one, or many, throw it out there, yo.

Employing a tactic I'm pretty sure I've picked up from the current presidential administration, I've decided to take a new approach to truth. Namely, I'm going to make it up. And make it up in such a way that justifies every decision I decide(r), and in such a way that makes me feel better about my life, and the enveloping society thereof.
So here goes: Everyone is reading.

And because everyone is reading, there is a high demand for poetry.
And because there is a high demand for poetry, once a week, possibly on Mondays, but certainly not limited to Mondays, I'm going to try really hard to post a Poem Worth Reading on this blog.

I know I know I know, this is supposed to be a blog about books, and probably shouldn't contain any actual literature, unless it's hyper-linked. Nevertheless, poems are great. They're (often) short, and powerful, and sometimes they even rhyme, which makes you feel happy for reasons you probably can't define very well. And people should read more of them. More, even, than they already are. Which is lots. Because everybody is reading. Obviously.

This week's Poem Worth Reading is by Marie Vogel Gery. It's part of a collection entitled Penchant - an anthology comprised of poems written by women from Northfield, Minnesota. Though I can't quite put my finger on it, there is definitely a quality that unites the verses of these poets. "The eleven writers gathered here show an easy abundance," notes Scott King in his introduction. And I think that's as close to a definition as one can get - a vague yet precise "easy abundance" - a lovely ability to meander, paired with the certain (Minnesotan) simplicity that underlies each stanza

Read it. Everyone else is.

"Sleepover"

My son and I battle weekly over whether he can sleepover there
or they can sleepover here, he has a lust for places
filled with smells other than my cooking
for rooms without his stepfather's voice
even for places without his brother's scent
still soft like his, like their cheeks when I kiss them goodnight

He longs for that future when the telephone is his
the refrigerator, the stove, the car, the front door
when he can have makko boards on all the walls
and Samurai swords in place of umbrellas

He longs for staying up all night at a party
where something wonderful happens and everyone knows
he is grown up and popular and everyone wants him to sleepover
be their best friend and they'll live on pizza and Mountain Dew

He wants that freedom not to get lonesome
as the dark comes in through the house
things he doesn't want to think about
slide down the chimney and hiss in the rooms
fear, like a cat, comes and sits near him
follows him into his room, plays under the bed

Each week by Wednesday we screech in tangled logic
magic and hope that he will sleepover there this time
or they will sleepover here for a whole weekend
and something wonderful will happen

It could have been so good.

That was the biggest disappointment - not how bad it was, but the discrepancy between its actual and potential levels of quality. I'm speaking (writing) of The Ballad of Josef K, a puppeted interpretation of Franz Kafka's The Trial, on stage now at the Illusion Theater.

When reviewing (or just viewing) a movie or play that's been adapted from a novel I've read, I do the best I can to separate the text from the performance (Bard notwithstanding). It's important to judge works of art on their independent merit, but when you're talking about an iteration of The Trial, at least for me the comparisons between subject and spin-off are inevitable. What a theater troupe is able to do with a novel as elusive as this one is almost more interesting than the liberties they'll take with it.

And puppets, it seems to me, could actually have been the perfect medium for this specific book.

As I understand it, The Trial (the novel) is largely about power. We meet Josef K on his thirtieth birthday, when he is apprehended for no particular reason. "Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K.," it begins. "He knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." (K, the protagonist of The Trial, The Castle, and a couple shorter pieces, is Kafka's fictionalized personality- the writer's middle name was Josef; later on in The Trial one of the arresting officers is revealed to have the name Franz...take it as thou wilt.) For the rest of the story, Josef tries to figure out what charges are being leveled against him, and by whom. His investigation takes him up through a government hierarchy - servants, secretaries, lawyers, judges, priests - and he's never quite able to get to the top tier.

Or, in other words, he's never quite able to find out who's pulling the strings. (What an awful pun, I know, I know.) In all seriousness, though, what better way than puppets to act this drama out? Puppets - with or without strings - are bodies controlled by forces that, by the very nature of puppetry, are meant to be both anonymous and omnipotent.

The notion of fate, and the extent to which we manage it, is the main theme of Kafka's work (The Trial and otherwise), and there's a fairly obvious correlation to a puppet and its master.

Which the Milwaukee Mask and Puppet Theatre left untouched. While their dummies were impressively rendered (fans of puppet theater might be impressed), and at times expertly controlled, they let alone any issues dealing with pre-determined fate. The relationship between the actors and their puppets was not mysterious - it was simply incidental.

Even when he was writing the book, it seems the author felt the tug of some supernatural power he was unable to control. An entry from his journal:

August 30. Cold and empty. I feel only too strongly the limits of my abilities, narrow limits, doubtless, unless I am completely inspired. And I believe that even in the grip of inspiration I am swept along only within these narrow limits, which, however, I then no longer feel because I am being swept along.

There is implicit reference to some force that ‘limits' his abilities, and the apparent opposite of that force, inspiration, is just another god whose whim Kafka has to endure. (Explicitly, Kafka could, then, be considered a puppet, controlled by Inspiration and its opposite, which I think he would have named ‘Doubt.') Not to acknowledge this in a performance, if not irresponsible, is at the very least passing up a terrific chance to further Kafka's explorations.

Rather than sticking to Josef's story - that of K's relation to the governing forces of his soul - the production literalized Kafka's novel, in order to show the dangers of our current political climate. From the playbill: "Today the news reveals hidden worlds of torture, terror, and mistaken identity...The Trial [bears] an amazingly contemporary resonance [with this]." (Sadly, when the plot did follow K's investigations, it was at its most compelling.)

I would argue that, on the scale of human experience, politics are at least one hierarchical step below religion (see Spinoza's Ethics); therefore, I would argue that this troupe was attacking Kafka's story at a level lower than it's meant to be understood. (Though maybe this doesn't apply anymore; we're living in a world where it's difficult to say the word ‘soul' and be taken seriously, whereas politics have become ubiquitous and all-important and seemingly infinite...kind of like God's supposed to be. Maybe it's actually impossible to relate Kafka's novel to the modern world and stay true to his intentions.)

The physical torture depicted in the novel - scenes of rape and electrocution - were the most vivid aspects of the performance. On stage there was more puppet intercourse than Team America: World Police (and less funny); an apt title could very well have been The Hyper-Sexualizaton of Josef K. But I really believe Kafka intended these aspects to be metaphor. To grossly oversimplify: in the book, I think, the sexual perversity was a sort of rape of the soul; in the play, though, it signified the corruption of government. To go a step further: In the book, the corruption of government stood for the corruption of the soul; in the play, the corruption of government stood for the corruption of government.

So I suppose the question comes down to intent. Maybe director Rob Goodman loved the novel for the same reasons I did, but also saw potential to make The Trial into a modern parable for Abu Ghraib. That's fine. But I would still call it dangerously un-ambitious. Why lessen the novel's meaning for the purposes of manifesto? Why make it so mundane? So earthly? Whatever its merits (which I'll leave to the theater blogger), there was a roughness to this performance akin to an unfinished jigsaw puzzle - all the pieces may have been there, but there was minimal effort to assemble them correctly.