Review of 'Forecast' by Shya Scanlon

Shya Scanlon’s first novel, Forecast, is a fabulist dystopian work about Citizen Surveillant Maxwell Point’s report to the United States Energy Commission regarding the disappearance of Helen Allen-Karuth (formerly known, in her youth, as Zara). Set in the year 2212, the title offers up the novel as a view into our own future through close examination of our own present time.

Part Kurt Vonnegut, part Philip K. Dick, Forecast incorporates various sci-fi elements (the characters in the novel power their houses and appliances with ETMs [Emotional Transfer Machines], wear Anti-Surveillance masks, etc.) to mirror our own society’s flaws, corruptions and obsessions.

As is tradition in most science fiction, Forecast critiques the political and economic landscapes which inhabit our own current culture, its ideological apparatuses (including repressive militarism) as well as rampant consumerism (many terms in the novel are either registered [Pansomatic®] or unregistered [WeatherLESS Reports™] trademarks, hinting at the overabundance of false dichotomies in our culture).

Helen, known in her youth as Zara (serving as her own dichotomy, and echoing perhaps Nietzsche’s Zarathustra who spoke of the Übermensch [Overman] who must cross from primitive savage into civilized man), is more rebellious than Helen, until Helen decides to leave her adulterous husband Jack and embark on a quest (with her neighbor’s talking dog, Rocket) to find Asseem, Zara’s ex-boyfriend.

Told primarily in two alternating time frames (Helen’s adult life and Zara’s youth), the novel also deals with the struggle between past and present identities—who we are relative to who we were, who we’ve been, ultimately forecasting who we will become. This identity changes (as all identities do) according to emotional responses to the circumstances Zara/Helen finds herself in. (Ironically, the rebellious Zara is incapable of transferring enough emotional energy to make the machine work.)

Point’s narrative—his story—is Helen’s story, as he is reporting Helen's disappearance to the Energy Commission, though his motives become increasingly suspect. His overall role in the novel calls into question authorial intent and the limits of the omniscient narrator (while no doubt playing on the conventions of the unreliable narrator) who literally watches and knows everything about his subject (our protagonist), and for this reason the boundaries between objective witness and emotionally attached voyeur are blurred when Point intervenes in Helen’s life.

In his report to the Energy Commission, Point provides key excerpts from the Citizen Surveillance Handbook written by his mentor, Dr. Kadik:

[T]he ability to feel … becomes something of an addiction. But it is not, as it may first appear, the narcissistic brand of self-interest, of vanity, that might otherwise be thought a first order threat to true connection. Because this is not a retreat into the self so much as an escape from the self. An emotion’s internal bloom does not reflect one’s own face, but distracts exactly from it. It is a nameless, universal equivocation of the self. These experiences transcend the finite, fleshy vehicle and open one up to some cast encounter with the anonymous nature of life. It is a release. A passage. A leap of faith. And it should not be undertaken lightly.

The purpose of surveillance in the novel is “to fill in whatever pieces are missing to recreate motivation, emotional response, and of course to predict behavior.” This behavior model is used as both a marketing and a military strategy to track and control citizens. This prediction of behavior also reflects the idea of weather—something which, in the novel, in 2212, can no longer be predicted.

Citizen involvement in society is also called into question:

I watched [Helen’s pursuit of anonymity] unfold with some astonishment, the way you watch an overseas war on TV: little spotty images filled with loads of conjecture, a touch of scandal, and then you wait for the real story to emerge so they can make a movie.

This not-so-veiled reference to current events reflects how seemingly incapable we are of affecting the world around us (or how apathetic we are based on our feelings of help/hopelessness), and that we can only utilize our barren, worthless mortality for entertainment purposes. This is where the genius of Scanlon’s Emotional Transfer Technology calls attention to the energy we waste on negative thoughts and actions (rather than redirecting them toward more positive ends)—reminding us that we literally have the power to affect/effect the world around us.

Forecast is now available from Flatmancrooked. Shya Scanlon is also the author of In This Alone Impulse (Neomi Press, 2010). Here is Shya Scanlon's website.

Review of 'He Is Talking to the Fat Lady' by xTx

xTx’s first chapbook of stories, He Is Talking to the Fat Lady, is a sobering collection of ultimately doomed narrators who, despite their self-destructive tendencies, seek out redemption through physical pleasure—perhaps at the expense of emotional stability.

I like the structure of this collection, as the transitions from story to story are smooth and calculated. It’s very easy, though, to focus on individual lines because they’re so precise, the analogies so appropriate, heartbreaking:

[E]xhaustion long gone, now transformed into something akin to transcendence and the encapsulated air within the hollow bones that kept birds afloat.

And:

[S]he’ll buy gold tips along with new lips…hers gone, worn right through, an exhausted hangman’s noose.

And:

The filth stays where they left it. Her feet and legs stained with it all. His too. This embrace unites them. It’s a place love hides. It will wash away. It will remain. There is nothing.

In the title story, a woman sits in a lawn chair at a barbecue waiting for a man (presumably her boyfriend) who’s gone to get her some water, but after getting the water he begins talking to another woman—a woman she feels is not as attractive as she is. In this short scene, as he stands there holding her water, talking to this other woman, she tries coming to terms with pangs of envy and inadequacy.

This story is reminiscent of Homer’s Odyssey, in that Penelope waits a seemingly endless 10 years for her husband Odysseus’s return from the Trojan War (a journey he makes, appropriately, across water—implying the narrator’s boyfriend holds in his hand entire oceans, the very element from which life originated). In this story, there are no suitors here to vie for the narrator’s hand, though a little girl does approach her and demand her attention:

I feel a hand on my shoulder. I am not startled. The touch is soft, almost ghostly. I do not even turn which proves I am not scared of the invisible touch. I think maybe it might be a trick of my skin or my clothes. That it how barely there it was.

This is also reminiscent of Beckett’s Godot, as he also never shows up. The little girl’s mother yells for her to “LEAVE THE NICE LADY ALONE,” yells so loud it scares the narrator. She looks at the little girl:

Sabrina seems nonplussed and hesitates for a heavy moment before complying. Innocently defiant. […] Good for her I think. I feel bonded to Sabrina.

This bond is forged in spite of the man who has yet to return with the water she requested, inverting the dynamic of marriage to incorporate not only a same-sex relationship but that of an adult and child.

The narrator’s concluding epiphany that she will never be satisfied reflects existential and even Buddhist themes of the cessation of desire:

I know now I will never get my water. He will never stop talking to the fat lady. The shade will never cool me. Sabrina will never really love her mother. I will never move from this lawn chair. […] I reach back into the bag of rice cakes.

Here the narrator shows how we substitute one desire, one addiction, for another. She seems to imply that the Buddhist ideal of cessation of desire is at best impossible and at worst a futile pursuit—paradoxically proposing that wanting to extinguish desire is yet another desire one must extinguish—that acceptance is the only solution.

In “And After, Upon Your Request, I Will Make You Both Ham Sandwiches,” an emotionally numb woman begs her boyfriend to physically abuse her:

Let me get pregnant with your baby so can kick me down the stairs. […] The baby will die inside me and I will bleed it out between my legs as you sit on a middle stair marveling at my numb aberrancy. Isn’t it amazing how I can’t feel a thing?

And then to cheat on her, to “bash [her] skull with a hammer,” and she imagines him telling the woman he’s cheating on her with:

Don’t worry baby, she doesn’t feel a thing. Ain’t that right sweetheart?

Physical abuse here serves as a deliberate metaphor for emotional abuse, a relationship the narrator unconsciously desires as a result of past trauma, left unknown to us and most likely repressed by the narrator.

In “When I Take Him to Yosemite He Forgets About Her,” two women meet, one of whom wants to give her son away to the other. She is exhausted, the son too demanding of her resources:

I hold her baby and he hates me. He wants her breast back. I give him mine and he swears.

The boy eventually comes to admire this new mother, “pats [her] cheeks.” She asks “[i]f he feels there is a chance for [them].” This story plays on the Oedipus complex through the inversion of courting rituals and replacement of the biological mother figure, suggesting this is the basis for all male relationships with women: The women they fall in love with are merely surrogate mothers, questioning also the notion of free will.

The stories in this collection are brutally honest, obscenely tender, and display a wonderfully subtle talent reaching out to us from beyond all the horizons of our own thoughts to pull us out of ourselves and into the world, and here we can see, through the pseudonym' xTx' how truly anonymous we all are, and ultimately how our individual struggles with identity parallel one another.

He Is Talking to the Fat Lady has sold out of its 50-copy print run, but is still available as a PDF chapbook w/ audio from Safety Third Press. Here is xTx’s blog.

Review of 'i am like october when i am dead' by Steve Roggenbuck

Steve Roggenbuck’s debut chapbook, i am like october when I am dead, is a work of ferociously subversive minimalism. The poems are concrete, and don't rely on figurative language to convey their imagery. But what Roggenbuck leaves out is, as in music, what matters the most, and Roggenbuck is here at work perfecting this ideal.

The poems in this collection are at most only a few lines long and (as most minimalist works seek to) leave much room for interpretation. I find much literary and political commentary in these lines.

Here is the first poem in its entirety:

i dont care about reading a poem
who do you think i am, robert frost?
i have never been in the woods and i hate walking

This sentiment, "i don’t care about reading a poem," erodes conventional notions of what it means to write 'poetry', to read and 'understand' it. The narrator places himself in the paradoxical situation of writing a poem about not caring about poetry, which reminds me of the work of Chilean anti-poet, Nicanor Parra.

Roggenbuck also questions the nature of the poet’s identity, inverting the poet’s ambition to surpass his/her predecessors (how I wish I wasn’t invoking Harold Bloom) to face the reader with the question of intention: The poet is (or should be) working for him/herself, not to please an audience which will inevitably compare the work to his/her predecessors.

The reference to Robert Frost, or rather, to 'older' poetry, is echoed again in a veiled reference to William Carlos Williams:

if you call me, i wont answer
i am sitting under the moon inside of a wheelbarrow

"So much depends on the red wheelbarrow," and the narrator’s placing himself inside it symbolizes a Marxist response to Williams, the fulfillment of the narrator's utilitarian purpose—in essence, existing as a mere commodity. The narrator doesn’t answer because he has no identity, no individuality in a capitalist society which claims to promote the very individuality it suppresses. Roggenbuck also shows how, to disregard and surpass one's literary predecessors, one must possess a categorical knowledge of their work.

In the title poem, Roggenbuck implies that doing anything in society (having hands to do things with) makes one complicit in society’s crimes, the horrors it commits:

i am like october when i am dead
there is my hand
i am like the killers of people

Roggenbuck also explores the generational conflict between parents and their children:

i asked my dad if the corn harvest is over
it is way over, my dad said

Here, the narrator is inattentive and completely misses the harvest while the father, seemingly eager to make a connection with his son—despite his son’s failure to follow in his footsteps—by using his son’s colloquialisms.

Roggenbuck also criticizes society's treatment of women, comparing it to the treatment of animals, juxtaposing secular consent to this treatment with the patriarchal ideology of Christianity (also implied here is the use of hands to accomplish these atrocities):

the hymnal at my grandmothers funeral says 'wives be subordinate to your husbands, as is proper in the lord'
five months ago i saw a video of a dog being thrown into a garbage compactor

There are also small, apolitical epiphanies such as:

oh, you have a smock on

As with all the poems in this collection there is no set up, only implied setting and action through simple, casual remarks. Conceptual work like this breaks the world and even life itself down into a series of non-sequitor impressions representing the small moments we too often ignore. For this reason, the poems in this collection remind me of the concrete minimalist poems of Aram Saroyan.

i am like october when i am dead is available for free from Steve Roggenbuck who has published it in the Public Domain. Here is Steve Roggenbuck’s blog.

Review of 'Cut Through the Bone' by Ethel Rohan

Ethel Rohan’s first collection of stories, Cut Through the Bone, is pregnant with characters haunted either by loss or the absence of something they never had. They compensate for these absences in strange ways, essentially becoming different people—their surrogate selves are prosthetics for phantom limbs. We meet Rohan’s characters in medias res, trapped in excruciating cycles of yearning, addiction and complicity—of quiet catastrophe.

In the very first story, “More Than Gone,” an older woman attends her first public gathering since her husband’s funeral where she is given a purple balloon. When she gets home she ties the balloon to a chair, thinks of her husband and draws a face on the balloon in black marker. The story ends with the line:

She can just about remember being so young that she’d cry over a burst balloon.

Here Rohan immediately sets the tone of this collection, at once whimsical, astonishing and tragic, weaving past and present selves together to document and question the nature of identity as it relates to her chartacters' memories of others.

In “Lifelike,” a woman in a childless marriage obsessively collects baby dolls that quickly fill the house, as she gradually forgets her other responsibilities (calling off work, neglecting the tropical fish, refusing to see friends or even leave the house). Her husband, disturbed by his wife’s obsession, eventually yields to his wife’s behavior, agreeing to let one of the dolls sleep in bed with them. He wakes during the night thinking he hears crying, and the story ends with the line:

He checked first on his wife and then on the doll between them.

Rohan’s endings are subtle, but simultaneously imply several literal and figurative meanings. Here the doll is literally between the couple, but also comes between them, figuratively driving them apart until the husband surrenders his pleas for sanity to his desire for happiness (which means allowing his wife's obsession to continue—letting her be happy). In this way, the dolls end up bringing them closer together. This paradox, among others, is why this collection quivers with surreality.

In “Vitals,” a doctor’s wife commands her son to take her pulse to reassure her that she’s still there.

In “Babies on the Shore,” thousands of (possibly dead) ladybugs pepper the shore of a beach as the narrator contemplates the possible consciousness of rain.

In “Next to the Gutter,” a boy comes home from school to find an endless series of Post-It notes from his mother instructing him to do his homework, avoid television, etc., all while she is at work. When she comes home he sticks a Post-It on his forehead that says “Free—Please Take,” and goes out to sit on the curb.

The story “How to Kill,” about a couple living in the aftermath of an abortion, seems like it could be a prologue to “Lifelike,” as it provides impetus for the wife’s eccentric and disturbing behavior.

Cut Through the Bone is bracketed by phantom limbs. I’ve discussed the first story, “More Than Gone,” above. In the title story concluding this collection, an amputee asks his massage therapist to massage “where [his] leg used to be[.]”

I feel Rohan is the massage therapist—rather, her description of the massage therapist’s work on the patient’s phantom limb is how I imagine Rohan composes her stories. This feels evident in the the collection’s concluding lines:

She started at the empty space, her heart knocking against her ribcage, and reminded herself to breathe. […] Warmth radiated out of her hands and into the memory of [the patient’s] foot, his leg, and all that was lost.

Cut Through the Bone is available from Dark Sky Books. Her second collection of stories, Hard to Say, is forthcoming from PANK Little Books. Here is Ethel Rohan’s blog.

Some Recent Things

On Christmas Eve, a chapter from my unpublished novel The Immortals Act Their Age called "When and If the Body Was" was published in Flash Fire 500 (Thanks again, Bozzy…). Perfect for the season, reminds me of last Christmas when a poem of mine called “Identical Nativity Scenes” was published in Zygote in My Coffee.

Big thanks to Ken Sparling who, in a list of his favorite reads in 2010 @ Big Other, says: "Everything by Eric Beeny." Thank you, Ken... Also on his list: work by Kim Chinquee and my good friend Thomas Luckie III (both forthcoming in Broken Pencil Magazine, 2011), as well as an unpublished manuscript by Greg Gerke. Also read favorites by Norman Lock, Jamie Iredell, Scott Garson and Kevin Sampsell.

Got my grades the other day, found out I’ll be graduating. I will get my BA in English, but not until like May. So what. I still don’t know what I’m going to do now. I need to find, like, ‘work’...

Essay on 'The Human Spirit' @The Nervous Breakdown

I wrote an essay about 'the human spirit' called "You Can Lead a Narcissist to Water" up at The Nervous Breakdown. Here are the tags: 127 Hours, adrenaline, animal instinct, animals, Aron Ralston, bombs, brain chemicals, canyons, death drive, dopamine, Earth, endorphins, evolution, fun, guns, hallucinations, humans, James Franco, mustard gas, napalm, narcissism, nuclear weapons, religion, sadomasochism, Sigmund Freud, survival mechanisms, the human spirit, the self, the soul...

Here are two other essays I wrote at The Nervous Breakdown: "'The Crazy Tagret Lady', or Why You Might Get Trampled to Death This Holiday Season" and "On the Other Side of the White Wall: A Post-Colonial Reading of Real Life."

And here are some other essays I wrote. Thank you for your time.

Coursework Completed: Now What?

I've now officially completed my Bachelor's coursework. I handed in my last paper and took all my finals this week. When I got home I laid in bed, half-relieved and half-scared out of my mind. I don't know what I'm going to do now.

I haven’t done too well this semester. I’ve had ‘senioritis’, or whatever they call it when you’re sick of doing shit you don’t care about anymore. Other things came up, too. My GPA has been 3.9 throughout all my previous semesters. I’m afraid to see what it’ll be after this one. I hope I graduate.


Anyway, if I manage to pass this semester’s classes, I’ll have my BA in English. I have no idea what I’m going to do then. I have no goals, no aspirations. I thought about applying to grad school, but I’m not sure I want to do school anymore. I like going to school, being in school, but not the pressure of all the work. (And work: I need a job. I've been tutoring part-time in the Writing Center on campus, but now I need something else.)

I’d like to get an MFA, but there aren’t any offered here in Buffalo, and I’m afraid to travel. So, MFA’s out. I'm thinking of applying to the University of Buffalo for the Poetics Program (which would be just a Masters in English, with a focus on Poetics).

I don't know. Other things. Life. I'm afraid. Of everything.

Because of school, I haven’t been able to read much of anything I want. I bought a lot of books with financial aid and loan money that I can’t wait to read. I want to post short reviews of them, too. Here’s an alphabetical list of books I've purchased (or traded for/received for free), will read and hopefully review:

Matt Bell’s How They Were Found
Andrew Borgstrom’s Explanations
Mel Bosworth’s Grease Stains, Kismet and Maternal Wisdom
Ana C.'s Make-Believe Love-Making
Jimmy Chen’s Typewriter
Shome Dasgupta’s i am here and You Are Gone
Zachary German’s Eat When You Feel Sad
Lindsay Hunter’s Daddy
Jason Jordan’s Cloud and Other Stories
Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything is Quiet
Adam Moorad's Oikos
Sam Pink’s Person
Sam Pink’s You Hear Ambulance Sounds and Think They Are for You
Steve Roggenbuck’s i am like october when i am dead
Ethel Rohan’s Cut Through the Bone
Shya Scanlon's Forecast
Ken Sparling’s Book
Audri Sousa’s Caspian Quilt
xTx’s He is Talking to the Fat Lady

I haven’t decided whether I will post individual reviews, or just post them all in one giant review post. A giant review post doesn’t make much sense to me, but I like the idea of having a giant review post. There's so much else I want to read, some of which I scooped up off Amazon pretty cheap.

Some other things:

Snowing Fireflies is available in a green edition for $5.00, and for $0.99 it’s available from Barnes and Noble as a NOOKbook. There’s still some copies of the Signature Series edition left, too.

Jason Behrends asked me to send him audio of me reading for his Orange Alert podcast, and he included one of the pieces I sent him in Episode 40 last week, “Living Expenses,” originally published in PANK. J. Bradley also reads a story in this episode called “Bury Me With It.”

Some other things:

Two-Part Giveaway: 'Of Creatures' & 'Snowing Fireflies'

1/
I would like to give away five copies of my recently released poetry collection, Of Creatures (Gold Wake Press, 2010), to the first five people to comment on this post re Of Creatures.

I also have a few review copies available, so if anyone is interested in reviewing it for their blog or any other site to which they contribute please leave a comment or email me (ellipsis81@netzero.net).

This collection is an experiment in optimism. The word 'happy' appears in it several times. You might like it, maybe.



2/
I have five extra copies of my chapbook, Snowing Fireflies (Folded Word, 2010), that I would like to giveaway to the first five people to comment on this post re Snowing Fireflies. The word 'big' appears in it several times. You might like it, maybe.

Here is a review by Mel Bosworth @ Outside Writers, here is a review by Renee Emerson @ PANK, here is a review by Jessica Maybury @ decomP, and here is a review by Steve Roggenbuck @ steveroggenbuck.com.

I would 'ideally' like to limit this giveaway to one title per commenter. Thank you for your time.

UPDATE:
Creatures remaining: 0
Fireflies remaining: 0

Thunderclap! 4: Love

Thunderclap! 4: Love is out and available for purchase here, or for free PDF download here. Thanks to Robert Vaughan for asking me to send him something. The issue includes an excerpt from my unpublished novel, The Quarantine Ceremony. Other portions of The Quarantine Ceremony have been published in elimae here and here, and here are some other parts of it published on this blog.

Also in this issue are stories and poems by Peter Schwartz, Howie Good, Ben Loory, Roxane Gay, Len Kuntz, Molly Gaudry, Kat Dixon, Ryan Bradley, Robert Vaughan, Shannon Peil, Parker Tettleton, Murray Dunlap, Kyle Hemmings, Donna Vitucci, and many more...