Weirdest Book Titles

Apparently someone is compiling a list of weirdest book titles. Frankly I think Ken Sparling's
"Dad says he saw you at the mall" should be there, or really what I always mis-think the title is when I try to remember it: "I think I saw your mother at the mall."

So in honor of this, the 100th post on this site, here's the list for your enjoyment.

1978: Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice (University of Tokyo Press)
1979: The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution (Transaction Press)
1980: The Joy of Chickens (Prentice Hall)
1981: Last Chance at Love: Terminal Romances
1982: Population and Other Problems (China National Publications)
1983: The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling (MIR)
1984: The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History and Its Role in the World Today (Constable)
1985: Natural Bust Enlargement with Total Power: How to Increase the Other 90% of Your Mind to Increase the Size of Your Breasts (Westwood Publishing Co)
1986: Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality (Brunner/Mazel)
1987: No Award



1988: Versailles: The View From Sweden University of Chicago Press)
1989: How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art (Ten Speed Press)
1990: Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual (Lace Publications)
1991: No Award
1992: How to Avoid Huge Ships (Cornwell Maritime Press)
1993: American Bottom Archaeology (University of Illinois Press)
1994: Highlights in the History of Concrete (British Cement Association)
1995: Reusing Old Graves (Shaw & Son)
1996: Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (Hellenic Philatelic Society)
1997: The Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition (Mitchell Beazley)
1998: Development in Dairy Cow Breeding and Management: and New Opportunities to Widen the Uses of Straw (Nuffield Farming Scholarship Trust)
1999: Weeds in a Changing World (British Crop Protection Council)
2000: High Performance Stiffened Structures (Professional Engineering Publishing)

Thoughts on Criticism and some reading

I've not been word-herding as much as I wish lately but I've been reading more.

I'd like digress for a bit and point out that while I am highly opinionated (according to some students and friends) I do try to be fair and my opinions are often changed by a persuasive argument. And I don't dish it out without expecting people to come at me with a similar honed and critical eye.

Whenever I write something that is less than rave, yeah I feel immense degrees of guilt because I know how hard it is to create. Period.

Now I think back to Elysium and say, well, was it really as bad as I made it sound? I believe the parts that I picked on were, yes. But there were some better parts too, the story about the bread was one of the best in the book I think, and while I still don't fully agree with the writing itself in that one, it does begin to hold together and the idea is more considered than others. Would it be good news if I said the stories are average in terms of what I've read out there from Canada, perhaps so -- once the typos are all fixed. Go back and read my Atlantic Monthly reviews and you'll see I rant up and down about their generic quality.

I believe it's an editor's JOB is to protect writers by pointing out and giving writers feedback early so that errors like unclear writing or typos don't make it into the final published work. What I wrote should not have been written by me, rather it should have been the comments by an editor who gave the author time to tune it up.

I also struggle against competing interests when writing reviews. On one hand I detest the lack of an ability to handle criticism and strong opinions by Canadians (at least that's what friends have told me Canadians suffer from). So I think I come on a bit strong because of that. On the other hand, I'm much more careful when providing feedback to students because I recognize their fragility and talent, and I have entered into a longterm contract/peer relationship with them. This personalization and the ongoing self evaluation required when I teach definitely causes me to try and forsee possible outcomes of any criticism before it is voiced. It's different when reviewing a writer I've never met.

Criticism stings in any form, with our without sugar. Yet while I may come on strong, I really do care about what I read and the writers behind the books. This is why I attempt to be so completely honest.

I know I wouldn't have grown as an artist without brutal honesty on the parts of those who had way more experience than I had at the time. This too is why when I do critique, I work at providing feedback that is as clear as possible with exact evidence to back up what I believe. This way it's not some vague generalizing that isn't helpful.

The absolute worst books don't get my time for even a review stating some negative points. One of these is Markio Tamaki's bok titled Fake Id. It's simply juvenile rambling and really quite dull. I read about half and let it drop from my hands. It wasn't worth the effort to throw it.

Now for two little gems. I polished off Foe by Coetzee. (the link is to another blog with a synopsis.) The story starts out with a woman shipwrecked on an island, already inhabited by a bearded man and his mute helper Friday. They get rescued and then Foe dies. The story changes voice here in a way that is absolutely beautiful. The shift of tone and pace threw me for a loop but unlike David Mitchell, it was entirely a related poetic shift that took my breath away. My sense of this gorgeous tale is that it starts out flat-footedly, a simple tale. Then it spins into a second reading, making us reconsider the first part, and then this spins a third time to make us revise all that happened before. Don't be fooled by the simplicity of the beginning, it's a ruse to get us hooked into some deep issues surrounding gender, power, freedom, slavery, and colonialism -- welcome to the world of Coetzee. Kicking in at around 40K or 60K words, if I remember correctly, the book can be polished off in one or two evenings. It's really a wonderful and haunting read.

The second novella I've just finished is another little stunner, this one at about 30 K words by John Metcalf. Did the guy ever stop? Private Parts is a tale of a boy who is obsessed with sex, in a way, who over three sections matures and has his own family. You'd think it was autobiographical according to the tone. Again it's simple, proving what a scholar of Metcalf (whose name I forget, either John Rollins or Barry Cameron probably) said -- the novella as a form sits between prose and poetry, an idea which I completely agree with. As a whole it's straightforward but it's seductive. I kept wanting to say, 'are you kidding me, are you really getting away with this voice' and then suddenly I'd realize that I'd read two more pages, completely sucked into the dreamworld. What sparked me to pull a few books out by him was his short story in The New Quarterly Salon des Refuses issue in which he went nuts on Alberta saying it's the sort of place where hotels have bottle openers on the bedboards. I'll never shake that one.

Elysium Review, Part 2

Part two of my review of Elysium by Pamela Stewart, published by Anvil Press, Vancouver.

Part one of my review is found on this same blog. This review is part of a wonderful idea called Mini Book Expo.

Elysium is a collection of short stories centered on themes of death and loss, bad lives and bad sex. Unfortunately the troubles suffered by all the characters are made shallow by the many typos (see my first review of the book) and by what I can only describe as unexamined writing. If you want the down and dirty here is my opinion: Piss poor writing, cheap storytelling, grammatical problems, gluts of cliche phrases, shoddy editing, lack of fact checking. You know how you see cars with "New Driver" on a card in the back window? This book should have a sign that says, "New Writer" posted on the back. I can't stress enough how much this book irritated me for it's complete lack of refinement. That Anvil Press published this is a crime. It makes it seem they care very little about publishing -- I hope they soon prove me wrong.

I wanted to like this book, I really did. But, I took issue with many aspects of the writing, from poorly constructed sentences and misplaced commas to the fact everyone speaks with exactly the same voice to twists that are gratuitous and cheap. I'll work my way through them with a few examples, but let me first say that the desire to write a book is commendable. The effort required is outstanding. So why would someone take to press, and why would a publisher undertake a book that is so obviously flawed? I won't account for the market, but perhaps one reason may be attributed to what the author writes about her history: she studied with Barbara Gowdy at Ryerson and she is a member of the Saskatchewan Writers' Guild [sic]. The guild does not put an apostrophe into their name -- let this be an indication of the sloppiness that follows in these stories.

Stewart's first trick is to combine partial sentences with complete sentences. Is this called ellipsis or anapodoton? Maybe someone can help me with this. With this problem. Not only of the word. But of how much. How much. I can take. Before. I quit. Reading.
You get the point. It's without discernable reason, without structural beauty, apparently applied at random. There are many authors who use this with expertise but not Stewart. At other times she sounds like she's read too much Stephen King by using the partial sentences to repeat a point for emphasis. It's ugly and cheap. Really cheap.

She states on the back of the book that she is a "literary proctologist" and that her writing "often looks into places that people generally don't want to look." Why then does she continually use cliches as though she's never even cursorily looked? Couches are red velvet, women have sexual hangups, people finish every drop, things happen, they shed a big fat tear when things are really stressful at work. A true perceiver would have seen the details and would have caught these cliches in editing the book. They are a sign of a writer without experience.

No matter what the story and no matter who the character, the people all talk the same. They speak in the same voice, use the same words and sentence length. This is a sign of a beginning writer. And they use "fuck" all the time when mad. I counted up in one story the number of times the character used the word to punctuate. It wasn't pretty.

Passive verbs abound. No wait, I'll do it in her style. Is it that there are many verbs that are passive and this is a problem?

Let us now move to her insight as she plumbs the depths of the human psyche as people respond to events at the edges of human existence. "I spent the next twenty minutes asking everything I could think of: why did God take my mother, allow the Holocaust, pain, suffering, disease, winding my way through a history of the world's misery." This is about as deep as it gets, about as deep as skimming Google results or polling a third grade class.

Stewart lacks an ability, I believe, to pause and step outside her story to view it with an objective eye. Again this is the sign of a beginning writer. Did she cry when writing them because she felt so much? In "Red means Stop" the two characters are described as "he" and "his brother" but she begins to switch the characters so we get absolutely confused. We end up not knowing who speaks, an frankly we stop caring. Here is an example:

He gave her money too. To get her off his back.
"I'm the man of the house now," he said.
His brother told him he did this to stop their mother from bringing a new man into the house.
"The last thing we need is some guy thinking he's in charge."
His brother's car was off limits to him, except for that one day.

Later in the same story one of them is holding a knife against "the nape of his brother's neck"." Three sentences later he pushes the knife in and watches the blood "drain from his brother's penis." Either this is vague or he cut the penis, which evidently extends from the boy's neck.

On the same page we see her loose Stephen King style hard at work: "He knew he didn't want to find out. Not now, not like this. Maybe not ever." The difference is King usually ends chapters on such notes.

This is what I mean by a seasoned writer being able to step outside and see the stories functioning as they realy are, not as the writer thinks they are.

In "A New Day" we see more vague writing with my comments: "Instead (no comma here) Sherri woke up with a hangover. Lit a smoke, (vague double meaning word here) took a deep drag (cliche) had a coughing fit, (cliche) slugged down (cliche) a bottle of beer after making sure there were no butts in it (how exactly do you do this, especially when the desire is to slug) and started again." (started what again?) (dull sentences breaking Gordon Lish's rule to write the most shining sentence ever written. If she slugged down the beer it would be empty. Can't do that again except with a new one. Did she check again for butts? Did she wake up with a hangover again?

In "All Day Breakfast" her lack of care with stories even gets her to contradict herself. "I know what they do to the food here, and I make sure it doesn't happen to his. Not that we're negligent, but when you're preparing large quantities of food anything can happen. A fly lands in pancake batter and no one notices. Things like that." But she, evidently does notice, and she prevents it. But how can she prevent it if "no one" which I assume includes her, notices.

Oh yes, on the page previous her whole story is a fight about a vegetarian and her meat eating boyfriend. He eventually uses a lambskin condom, which is the setup to the whole punchline that is a book she picks up titled, "Raold Dahl's Lamb to Slaughter." Hilarious. Really hilarious, funniest thing I've seen in years. I hope you understand my cynicism. One: that is not a twist. Two: that is not witty. Three: that is just too adolescent for the story. Four: just because Dahl titles a book that, it doesn't make it resonate with meaning. Please, where is Hemingway's Merde detector when needed? I get the feeling she spends too much time watching tv.

Try on page 125 this grotesque series of prepositional phrases, "This was accomplished in court by holding a sardine sandwich that the court clerk had forgot in his locker for three days, up to her face." Painful stuff.

Or try this clunky sentence for style, "He is sure if it is meant to be they will work it out."

The ugliest sentence in the book must be this, "She dissolves in Marie's mind like wet tissue paper sitting at the bottom of an unflushed toilet."

Characters are named the same in different stories, (they are not the same character) titles are flat, the writing is dull and of the same tone and pacing. Tenses switch from present to past with randomness. I'm not sure about talent and writing, I suspect it's the same for most people, it requires lots and lots of hard work, hard study, tons of reading, and a huge amount of sensitivity. I don't see evidence of any this here and I don't encourage anyone to read this collection of poorly written work. Stewart writes on page 134, "It seems rote, and besides, it's just irritating." I couldn't agree more.

Elysium -- Review

HIDEOUS FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS
Elysium
by Pamela Stewart, Anvil Press, 2008

I've received a book of short stories by Pamela Stewart from Anvil Press, part of a wonderful blog idea found at Mini Book Expo for Bloggers. We literary bloggers agree to review the book upon receiving it. I've just finished it. I began with a short middle story, worked my way to the end, and then started back at the beginning.

Elysium is a collection of unrelated stories (don't be fooled by certain names reappearing in different stories, they are different people) where death is the theme of about half. The other plots center on the equally downhearted: people have recently died, sex is bad and getting worse, relationships are ending people are homeless. Still, Halloween is approaching and I approached the book with ghoulish delight.

Because my review is complex I'm writing it in two parts. This first one addresses a slew of frightful problems that should have been caught by the author or editor.

It really saddens me to see what could be a great independent publisher cranking out a work so full of mistakes. And I really don't understand. Is the writer so uncaring she doesn't check what she writes? Is the editor so blind s/he misses the errors? Is this a symptom of sloppiness or laziness that infects this author?

So, in this first part of the review I'm going to merely catalogue some of Elysium's mistakes as we ponder whether or not to trust anything the author has written. If they can't get the simple things right, how can we expect them to handle the complexities of writing?

-- a primary colour is not green. It is a secondary colour. Red, blue, and yellow are primary colors when it comes to paint, which is what I think she means even though she is talking about a streetlight.
-- "skoot" is spelled "scoot"
-- "complement" means a colour complement. The author means "compliment." Seriously, even a spell check will pick this up.
-- "Mea Culpa" does not have to be capitalized
-- "Dr. Suess" should be "Dr. Suess." Disgusting lack of checking here.
-- "Childrens' Aid" should be "Children's Aid"
-- "Gideon's Bible" should be "Gideons Bible"
-- Wilson Bently in Vermont is known by everyone as "Snowflake Bently." This shows she didn't understand the regional very well, nor did she fact check very thoroughly.
-- "one-night-stand" does not require the last hyphen
-- "jack-knifed" as what a semi does, requires no hypen
-- "Hudson Bay Blanket" should be "Hudson's Bay Blanket." Again, poor fact checking.
-- "meat-eater's" does not require a hypen
-- the plural of "Bichon Frise" is "Bichon Frises." The author left it singular because it appears she did not know how to pluralize it.
-- "Paul William's" has the name of "Paul Williams" so the apostrphe would be after the "s".
-- "Foccacia" bread should be "Focaccia." Here's a hint....DICTIONARY
-- Matthew 15:13 is mis-referenced. She means Matthew 15:24 or 15:34 depending on the version.
-- "Sam Kinnison" is really "Sam Kinison"
-- "Wikki Watchi" is really spelled "Weeki Wachee." Another hint...SEARCH ENGINE

I shall stop here with the understanding that this is more than enough to make my few but gentle readers shudder with disgust and horror.

In the second part of the review I will exhume the writing itself. Stay tuned.
--

Beckett

I just read some Beckett this past week, Text is a good one, Joycean, short, tidy and tintintabulous, exactly what one needs to break the sone emitted by typ-lit. (pronounced tip lit, not as tipping point but as in typical.)

I've been thinking that too often artists think the answer is the answer.

We need to get beyond the neat and head to the messy. Better work comes when we don't press resolution. There is beauty in the unfinished.

I've pulled out the novel (really half of the novel I had been sending around. I'm turning this into it's own thing.) I've spent a good week or more every night a few hours, rewriting the beginning, rewriting the beginning...etc. I'm not bored yet. My goal is to really clarify the voice. What a delicate matter, what a brutish matter. One tickles with a swing of a hatchet. There is absolutely no mercy in figuring this voice out.

You know what really sucks, and here you will see life is for the living, that I was sending around a story titled DFW Interviews the Elusive One. It was a spoof on David Foster Wallace heading out to interview Bigfoot. Gonna be tough to send that one around now, not that it worries me but who would dare pick this one up?

C'est la vie, c'est la morte. So I get back to writing.