Review: Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan
published by FSG Originals
365 pages

This is a generous four stars. The essays were solid, often brilliant, but more than a few were average, near boring. Favorites include 'Upon this Rock', 'Getting Down to What is Really Real', 'Violence of the Lambs', and 'Peyton's Place'. It's a decent essay collection but the praise on the back gets a little out of hand, as do most blurbs. Wells Tower calls it the "most inspired book of essays since DFW's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. A bold claim.

Ask the Optimist!

The Braindead Megaphone: Essays by George Saunders
272 pages
published by Riverhead

George Saunders sure can write a great essay. His fiction is better, but these sure ain't bad either. Funny and compassionate as hell. My favorites were when he went to Dubai and toured the luxury hotels, the one with Ask the Optimist is really just astounding, and the one where he goes to visit the Buddha Boy in Nepal.

Quotes:

"Man, it occurs to me, is a joyful, buying-and-selling piece of work. I have been wrong, dead wrong, when I've decried consumerism. Consumerism is what we are. It is, in a sense, a holy impulse. A human being is someone who joyfully goes in pursuit of things, brings them home, then immediately starts planning how to get more. A human being is someone who wishes to improve his lot." pg.30

"The story, then, can be seen as a series of repetitions of one event: the reader leaves a little gas station at high speed, looking to the next one." pg.179

Ruminations on the Essay and Doritos

Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir by Ander Monson
208 pages
published by Graywolf Press

I've had Monson on my radar for a long time now, probably ever since he wrote Vacationland, which seems like a long time ago and I have a vague recollection of him visiting my college campus for a reading, probably promoting Vacationland. Am I making this up? Not remembering it correctly? Whose to say. Also, I never ended up reading Vacationland, or haven't yet anyway.

So, I was ready to enjoy Vanishing Point. I wanted to love it. I am excited about writers who choose to expand certain forms, in this case, the essay. And while a few pieces were really excellent (like his piece on Doritos and artificial flavors or his eulogy-type thing on the death of Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax or his time serving jury duty) the others were a bit too circuitous for my taste, where Monson seemed to be wandering around this essay space he had created, not quite sure how he was going to write himself out of this subject he found himself in, which more often than not, were meanderings on the 'I' of memoirs. I think I could have appreciated the dissection if it had just been one essay on the 'I' but Monson kept coming back to it again and again, to the point where I didn't care anymore. But that's just me (well, it's always just me) and that subject didn't particularly catch my thinking fancy.

I'll definitely read more Monson though. Vanishing Point is certainly on the experimental side, which I'm down with, but I'd like to read some of his more "traditional" stuff. And his poetry. Also, I will now try and stop using a 'double space' after the ends of sentences. I forget why exactly, but he touches on it briefly, something to do with Courier font and how it made the formatting all weird and so they (I don't know who they is) had to implement the 'double space', which really isn't needed with other fonts, and if you'll notice, books don't use the 'double space'. But now that I've taken a brief moment to do some research, a la Wikipedia, they say that the 'double space' has been carried over from type writers, when the ink ribbon would get would too dry and the period could sometimes not be seen clearly at the end of a sentence, so the writer would just use a double space to indicate the start of a new sentence.

Oh man, I totally forgot to mention the website! Along with the print reading experience, various words throughout the text have a small dagger as an indicator to go onto the books website, input the indicated word into a search engine, and then a digression (or any other various thing) pertaining to that word will appear. Kinda like web-based end notes. I was not always near a computer when I was reading the book, so I only used the site a few times, but it was a cool idea nonetheless. Though I usually read books to get away from computers.

Fragmented knowledge!

Quotes:

"But still there is life there, even if in data fragments. All human lives can be described by this esoterica, this collection of descended asterisks. It's only in the tiny that anything matters or exists at all." pg.62

"Some true things are not dramatic. But the minutiae of our existences are. These are facts, friends, all twenty thousand boxes of our lives of eating them. We are surrounded by their ordinary glory." pg. 164

Review of : Chuck Klosterman IV by Chuck Klosterman

Mostly previously published magazine articles. Classic Klosterman, for the most part. I enjoyed the THINGS THAT MIGHT BE TRUE section the most. I think he's at his best when pondering strange scenarios, both real and imagined. The piece of fiction at the end was great at times and eye-rolling at others.