Summer Reading Frenzy: A Post of Odds and Ends. Mostly Odds.

Happy Father's Day Dad!

The best thing about all this time off during summer is the amount of reading I’m allowed to do. True, much of it is related to work anyway, but I’d never get this much in during the school semester. This week has brought some very unusual books my way, and feeling a little brainless, I thought I’d do what I used to do at Current and smush three short book reviews together. All three of these books represent big risks taken by the writers – other than that, they are about as different as three books can get.

Kelly Link’s collection titled Get in Trouble Stories really inspired me. I first encountered Link’s writing during one of Liam Callanan’s fiction writing workshops at UWM, in which we read her story “Magic for Beginners.” I can’t remember whether it was the novella workshop or the magical workshop, because Link’s stories are both magical and usually really long. I’m not sure whether you’d call her work “magic realism” or “speculative fiction.” But her take on fantasy writing, if that’s what you might also call it, is really refreshing and new. My creative writing students tend to be very interested in sci-fi and fantasy, but they tend to be trapped in the formula. Kelly Link is a great example of someone who breaks all the formulas and actually writes speculative and fantasy that we haven’t all read before. Link strikes me as someone who is constantly imagining and occupying other worlds, which may be inspired by places like Middle Earth or the Star Wars universe, but are something else entirely. It’s speculative fiction for those who aren’t necessarily diehard fans of speculative fiction, because it’s mostly inspired by the real world (or specifically, the people in it.) Featured are a demon lover employed as an actor with an infamous sex tape, a story of teenage-girl jealousy in a world where you can buy your daughter a life-size boyfriend doll who moves and talks, and a haunted house that gets transplanted overseas piece by piece like the London Bridge. The settings feature environments that sound like they come from a dream: floors covered in moss, floating blood bubbles that serve drinks, rooms with metal walls featuring miniature warzones – Link invites you into her madness and doesn’t spare details. This should be required reading in a beginners speculative fiction class, especially if you don’t want the same old shit.

Next I read Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work by Melissa Gira Grant. As some of you know, I teach a course on migration and gender in the global economy, and sex work and sex trafficking is an important unit in that class. Part of the students’ grade included a debate over the legality of prostitution, and I’ve always felt there was something inherently lacking in the arguments that I and my students put forth. Grant (a former sex worker) really spells out what that lack is: the voices of sex workers themselves. Our discussion about sex-trafficking, and in particular the way that the global economy supports its existence, tends to frame our understanding of sex work in general in way that oversimplifies the issue. We read the column of Nicolas Kristof on sex trafficking and sex slavery, which represents at least one level of understanding about the situations of underage and involuntarily trafficked women forced into a life of prostitution not only by their captors but by a life of abject poverty from which they can’t escape. But to understand all sex work through this lens alone, as Grant points out, may actually be counterintuitive to justice for prostitutes who, for reasons of survival or lifestyle or other, have chosen this work. It reinforces the notion that no woman of intelligence with any self-regard would choose such a job, and denies agency and autonomy to women – maybe even guarantees that a damaging stigma against them continues. My students have trouble imagining why a woman might intentionally engage in this work, but a lot of that has to do with long-held insecurities and fears about sexuality in general. They also wonder what kind of future lies in such a career, and what Grant points out is that prostitutes have other lives – other occupations besides sex work such as advocacy, taking care of family members, getting an education, artistic ambitions, etc… I was reminded of the recent exposure of Somaly Mam, an advocate for young Thai prostitutes, many of whom are trafficked, who was sold into sexual bondage in her youth. Sources accuse Mam of fabricating some or all of her stories and the stories of some of her charges. In the documentary I show my students, Mam refers to a “darkness,” a hole in her memory in which many of her experiences as a prostitute have disappeared. However accurate or factual her story may be, this condemnation of a woman who has helped so many young girls regain a sense of self-love smacks of the way in which these women are denied the right to tell this kind of story on their own terms. As Grant puts it, “Off the stage, she knows there is also a script for how her story will be received. She’s often accused of not being capable of sharing the truth of her own life, of needing translators, interpreters. But part of telling the truth her is refusing to conform the story to the narrow roles – virgin, victim, wretch, or whore – that she herself did not originate,” (33). This silence is created as much by groups invested in rescuing women whose efforts, however well-intended, may actually make it more difficult for women to safely do what they need to do right now to get by.

Finally, I present Parse, by Craig Dworkin. I’m not going to lie to you – I did not really read Parse. To actually read this book is to redefine the purpose and experience of reading altogether, which was likely exactly what Dworkin was trying to explore. To explain, Parse is a translation of Edwin A. Abbott’s How to Parse: An Attempt of Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar. Basically, Dworkin diagrammed every sentence in a book about diagramming sentences, and then published it. No I’m not kidding. I of course will not make my students of digital poetry and prose read this book in its entirety – they’ll just get a glimpse at a couple of its 284 pages. (He diagrammed the entire index as well.) This strikes me as one of those digital projects that disregards audience in a kind of masturbatory way, like the Twitter page of Vanessa Place. But I certainly appreciate the active resistance to old ways of reading and publishing that this work represents. I just don’t know what I’m going to do with this object now that I have it. It’s an artifact of value, but not as a read. The truth is, he probably enjoyed doing it. English nerds love diagramming sentences. But this is regarded as a “digital” project because it’s the kind of writing task that could potentially be programmed as Parse defies reading by the most persistent of scholars.

software and done in a few minutes by a computer. “Digital” creative writing, I’ve learned, applies to poetry or prose that begins with a program or algorithm, made possible (or at least a lot easier) because of the use of a computer as a writing tool. The idea is that the poet comes up with a system of constraints and a database of language to use. The poem itself is a result of largely random organization based on that algorithm. The author devises the instructions, the blueprint, for the work and the computer and/or the “program” does the rest. So for instance, I am just beginning work on a collection of interrelated flash pieces, all of which are based on some formal or content-based constraint. For the installment I’ve been mulling over lately, the young protagonist discovers that his spirit animal is a rattlesnake. I would argue that creating an algorithm for this is as challenging and creative as writing the piece from imagination. So far, I want the structure of the story to align with Mark 16: 17-18 in the King James Bible which refers to laying hands on serpents. I want a maximum of S and T and CH sounds, to imitate the sound of the rattler’s segmented tail. Since we’re delving into the spirit world for this story, I’m going to borrow from Ms. Link and create a wholly unfamiliar environment in which the protagonist moves. And I’m aiming for just 500 words. The trick is to let the algorithm do most of work and to intervene as little as possible – let the work become randomized by the constraints. Digital writing is about relinquishing control – relinquishing authorship. But I still want it to be legible, unlike Dworkin, whose

Parse defies reading by the most persistent of scholars.

This handsome dude I now call Dad...