David Wong | John Dies at the End

 

Title: John Dies at the End

Author: David Wong

Publication Info: St. Martin's, 2009

My Tagline: Sex. Drugs. Mutant Meat Monsters.

 

 

This book, I told a friend of mine, is quite possibly the most ridiculous book I've ever loved. It tries extremely hard to be nonsense--and in places, it succeeds--but there exists, too, a level of adventure and self-reflection that makes it absolutely impossible to stop reading. Throughout reading, there were many, many times when I had to look up from the pages, blink a few times, and say to myself, "What the fuck just happened?" It was, from start to finish, one hell of an interesting ride.

 

"Expect tentacles." --John

 

Here's the general idea: a bunch a kids try a drug. A drug they call "soy sauce." And this drug makes wild, unnatural, possibly demonic stuff happen in a their smallish Midwestern town of "[Undisclosed]". We're told the story from the first-person point-of-view of young twenty-something David Wong himself, who spends a long, grueling time trying to explain the events following the soy sauce escapade to a non-believing reporter. David and his friend John can't quite make the aftereffects of the soy sauce go away--not in their heads, not in their town, not in whatever parallel dimension seems to be sending mutants their way at every turn--and they set out to save the world.

 

That's all I'm going to tell you as far as summary, though, because I plucked this book off the shelf at the library with absolutely no idea what it was about, and I'd like for everyone to have that same naïve approach to the story and the same opportunity to have their minds blown every which way to Sunday. According to the back of the book:

 

"The important thing is this:

The drug is called soy sauce, and it gives users a window into another dimension.

John and I never had the chance to say no.

You still do....

None of this was my fault."

 

Personally, I like overly-implausible novels that craft themselves like they're written documentaries of true stories. David Wong, we know, is a pseudonym for Jason Pargin, the senior editor of Cracked.com, but chooses to have his character tell us the story. It adds a certain urgency to an oddball story, and even though I know there is no such thing as meat monsters (right?) and any of the other creatures that arise in Dave and John's adventure, the author shows a strong faith in the readers' ability to suspend disbelief far enough to entertain it all.

 

I was pleasantly surprised by both the depth of the novel's character development and the strong overtones of philosophy that appear here, even as they're scraping monster-goo off their demon-bashing baseball bats. David shows incredible loyalty to his friends, a sense of reluctant but innate bravery, and an admirable arc from regular-kid to stalwart leader. I genuinely like him, and I really like John, and it absolutely feels like I'm running straight into disaster with a bunch of stoner college friends I chose for myself.

 



Movie still from John Dies At the End.

There's some nihilism, some existentialism. There's a heavy dose of Big Question asking--Don't we all die alone? What else is there? What's the point of it all?--but it's fed as naturally as possible in an outlandish situation. My guess is, if you found yourself staring into a portal to another dimension, you'd start asking yourself the tough questions, too. Even if, previously, you, like Dave, were just a kid working at the video rental store looking for a good party and a date with a pretty girl.

 

The blunt, simple writing style makes it feel like a conversation, and yet it crafts the most incredible imagery. A book like this wouldn't be possible if the author went easy; you've really got to see the multi-eyed, tentacled, writhing monsters in order to understand what the hell he's talking about. I found myself never once, in all the many strange instances that occurred, struggling to envision exactly what was happening. It's a testament to the skill of the writer, really. It's with a rare and unbound hand that he illustrates, peoples, and performs the story before you. It's now I hear, this novel has been turned into a pretty big movie from the same guy who directed Phantasm (featuring Paul Giamatti), and if you've ever actually seen Phantasm, that should give you a pretty good idea of the imagery necessary here.

 

I say with some heartfelt dedication: go read this book. It's not like much you've read before, I promise. It's 466 pages of lunacy, peppered with laugh-out-loud humor and smart references, held up with strong characters and satisfying, substantial themes. I can't stop raving about it, which is fitting, because probably you're supposed to be somewhat raving after finishing a book about mind-bending insanity. 

Literally!

Have you tried Literally yet? It's a neat new site for readers that I happened across nearly by accident the other day. At first, I really wasn't interested; I'm not on GoodReads, and though I dabble in social media, I rarely share things across different platforms or link accounts. I signed up for Literally on a whim, and so far I think it was a good idea!

 

Personally, I think I'll use it most as a place to keep track of the books I plan to read, since I am forever "forgetting" about books I put on my proverbial To Be Read List, only to remember when I'm already getting into something else. It's also neat to track my progress on the books I'm currently reading; I hope it will light a fire under me to read more each day whenever I'm slacking. They also offer a "TBR Challenge," where you can start a mini-tournament with your TBR list and find out which one you should read next, and boasts "personal" recommendations for further reading that aren't generated by computer algorithms. I'm interested to see how that part pans out.

Literally claims to still be in beta stages, so it warns about possible bugs and encourages feedback. I haven't been using it long enough to judge how buggy it may be, but so far I've found it sleek, simple, and extremely user-friendly. There are several features that they promise will be "coming soon," but I appreciate the fact that they take the time to explain what will be available so new users know what they're getting into. I can't really compare it to GoodReads because I'm not a huge fan of the GR platform and haven't really given it a fair try, but I would venture to say that Literally is more to-the-point, less prone to clutter, and better suits my personal needs in such a website. 

Are you on Literally? New users can request an invitation code to sign-up, or get one from a user friend. If you do, come find me! I'm lonely over there all by myself. 

So, I read this book one time...

I still remember it clearly--it was a romance novel, hardcover, wrapped in the clear, crinkly plastic that libraries use to keep dust jackets from getting dirty. There was a horse on the cover, or maybe it was a lake. I think there were trees? It was definitely a yellow cover. No, it was orange, but the title was yellow. Maybe. The main character's name started with an "L." Lucy or Lynda or Leann or something. Wait, no, I think her name was Kate, but she had a sister named Leann. And a brother named Tony. I'm sure I remember a Tony. 

As a perpetual re-reader, my inability to recall any concrete, searchable terms for this book infuriates me. Of the things I can remember about it, not a single one helps me or the librarian or the omnipotent Google to help me find it again. I know I read it in the summertime, because the air conditioner in my parents' house was turned up so high that I could hear it rattling in the window frame, and it made my fingertips cold. I know that I checked it out of a local library on a bright, sunny, clear-as-forever day and that I dropped my library card in the mud because I was watching kids play catch in the parking lot and stumbled over a curb on my way inside.

I know, too, that it was exactly the book I needed at exactly the moment that I read it, because that's an unmistakeable feeling that sticks with you, and maybe even lives on the pages long after you've returned it to the library, two days late, and infects the next person who takes it home and cracks open the yellow-or-possibly-orange cover.

I do not, however, know what the damn book was called.

Unfortunately, I have wandered the stacks of that same library countless times since, sometimes on equally bright, clear days, looking for this book I barely remember but cannot entirely forget. Unless that "unmistakable feeling" suddenly turns into a giant flashing strobe light with a neon sign saying, Here it is, you dummy, I don't know how I'll ever find it again. And I desperately want to read it. I think. I mean, it was a really awesome book the first time...maybe. I remember it was perfect at the time, so that means it's got to be good. Really good. Probably. 

The story of This Half-Forgotten Novel comes back to me in still frames and frozen phrases. There was a horse ranch, a girl who'd just buried a family member, a rugged horse trainer who steals her heart. There were troubled teenagers and a gap-toothed farm hand and possibly a snowstorm. There was a pack of wild mustangs, running free in the Montana mountains, and the way the author described them took my breath away. I stayed up all night, sitting on the living room floor and making notes about the mustangs in a steno pad and falling so hard and fast for this story that I spent the whole next day physically in smoggy, stuffy New Jersey but mentally on a mountain in Montana. It was wonderful. And I so very badly want to experience that wonderful again.

But, I can't help but ask myself, what if I do find it? Will it be just as wonderful? They say you never read the same book twice, that what mattered to you then won't matter to you now, and who you were the first time has long been replaced by someone new. So what about the mustangs? It could be that I'm searching and searching for this book that doesn't even exist anymore...at least, not in the way I think it does.

I re-read because it's safe, and comfortable, and I know what I'm getting. If the guy gets the girl the first time, he's going to get her each and every time. While I often like to explore literature and let new stories unfold around me,  sometimes I just don't want to worry that I'm investing myself in a story that will end in a way I don't want it to, or that I'll be left unsatisfied, or that my favorite character will get a terrible case of small pox (I hate when that happens). But even when I consider my favorite novels, the ones I re-read the most often, I know the words so well and I know the characters as if they were old childhood friends and they're still different, each and every time.

You can print the a in indelible ink, but the response you have to it will always be unpredictable.

So what about these mustangs, huh? They could be just a fleeting memory of a summer night that passed from me a long time ago, or they could be lurking somewhere on the library shelf between their yellow-or-maybe-orange covers still as perfect as I'm almost definitely pretty sure they are. Was it This Half-Forgotten Novel that was so wonderful, or was it just my response to it that mattered to me? Can we ever really tell the difference?

Or, more importantly, should we try?

You know how, in nearly every family sitcom ever, there's always an episode where a kid idolizes some athlete/rock star/actor/et al, but when he finally meets him, the idol turns out to be a huge jerk? I always feel bad for the kid, and I always think that if it was me, I'd have rathered go on thinking he was great instead of knowing I had hung big posters of a jerk on my wall. It doesn't really change what that athlete/rock star/whatever meant to the kid, except now, he's tarnished in the kid's mind, and it'll never be the same. In that respect, maybe we shouldn't try to remove our personal responses from the equation when talking about books we love. It could be that they're only thin, hollow skeletons of ink without our feelings and reactions to hold it all together. 

Because there are so many gaps in my memory of This Half-Forgotten Novel, and of Leeann-or-maybe-Kate, and of the breathtaking mountain descriptions, I worry that it wasn't actually all that good to begin with. For the same reasons, I worry that it is still that good, but I'll never be able to get back there with the mustangs. It's a damned-if-you-do kind of thing, I guess. Half the time I'm kicking myself for not writing down the author's name or the title or something searchable in Google, but sometimes, I think it's better this way.

I do know one thing, though--that kid in that family sitcom? He'd still have gone to meet his idol even if he knew there was a chance he'd be a jerk. And if there's ever another clear sunny day that I stumble over the curb outside the library, wandering the shelves looking for exactly the right thing at exactly the right moment, and I happen to find This Half-Forgotten Novel, it won't matter if the cover is yellow or orange or fluorescent blue with rhinestones--no pack of mustangs, proverbial or otherwise, is going to stop me from checking it out.

Four Romance Novels Worth Reading (and Re-reading)

Happy Valentine's Day! 

I am an insufferable lover of love stories -- real, fictional, tragic, classic, bound with Fabio on the cover, you name it. Like most, I've swooned over the Darcys and Knightlys of the Austen 'verse more times than I can count, but I've always found myself equally enamored with many of the products of the megalithic "Romance Novel Industry" as we know it today...much to the disappointment of my more prideful and prejudiced peers. I can honestly say that I have been more criticized for my enjoyment of bodice rippers than for any other hobby or interest I have (including, but not limited to, my affinity for re-enacting Tolkien-esque battle scenes with or without supporting players). But the good news is, not even the eye-rolls or scoffs or attempts at re-direction make romance novels any less enjoyable for me. 

So in honor of Valentine's Day, I give you the four pretty fantastic romance novels, which are not to be confused with capital-R Romantic novels, tragic love stories, or porn. (No matter what my great Aunt Jeanie may say about that last one.)

1. Ravished, by Amanda Quick

Amanda Quick (a pseudonym for Jayne Ann Krentz, Jayne Castle, et al) has been my be-all, end-all favorite in the genre for a while now. I once spent an entire summer driving around to all my local libraries so I could track down and devour each one of her historical romances, one right after the other. I liked Ravished the best, and I just keep re-reading it over and over again (like earlier this week). It's a regency-era tale about a quirky, demanding female fossil hunter named Harriet and the dark, dangerous Gideon, known to the ton as the Beast of Blackthorn Hall, who join forces to defend seaside coves from marauders. The stakes rise, as they always do, and Gideon and Harriet take on the ton, fighting damning gossip, broken reputations, and a killer who's been on the loose for years. 

Personally, I like Ravished so much because the romance aspect develops naturally; it is not simply a case of two people being thrown together in a dangerous situation, and therefore we must believe they love each other (which is painfully common in many other stories). The reader can see why Gideon connects so strongly to Harriet, why there could not be anyone better for either of them, and we can watch them fall in love. As a hero, Gideon is big and broken -- my favorite kind! -- and it's nice to see him heal with Harriet's help, especially since Harriet as a character is so interesting.

2. Hidden Riches, by Nora Roberts

I'd venture to say that Nora is the reigning queen of romance writing; she's written so many novels at an impossibly fast rate, and somehow manages to make each one good. I generally prefer her earlier stories, because I find they have more grit and realism than her more recent best-sellers. Hidden Riches stars one of my favorite romance heroines, Isadora Conroy, a Philadelphia curio shop owner with a sharp wit and an inherited flair for dramatics. When she rents the apartment over her shop to the hot-tempered ex-cop Jed Skimmerhorn, his past springs up to haunt them both as thoroughly as Banquo's ghost haunts the Conroy family's theater production of Macbeth. Though the mystery relies on a smuggling ring, it's actually Jed's internal conflicts that power the story and pave the way for romance between him and Dora. This book features stolen antiques, evil-to-the-bone villains, and Roberts's signature skill at crafted leading men you just can't help but fall for.

3. Faking It, by Jennifer Crusie

I call novels like those of Jenny Crusie "Potato Chip Books" because, like the snack food, they are fun, satisfying, and completely impossible to put down until I've wrung every last calorie out of the bag (uh, I mean page). Her books are always funny, often odd-ball, comedy-of-errors-type stories with well-crafted characters that come without too much sentimentality or sap. Faking It centers on Matilda Goodnight, her family's failing art gallery, and the secrets the Goodnight clan have been keeping for centuries. Then enters Davy Dempsey (of Crusie's oft-visited Dempsey family, a la Welcome to Temptation), a reformed crook who somehow manages to get himself roped into helping the Goodnights solve their many wacky problems. The secondary characters in Faking It are hilarious and wholly developed, and add depth to an already compelling story. Crusie also has a knack for interesting wordplay, and often I find myself re-reading this for the laughs only to come out with a new appreciation for her craftsmanship. If you like this one, I'd also recommend Bet Me, though the heroine of that story isn't nearly so enjoyable as Matilda Goodnight.

4. Ain't She Sweet, by Susan Elizabeth Phillips

Gosh, this book is just so damn dramatic. Sugar Beth Carey is a former Southern belle who has fallen very, very far from grace -- a fall, even Sugar Beth notes, which is entirely her own fault. On the outside, she's mean, thoughtless, and cares little for the feelings of others, but draws you in with her sharp-as-nails wit. She returns, tarnished, to the small Mississippi town of her youth without money, friends, or options, and finds that Colin Byrne, a man whose life she nearly ruined, as taken up residence in the house where Sugar Beth grew up. So begins the story of Sugar Beth's redemption, and romance, as she makes amends for what she's done and learns about her own personal motives.

I would definitely not call myself a Susan Elizabeth Phillips fan; for the most part, I find her novels less about the dynamics between the "leading couple" (for lack of a better word), and more an exploration of many different relationships between characters -- be they friends, sisters, parents, et al -- that I often feel leaves less room for the full development of the love story. All that can be great, but it's not really what I look for in a romance novel. In Ain't She Sweet, however, she kind of gives the best of both worlds: the romance between Sugar Beth and Colin is at the forefront, but the surrounding conflicts and characters add a level of drama so poignant that I don't mind. Like, for instance, the story arc of Winnie Davis, the girl that Sugar Beth tormented all her life, and the former football hero that Sugar Beth once thought she loved. This book is, at times, entirely heartbreaking, but the biggest credit I can give the author, I think, is that while Sugar Beth was once an awful person, she goes through such a realistic, understandable change. It's like watching the warming-over of a bitter heart right there on the page.

What are some of your favorite romance novels?

Love & Snark from Dorothy Parker

Dorothy Parker has always been a figure that interested me. She's known and celebrated for her participation in the snarky scholar club known as the Algonquin Round Table, a salon of sorts made up of writers and thinkers who weren't afraid to cut with their wit, whether in print or in politics or in the leading media outlets of the 1920s. In what became a regular luncheon date for some powerful voices of the time, many of which have faded with the years. Period heavy hitters like Fitzgerald and Faulkner, while infrequent visitors, were not the core; instead, the club was built upon the sharp wits of theater critics, essayists, and newspaper moguls like Alexander Woolcott, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Harpo Marx, and, of course, Mrs. Parker herself. 

Though Parker made her name as a critic and oberserver in such publications as Vogue and New Yorker, she often spoke of her own talents in a self-deprecating, sometimes bitter way. "I don't do anything," she once said. "I used to bite my nails, but I don't even do that anymore." Later in life, she grew critical of her own contributions and the company she kept with the Algonquin Round Table, as if consigning them to a realm of fops and intellectual hacks, among which she thought herself an equal part. This honest, anti-rose-colored way of seeing herself is also, I think, one of the highest values of her work; she sugar coats nothing, and narrates as one would speak when one is surrounded by (albeit exceptional) friends.

                                         "Indian Summer"                                           

                                     In youth, it was a way I had                                      

                                         To do my best to please,                                           

                                 And change, with every passing lad,                             

                                        To suit his theories.                                                  

                                                           -                                                                 

                                         But now I know the things I know,                       

                                          and do the things I do;                                            

                                          and if you do not like me so,                                  

                                         to hell, my love, with you.                                         

In what her critical contemporaries may have called mere "flapper verse," Parker revealed a stark, unapologetic voice, with which she captured her own spunk and irreverence. It is obvious in reading her work that Parker was intelligent, astute, and well-read. Even the shortest of her poems speak to a keen familiarity with a gamut of classicists, historical figures, and cultural ideologies. The fact that she chose to boil them down to single four-line verses or a flurry of rhyming couplets is deceptive; her simplistic style does not lessen her commentary on the subject, but rather demands that the reader bring his own knowledge to the piece in order to get the joke.  And, as Polonius says, brevity is the soul of wit, afterall.

                                              "Charles Dickens"                                   

                                       Who call him spurious and shoddy                      

                                       Shall do it o'er my lifeless body.                             

                                         I heartily invite such birds                                   

                                        To come outside and say those words!                 

In large part, Parker's collection of poetic works are an outward depiction of a cynical, jaded opinion on love, crafted not in a falsely independent bravado, but in a voice that is genuinely disillusioned. She does not need love, but from her work I get the distinct impression that she wanted it very much, and that she tried valiantly to find it many times over throughout her life. She does not issue warnings or cautions, but observations cultivated through experiences that may have proven to her, at least, that love is a distant promise unlikely to materialize for the average person.

                                 "Unfortunate Coincidence"                         

                              By the time you swear you're his,                              

                                         shivering and sighing,                                      

                                And he swears his passion is                                  

                                         infinite, undying--                                            

                                Lady, make a note of this:                                       

                                           one of you is lying.                                         

I've always seen Parker as a sad figure, made so not through tragedy or misfortune, but her personal dissatisfaction with her life as it progressed. Famously, she composed verses on suicide, even alluding to her own attempts to end her life [ as seen in "Resume," which can be found HERE ], but the most emotional of her poems, I think, are the ones chronicling the failure of love as a human condition. It's more than unrequited infatuation or several failed affairs; for Parker, love itself seems an unattainable idyll that rarely appeared in real life, and because of that fact, relationships and sex were not meaningful experiences to be sung about in her verses, but reduced to quips and asides and the occasional irreverent rhyme.

In all, her tenderest, most vulnerable works are the sad ones, the ones that speak faintly of universal regret and the inescapable hollowness that seems to linger in unfulfilled hearts.

                                             "Autumn Valentine"                                     

                                       In May my heart was breaking--                                

                                        Oh, wide the wound and deep!                                   

                                           And bitter it beat at waking,                                      

                                              and sore it split in sleep.                                       

                                                                 ~                                                          

                                          And when it came November,                                    

                                       I sought my heart, and sighed,                                 

                                      "Poor thing, do you remember?"                                

                                        "What heart was that?" it cried.                                 

Parker died in 1967, at the age of seventy-three. It is worth noting that upon her death, she donated the whole of her estate to the Martin Luther King, Jr, foundation for civil rights. I wish that her critiques, essays, and columns were more readily available today, at least to prove her own notions of the triviality of her work false. From her still-widely-read poems, I imagine her as a fascinating character in her time, a woman who sat in the corner of the dance hall with a glass of dark liquor and a cigarette, cracking jokes at the expense of the dancers and dandies alike.   

                                                "Inventory"                                             

                            Four be the things I am wiser to know:                        

                          Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.                             

                                                              ~                                                          

                      Four be the things I'd been better without:                          

                             Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.                              

                                                              ~                                                            

                         Three be the things I shall never attain:                              

                        Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.                         

                                                              ~                                                            

                                 Three be the things I shall have till I die:                      

                                   Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.                        

Snow in Suburbia (and my return to Roshar)

I spent yesterday's snow day with Brandon Sanderson and my puppy Finn, and it was unexpectedly wonderful. I admit I was lured into a false sense of springtime security with the fifty degrees we had for Super Bowl Sunday (I live in East Rutherford, the REAL Super Bowl City this year!), so I hadn't been ready for the day of slush and shoveling that followed. I'd also committed to a pretty well-thought-out reading list for February, so I had no idea I'd be going back to Roshar any time soon. 

Gee willickers, Batman, I'm glad I changed my mind.

I had a revelation while digging out my car yesterday morning-- there are only twenty-nine days until Words of Radiance, Book Two of the Stormlight Archive, is released!

The Stormlight Archive came alive, for me, when I was wandering around the massive Hackensack Public Library one summer afternoon, looking for something to read. The giant spine of Way of Kings jumped out at me, and I checked it out without any real knowledge of where it would take me. I remember spending all my sunlight at the park that day, sitting next to the murky river with my friends, feeding geese and falling deeper and deeper in love with the story.

Plus, I'm like ninety percent sure Kaladin is the love of my literary life.

Way of Kings, book one of the series, is an epic fantasy powerhouse, filled with all the things I like best about epic fantasy: flawed heroes, dead kings, tragic wars, and ancient magic. I found it at a time when my reading list was made up largely of regency romance, when I had lost the thread of fantasy novels that I had loved so much when I was younger. It rekindled my ardent admiration for the fantasical, which is something I'd like to personally thank Brandon Sanderson for, should I ever have the chance. I even pressured a librarian at my hometown library to add a copy of Way of Kings to their sadly small sci-fi/fantasy collection, because of how strongly I felt every fan of the genre should read it! Since finishing it myself, I've devoured Sanderson's work, from Mistborn to Warbreaker, and returned to my reading roots with other epic fantasy authors. 

But in twenty-nine days, Stormlight comes back.

click image for photo source

To prepare, I've decided that it really wouldn't be right not to revisit Way of Kings in its entirety. Sanderson is a busy man (Wheel of Time, anyone?), and these are long books, so it's been a helluva long while since the first installment stole my heart. I know many places, including the grand ungodly godlike Tor publishing, have hosted read-alongs of Way of Kings, and I've loved seeing what other fans are saying, but for my personal re-read, I want to really relish in the world as it is on the page, get lost for a while, and hopefully come up for air with some new ideas of my own.

Also, I want to gush like a little girl about how so totally awesome it is. 

So I've had to shift around my February reading list to make room for this behemoth of an epic fantasy novel. My library copy of George R.R. Martin's Dying of the Light has been sitting on my coffee table for a week now, unmoved from the place where I dropped it after doing my little happy dance at the circulation desk when it first came in, and it's going to have to sit there for a little longer (my apologies, Mr. Martin; you're so totally awesome, too, I swear). I've whittled it down to just what I'm "currently reading," which looks like this:

• Way of Kings, Stormlight Book 1, by Brandon Sanderson (duh)
• Hard Times, by Charles Dickens (for THIS Dickens birthday celebration)
• Age of Innocence, by Edith Wharton (as my keep-in-my-purse-for-boring-life-moments book)

I have been anxiously awaiting whining like crazy about how badly I've wanted Words of Radiance for so very long, it's hard to believe it's almost here! I'm excited, and nervous, and sometimes I peek my head in at the library just to make sure they're all aware that it's coming soon (they are, and they've asked me to stop reminding them). I hope epic fantasy fans who haven't read it yet will give it a try, and lapsed fans will jump down this particular rabbit hole and realize how much they've missed it.

In the meantime, I'll be reading (and gushing about) Way of Kings while these last twenty-nine days slip away.

*Fifty proverbial points to whomever spots the Moby-Dick reference in this post! :)

Cloud Tectonics, Jose Rivera

Title: Cloud Tectonics
Playwright: Jose Rivera
Pub Info: Broadway Play Publishing, Inc., 1997.

 

"I wonder if love sometimes does that to you. It alters the physics around you in some way: 

changing the speed of light and the shape of space and how you experience time." (44)

Is Cloud Tectonics a love story? Maybe. I suppose. They tell me it is, on the back cover and in performance reviews and, even, in the long monologues throughout. The "love of a lifetime," the leading characters say, the idea that such a love makes you so different from how you were before that even something as elemental and innate as your concept of time is altered. I get that. But is this really a love story, or is it a warning?

"What's life? A fucking blink." (35)

I like going to the theater, but the special thing about reading plays instead of watching them is that I get to be the director, the actors, the stage hands, and the audience. The only authority that gets to affect how I interpret it is the playwright himself. In the case of Cloud Tectonics, that playwright is Jose Rivera the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of Motorcycle Diaries, and, thankfully, he provides enough detailed, demanding stage directions that I could watch this whole production play out in my head. His words drip with poetry and purpose, grit and reality, drawn-out metaphors and very heavy-handed symbolism. If he ever took a class on how to make his audience cringe, scoff, sigh, smile all at the same time, he passed it with flying colors.

Staging of Cloud Tectonics; click for photo source.

His leading characters are Celestina del Sol and Anibal de le Luna -- I don't speak Spanish, but geez, I get that much -- and their setting is simple: a small house in LA, in "the present," during the storm of the century. Anibal finds Celestina, a beautiful young woman who is "very pregnant" and offers her a ride. Realizing she and her child have no where to go, he hesitantly but nobly offers her a warm place to sleep in his house for the night.

It's not long before he's pretty sure she's absolutely insane.

Celestina tells him that, by all accounts, she's been pregnant with her baby for two whole years, and though she could pass for early twenties, she's at least fifty-four. When she walks into his house, the clocks stop, the TV goes out, and they're cut off from the screaming sirens and raging storm outside. Isolated, adrift, disconnected from the world around them and, it turns out, from the passage of time.

"Papi wanted me to count numbers, count numbers, over and over; he said it would teach me 

about the nature of 'time,' and I tried and tried, I really did, but I didn't learn anything." (18)

For Celestina, there is no such thing as minutes, hours, days, years as we know them. To her, a lifetime could pass in a moment, and a moment feels like days. That, from the outset, makes this play worthwhile for me, because it is so frustratingly fascinating to contemplate a life where time plays no part. Like Anibal's brother Nelson, an enlisted serviceman who appears briefly on stage, we are all of us trapped in the when of life--when we will arrive, when we will leave, when we will do, be, act, go, change. To consider no schedules, no aging or growing up, no distinction between then and now, is interesting and, by the end of the play, a little exhausting, too.

Nelson de la Luna alone breaks the isolation of Celestina and Anibal during the play, and only one who's still trapped in a world dictated by time; he's got only two hours to visit his brothers after years apart. He comes in with a flurry of sirens and thuderclaps from outside, and his reunion with his brother plays out the way most reunions do: how long has it been?; going so soon?; when will you be back? Nelson, blatantly, represents the "normal" progression, time as we know it outside of Celestina's world.

The main action of the play spans, perhaps, an hour of Anibal's day. He and Celestina talk, eat, almost-but-not-really have sex, and then there's Nelson again, knocking on the door and bringing the sound of sirens with him. "It's only been a few minutes," Anibal tells him, but in that short time he spent alone with Celestina, two years have actually passed.

 "Trying to understand such a life, and why love matters to it, why a god would need to be loved too, 

was like trying to understand the anatomy of the wind or the architecture of silence or cloud tectonics. 

(He laughs) Yeah. What better way to respond to a miracle than to fall in love with it?" (70)

So where, exactly, does the love-and-romance part start? I honestly don't know. One minute we're ruminating on time, discussing Anibal's life story on two coasts, trying to figure out Celestina's sad, sentimental, and creepily child-like sexual fantasies, and the next, we're all of a sudden thrust into a grand metaphor of what love does to you. I like the grand metaphor, really. I get it, totally. But where does it come from? Why are we all of a sudden supposed to believe we just witnessed the "love of a lifetime?" By all accounts, they just cuddled on a bed suspended over the stage and woke up two years later. 

But in order to make this play work, we've got to accept that they fall in love, even though Anibal's got a girl named Debbie that he loved from afar for five years and finally won over, even though Celestina is crazy (in real life he'd have had her committed, not kissed her feet), even though Celestina is "very pregnant" and currently on a mission to find the baby's father, who may or may not have raped her two years ago, when the baby was conceived. But, alright, sure, they're in love. And love stops time and makes you forget yourself and paints the whole world as one long, glittering, beautiful moment that will stretch on forever and ever if only you'd let it. Fade to black.

In my opinion, though, that's not the message that makes this play powerful.

"It was so long ago and so much has happened since then, so much life, so much dying, so 

many changes, it just gets buried under all the time between now and then, you know?" (67)

The most touching part, to me, was the way the play toys with a concept of memory, both as a product of time-that-has-passed and as a reflection of what makes us whole. Anibal is constantly forgetting; he forgets how to speak Spanish, the names of people he used to know and when exactly he knew them, how certain circumstances of his life came to be the way they are. It speaks of how easily life--the important things, the little things that shape us, the moments that were so valuable--gets swept up and diluted as time marches forward, as if that passage of time blurs everything but the lingering essence of feelings we used to know.

I see in this play a distinct warning, or at least, an urging to ask yourself the question, With what do we chose to fill our "time?" And what kind of life would it be if the things we chose today are all we'll ever have? Do we love, even if it means two years of our lives could slip by without our knowing, if other relationships and obligations are neglected or forgotten for the sake of it, if we'd be haunted by it forever, even after it's gone? Maybe Rivera's telling us that that's what love is, the relinquishing of our whole lives for that one feeling, and even though the world is turning outside and time is passing, you're always going to trapped in that love, alive in love like you aren't alive anywhere else. Are you prepared for that?

I'm not sure why I decided to read this play last night. I was looking for an old yearbook on my bookshelf and it was wedged into a stack of old student literary magazines, slender and small with its corners all crinkled. I was just flipping through it, reminding myself what it was about, when I kept getting stuck on certain words and phrases so often I finally gave in and read the whole thing. Overall, I would say, those words and phrases are the sum of it's worth; the play itself is fueled by poetics but little story, and sadly, the characters are structured to be symbols and that's all they ever really amount to: pretty symbols for sad notions, bluntly staged and fleeting.

Hunter S Thompson, daily

The first time I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, I was a brown-nosing little eighth grade student who favored epic battle re-enactments with action figures over all other forms of social interaction. Simply checking that book out of the library made me feel a little bit bad-ass. Now I know Thompson a little better, and I have since found other ways to entertain myself (sometimes still involving action figures because, well, people don't change that much), and I find something more than feeble claims at street-cred within the pages of his work. This, though, is awesome, a short-but-telling summary of a day-in-the-life of Hunter S Thompson:

I found it on THIS blog.

Let's Talk About Shakespeare

I love to talk about Shakespeare, don't you? I focused a lot of my studies on his work in college, and still sometimes dream about being a professor of Shakespeare's tragedies at some point in my life (tweed smoking jacket with elbow pads, perhaps?). Here I've compiled a list of the questions people most commonly ask me whenever I somehow manage to turn regular conversations at dive bars into discussions of Shakespeare (which is more challenging than you'd think, actually). 

Favorite Shakespeare ________?

Comedy: As You Like It.

Tragedy: Antony and Cleopatra.

Character: Horatio, from Hamlet.  

Sonnet:#137 (he's so mean!)

Have you read them all?

Hah. No. At last count, I had read 11/14 comedies; 7/11 histories; and 10/12 tragedies.

Biggest Shakespearean pet peeve?

All the misquoting and poor attribution aside, I can't help but ask -- Why, oh why, is Hamlet always holding Yorick's skull in drawings/renderings of the "To Be or Not To Be" soliloquy? He holds up the skull during "Alas poor Yorick! I knew him Horatio," which comes way after he gives his famous emo-kid speech.

 Have you seen so-and-so do this-or-that?

Probably not. I'm not a huge fan of the "re-imaginings" of any writer's work (leave Jane Austen alone!), and I prefer to read the plays so I can take my time and enjoy the craftsmanship and wordplay. That said, I do love Kiss Me Kate (Taming of the Shrew), which I discovered during my young Fosse-obsessed phase, and I once went on a class trip to see Midsummer Night's Dream that made my best friend laugh so hard she had an asthma attack in the audience. Also, Gerard Butler and Voldemort (ahem, I mean Ralph Fiennes) in the recent film version of Coriolanus were pretty spectacular. 
  

Do you use the "third" genre of classification for his plays?

Sadly, my nerishness has led to several debates over cocktails on whether we can break down Shakespeare's plays into just Comedies and Tragedies, or if we should also denote certain titles as Histories. Short answer: I do like the distinction, but I rarely use it. To explain: in a way, most of Shakespeare's work is based in history and/or folklore, right? There are all those names and faces ripped straight out of Plutarch's Lives, and you could spend years studying all his sources. So, do we say some are more historical than others and therefore those are the histories? Or just the ones with a real-life dude's name in the title? Sometimes I think it's just an arbitrary distinction, but then, aren't most genre titles and categories?

 

Least favorite Shakespeare play?

Totally, definitely, without-a-doubt All's Well That Ends Well, because seriously, ALL IS NOT WELL at the end (nor is it well at the beginning and middle). Helena, the young daughter of a late doctor is madly in love with Count Bertram, a class-A douche who pretty much equates Helena with the Elizabethan muck on the bottom of his noble boots. When Bertram's father gets sick, Helena attends to him with the stipulation that, should he be cured, she gets her pick of any man in court for a husband. Lo! she chooses Bertram, who still doesn't like her even a little bit so why does she want this guy anyway? A whole host of awful, cruel, deceitful, low-down, dirty escapades ensue (bed tricks included!), painting neither Helena nor Bertram in a very pretty light. Everyone sucks and nobody is happy. The end.

My honorable mention for least favorite is Troilus and Cressida, because Cressida is just so whiny.

Why is Shakespeare so hard to understand?

Probably because your high school English teacher did not do a good enough job teaching you how to read it! Seriously. Shakespeare needs to be read intently, but without over-thinking it. You've got to allow for plays-on-words, double entendres, and the notion that, even while playwrighting, he was a poet at heart. Mostly I find that people are so sure they won't get it that they're too nervous/close-minded/et al to try, and the words get all tangled up in their heads. Chances are, you already know what's going to happen because the stories are so ingrained in us already, so just let go of the intimidation and read the words in front of you. 
   

And, honestly, it always helps to get a good copy of the play, one with well-developed footnotes or annotations. There are going to be archaic words in there that even the best use of context clues won't decipher, or words that had a different meaning to Shakespeare than they do to us. Look them up, or you may miss out on some pretty hysterical jokes.

I haven't read Shakespeare since high school; which one should I pick now?

That depends on what you want from it. 

Something simple to ease into? Hamlet. You can probably recite half of it already, and it's cut, dried, and wonderful.

Something fun? Midsummer Night's Dream, or As You Like It. Both make me laugh.

Something to impress your friends with obscure Shakespearean references? Coriolanus. It's a great one, and in my experience, no one knows it well enough to notice when you misquote it.

Something after which I will never want to read anything ever again? Henry IV, parts one or two.

  

Which play is [insert quote from Pinterest] from?

Most likely NONE of them! There are so very many quotes attributed to Shakespeare that are not actually his words. Some of them don't even sound like something he would say. Most notably, "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," is by William Congreve; "How do I love thee; let me count the ways," is by Elizabeth Barrett Browning; and "When I saw you I fell in love, and you smiled because you knew," is actually Arrigo Boito. Check before you get things tattooed on yourself...and probably take a look at the quote's context, too.

Nobody asks (but I wish they would):  

What's the deal with the bed trick?

I HATE the use of the bed trick! It is so...icky. It's an oft-used device in which someone tricks someone else into sleeping with him/her, usually using thin disguises that are as bafflingly successful at hiding his/her identity as Clark Kent's glasses. The resulting tryst is usually the means to the play's dramatic end, and for some strange reason leads to romance and weddings. Oh, and the bed trick almost always results in pregnancy. 

And the most common question I've ever been asked about Shakespeare--

Will you write this 7-10 page MLA-formatted paper on Shakespeare for me? 

Yes, but it'll cost ya. 

[ This post was inspired by The Classics Club's January Shakespeare Event, which you can find HERE. ]