#7 Entrance to the rodeo where we begin to reboot
Devoted to fans of prairie novels and Star Wars
Everyone is welcome at the Rodeo!
⍀ Weekly Link Rodeo
As I struggle to write yet another article by a Canadian prairie novel, I’m reminded of the famous dual-identity author Frederick Philip Grove. Most people outside Canada (and German academia?) don’t really know about this guy. This somewhat updated biography combines his two personas into one, whereas when I was doing my PhD a lot was still written about the scandal of it all— that the dour Canadian prairie novelist with the stilted syntax was, in fact, the German dandy who translated Oscar Wilde and in some way faked his suicide before emerging again on the Canadian prairies. His 1946 autobiography, In Search of Myself, won the Governor General’s award for non-fiction despite being completely fake. I’d recommend pretty much any of his prairie novels, most especially Settlers of the Marsh (1925), as well as a deeper cut — his German-language novel of the 1906, The Master’s Mason’s House.
A Search for America (1927) is Grove's most successful book. Failure and a kind of triumph inform the 3 late works: The Master of the Mill (1944), In Search of Myself and Consider Her Ways (1947). The Master of the Mill is the first Canadian novel to explore the social effects of monopoly capitalism. Its protagonist, like the narrator of the autobiography, tries to account for his own, and mankind's, failure to realize his potential greatness.
Here’s a middling review of the second verse novel by Jason Guriel. I picked this one up at AWP. Here are my thoughts around the halfway mark. It’s a lot, and the language is awkward at times. But I guess it’s all about the ambition? You can’t mess with that aspect of it, and it’s definitely unlike anything else I’ve read aside from his last book, Forgotten Work, which is set in the same universe. The technology is too old/current for his imagined future, but Guriel’s well aware of that — he at one point ventriloquizes about his own previous book, the “‘technology / Makes no sense,’ she’d say with a knowing smirk. / ‘It’s set too close to now. It doesn’t work.’” I’m ntill not sure if The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles “works” but it is definitely worth a look. Here’s the book reviewed by in Kirkus Reviews:
If Guriel’s fiction debut about a musical scavenger hunt was 1970s-era space rock, this book is full-on Lord of the Rings via Ralph Bakshi with a scattering of cyberpunk tropes to keep things spicy. Like its predecessor, it’s not easy to read unless you’re the sort who finds rhyming couplets roll off the tongue, but the author’s playful disposition and quixotic milieu remain infectious. The book alternates two storylines, juxtaposing a young scholar’s fascination with a famous work of YA fiction with the text of that novel, also composed entirely in rhyme and concerning itself with seafaring werewolves. When Kaye’s friend Cat drags her to a convention celebrating The Full-Moon Whaling Chronicles, she’s not terribly impressed, but something about the book’s depictions of pirates and monsters gets under her skin, as does the mystery of the book’s author, Mandy Fiction, who vanished into thin air in 2052. Guriel’s book desperately needs focus, but it has plenty of startling imagery to enliven the reader’s journey. There’s clever wordplay satirizing corporate culture (apparently ZuckTube and ZikZok remain inescapable in the future) but also dystopian vistas, like the crater where Kaye lives and where Montreal once stood. Meanwhile, the teenage lycanthropes onboard the Lucy Dread sail treacherous seas in search of a sea monster dubbed a “Moby.” Soon, Kaye is invited by her eccentric professor Emmett Lux to join him for a research assistantship in Japan, where her relationship to Fiction’s fiction becomes even more Byzantine. Those who can manage the linguistic gymnastics needed to navigate the journey—laden with pop-culture references and winking observations about the fickle nature of fan culture—will reap strange rewards.
Grafton Tanner’s works are full of ideas, references, and at times self-referentiality. I discovered Vaporwave and Too Many Cooks from his thesis developed into book Babbling Corpse. He was a recent guest on the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast to discuss his most recent book Foreverism. Here’s a clip from a review by Guy Lancaster:
Foreverizing obviates the idea of growth, punishing people who have strayed too far from the brand they work so hard to embody. In like manner, ‘capitalism maintains growth of profit for elites while telling the rest of us that insignificant, incremental updating is the best that can be done’ (65) – social change as a series of tweaks to the operating system. Not only is the present updated in this manner; so, too, is the past, as represented by Tanner with the present preoccupation of removing from ‘classic’ texts passages now deemed indefensible. In this manner, ‘foreverism frames the problematic aspects of the past – its nightmarish realities unforgotten by so many – as throwback traits that have been bred out. Now you can consume the past without worrying that you might be ignoring the injustices of history’ (108). And the erasure of these problematic aspects not only enrages a far right nostalgic for the past but also mimics their own strategies for de-problematizing our earlier history and thus problematizing the whole idea of progress. A golden age can be rebooted, and if this reboot is not successful, we can try again.
/\/\/Interlude
The review of Foreverism asks if the ideas of foreverism are anything. The review likens this desire to capitalize perpetually as a religion notion. Akin to Innovation, perhaps coming from Raymond Williams’ Keywords which looks at particular, culturally important words and their usage over time.
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