Saturday, August 22, 2009
Jim Krusoe at St. Marks: 8/20/09
Jim Krusoe looks like a denizen of the Old, Weird America, a midwesterner in steel-toed workboots, a faded flannel shirt, and with wild eyebrows two shades darker than the rest of his hair and pointing skyward like devil horns. Very friendly but with an inwardness which fell, unlike most people's inwardness, to the outside.
His latest novel is called Erased. He traveled from Los Angeles to read from it (a born Clevelander, he moved west while still in his teens). I had just finished the book and was still walking around in his world when I met him. His world, incidentally, is Cleveland: a very strange Cleveland that bears some resemblance to the afterlife, if the afterlife had been designed by the Big Boy franchise of restaurants . "I set out to take my revenge on the place," said Jim to me before the reading. "But I found myself writing something different, something sort of affectionate."
The reading was among our best, and featured Zachary Schomburg, whose new work bears an extraordinary love for jaguars, and Gary Lutz, about whose work you could say the same, except that for Gary Lutz words are jaguars. Gordon Lish was there, wearing an interesting hat.
Krusoe read from a section of his novel in which the citizens of this other-Cleveland go to war with the city's rats. It is the most plainly fantastic piece in a novel which otherwise trades in odd coincidences and uncanny nighttime epiphanies. Yet as he went along I could see why he chose it: read by him, in his flat, uninflected manner, one pokes and prods at the vibe of the story, asking whether it's funny or violent or philosophical before realizing, some time later, the plain absurdity of the situation. "When have you humans ever changed your minds about anything?" ask the rats of their human persecutors, just before getting creamed.
I don't tend to follow the contemporary fabulists: Kelly Link's worlds seem open to vast and frightening realms akin to the world of science fiction, but most other writers in that vein are sort of warm milk, an excuse to reify the world we've been given rather than deal with the consequences of making a new one.
I've been following Krusoe since Blood Lake, however, and I'll read anything he does. There is no "magic" in his world. He seems to write about bodies, imperfect, uncomfortable, which stand so rigidly against a loose world that the biological fact of human life becomes a sort of fabulism. "In this book, the character stands in place, and setting unfurls behind him, like a scroll."
He's also funny. ¶ 7:06 AM
Jim Krusoe looks like a denizen of the Old, Weird America, a midwesterner in steel-toed workboots, a faded flannel shirt, and with wild eyebrows two shades darker than the rest of his hair and pointing skyward like devil horns. Very friendly but with an inwardness which fell, unlike most people's inwardness, to the outside.
His latest novel is called Erased. He traveled from Los Angeles to read from it (a born Clevelander, he moved west while still in his teens). I had just finished the book and was still walking around in his world when I met him. His world, incidentally, is Cleveland: a very strange Cleveland that bears some resemblance to the afterlife, if the afterlife had been designed by the Big Boy franchise of restaurants . "I set out to take my revenge on the place," said Jim to me before the reading. "But I found myself writing something different, something sort of affectionate."
The reading was among our best, and featured Zachary Schomburg, whose new work bears an extraordinary love for jaguars, and Gary Lutz, about whose work you could say the same, except that for Gary Lutz words are jaguars. Gordon Lish was there, wearing an interesting hat.
Krusoe read from a section of his novel in which the citizens of this other-Cleveland go to war with the city's rats. It is the most plainly fantastic piece in a novel which otherwise trades in odd coincidences and uncanny nighttime epiphanies. Yet as he went along I could see why he chose it: read by him, in his flat, uninflected manner, one pokes and prods at the vibe of the story, asking whether it's funny or violent or philosophical before realizing, some time later, the plain absurdity of the situation. "When have you humans ever changed your minds about anything?" ask the rats of their human persecutors, just before getting creamed.
I don't tend to follow the contemporary fabulists: Kelly Link's worlds seem open to vast and frightening realms akin to the world of science fiction, but most other writers in that vein are sort of warm milk, an excuse to reify the world we've been given rather than deal with the consequences of making a new one.
I've been following Krusoe since Blood Lake, however, and I'll read anything he does. There is no "magic" in his world. He seems to write about bodies, imperfect, uncomfortable, which stand so rigidly against a loose world that the biological fact of human life becomes a sort of fabulism. "In this book, the character stands in place, and setting unfurls behind him, like a scroll."
He's also funny. ¶ 7:06 AM
