Literary Pop

Goodbye Borders, it was nice knowing you!

Editor's Note:
Here's the back story on Borders locally.

• Let’s Halt the Decline of Route 132
• A Visit to What's Left of Borders

Look at the Birdie - New short fiction from Kurt Vonnegut

Ever since reading Cat's Cradle fifteen years ago I have faithfully made my way through the entire Kurt Vonnegut catalog and even after all those wonderful books I have often wished there was more hidden out there. Maybe an old dusty novel found under the floor boards of his West Barnstable house or some sequel to Breakfast of Champions found after all these years at the bottom of Dell publishing slush pile. The world without his unique brand of macabre humor has been sadly lacking. Well friends we got our wish...kind of.

 Look at the birdie, a new collection of short stories. I know what you're thinking; this must be a bottom of the barrel collection of rejects and stories never meant to see the light of day, thrown together by greedy publishers looking to make a buck. Yeah, I felt that as well, but then I thought..."Who cares! More Kurt!"

The book contains fourteen formally unpublished short stories. And although they don't stack up to Welcome to the Monkey House or Bamboo Snuff Box it is a good Vonnegut fix for all us fans of farting aliens and hilarious apocalyptic stories.

The highlight might be the story Confido about an inventor who creates a devise you put in your ear and it tells you everything you ever would want to hear, but in true Vonnegut form the devise unfortunately plays on all the users' darkest fears and insecurities.  My personal favorite is the story FUBAR about a lonely corporate employee who is moved to a desolate building completely alone and forgotten about until his life is transformed by a new secretary randomly assigned to him. 

Vonnegut once said: "Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae." So who am I to attack a defenseless hot fudge sundae?  I'd rather eat it and say Yum, thanks Kurt!

The Portable book vs The Portable Book

Back in the olden times, books were a big deal, and I do mean big!  Most hand written copies and available to only the nobility and crazy ass rich.  The books were often jewel encrusted with heavy wood covers and fancy metal hinges. Unusually you needed a book assistant to move the massive thing and turn its pages for you.

When along in 1436 those modern sophisticated movers and shakers invented the printing press. The man who gets the credit was Johannes Gutenberg from Germany. Well, before we were enjoying our favorite German weird gory fiction that we all love, we still had massive books, but the road had been struck, we were well on our way to the books that just one person can carry and enjoy today. They called this feat of technology the “portable book.”

Well time marches on and the portable book became cheaper, smaller and before you know it you could march down to your ye olde local book store and pick up you favorite Dickens yarn or poetry by Milton and feel pretty cool.

Now you can’t swing a dead cat without someplace that sells book; Drug stores, airports, department stores, supermarkets, hotels. I even bought a book one time in a gas station. Oh yeah and lets not forget the mega book store chains that take up half a city block.

Where do we go from here? Tiny book that beam in to your head via invisible ray?  Well sort of. Today we have the e-reader or the portable book. When I first started this blog a few years ago the e reader was cutting edge stuff, there was multiple formats and a us and them mentality, well ok, that hasn’t changed but what has changed is now everybody has one, I bet you do to.  My Grandfather has one and let me tell you the guy knows how to use it. Like the massive coffee table books of old that really were the size of actual coffee tables, the e readers have gotten smaller and cheaper so now we can enjoy our favorite weird gory German fiction in the palm of our hands.

Ah, I love it when a plan comes together, that’s from the A-team but its true! We have moved full circle. The future is in the palm of our hands and we feel pretty cool!

70 years later Cool is still Cool

In 1951 Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road and it shocked the literary world with its shocking use of language, including the word cool.  The world was a cool place to Kerouac. He was cool, his friends were cool, and the things they did were so cool he put them in a book that sold millions of copies. If you walked around with a copy of On the Road you yourself would become instantly cool.

The birth of cool most likely goes back to the 40’s when white and black Jazz musicians started to mix and a new kinder gentler version of Bebop called Cool Jazz was formed.  They called it “Cool Jazz” because the tempo was laid back or “cool daddy O.” The musicians like Miles Davis were cool and you were one cool cat if you listened to it.

The Hipsters of the 40’s were cool; the Greasers in the 50’s perfected the art of being cool. The hippies in the 60’s were way cool. Unfortunately the kids of the 70’s were very uncool by trying to replace cool with groovy. Thank god the term didn’t permeate into literature and no authors worth there salt outside the writers of the Brady Bunch dared to use it. The 80’s saw the term cool come back with a vengeance. Douglas Adams created a galaxy full of coolness including the universe’s coolest book The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. In the 90’s we had L.L. Cool J and  I was briefly cool playing the bass in several bands during the last few years’ Rock and Roll was still cool. The twentieth century saw the publication of the hugely successful Book of Cool in 2005, a kind of guide to all things cool.

Cool has become so ingrained in our vernacular that it’s hard to find a book without the word in it. Jack Kerouac would be proud of how cool we’ve all become. Instead of the Oprah’s book club O sticker on books, I propose a new sticker of the Fonz’s thumb.  Aaaeeeyyy!

70 years later cool is still cool…Be cool people.

Literary Pop's all time best Dystopian Novels get turned up to 11

The Top 10 11 Dystopian Novels of all time

I think that the ultimate purpose of the novel is to teach us something. Non Fiction can only show us real life events that may or may not have any bearing on our lives and keeps a comfortable distance from us. Fiction on the other hand draws us in and makes us live inside the story and relate it personally to our world.

The genre of the dystopian novel is perhaps the very best at this. The heart of the dystopian work is a tale of warning.  The word itself comes from the Greeks meaning bad and landscape.  The dystopian novel serves as a kind of voice in our heads asking us to take a skeptical look at our world and not let the dystopian vision happen to us.

There have been many top ten dystopian lists and most disagree with each other. This is one of my all time favorite genres and if I may I would like to offer up my personal top eleven best dystopian novels. I tried to make it a top ten list but just couldn't bear to edit a single title on the list so I gave up and made it my top 11. This is just one man's opinion and I would also welcome your comments and works that have not made my list. What's your top 11?

11. Neuromancer (1984) by William Gibson. This is the novel that coined the word "cyberspace" and ushered in the sub genre cyberpunk. Neuromancer all too chillingly showed us a world that has become dependant on technology and the virtual world we hide in to escape it.

10. Logan's Run (1967) by F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson. This book is often overlooked by the massively popular movie in the 70's. The story of ageism and the horrific balance of limited resources and the choices of a society that would rater live a short life in comfort than a longer one of conservation.

9.The Handmaidens Tale (1985)by Margret Atwood. This book is considered to be one of the very first "Slipstream" novels and depicts a totaltalism society where woman are subservient baby making machines. This Feminist work of dystopia brings it close to home with the story set right here in the not so distant future.

8. The Children of Man(1992) by PD James. One of the few Dystopian works to translate well to the big screen. This strangly optomistic yarn of a future where mankind looses the abitity to reproduce  and spins into anarchy. Terrorism and class warfare tear the world apart and the hope of man rests on the birth of a single child.

7. Fahrenheit 451 (1951) by Ray Bradbury. One of my all time favorites, Bradbury envisions a future where firemen don't put out fires, they start them. 451 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature that paper combusts and the firemen hunt down and destroy books. This novel oozes themes of censorship and mass hysteria. 

6. Cats Cradle (1963)by Kurt Vonnegut.  This satire is written in black humor only Vonnegut is capable of. Foot sex, rouge religions, dictatorships and mad scientists. Who says the end of the world can't be funny?

5. Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley. This vision of a tidy world order is still perhaps the most famous science fiction book ever. The future has gone awry with orderly and encouraged free love, consumption and recreational drug taking. Huxley like Verne before him invented gadgets that we take for granted today. After 80 years it is still  topical and relevant.

4. The Dark Tower (1982-2004) by Stephen King.  This seven part 3712 page magnum opus took King 27 years to write and is worth the huge investment of time you will need to read it. King brilliantly blends mythoi, and shows us many familiar things in a horrific world that has moved on.

3. Anthem (1937) by Ann Rand.   No publishing company originally wanted to touch this story of the triumph of ego with a ten foot pole so she ended up distributing it in pamphlet form and lucky for us this tale didn't fade into oblivion. It was also lucky for the band Rush who used it for the basis of there breakthrough album 2112.

2. The Road (2007) by Cormac McCarthy. This bleak post apocalyptic novel won the Pulitzer Prize, it's just that good. You might need a few months of therapy after reading this story that lays bare the question of why bother go on living when all is lost.

1. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell. 1984 is the literary equivalent of repeatedly getting kicked in the head with a iron boot. This horribly powerful story is the dystopian novel all others are measured against.  It's theme of mind control, sexual repression and the brutal enforcement of no individual freedoms. 1984 spawned terms like Orwellian and Big Brother into our vernacular.