"Shipbreaker" by Paulo Bacigalupi

Shipbreaker is a young adult dystopian novel written by Paulo Bacigalupi.  His collection of short stories (for adults) titled Pump Six is the best science fiction I've read in a decade.

So what about Shipbreaker?  It's better than Hunger Games.  There, I said it.

Hunger Games is overrated.  

There, I said another thing.

Hunger Games is derivative, recycled, imitative.  If you're a fan of dystopian sci-fi, which I am (I've got anthologies), Hunger Games is a tired and entirely underwhelming book.

So why do people like it so much?  Because most people don't read dystopian books, or sci-fi for that matter.

Let's say there's someone who has NEVER eaten candy.  Then one day you give them a 3 Musketeers bar.  They eat it and say "This is amazing!  It's so sweet!  A blast of sugary, delicious flavors . . . I love it!"

3 Musketeers is NOT a great candy bar.  It's hardly in anyone's top 10.  But if you've never had candy, you might really like it.

Or let's say there's someone who has NEVER heard rock and roll.  Then this someone hears a song by a second-rate hack band like Third Eye Blind.  The first-time listener might say "This is amazing!  The guitars are distorted!  There's so much energy and noise.  I love it!"

No, you do not love Third Eye Blind.  Their song is tired, derivative, recycled.  You love the idea, promise, and possibility of rock and roll.

So I ask you, fans of Hunger Games, did you really love that book, or did you the idea, promise, and possibility of dystopian science fiction?

(If you want, you can also take everything I've written above and replace "Hunger Games" with "Harry Potter," and "science fiction" with "fantasy."  Enjoy.)

"The Anxiety of Influence" by Harold Bloom

It's a giant in the annals in literary criticism, arguably the most influential work in the field in the last 50 years.

The premise?  That all poets face an anxiety of influence when they develop as artists.  Meaning all authors have a precursor who influences their work--and whose shadow looms large over all of their own production (thus the anxiety).  What is an author to do?  What if you're a short story writer and have been awed by James Joyce all your life?  What happens when you sit down to write your own short stories?  How do you start when you know they'll never be as good as his?  How do you develop your own voice and style when you know there's no surpassing your greatest influence?  How do you dare to do something different (or "swerve" in a different direction, as Bloom would say) when you know the best of the best wouldn't have made such a move?

I think anyone who grows strong in a field faces the anxiety of influence.  When I started teaching, I had a mentor named Mr. Harber (the subject of some of my earliest posts) who was and still is the smartest man I've ever met, and the best teacher I'll ever know.  How do I deal with his long shadow?  Would I ever imagine doing something differently than he would have in the classroom, knowing he was the best of the best?  But does that leave me as his eternal disciple, never to come into my own as an educator?  Would I always just try to be like Mr. Harber, but of course always fail to do so since I'm not him?

Some artists never do escape the influence of their precursors.  The Black Crows will always be a 4th-rate version of the Rolling Stones.  The play "Fences" by August Wilson, good as it is, is still in the shadow of the grandest of all American dramas "Death of A Salesman."

So what's an artist to do?  Arbitrarily try to do something different?  But doing something different just for the sake of being different rarely becomes good art.  So what about unabashedly ripping-off your influences and call it an homage?  Doesn't sound like the purpose of art to me.

What to do?  Thus the anxiety.

Maybe you just don't give up.  Maybe you just rip-off your precursor so much that you get bored with it and your mind finally gives you the right "swerve."  Maybe you do something different just for the sake of being different, and therefore your art is bad and unauthentic for awhile, but you do this "different" art over and over again until it becomes natural and you slowly claw your way to something authentic.

Mr. Harber was my mentor for the first two years of teaching.  I've now taught 16 years beyond that in about six other places . . . so maybe there's something in my teaching that's now my own.  Maybe I've made some of my own rightful swerves.  Maybe.

"The Third Throne of Heaven" by Denis Johnson

More than thoughts on Denis Johnson's work, here's some thoughts on poetry.

Is it just me who thinks that poetry can save the whole world?  Or at least that the experience of poetry is synonymous with the experience of life itself?

Poetry is hard.  Life is hard.  Poetry is mysterious.  Life is mysterious.

As Wallace Stevens said:

. . . A more severe
more harrasing master would extemporize
Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory
of poetry is the theory of life

Or as my great poetry teacher Joanna Klink liked to say at the end of her emails:  "take care of your poetry and take care of yourself, which is the same thing you know."

It's too bad that hardly anyone reads poetry books for pleasure anymore.  It teaches you a lot.

When I read though the Denis Johnson book of poetry, I liked 10 out of the 128 poems.  Roughly one out of every 13.  Those are low odds, but it's worth it.  (Once again, poetry is like life:  1 out of every 13 dates you go on is a good one, 1 out of every 13 days of teaching is a good one, 1 out of every 13 songs you listen to is a good one, etc.  It's a reminder to keep slogging through all that doesn't work for you, because it's the only way to get to what finally does.)

Poetry mysterious, and we need a lot more of that in our world. Sitting in the mysterious, in the unknown, in the transcendent, in what can't be defined--that's what we crave.  But these days we like to quantify and mechanize and measure everything (this is why high school English is so unpopular), and we're paying a high psychic price for it.

I don't know why the following lines from Denis Johnson work for me, but they do.  And I don't want to know why--because if I tried to break down the reasons, the magic would disappear.

From "The Risen"

How sad, how beautiful
the sea
of tumbling astronauts,
their faces barred
and planed and green amid
the deep

From "The White Fires of Venus"

The remedy for loneliness
is in learning to admit
the bayonet:  gracefully,
now that already
it pierces the heart.

From "What This Window Opens On"

among the trembling organs
of a captured bird

A book called "The Keep" by Emily Wilson is another great example (for me).  I read through the book, not really getting it, not really resonating with anything . . . and then one poem, for some unknown reason, grabbed me (making the whole book worth it):

"Radical Field" Emily Wilson

We have tenuous edges. 

We have striated hides. 

Glandular black ribbons all
inside us,
pelagic and sweet. 

We have reservoirs you can't see. 

The caribou move
through us beyond
numerous. 

One of the cortical
adumbrations,
one of the ferns. 

Our heaviest metals accumulate. 

We wouldn't dream.