Scattershot Book Review

Scattershot by Richard Goodwin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I started writing this review on paper, with a pen about a week ago when I was having a lot of trouble with my laptop. What I wrote in the hour I was on break was mostly about my experiences reading this book on the Nook touch, the third generation device put out by the company that gives me my paycheck each week. I was borrowing one of these for a couple of days, and I borrowed it expressly so I could read Scattershot, which the kind people at Seedpod emailed to me so I could review it.

Does anyone really care to hear my semi-luddite ramblings about electronic devices you read on? I didn’t think so. I will say that I had some awesome points in the rough draft that had to do with the misuse of our language in the marketing of these devices to the public. Those glorious and not so profound points though will die in my notebook, or maybe pop up somewhere else but for now they aren’t important.

I felt it was a disservice to this book, the author and the publisher to use the review as yet another platform for me to rant about ‘e-readers’ (I seriously hate that term, anytime you see the word device you can think Nook, Kindle or whatever other brand of thingey’s one would use to read a book without paper).

This is the very first book I read on a device. I could have read it on my computer but after reading the first twenty pages or so I realized that I wasn’t enjoying the experience very much. I will admit I enjoyed reading on a device more than I enjoy reading for an extended period of time in front of my temperamental laptop. For now I will just comment that this is all slightly relevant because this is only available as an e-book. We’ll come back to that later though.

The book itself. I had a lot of fun reading this. I think if twenty-two year old Greg had read this he would have wet himself over it, but nearing middle-age Greg enjoyed it too, just not as much as my younger self would have. The book falls into the same category that I’d place Bukowski, John Fante (and quite possibly Dan Fante, who I haven’t read but I think would fit here), or The Motel Life by Willy Vlautin or Joseph Mattson’s Empty the Sun, which I don’t know exactly how to sum up nicely but as pretty straight forward, ‘muscular’ / masculine, anti-hero / loser stories. One thing that separated Scattershot from most of these other books is it didn’t end up glorifying the chemical abuse aspect. There was some drugging and some drinking but there wasn’t much of a romanticism put on it.

The premise of the book is so outlandish and borderline stupid that as soon as you hear it you want to groan for the poor fictional character who would actually go through with doing something like this. But, I’ve known more than one person who has thought up dumber ideas than this and tried to act on them in the real world, that I could picture some friends from my younger days doing something like this that I found it quite believable. Wicker, the main character, is a twenty something year old loser who has a talent in beer bongs (I’m not sure if this talent extends to making them or just doing them, but he does state this as his main skill at one point) who doesn’t like to work and has the stunningly awesome aspiration of growing his hair long enough so he can put it in a pony tail, because he thinks it would look good and and easy to care for. All his belongings he’s put into a storage unit, he’s no longer able to pay the rent on the storage unit and his mom’s ashes are in the unit. In order to pay the back rent and get his mom’s ashes along with the rest of his junk out of storage he needs money and he figures the easiest way to get money is to goto Las Vegas and win one of the jackpots playing the slots. Armed with a book telling you how to beat the slots he’s off hitchhiking to Sin City to make his money.

What a stupid idea. To play slot machines to make serious money. If I hadn’t gotten almost suicidally depressed once in Vegas while watching rows of white-trash rednecks playing the slots and video poker with the look of desperation and at the speed of people playing not to have fun but to try to pay their rent at Sam’s Town once I might think that this isn’t an idea someone would normally have. But with some of my experiences watching friends make similarly stupid decisions to bail themselves out of money trouble and witnessing one of the most depressing things I’ve ever watched in Vegas I know that Wicker isn’t an absurd creation or anomaly, but someone that could very well be sitting his ass down in The Tropicana right now to with dreams of hitting the right combination that will alleviate all his woes.

To get to Vegas he gets a ride with a scatterbrained elderly woman suffering from mild dementia who he convinces to drive him from Los Angeles. She’s an endearing character with a strange grasp on reality and as the novel goes on becomes attached to Wicker and the unravelling of his original plans. A third major character is the elderly woman’s son, a sad-sack dentist who likes looking at some sort of weird porn on the computer and who also heads to Vegas trying to track down his mother and bring her safely home. In his own ways he’s as much of a fuck-up as Wicker and his own life starts to unravel as his life gets shifted off of it’s mundane middle-class tracks because of Wicker and his plans to make good with the one armed bandit.

There are some great scenes in this book and I’d talk about them some but I think it would give away too much plot and I don’t want to do that because I’d like you to read this one. Hearing that this book is an e-book only release and that it is Bukowski-esque could be a big flag that one should avoid this at all costs, neither of those two things usually bode well for a very enjoyable reading experience but this novel is well-written and well-edited. It doesn’t feel like an e-book (which in my head I always think of as being one step below the horrors that descend upon readers in the form of self-published / vanity books) and it doesn’t get stuck in the muck of the ‘look how fucked up I am’ frat-boy-ishness that followers of Bukowski can easily fall into. No. This is a good book!

When I finished reading it my one major gripe was that it was only an ebook and that I couldn’t order it into the store, I couldn’t bring it down to the daily show-and-tell meetings at the store, that it couldn’t one day sit on one of Karen’s tables, and that I couldn’t possibly buy a copy and let it live on my shelves. I thought, what a shame it’s not a ‘real’ book, but then I said, ‘bad, Greg’ this is a real book. It’s a very good and real book even if it’s only available in processed zeros and ones. And also it’s a pretty cool thing that Seedpod is doing, they are releasing a small number of well edited, nicely formatted books in the electronic format and are able to sell them for a relatively low price with little of the risk normally involved by traditional publishers. I think that’s a pretty cool DIY / independent sort of thing to do, even if it makes me feel a little uncomfortable because I’ll need to either invest in one of these device things or train myself to read books on my computer. I sort of feel like I’m being left out of the cool possibilities publishers have by my own prejudices but for everyone out there who doesn’t hate devices like I do I’d recommend checking this book and publisher out. It’s good to see some quality stuff being produced exclusively for this new medium.

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Blood in the Cage

Blood in the Cage: Mixed Martial Arts, Pat Miletich, and the Furious Rise of the UFC by L. Jon Wertheim
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the first MMA (Mixed Martial Arts) book I’ve read that is written for people who aren’t already fans. The author, a Sports Illustrated writer, sets out with the basic question is MMA a real sport or is it in the words of failed Presidential hopeful John McCain, “human cock-fighting”? (Or is it just merely a spectacle a la professional wrestling? Or is it a barbaric blood-sport?)

The author starts out not being a fan, or even terribly knowledgeable about the sport or the people who participate in it (he admits to looking up Randy Courture on the internet to find out who exactly he is right before his first interview with him, which for non-MMA fans is sort of like if you had an interview with someone like Larry Bird having to google him to find out that he was a really important player for the Celtics back in the day); which is a blessing to the book. Instead of getting a fanboy account of the sport you get someone who has no real knowledge and is curious to figure out what the appeal could be. He ends up becoming enthralled by the sport and the book turns out to a multi-thread narrative that mixes a brief history of MMA with the personal story of the first UFC Welterweight World Champion Pat Miletich and a skeptical telling of the UFC’s history.

It’s an interesting approach to the book. One, because Pat Miletich isn’t exactly the first person you would think of focusing on if you were going to write an MMA book for non-fans. He was (is) important to the sport first as a fighter but more importantly as a trainer and coach to fighters like Matt Hughes, but he’s not exactly a huge name. Partly because he stopped fighting in the UFC back in 2002 and coaches aren’t exactly celebrities in the sport (and if you were going to go for a ‘celebrity’ coach you’d obviously go for Greg Jackson (free betting / picking a winner tip for an MMA fight? When in doubt, if one of the fighters is coached by Jackson pick him, his fighters always have phenomenal game plans that work really well against their opponents). There are flashier and bigger names from the early UFC days that could be featured in a story about MMA. The second interesting approach to the book is the amount of criticism thrown at the UFC in all its various incarnations. The UFC doesn’t like it’s dirty laundry aired and it routinely black-lists journalists whom don’t toe the party line. I don’t imagine a fanboy author would have given as realistic picture of Dana White (UFC President and the ‘face’ of the UFC) out of fear that their career of writing about the UFC could be in serious jeopardy.

So how is the book? It’s good. If you’ve done something sort of dumb and ordered every MMA biography you could think of from the library and read them in the past month there will be quite a bit here that is re-hash and that is where the focus on Pat Miletich is a welcome bit of fresh-air. His story is kind of sad, in that he was a fairly important fighter in the early / middle days of the UFC who got left behind and never had a chance to personally cash in on the bigger money that came along later. Some of it had to do with injuries, some had to do with the fact that he had to choose between himself and the fighters he was training at Miletich Fighting Systems, and some with his uncompromising approach to life and way he fought. Like just about every other fighter I’ve read about recently, at some point Miletich was fucked over by Dana White and Co., (in his case it was getting snubbed at being a coach on the second season of “The Ultimate Fighter” after he had been privately promised the spot) but unlike everyone else he for whatever reason he didn’t kiss and make up to be dragged back to have the shit beaten out of him by younger fighters for bigger paychecks (I mean, to have a comeback—seriously, you guys are dragging Mark Coleman out again for a fight this summer? Really? Can’t he just retire already). There is also the case that Miletich fought well, and fought to win but he generally fought in the ‘boring wrestler’ style of dragging someone to the ground and grinding out a victory through superior grappling. Critics of his style like to call it, “lay and pray”, because to most people it looks like one guy is just laying there on top of the other guy. The dominant fighter is ‘winning’ the round since he’s controlling the fight but unless you are fascinated by the nuances of the wrestling game there isn’t much excitement to the fight. This style of fighting has become less prevalent lately for a number of reasons. One, fans don’t like it much and generally a lot of boos will be heard when there is just a lot of laying around on the mat. Two, the organization and the refs know this so they are quicker to stand up fighters who aren’t being active enough on the ground (which is sometimes a good thing and sometimes gets in the way of some interesting technical fighting, but that doesn’t happen to often). And third, fighters are much more dynamic, or well rounded these days. When in the early days someone who was predominately a boxer met a wrestler, the wrestler could usually take the boxer down and once on the ground the boxer was like a fish out of water, these days there are specialists in the game but no one can compete at the level of the UFC by being a specialist while totally ignoring all other facets of the fight game (ie., everyone knows enough wrestling to generally not be completely dominated by some guy laying on top of him).

Fuck, what does any of this have to do with the book? Not too much I guess. I guess everything I just wrote in the second half of the last paragraph is a nice way of saying that as a fighter Miletich was something of a throw-back to the earlier era of the sport. But as a coach he did help create a Miletich 2.0 in Matt Hughes who is usually given the superlative, the most dominant champion in the UFC history (this same superlative is used for Anderson Silva, too. And I wouldn’t be surprised that GSP hasn’t been described as the most dominant too, although both of them are more likely to be described as ‘the pound for pound best fighter in the world’, this particular superlative is used for at least Jose Aldo and Fedor Emelianenko regularly (not to mention fighters currently in the Bellator Fighting Championship, where all of their champions are described as potentially ‘the pound for pound best fighter in the world’). Similarly just about every fight on every UFC card has a fighter who has ‘arguably the best stand-up / take-downs / take-down defenses / jiu jitsu / wrestling / knees / elbows / hands in all of MMA’. The use of superlatives in the world of fight commentators is astounding), so in a way Miletich did get his redemption in the UFC he just did it by molding another fighter into a newer sleeker version of himself.

This is the one book I’d recommend to booknerds who might be interested in knowing what the appeal of watching MMA is. Oh, and what is the answer to the basic question behind the book? Yes, it is a sport with world-class athletes. No, it’s not human cock-fighting and it isn’t a blood sport and it’s actually safer than boxing and professional football, there just happens to be a copious amount of blood in some of the fights. But if you were already a fan of MMA you already knew that.

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Mr. Squishy: the first of maybe a series of thoughts on the short stories in DFW’s Oblivion

“Mr. Squishy”

(These are more just some thoughts I’ve had about the story, half of it is talking out of my ass and shouldn’t be taken too seriously.)

The first story in Oblivion is a near perfect example of why some people really really dislike DFW, he bombards the reader with so many details that it is possible to be put off by the sheer amount of information he gives the reader. One could easily argue that there is too much, there are too many details about market research given, there are too many unnecessary details given about the person leading the focus group and the argument could be made that he’s just showing off: as if he is saying look at all the things that I know and I’m going to tell you them all like a precious child you want to smack. For roughly the first half of the story he does bombard the reader with almost too much information and the moments when humor and humanity show through are dulled by the onslaught of minutiae.

An often seen quote of David Foster Wallace is, “I received 500,000 discrete bits of information today of which maybe 25 are important. My job is to make some sense of it.” In the case of this story I believe that part of the structure is the bombarding the reader with somewhere less than 499,975 bits of discrete information but still piling it up and surrounding the ’25 bites’ that are important. For a story that is mostly about marketing, the selling of products via a stream of information to potential consumers there is a good reason to put the reader in the position he or she lives in daily of being forced to find the important pieces from the sea of superfluous. I don’t really believe this totally though, I believe that DFW isn’t just creating a story that is a narrative version of white noise and saying, hey find the pattern in here, I think it’s all very controlled; he is the marketing and ad man choosing carefully what is presented to us. He’s just not making it that easy for us. He’s making us surrender the role of passive consumer, and not just take the ironic role of a public that is aware of what the role of marketing and is supposedly more savvy about it, but wants the reader to be an active part of the story. This is all a re-hash of what I’ve written about Infinite Jest, but I like repeating myself.

The easiest way of looking at this story is to see it as a hip kind of fuck you, snigger snigger to corporate America and the marketing companies do for products. This is a common enough theme in many of DFW’s works but I think it’s just window dressing, it’s a level of distraction just like it is in reality. I think one needs to look past the critique of consumer products and DFW’s treatment of characters in the focus group and outside among the spectators watching the strange man climbing up the building seem to be pointing to the idea that just knowing what is going on and feeling detached from being part of the herd isn’t enough. Actively focusing on marketing even in a removed manner is still being focused on that world and you are still being taken in by the amount of psychic garbage that waves it’s hands around for our attention.

Instead the real meat to this story is loneliness and alienation. The story is depressing, for all of the humor in it at the center of the story is a lonely man who thought he was going to make a difference and now finds himself staring in the mirror each morning and seeing he looks more and more like Mr. Squishy, a friendly looking blob that is used as a mascot on snack-foods. But it’s not a story about him being a failure but rather being totally unexceptional, even in ever thinking that he could be exceptional, that he could make a difference and that his life would amount to being more than having a career he doesn’t find much satisfaction in. Schmidt can’t even feel exceptional in his failure because his is the story of everyone. A telling line in the story is when Schmidt is described as being afraid of the way he walks makes him stand out from everyone else, and he feels embarrassed by this fact, but in reality there is nothing distinctive in the way he walks and he actually walks in a way that is a hundred percent normal. Our perceptions of ourselves and the way others see us are incongruous and in way we are trapped in and by ourselves. Repeatedly in the story the theme of being watched by others who we can’t see comes up. From the double-blind manner research is done, the windows of The Gap that allow the people in the store to see the crowd outside on the street without being observed themselves, the way the ∆Y organization spies on it’s own employees, the hidden camera and moles in the focus group room itself; the references to situations like this steadily increase as the story goes on until by the end every relationship in the story is predicated on some form of being watched without the other person knowing and some form of deception. There no real human relations in the story everything is trickery on some level or another and many of the deceptions are being done with a nudge and nod to the other person letting them know that deception is all around them but between you and me there is honesty.

There is no human warmth in the story and that is kind of fitting in a story that bombards the reader with way too many details about statistical analysis, a type of mathematics that can reduce people not to individuals but into figures to be exploited and used.

Along with the theme of being watched by others who we can’t see, being subjected to the tyranny of the others gaze in existential speak, there is the violence that has an undercurrent in the story. It’s interesting the way that DFW first gives the idea of poisoning the snack cakes as some kind of revenge fantasy that probably passes through most peoples mind at some point when they work at a job they find unrewarding (well maybe not poisoning but doing something that would damage the company) to casually moving from a description of Schmidt’s condo to the details of the chemistry lab he has set up in a spare bedroom where he has been synthesizing a chemical that could be used to contaminate the snack product he is doing focus group research for. And of course there is the unknown violence that could be committed by the man climbing up the outside of the building who during one of his breaks straps an M-16 onto his back and continues his climb. Violence shakes people from the everyday hum-drum and it threatens to occur by ineffectual people who find no other way to get themselves really seen (on their own terms) than by doing something overly dramatic.

And what about the guy climbing the building? Why is he in the story? What is his purpose? He is the big question mark in the whole story. He is the ‘what happened to Hal’ kind of point, and why in the middle of one of Schmidt’s paragraphs is there a footnote told from the climbers perspective, and why is that the only perspective that is given in the first person? He’s a surreal aside to the story but by giving him that brief moment where he becomes the first person narrator it makes his relationship to the story seem more important that the ambiguousness suggests. A second reading of the story with some of these questions in mind will probably be necessary at some point.

Book Review: Edge by Thomas Blackthorne

Edge by Thomas Blackthorne
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The cover of this book is a lot cooler than the book itself.

I was kind of hoping for a Battle Royale / Hunger Games sort of thing. But with knives. There is some fighting with knives and there is a reality tv show that has knife fights in it, that seems an awful lot like the UFC reality TV show and England in this dreary future has professional knife-fighters who go at it in a cage, but that is all pretty much in the background.

Instead this is a sort of a run of the mill action novel starring an ex-special forces guy who has some anger and guilt issues. The guy is a martial arts whiz. He can hack computer systems with the greatest of ease, and women all want to flirt and sleep with him, even lesbians. Co-starring with him is a psychiatrist who is a whiz at putting people in to trances with a sort of NLP technique. She can do this like that (picture me snapping my fingers) to just about anyone. I’m very skeptical about the way she can do this, and how real her skills are, they seriously sound like Luke Skywalker passing his hand in front of someone’s face and getting them to do whatever he wants them to do. Jedi tricks. But to be fair I don’t really believe in the main characters fighting skills either. He does an awful lot of one hit knockouts on people who are also trained fighters. I don’t know a whole lot about fighting from the actual doing it side, but I’ve watched way too many MMA fights to know that trained fighters usually don’t just overpower another trained fighter with one quick blow, yeah it happens every now and then (see some of Mirko Cro Cop’s fights when he was in his prime, here is one video, you can skip to the 1:30 mark to see the actual fight: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il66HYPgo… there is a UFC match that he just walked right up and knocked his opponent out with a head kick in the first few seconds, unfortunately the UFC are greedy people who have their fights pulled off of youtube when they are posted… If you want to see a pretty cool head kick though you should watch the youtube clip above), but over and over again against groups of opponents is kind of silly.

I’ve read a lot worse written books in this type of genre. The story was interesting enough to hold my attention. The dialog was borderline awful at times, especially when the characters got jokey and started having the one-liners fly. And there is a sentence that gets repeated on page 371, which is one of the bigger copy-editing mistakes I’ve ever seen in a non-self-published book.

I’ll probably end up reading the sequel, which is about group suicide with knives, and I’ll probably be disappointed that there isn’t more knife induced self-destruction in the novel, and I’ll probably have all the same complaints I have here but I expect it will be at least mildly entertaining.

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Quiet, Please…

Quiet, Please: Dispatches for a Public Librarian
By Scott Douglas

A review where I find I’m writing more about myself than the book at hand, only because the farther along I read in the book the more I saw myself in the book — which might not be the best way of reading a memoir.
(note: this is word for word my review that I also wrote on Goodreads.com–but I meant to actually put it here first, so I consider it a blog review for the book, rather than a goodreads review for the book. The distinction is a minor one and only matters to me, but now you know too. You’re a very very lucky person to know this fact.)

When I first came across this book I thought ‘oh cool – a book about being a librarian’, then I thought it will be nice in the biography section with the other book that came out a few months ago about being a librarian, and I’ll mean to read it and probably not, or at least until it comes out in paperback, and then maybe still forget about it. Then though I happened to open the book up to an early page and noticed first footnotes (and not that I would phrase it as a man-crush like the author does, I will admit being a complete sucker for David Foster Wallace (and Thomas Pynchon, but not Mark Twain who I avoid like the plague because of a horrible first experience with him at the hands of an incompetent English teacher)), which (I’m back on footnotes here) are an instant selling point to me and on the same page the story about trying to impress a librarian by reading Thomas Pynchon, only to find out the librarian thinks Pynchon is maybe some actor in a Julia Roberts movie. That’s all I needed to see, the book went right on top of my to buy pile of books and actually made it out of the to buy pile in the first week it was there (no little feat let me tell you, books can live in that pile for quite awhile).
Parts of the book were a little disheartening, since I’m currently enrolled in Library School, and hearing some of the bad things about being a librarian, and the way he questioned his decision to become one and stuff, but as the book went on I found myself seeing that it’s not so bad, and that a lot of the humorous horror stories he’s relating could be lifted out of my own experiences working at the bookstore, with maybe a few little details changed (for example, he has a patron come up and tell him there is a man sleeping in a restroom stall, I had a woman come up to me and tell me there was a woman scratching her skin off in the ladies room, or perverts jerking off on the computers compared to some guy blowing his wad on a woman’s leather jacket (while she was wearing it) in the Woman’s Study aisle). Besides taking an amused solace in similar kinds of experience I also loved reading his short tales of going to Library School. I was also happy to find out that there is some kind of web-page out there for Librarians with Tattoos, it’s nice to know that in the future I could belong to something bigger than myself.
I found the book to be overall really enjoyable, I’d recommend it to people, especially people who don’t work in places where the homeless and crazy come to spend their days just for the wonderfully bizarre tales they bring with them.
Good stuff.