182. of the Best } of the Best of the.

An anonymous Publisher’s Weekly reviewer writes “[Ellen] Datlow’s 10th-anniversary volume of horror shorts [The Best of the Best Horror of the Year ] is a stunning and flawless collection” and that it’s “nothing short of exceptional.”

It’s unlikely PW’s reviewer read the whole book. But I have, and there are good stories in it: “The Nimble Men” by Glen Hirshberg, “Shepherd’s Business” by Stephen Gallagher, “At the Riding School” by Cody Goodfellow, “Grave Goods” by Gemma Files, "The Ballad of Ballard and Sandrine" by Peter Straub, “The Days of Our Lives” by Adam L. G. Nevill, and “Nesters” by Siobhan Carroll.

Files’ “Grave Goods” and Carroll’s “Nesters” were both written for Lovecraft-themed anthologies. “Nesters” is lovely—it’s all about two images juxtaposed: the dust bowl and the Garden. “Grave Goods”—on Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation land a transgender African American and an indigenous woman angrily argue identity politics while excavating the grave of an unknown species of hominid. It strikes me as problematic to posit one of Lovecraft’s racist creations from Innsmouth as the actual indigenous peoples of North America. It’s a compelling story. I’ll leave it at that.

I haven’t read a Best of since the first volume, published in 2009. All the stories—except for my own (“The Man from the Peak”) and E. Michael Lewis’ (“Cargo”)—are thus new to me. As are most of the authors. I’d be curious to know what folks familiar with the series think of the selections. I don’t mean to second-guess Datlow—she chose her favorites.

I'm often surprised by what people like and don't like. My favorites from vol. 1 are “The Clay Party” by Steve Duffy, “Loup-garou” by R. B. Russell, “Beach Head” by Daniel LeMoal, and “The Narrrows” by Simon Bestwick. I’m trying hard not to be too pleased that my story was included in place of any of those superior tales.

153. What’s about } totally wrong?

David Shields invited me to watch I Think You’re Totally Wrong (2017*), directed by James Franco. It’s an adaptation of an argument between David Shields and Caleb Powell. Its subject, ostensibly, is a life dedicated to art (Shields’) vs. a life dedicated to living (Powell’s). That’s a dumb argument, and it’s quickly apparent Shields and Powell aren’t really arguing art vs. life, but success vs. failure and who is a better man. James Franco’s appearance in the film radically distorts those arguments—Shields and Powell and their discussions are utterly dwarfed by Franco’s larger-than-life presence.

After I watched the film, I sent Shields my comments; I asked if it was okay to post said comments. He said he’d be “honored.” What follows is a selection from my comments.

Why “white guys bullshit”? Are there no books and films in which two black guys bullshit? Two Pakistani women? Is it difficult to recognize when people from a culture not your own are bullshitting? Why “bullshit?" and not dialogue? Dialogue can't be too rarefied if what follows “white guys bullshit” is “Apollonian and Dionysian.”

David explains why Caleb. Caleb does not explain himself. David wants to be questioned; Caleb want to have a good time (according to David).

[Un-focus my eyes and see thru Caleb.]

Conversation about homosexuality—Caleb's—“you trying to Mark me?” Caleb’s wife's privacy.

Broken leg. Coma. How do you avoid the tendency to always have a reply anecdote? To one-up? 

David: "Here's are chance to reanimate both your art and my life." [Is this line scripted? Rehearsed? Previously articulated?]

Caleb has four-wheel drive, snow chains, he helped build the deck, he did some roofing. Blue collar work. David lights a fire in the fireplace. “I'm Bertrand Russell who couldn't even start—who couldn't even boil water.” Caleb doubts this anecdote. Good on Caleb--how could you not? Russell's teapot. Caleb suggests maybe Russell didn't boil water. More plausible, but still not likely. The kind of anecdote artists perpetuate about other artists and themselves. What does that anecdote admire?

Knight to Death: “You play chess, don't you?” (The Seventh Seal, 1957.)

Caleb: “You can't just play to play.” According to David, Caleb's work lacks an “x-factor.” “It's not making any meaning.” “Your work stands next to the world.” Chess = a game, a competition, intellectualism. Caleb drinks beer, David, water.

David and Caleb do not look alike, tho it would be easy to reduce them to two bald, white middle-aged men. Collapse the split screen.

How does a non-artist relate to this film? Is this film for the “10,000 people who have MFAs”? “I want everyone...,” Caleb says. 10,000 people? That would be a fucking amazing crowd. How many audiences of two have I traveled three hundred miles for? About 10,000.

Why is it making the world better vs. art? Is the only way to make the world better to directly engage with some kind of politics? Another false dichotomy: the “real world” vs. the academic world. Is David strictly an academic, or is he an academic and a practicing artist? The real world = changing tires.

David: “...you gotta start with the chaos of life whereas in a way I always want to start with the cathedral of art.” [Scripted? Rehearsed? Previously articulated?]

Genius. Get to the bottom of talent. A work of amazing power vs. a work that helps everyone. A real dilemma. A work of amazing power might help people. How does art help? (Let's ignore art therapy, etc.) Let's put dresser drawers in a bust of Venus.

SALARY.

Caleb has never earned more than $20,000 in a year. David earns approximately $170,000 a year. What does James Franco earn per year? How much is changing a tire worth?

Caleb twice has had sexual encounters with men he thought were women. Is this humiliating? Might it make his wife nervous? Does it ultimately seem as trivial as having never changed a tire? Is a bad stutter or is feeling like a “walking dead man” or “you have a high-pitched voice” less of a cross to bear than a blowjob from a transexual? Is this about manhood? James challenges David: “...if you don't have any material to man-up....”

What James is interested in is being an artist. And being an artist, for James, is taking risk. He uses the word “stake"—as in, what's at stake. A very writers' workshop term. [In the voice of my least favorite professor: But, Adam, what exactly is at stake here?]

I like James' presence is this film a lot. It's so bizarre. He walks among us.

Expression in this film. When Caleb describes Waltz with Bashir, he becomes visibly upset. David, in response to this, sits up—he knows it's no longer appropriate to lay sprawled on the couch. David is a performer—he's a professor! Caleb appears not to perform. Caleb becomes emotional when describing a work of art, not when discussing his family, or being overseas—i.e., his life.

That art causes Caleb to choke up is the big twist David suggests a film needs.

It goes without saying that James is an actor too. James also writes fiction—David sees fiction as a “veil.” “The moment it was fiction, it was dead. The Moment it was nonfiction, our nerves jangled.” Maybe fiction creates a space between author and material so author can breathe, but the author is always held accountable. 

Caleb “confesses” he took photos of David asleep. Did he? James' shadow follows Caleb and David to the car.

[ *IMDb states that the films release date is 2014. I asked David about this; David asked Oliver Ike, president & founder of First Pond Entertainment, if that date could be changed. Ike wrote, “The year listing cannot be changed. They go by production year.” Why would IMDb do that? Obviously the date we want is the release date. ]

143. “Ruby,” } I will see you in time.

Long ago, Danel Olsen used two short stories of mine in his “Horror, Ghost, & Gothic Fiction” course; “Weird Furka” and “A Line Through el Salar d’Uyuni.” I don’t recall the prompt—did one of his students ask me about “Weird Furka”?—but I sent a letter addressed to his students that revealed the true story behind “Weird Furka” and then, for years, struggled to make that letter a proper tale. And when Brian Showers asked for a story for his anthology Uncertainties—ananthology originally meant to skirt the edge of genre—I finally did.

Uncertainties was a fraught project. The deal, like Calrissian’s with Vader, was altered and altered again, until Brian decided he’d claim the book for his own Swan River Press. Lucky for me, because all Swan River Press books are beautiful.

Gary Fry reviewed Uncertainties volume II and, of “Ruby,” wrote, “I wasn’t quite sure what to make of Adam Golaski’s ‘Ruby.’ Its descriptions of drugs and music and the states they can invoke were slightly lost on me, but that is probably an issue that I should address rather than the author. Sorry!” Never apologize, Mr. Fry.

D. F. Lewis, of the “real-time review,” very nearly agrees with Mr. Fry, except—“I really like how Uncertainties volumes 1 and 2 are presenting all the various distinct varieties of weird fiction that I love… with some future classics of this distinctly constituted as well as multi-palimpsest genre. “Golaski is a case in point…”Ruby” is a fine example of his work, as I follow this man in blurred interface between distinct places and people of his life… but there is no way of describing this story’s ruby other than by reading about it in it. Believe me, this is class.”

[Oh and yes, D. F. Lewis wrote about every plate in the Color Plates—a review tour de force. He picked the cleft tail of Cassatt’s black ribbon and un-throated it ‘till the head’v’it tumbled free.]

132. “Did you touch me, } or why am I terrified?”

From The Supernatural Tales Blog, Jan. 30, 2016:

“…the online poll for most popular story in… ST #30 produced a pretty decisive result. ‘Wild Dogs’ by Adam Golaski won by a country mile.”

81. The terror of omission & } of secret dads.

The day before Christmas 2012, Arnold Snyder, senior editor of Vegas Lit and blackjack expert, published a review of Worse Than Myself. He writes, “Golaski’s stories brought back memories… the feeling of danger you sense as a child when you know that something’s off but you don’t understand the nature of the problem,” and includes the following childhood memory, which perfectly illustrates what he means:

When I was five years old, playing in a field—really just a vacant lot in my neighborhood on the east side of Detroit—a teenage boy I’d never seen told me he was my father and he was going to take me home with him. He was on a bicycle and he rode over to where I had been trying to catch grasshoppers in the dandelion patch, but now stood paralyzed with fear. He grabbed my arm and I screamed. He rode off down the alley from whence he’d come, laughing loudly. I ran home crying, and never returned to play in that vacant lot again.

My first instinct, copyright be damned, is to steal this anecdote for a story. I won’t, I don’t want to end up paying Chuck Berry royalties for the rest of my recording career, but Snyder’s anecdote certainly does fit my aesthetic. Perhaps he should write the story.

A little less than a month later, Gordon White, a self-described “late-blooming” writer, published his review of Worse Than Myself. His begins with “a lengthy pre-digression,” which I like. White summarizes how David Byrne wrote “Once in a Lifetime” and “Naïve Melody” and writes, “I think the strength comes from the fact that [the image is] thematically coherent within the larger structure of the song, but it’s not narratively inevitable.” He speculates that “Adam Golaski must do his work in a very similar way.”

White took time to consider the types of stories in the collection, how my style works (and doesn’t), and generally to speculate why certain stories resonated more than others. He also “nit-picks”—the story “Back Home,” which he writes is “a perfect little frozen gem,” employs a device he doesn’t care for: instead of full names, I use the first initial and brackets. So, “K[   ].” The good editors of All Hallows, who published the first version of that story, also didn’t like the device; in All Hallows 32, she’s Kate. When I had the opportunity to run the story as it was meant to be, I did. I first saw the device as a boy reading Edgar Allan Poe. To leave the name incomplete makes a great deal of sense to me, especially in the case of the characters in “Back Home”—a story all about incompleteness (see the body parts falling info the fireplace). In the ms. The Unfinished House, one of the main characters is M[    ].

There are other reasons, too. Some literary, some personal.

On the drive to my office I caught a snippet of a comedy routine delivered with great bluster in Igbo. I laughed. Made me wish to hear David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. Anyway, I laughed, even though the joke was very dark, and not particularly funny.

71. Scariest Books Ever } & connections.

Last night Marianne S. wrote to tell me she saw Worse Than Myself named as one of "The Scariest Books Ever," according to Abigail Ohlheiser for Slate. The list includes Lafcadio Hearn's Kwaidan, Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road. My thanks to Ohlheiser, to Slate, and to Marianne.

Marianne is the first person I called co-editor. I'd had co-conspirators (Jeremy Withers was making covers for me as far back as 8th grade), but Marianne and I read a slush pile together, made selections, made changes, and published (via Sir Speedy) a couple spiral-bound issues of our high school's literary journal. I recall, with pleasure, working with her in an otherwise empty classroom as the afternoon waned to evening.

A review of Color Plates, written by Jeff Charis-Carlson, was published in the Iowa City Press-Citizen shortly after John Cotter and I read at Prairie Lights. The review now resides on his blog. I like a couple lines especially: "There are recurring characters and themes running through the 63 fictional snippets, but Golaski doesn't slow down for readers who might be slow to catch all those connections by themselves" and, "He's more focused on describing the memories and fantasies that the paintings inspire." Accurate, both. Indeed, embedded in one of the Plates is a memory of Marianne and me, editing together after school.

13. Color Plates } “the subtle intersections between appreciation and invention”

My publisher sent me a link to the short review of Color Plates that appeared in Publisher’s Weekly. It’s a positive review, for which I am grateful.

Built into the review is an assumption that the reviewer made about the book: that because the paintings that are the book’s inspiration are 19th century paintings, the stories must be set in the 19th century. They’re not.

Neither are they explicitly now, though. The reviewer has picked up on something that the stories couldn’t escape: even though they’re all set in the present (or a time like the present), something essentially 19th century was brought into them. Or, maybe what the reviewer has picked up isn’t that specific. Maybe the stories don’t feel like they’re set in the 21st century because they’re set so much in their own world.