I recommend watching it while you have a fever, as I did recently.

Over at Weird Fiction Review, several dozen writers reveal their favorite monsters. I contributed a brief defense of goblin-kind:

Goblins have gotten a pretty bad rap over the centuries. Sniveling, mean-spirited wretches, bowing to whatever power they most fear, they’ve pestered, tricked, and cajoled their way into the grimy underbellies of countless tales and legends. But I say that goblins are the great unsung worker-heroes of monsterdom. . . .

You can read the rest here, along with the responses from many others.

On a personal note, I knew a goblin once. He began life as a mischievous cat named Goblin, a fine companion to me and my siblings. He vanished one day, and though we called his name into the woods out back, and left out bowls of food, we failed to summon Goblin home.

Years later, a strange creature appeared in the back yard, huge and furry, with shining yellow eyes and battle-scarred ears. Goblin had become a goblin. He regarded us with mild curiosity, but eyed the food we offered him with obvious disdain. After an hour or so, he sauntered back into forest, to rule whatever strange domain he had conquered for himself.

We do need our monsters, don’t we? To haunt the edges of our maps, to keep the shadowy spaces perilous, to rend and devour if it comes to that. To be something worse than we are. We squirm at the violence and gore of the horrors we build for movies and video games today. And that’s nothing new. Just look at what the Cyclops did to Odysseus’ crewmen (from the Fagles translation):

     Lurching up, he lunged out with hands toward my men
     and snatching two at once, rapping them on the ground
     he knocked them dead like pups—
     their brains gushed out all over, soaked the floor—
     and ripping them limb from limb to fix his meal
     he bolted them down like a mountain-lion, left no scrap,
     devoured entrails, flesh and bones, marrow and all!

Monsters have been popping up in my work since the beginning. My first published story was a bestiary of sorts, and it’s still lurking over at La Petite Zine. Most terrifying of all, I think, are the monsters we keep hidden. The secret monsters whose twisted existence we don’t dare acknowledge. That was the idea I was working from when I wrote “Inheritance,” a story about a man who discovers a strange beast in his recently deceased father’s basement.

That story, which originally appeared in the green issue of Fairy Tale Review, has just been reprinted in Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings, edited by B.J. Hollars.

The book includes stories by the likes of Kelly Link, Benjamin Percy, Matt Bell, Alissa Nutting, Kate Bernheimer, and Brian Baldi, who I first met some seven or eight years ago, on the night he read his Godzilla-themed story in a barn somewhere in Western Massachusetts.

Want to get your paws on a copy? The book is available now from Powell’s, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and your local independent bookseller.

The group is breaking ground in many ways. With three gardens cultivated, its members have made UMass the only public university in the country adding new on-campus permaculture gardens each year. They’re teaching these techniques to the community, and they’re even putting food in the dining commons.

We need more of this. And right now, the UMass Amherst Permaculture Initiative is in the running to secure a trip to the White House (and an appearance on MTV). It’s a great opportunity to bring more attention to their important work. If you’d like to support them, you can vote for their project in the White House’s Campus Champions of Change Challenge.

For more about the Initiative, and about permaculture more generally, visit the UMass Permaculture site.

]]> http://thirdarchive.net/the-constant-gardeners/feed/ 0 http://thirdarchive.net/that-old-dead-end/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=that-old-dead-end http://thirdarchive.net/that-old-dead-end/#comments Wed, 15 Feb 2012 03:37:41 +0000 jedediah http://thirdarchive.net/?p=971 Continue reading →]]> If you are among those who believe in that species of monster that goes by the name “spoiler,” and if you haven’t read The Third Policeman, you may wish to skip this one.

Seventy-two years ago today, Flann O’Brien (Brian O’Nolan) (Brian Ó Nualláin), wrote in a letter to William Saroyan: “When you get to the end of this book you realise that my hero or main character (he’s a heel and a killer) has been dead throughout the book and that all the queer ghastly things which have been happening to him are happening in a sort of hell which he earned for the killing. . . . I think the idea of a man being dead all the time is pretty new.”

Discussing The Third Policeman in class today, my students and I wondered whether this now familiar twist had in fact been done before 1940, but we couldn’t come up with an example. We also wondered whether certain phrases in the book—in particular “it is a difficult pancake” and “I am nothing but a gawm”—were O’Brien’s inventions, or if they were drawn from the common parlance of the day.

In any case, this novel is the finest of difficult pancakes, and I continue to puzzle over it with pleasure.

Picking those five finalists was no simple matter, and I found many other books deserving of recognition. Here are five more that I personally recommend.

The End of Everything by Megan Abbott is the story of a thirteen-year-old girl whose best friend disappears, apparently kidnapped. It’s a devastating novel that captures perfectly the way a small town can feel both claustrophobic and isolating while in the grips of a traumatic event.

The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt is a western that pushes the boundaries of genre and form, and is at turns weird, brutal, and very funny. It put me in mind of Samuel Beckett, especially when the hired killer who narrates the story begins to ponder, say, the virtues of various tooth powder flavors. Probably my favorite novel of 2011, if I had to pick one.

Turn of Mind by Alice LaPlante, narrated by a woman with dementia, is a book that might have gone terribly wrong in the hands of another writer. There’s a murder mystery, but we come to know it via a fractured lens. As much a study of language and consciousness as a crime thriller, this book loosens our hold on time, identity, and memory it unfolds.

The Revisionists by Thomas Mullen is a long novel, but I read it in one day. Couldn’t put it down, as they say. A literary thriller with a time travel subplot, this book was layered and often surprising. The science fiction element contributes a political angle—one of the main characters is fighting to preserve a future we understand to be a chilling dystopia. But the book is very much about us, here and now.

The Quiet Twin by Dan Vyleta takes place in Vienna under the Nazi regime, and most of the action is confined to a single apartment complex. A dog is murdered. People have secrets and try to keep them. The villain of the story is a police detective, and he is completely terrifying. This is a disquieting book, packed with desperate and memorable characters.

Sabina Murray was a professor of mine in my grad school days, so I’m looking forward to reading with her. And I consider myself lucky to be living in an area where the “local novelist” category includes the likes of John Crowley. Fellow fans of Little, Big may appreciate this needlework sampler that Emily stitched for me a while back. Stitched? Needleworked? Sampled? She made it.

The Other City, Michal Ajvaz (translated by Gerald Turner)
Poem Strip, Dino Buzzati (translated by Marina Harss)
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Ursula K. Le Guin
Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
The Third Policeman, Flann O’Brien
Motorman, David Ohle
There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor’s Baby, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya (selected and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers)
The Weird, edited by Ann & Jeff VanderMeer

The Weird isn’t out in the United States yet, so I’m asking my students to special order it from England. It really is that good.

When they make the board game based on your life, what will the playing pieces look like? Will you roll dice to move around the board? Draw tiles? Play cards with pictures of your friends, your uncles, your pets on them?

Which areas of the board are safe, and which are dangerous? The room that was yours when you were a child. The room you couldn’t bear to step foot in. Maybe: a patch of grass somewhere. Maybe: grandmother’s porch. Maybe: aquarium field trip.

Will you keep score on a pad of paper? Collect sheets of paper money? Count tokens to represent jobs, road trips, arguments, books, loves, food, conversations, births? Mistakes, illnesses, sports events? Drugs, drinks, jogs, degrees? Paintings, sunsets, ceremonies, puppet shows?

How will the board game based on your life represent the board games you’ve played in your life? How long is the timer set for? Is it an hourglass or a ticking clock?

When they make the board game based on your life, they’ll thank you for being a playtester. You’ll get a complimentary copy in the mail. Will you leave it on the shelf with the others? Or will you unwrap it and set it up on the kitchen table, just to see if it looks any good?

Once you understand all the rules, will you play the board game based on your life? Who will be there to play it with you?

This Sunday, I’ll run a 5k. It’s for a good cause: I’m raising money to support Safe Passage, an organization in Northampton, Massachusetts, that provides support to women and children who have experienced domestic abuse. If you’d like to make a donation, you may do so right here.

Or maybe you’d like a running playlist? I just uploaded a sampling of what I’ve been listening to, and that’s available here.