Fantastic Metropolis

Books

Chekhov

In terms of reading and what has been read, 2004 stands out in my memory primarily because it was the one hundredth anniversary of Anton Chekhov’s death. This matters not because I like numerology, but because publishers do. Hence, three marvelous books of Chekhoviana made their way to the U.S. this year: Complete Short Novels translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Shooting Party translated by John Sutherland, and A Life in Letters translated by Rosamund Bartlett and Anthony Phillips. (Bartlett also put together a small selection of short stories, About Love for Oxford University Press, which is a fine starting place for reader new to Chekhov, and published a biography that has so far only been seen in the U.K.)

Why does Chekhov matter? I could say it’s because fiction and drama in the 20^th century were as deeply influenced by him as by anyone else, but that’s the teacher in me coming out too much. Chekhov matters because he was humane, and his writings were humane. He was seldom sentimental, seldom predictable, and he always matched sorrow with a trace of absurd humor. His words, then, and the characters and situations they create, are a refuge and a mirror, an entry into a meditation on the vast, inhumane world we inhabit.

Read the stories in whatever translation you can find. Read the plays (preferably in translations by Carol Rocamora, Michael Frayn, or Paul Schmidt). Read the letters—particularly in the new edition, which is the first completely uncensored one.

Put me in an apocalypse, and all I will ask is to keep a couple volumes of Chekhov.

Novels

I read very few novels this year. I’ve vowed to read more next year. Of the novels I did read, most seemed competent but not particularly original. Good but unnecessary.

There were some valuable, necessary novels, though. For instance, China Miéville’s Iron Council, of which I deeply admire about two-thirds. Few people, I expect, will fully embrace the entire book, and yet I also doubt that any two readers could ever agree on exactly what is best or worst about it, and that, to me, is a sign that Mieville is doing something right.

The novels that stuck with me most vividly tended to be short ones. Travel in the Mouth of the Wolf by Paul Fattaruso is 114 pages of marvelously whimsical metaphysics, a series of fragments that want to be a story that wants to be a poem that wants to be a eulogy for the entire human race, and maybe even the universe itself. The Labyrinth by Catherynne M. Valente did not excite me quite as much, did not tickle the visceral centers of textual pleasure lodged in the birdhouse of my soul in the same way Fattaruso’s little book did, but I admired every page of Valente’s book, and nearly every sentence. It’s a song, not a novel, and I can appreciate that.

Old Friends by Stephen Dixon was probably the most impressive novel I read this year. It’s quite funny at certain moments, but phenomenally sad throughout. Dixon’s style of writing—vernacular, tangential—may look easy, even offhanded and careless, but it is no more so than is an illusion by a particularly skilled magician. 1,000 other writers could try to write in Dixon’s style and would produce piffle. He produced a book that aches like life.

Boy Genius by Yongsoo Park kept me amused while I read it. If the caricatures were ultimately a little too broad for me to embrace the book fully, I also have to admit that few books I read this year were as much fun during the reading.

I read far fewer novels that were pure science fiction than I normally do. L. E. Modesitt’s Archform: Beauty may have been the only one; it’s certainly the only one I remember. If you like traditional science fiction, it’s worth seeking out.

Short stories

Alice Munro published a new collection of stories this year, but I haven’t gotten a copy yet. Instead, I reread some of The Love of a Good Woman, a collection of perfect stories.

First there was Chekhov, then there was Munro. I’m tempted not to bother with anything else!

But I did read and enjoy much else. I finally got around to reading most of Harry Mathews’s collected stories, The Human Country, a few of which were so surprising as to be delightful, because they did things with words that might not seem altogether possible. The most impressive feat of writing I came across this year is Mathews’s story “The Dialect of the Tribe”, which moves a linguistic shaggy-dog story toward a 47-word palindrome. Why he would bother, I’m not sure, but it’s certainly an impressive feat.

The best anthology I read was undoubtably The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories edited by Ben Marcus. It is both enlightening and entertaining, a model of ecumenical taste, a definition-defying mad dash at the heart of what fiction is and can be.

As for work published in 2004 itself, there’s quite a variety. Good short stories appeared everywhere this year, though often not in the familiar places. The small presses produced some lovely work, and if you’re not reading such magazines as Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet and Alchemy and Flytrap and Say… and Electric Velocipede, then you’re missing some weird and wonderful writing. (Some dreck, too, but you get more predictable dreck from the well-known SF and fantasy markets, of which only Fantasy & Science Fiction was reliably good this year.)

The best short fiction I saw from the small presses came in the form of two chapbooks from Small Beer Press. Richard Butner’s Horses Blow Up Dog City and Theodora Goss’s The Rose in Twelve Petals have, it seems to me, the highest percentage of excellent work in them of any of the collections published this year.

Which is not to say it was a bad year for collections—it’s easy for chapbooks to maintain a high percentage of good work, since they contain a small number of pieces. Among full-length collections this year, two up-to-now career retrospectives showcased some particularly fine writing: Jeff VanderMeer’s Secret Life and John Crowley’s Novelties & Souvenirs.

The online magazines seem to get better each year. SciFiction published Christopher Rowe’s “The Voluntary State”, a story that truly justifies the adjective “breathtaking”. Strange Horizons published “Tetrarchs” by Alan DeNiro and “Women are Ugly” by Eliot Fintushel, two of my favorite stories of the year. Ideomancer had the good sense to make M. Rickert a featured writer for a couple of months (the best Rickert story of the year, and one of the best by anyone this year, was “Cold Fires” in F&SF, a story that requires an active and attentive audience, but repays that audience well for their work). Lenox Avenue published Tim Pratt’s “Life in Stone”. Failbetter.com, Pindeldyboz, and Identity Theory published reams of interesting work.

(If duct-taped to a chair and threatened with tickling by featherduster, I would say that my favorite story of 2004 was “Revenge of the Calico Cat” by Stepan Chapman in the anthology Leviathan 4: Cities. But there’s nobody around with duct-tape or a featherduster, so I don’t feel obliged to choose. Because “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link, in Conjunctions 43: Beyond Arcadia, was just as good. And “Delhi” by Vandana Singh in So Long Been Dreaming. And “Three Days in a Border Town” by Jeff VanderMeer in Polyphony 4. And everything else I’ve mentioned so far. No, to choose is impossible.)

Other than fiction

What with the choice between TweedleDull and TweedleDarklord for U.S. President, it was a political year, and I couldn’t avoid reading some political and historical books, at the very least to keep myself reminded that life has always been this bad, and often worse.

There was, for instance, The Battle of Blair Mountain by Robert Shogan, about labor wars in West Virginia in the early part of the 20th century. John Sayles’s movie Matewan has long been a favorite of mine, and this book tells the true story of the Matewan battle, as well as others. It is sobering and compulsive reading.

Emma Goldman’s My Disillusionment in Russia, first published in two parts in 1923 and 1924, was reprinted by Dover Books in 2003, and I read it in 2004. Some of it gets bogged down in details, but it’s an important chronicle, one I found more fascinating and illuminating than I expected.

AK Press published some of my favorite books of the year, including an immense collection of interviews and articles by Noam Chomsky, Language and Politics, that is so comprehensive as to be overwhelming. I sometimes disagree quite vehemently with Chomsky (he’s not exactly reliable when it comes to Cambodia, for instance), but I’ve found him a good starting point for learning and thinking more about the world, because often I will read a page of two and say, “That can’t possibly be true!” and then go and find out more. More often than not, what Chomsky has said is not only true, but just the beginning.

Also from AK came Ya Basta!: Ten Years of the Zapatista Uprising, the largest collection of writings by Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos that I have seen. A valuable corrective to apathy and cynicism.

Alas, Dime’s Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, filled me with apathy and cynicism, but there are some enlightening articles collected in it nonetheless. The book made me stop reading about politics, which was probably a good thing.

My favorite amongst the nonfiction books I read this year was certainly Jay’s Journal of Anomalies by Ricky Jay. It’s an undescribable, beautiful, weird, fascinating collection of generously illustrated monographs about such subjects as animal hoaxes, flea circuses, ceiling dances, nose amputations, “the art and artifice of fasting”, conjurors, fakirs, automatons, strongmen, giantesses, grinners, gurners, and grimaciers. If you like to know strange things, this is the book for you.

Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer by Peter Turchi was also fascinating, and just as beautiful—illustrated with full-color reproductions of various maps and advertisements and art and objects. It’s an elegant book, both in its writing and its presentation.

I don’t read many biographies all the way through—mostly I mine them for what nuggets of information I need at the moment—but I read all of Kevin Bazzana’s Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould, mostly because I’ve long been fascinated by Gould’s approach to piano playing, and to Bach in particular. I had read one Gould biography a few years ago, or at least pieces of it, and wasn’t much impressed by either the writing or the information. Bazzana’s book is well written and informative, a model of what a biography can be.

Speaking of biographies—earlier in the year, I read Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson by Adam Sisman, a book that definitely has some dull spots, but overall provides a remarkably clear picture of how Boswell went about creating one of the more remarkable books of all time, his Life of Johnson. I haven’t actually read the Life from cover to cover, but find it a wonderful book for dipping into a few pages or scenes at a time, and Boswell’s Presumptuous Task had me going back to the Life like a kid who’d been granted his own candy shop.

As for works related to SF, I read quite a bit—everything from the early gurgles of science fictional criticism that were James Blish’s The Issue at Hand and More Issues at Hand (hugely influential books that seem to me not to have weathered the years all that well, which is not to slight their accomplishments but to say that they are of more historical than critical interest) to the recent attempts of valiant heroes to solidify whatever it is they talk about in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, a book that is more useful than I expected it to be, because the editors, Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, actually commissioned people who knew what they were talking about to write the articles included in the book. Not only did the authors know whereof they spoke, but most of them did so clearly.

I had the good luck to discover Monkeybrain Books this year, a little publisher of SF-related nonfiction. First, I read Michael Moorcock’s Wizardry and Wild Romance: A Study of Epic Fantasy—a lively monologue from an important writer—and then Jeff VanderMeer’s Why Should I Cut Your Throat: Excursions Into the Worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. The latter collects articles, essays, and reviews VanderMeer has written over the past twelve years, and so it is sometimes repetitive, sometimes obsessed with minutia or information that seems less important now than five or ten years ago, but the collection on the whole is fascinating, because it offers a parallel history of the sf world in the 1990s and early 21^st century than the history anyone not involved in the day-to-day grime and greatness of it all might know. It is a portrait of the artist as an ambitious young man struggling against the petrified mucas of preconceptions and prejudices, against the tide of the publishing world’s endless ocean of commodification, against the limits and wonders of technology, against friends, enemies, and even himself. If you want to know what it means to be a writer who values originality in a world saturated with cloned entertainments and entertainment for clones, this is the book to read.

Toward the very last days of the year, Alan M. Clark sent me a retrospective collection of his artwork, The Paint in My Blood, and though I have only had a few days to look at it, I can see it will be a book I return to with some frequency. Clark mixes the darkest of dark fantasy with surrealistic flourishes, as if Max Ernst had boarded for a night at Arkham House.

Things that are not books

Once upon a time, there was an irascible literary critic named Marvin Mudrick who published a book of essays called Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is?, and it is a title I like to fall back on, not because it is true, but because it sounds like it should be. We can pretend for the moment that books are the house of life, but the basement and attic of life are music and movies. (That’s enough for me, at least. I’m not responsible for your architecture.)

So, from the tapes in the basement: I was busy this year, and didn’t challenge my musical tastes too much. I listened to things I’ve known for years, though sometimes in new forms. For instance, there was The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, which only made its way to CD this year, just as my old tape of it was beginning to wear out.

Another band that, like Talking Heads, became well known in the 1980s was The Cure, and Join the Dots, a four-CD collection of B-sides from throughout their career, lived in my CD player for two months. I’ve never gone out of my way to hear The Cure (though I have not disliked what I’ve heard), but a Village Voice review of the B-sides intrigued me, and I was hungry for something new and different to listen to. New, different, and full of various pleasures it turned out to be.

I also heard for the first time Pablo Casals’s recordings of Bach’s six cello suites, which I had previously only known on Yo-Yo Ma’s two recordings (from the early ’80s and late ’90s). Casals is the first person to have made the cello suites famous in the 20th century, and his playing is vastly different from Ma’s—not better or worse, to my ears, but certainly different. The recording I have contains lots of scratches and swishes and clicks from the originals, which Casals made in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and the imperfections let me love the sound even more, because somehow the imperfections heighten the sense of intimacy and the range of emotions.

A range of emotions appear on PJ Harvey’s Uh Huh Her, my favorite album original to 2004. I am a bit of an anomalie among PJ Harvey listeners, in that I like her most recent three CDs best among her work, although there are certain songs from her earlier albums that grab my attention as much as anything else.

Tom Waits released a new album, which is always, for me, a reason to run to the record store, because the combination of his inventive lyrics, beautiful melodies, odd choice of instruments, and dust-encrusted voice is irresistible. Real Gone is not his best album, and it takes some getting used to, but it’s original and surprising, and a couple of the songs are as astonishing as anything he’s done.

They Might Be Giants released an album of rarities, oddities, and spare parts called They Got Lost via their website. There’s not much of interest on it, but the song “All Alone” is brilliant: the story of a single germ on the moon.

I spent a tremendous amount of time listening to John Prine’s first, self-titled album, even though it’s not his best (that would probably be John Prine Live). “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore” amused me endlessly, particularly as the U.S. election season drew to a close and legions of bigots mobilized their brethren to fire on the last vestiges of the Age of Reason.

As for movies, I didn’t see much in the theatre, but at the end of 2003 I subscribed to Netflix, so I saw a wider range of films than I have in many years.

Just as I remember 2003 as the year I discovered Jan Svankmajer and Hayao Miyazaki, 2004 will be remembered as the year I discovered Guy Maddin. First, I saw Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary, which was so unlike anything I’d ever seen I had to find more. Next was The Saddest Music in the World, Maddin’s most recent film and my favorite of his that I’ve seen, a medley of hardboiled cardboard and wistful yearning and goofy horror and all the travails of a fairy tale gone dreadfully wrong. Of Maddin’s other films, I saw Triumph of the Ice Nymphs (Aubrey Beardsley does Mr. Rogers), Archangel (Sergei Eisenstein does Preston Sturges), and The Heart of the World, which may be my favorite Maddin movie, a six-minute silent film about love, death, and the center of the Earth.

It was a good year for DVDs, with some of my favorite films finding their way onto DVD for the first time. There was Short Cuts, Robert Altman’s channelling of Raymond Carver’s stories into L.A. ennui, coupled with plenty of extra features about the film, Carver, and Altman. It even comes with a book of the original stories.

Paris, Texas is an even better movie, and the fact that it is now available on DVD almost makes my life complete. Written by Sam Shepard and directed by Wim Wenders, Paris, Texas has some of the best acting ever put on film, and some of the most haunting, harrowing scenes. It is not a movie that clamors for your attention or plays your emotions like some Spielbergian epic of gotcha, but it is so respectful of the story it has to tell and the characters it portrays that by the end it is emotionally draining and artistically overwhelming—loneliness made manifest in landscape, life made vivid by the lies of art. The DVD includes a series of deleted scenes woven together, and it is a testament to the power of the film itself that even watching the deleted scenes is a powerful experience.

I’ll end where I began, though, with Chekhov, because a film of equal power and beauty to Paris, Texas also recently made its way to DVD, Unfinished Piece for Player Piano, a Russian film directed by Nikita Mikhalkov and loosely adapted from Chekhov’s first play, Platonov, as well as some of his stories. It’s one of the only films I’ve ever watched and then immediately watched again—and that was on a bad videotape rented in New York on a cold winter night in a basement apartment without much heat ten years ago. I’ve since seen the film many times, and each is a revelation. Watched once, the movie reveals little, because it is an ensemble story, and just keeping the characters straight is a challenge at first. It’s not the individual characters that matter, though—they are important in the way any individual instrument in a symphony is: inextricable, but the beauty comes from everything coalescing into a whole.

In his notebooks, Chekhov wrote, “I hope that in the next world I shall be able to look back upon this life and say, ‘Those were beautiful dreams…’” Amidst its disappointments and disasters, 2004 gave us some beautiful dreams.

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Matthew Cheney has written reviews, essays, and interviews for Locus, English Journal, The SF Site, and The Internet Review of Science Fiction. He writes regularly about various topics at his weblog, The Mumpsimus.