And Only Weeks Before the Guns all Came and Rained on Everyone

For someone like me, it is a very strange habit to write in a diary. Not only that I have never written before, but it strikes me that later neither I, nor anyone else, will care for the outpouring of a thirteen year old schoolgirl. -Anne Frank

The first written voice that I ever connected with was when I read The Diary of Anne Frank when I was eleven years old. Never before had I encountered a voice that I felt was talking directly to me, explaining feelings that I had also felt but could never put into words. In many ways, the influence of her writing is still very present in my own. The conversational tone I take with the reader owes an incredible debt to her diary.

She was the first literary character I ever had a crush on and I still remember finishing the last few pages while laying on my bed and hoping against all reason and fact that the story would end differently. I still feel that way every time I listen to Neutral Milk Hotel's Holland, 1945 and it still makes me sad. I've recently incorporated those experiences into the manuscript I finished this spring, and Anne Frank is mentioned quite a bit. Today would have been her eighty fourth birthday....and though she died far too young, her spirit lives on in the words she shared with everyone. 

The Horror and the Horror

It's been a little while since I reviewed any books on here and seeing as how Blogger was down yesterday, combined with the fact that I'm heading away for the weekend, time is crunched and it seems like a good time to catch up. As I mentioned in my last post, my writing has been living in a dark place, typically my reading follows me where my writing takes me. So I've decided to tell you a little about two books that are both 'horror' for very different reasons. Enjoy...if that's the right word.

The House of Dolls by Ka-tzetnik 135633

I've owned a first edition of this book for nearly a decade and for nearly a decade it sat on my shelves unread. That was a decade wasted because this is rare book of genius. My initial interest stemmed from the fact that Joy Division supposedly took their name from this book. However, I've read so many Holocaust books in my time that it never seemed like the book to read...seriously, when is anyone in the mood for a Holocaust book. I still wasn't when I read it, I just felt guilty that I'd owned it for so long without giving it a chance.

The power of this book comes from the way it captures the feeling of utter helplessness in the Jewish ghettos and labor camps under Nazi rule. Told through a kind of stream of consciousness narrative, much of the text feels as if it could easily be a dispatch from Burrough's Interzone. It's so stark in the realism of an insane world that it feels surreal in many passages.

The story is that of a brother and sister, stripped of their homes, freedom, and family, who refuse to surrender their humanity. In a way, it's a story in total opposition with The Diary of Anne Frank which highlights the remarkable way in a which a young girl is able to still be a young girl despite the horrible conditions of her life. As the hardships in this story mount, that hopeful spirit within Daniella is gradually crushed until she is like the others, simply a walking skeleton. Brutal, to be sure...yet there is something beautiful inside her that is undeniable.

Truly an unforgettable book.

The Strain by Guillermo Del Toro & Chuck Hogan

Perhaps my expectations were too high given my love of Guillermo Del Toro's imaginative film making (Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone), but I found this book disappointing. I had hoped some of the visionary creativity from his movies would carry over into the writing, however this book reads much like any other mass market thriller. There are loop holes aplenty in the story, there's entirely too many flat characters, and it drags for the first 100 pages, unfolding like an average television show.

It does start to pick up after that however. Some of the characters become really intriguing and the mythology begins to take shape. The redeeming quality of the book is its terrifying imagining of the vampires. The last third of the book was engrossing, once they finally pushed the plot toward the chaos that was bound to happen. Hopefully the second book will be better paced and more surreal. (This is the first book in a trilogy)

Ideas are Dangerous

It's that time of year of again, Banned Books Week, when all of us in favor of intellectual freedom rally against the forces of censorship who seek to protect us from ourselves. Of course, the majority of challenged and banned books are books written for children and teenagers as a way of protecting them. But it's what they are protecting them from which is often disturbing.

In many cases it's simply ideas. It some cases it's exposure to concepts that might be disturbing or uncomfortable. Now I'll be the first one to admit that there are certainly books out there that are inappropriate for this child or that child, but it's on an individual level...not a school wide level, not a town wide level, or nationally. No one has the right to inflict their values or insecurities on others. What might be disturbing for one child to read could actually be crucial for another.

The Diary of Anne Frank (a most-often challenged book) comes to mind. Some might find it upsetting, others simply object to her innocent first observations and thoughts about sex. But for many young readers, it makes learning about the Holocaust personal. It stops being a subject told in black and white pictures and history text books or Hollywood interpretations and becomes about a girl you end up knowing and thinking of as a friend by the end of the book. To make something as powerful as that unavailable is the kind of mentality that led to books' existence in the first place.

Everyone needs to make decisions for themselves and their families...but don't make them me or mine.

Monday Morning Glory

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, trying to discover who I was as a writer, most of my texts were riddles of surreal images and stream of consciousness semi-poetics. They were untamed. Though at times, I wrote passages that I thought were exceptional, I struggled with honing in the lyrical content within a context. In 1998 Neutral Milk Hotel released one my ten favorite albums of all time, In the Aeroplane over the Sea. This is one of those works of art that both inspires me, yet haunts me with its genius. However, there is one verse on it that really helped me focus in on the creative dilemma I described above.

The only girl I've ever loved
Was born with roses in her eyes
But then they buried her alive
One evening, 1945
With just her sister at her side
And only weeks before the guns
All came and rained on everyone
Now she's a little boy in Spain
Playing pianos filled with flames

-from the song Holland, 1945

There's an undeniable beauty to the words that on the surface seem to make no sense, especially the "now she's a little boy in Spain", but that is what so attracted me to the lines in the first place. I think it was about the second or third listen when I realized this verse was talking about Anne Frank (one of my earliest literary influences). Like any great piece of poetry, the puzzle takes time to unravel, but once it does, once it's clear in your mind, the imagery and meaning of these lines is overwhelming. They stop me every time I hear them.

Through these lines, I learned that stringing together odd and beautiful images only reached their full potential when they were used for a deeper meaning that was beyond the showing off of creative language. It took me a long time to learn how to use this knowledge, but I think it's fair to say that now my books are filled with examples of what I learned thanks to two influential figures in my literary life, Jeff Mangum and Anne Frank.