Four Letter Word: Invented Correspondences from the Edge of Modern Romance edited by J. Knelman and R. Porter

I've gotten really busy lately, unfortunately.

Well, it's fortunate. I actually obtained a job, which is seriously cutting into my time. You can expect this blog to be dormant until I've settled into my new schedule.

In the meantime, pick up Four Letter Word. It's a collection of fictional love letters written by a smorgasbord of authors from around the world. It's alternately sweet, funny, tragic, and so on. The introduction by the editor Rosalind Porter was inspiring enough for me to start up another blog to share letters I've written. I've placed a link to that new blog in the right-hand column, if you're interested. It's called "Anostrophe," the explanation of which is in its first post.

I've always enjoyed writing letters (anyone who knew me in high school knows that I took the whole "note passed in class" concept to another level), but I never get a chance to enjoy reading them. I've been told I'm most intimidating through writing, which is a much nicer explanation for why I've received so few letters during my life thus far than the one I like to fall back on: you're all lazy punks.

Anyway, as much as I loved composing and coveting the receiving of letters, I never really considered them an art unto themselves until reading this book. I knew that we could recognize the personal letters of already established authors as art, but I never felt as though one's writing ability could stand upon letters alone. I really responded to this collection, because it made me feel that I can cultivate letter-writing as an authentic and worthwhile form of writing. That may seem obvious, but in a world of not only e-mail but Facebook and MySpace wall posts, the concept of an actual "letter" is practically akin to myth.

I'd like to bring it back down to reality, if I might. If you don't read my letters, then at least read the letters in this book. They are better than anything I could ever write. The first one is from Mars to Earth, although there are more traditional love letters as well. Many have to do with family, and there is far more sadness than I expected, so if you're one of those "I'm not a sap, I'm not reading a mushy book of mindless cooings" kind of people, drop the bitterness and pick up the book instead. It covers all the bases.

Just read the first half or so (as far as I've gotten at the time of this writing) and try to tell me you don't wish you could either compose or receive such powerful condensed direct statements of emotion from one human to another. And even if you can tell me that, I won't believe you.

Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

I had seen the majority of the first book's plot acted out for me over a series of weeks by the lovely folks over at Showtime, and I expected to have a similar feeling about the second installment.

I could not have been more off-base. Whereas I could have definitively said I preferred the show over the books before reading this sophomore effort, I now confess the two mediums are in a dead heat to provide me with the best version of the Dexter character.

For one thing, Lindsay is much more violent and brutal in his descriptions than a television show could ever match. As opposed to other fictional serial-killer narratives, these Dexter stories shine light directly upon the depravity of both the killer's mind and his acts. While Dexter's kills go mostly undescribed, those of his "foil" killers are very horrible and Lindsay doesn't shy away from the gruesome details. The appeal isn't in couching the serial killer in a deeper shroud of sexy mystery, but in throwing the harsh Miami sun right into the depths of his heart.

This idea didn't strike me until I got to the descriptions of Dr. Danco's murders in the second book. I don't want to ruin anything, so I'll just say that a mirror is involved, and that's when I started thinking about reflection, revelation, and self-examination.

Dexter remains an undeniably likable killer, but I still wouldn't want him anywhere near my children. He is obviously deranged, and has a skewed world-view at heart. At one moment, he is saying that he feels at home during the Miami rush hour traffic, because everyone on the road is acting like a homicidal maniac. We can fully identify with him at such moments. At others, though, he is perhaps reading too much into a child's enjoyment of the game "Hangman." When the consequence of Dexter's depravity is a joke, we can all get on board, but when the consequence is either ignoring (or creating) homicidal tendencies in children, his true nature as a threat becomes clear.

I think this is what gives Lindsay's books a power that Ellis wasn't able to with American Psycho. Dexter's search for others "like him" makes it harder to see him as an isolated image we can laugh at and dissect. To find others like you is a genuinely human desire, constantly reminding us that Dexter isn't an isolated archetypal monster the way Bateman is, but that he is a human. It's much scarier to see humanity in monstrosity than the other way around.

Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl

I can't talk about any of these stories without completely ruining them. It's essentially like reading four extended dirty jokes. As with any good dirty joke, they all end with someone being humiliated or harmed or somehow ironically put out.

But, every story is something like forty pages long, and there is good character development. That means that you can't just laugh off the endings like you can with a dirty joke, because you actually grow to like or possibly care about the characters, so their sudden transformation into a punchline can actually hurt you.

A quick read, very fun, especially good for those of you with twisted minds.

The Plague by Albert Camus

I didn't want The Stranger to be the only novel by Camus I ever read, and the latest Vintage International paperback edition of The Plague had an excellent cover, so I found myself again wading the waters of this Frenchman's "idea writing." I call it that because there is much more (roughly) objective description of emotion and psychology in this novel than there is dialogue addressing those same issues.

As might seem obvious, this novel is about an outbreak of plague. It takes place at a port town named Oran and quickly leads to a quarantine. From within the shut walls, we are able to follow this lives, even in broad outline, of a doctor, a journalist, a priest, a criminal, and various others. Each one struggles for hope or escape, sometimes achieving these goals and sometimes simply discarding them for new goals.

I absolutely loved this book. I relished every page, rereading entire paragraphs frequently. Camus occasionally seems repetitive, but he is actually circling around a very fine point and only after a little while does he finally hit that point on its head. It is worth the wait.

There isn't much of a plot to examine, and the characters are such vehicles for philosophy that it's hard to talk about them as individuals. This is, essentially, a novel of ideas and not events.

Sorry this entry is a little scant, I've been very distracted lately.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

My views on this book are necessarily filtered through what I know of the Showtime series "Dexter." Most of my impressions of the book are actually impressions of the adaptive work Showtime did in bringing the protagonist to the screen.

What's particularly different about Dexter is that (and I'm talking about the book here), he doesn't seem particularly cold. Although he is confiding in the reader his desire to and enjoyment of killing, it never feels as though he would ever kill you. This creates a strange pact with the character, drawing you into his difficulties and decisions because, well, if you're not on his side you'll probably end up dead.

The comparison of killers to artists is common in the crime genre, especially when describing the most depraved and psychotic of killers. Lindsay's novel, however, gives a new angle to the killer-artist by having his narrator-protagonist introspect in different ways. Dexter lives only to kill. The rest of his life is a safety shell erected to spare him suspicion or difficulty in achieving opportunities to kill. He is frequently distracted by everyday life, even by his family and friends. I think anyone with a strong creative drive can identify with the idea that everything but practicing that creative art is merely a distraction, one that makes you feel human and normal, but also one that is capable of making you soft and lazy.

The plot of this first Dexter novel seems to unfold very quickly, and I say "seems" because I spent weeks watching the same plot unfold on screen whereas I read this book in a matter of hours. There are definite merits to this character and his exploits remaining literary, however. Certain depictions of murder and murder scenes are capable of eliciting the right amount of mingled humor and horror only if they are primarily left up to the imagination. Filming them would be next to impossible - there are too factors in creating just the right mood. When reading these scenes, you provide your own music and scenery, and if they are off just so, you will get the wrong impression. Or, at least one that doesn't keep you engaged with the story.

I personally found this book to be not much more than a quick and entertaining read. I can certainly see how someone with an eye for television would pick up on this character immediately - although this novel is a completely enclosed story, it begs for another episode. The character is rich with possibilities and potentials. I already have the second book in this series in my possession, and will read it the next time I have a hankering for the purple prose of cheeky killer.

Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown

It's lesbian pulp. That may mean something to you, maybe not. A poor girl, growing up in the south, quickly becomes comfortable with genitalia of both sexes, finds out she's a bastard, makes loves to another girl when she's in sixth grade, makes love to some cheerleader in high school, excels in school despite poverty, gets to college, sleeps with a sorority sister, gets kicked out, has to take a shit job, finds some solace in a friendship with a gay male, gets mixed up with older women, goes to film school, reconciles with her adoptive mother (in a way), and so forth.

This is the world of lesbian pulp. Nobody slows down for long thought-out emotional diatribes like in heterosexual literature. Nope. Stuff just happens. Girls just get things done. It's exciting. It's empowering. It makes me want to make love to a woman, but only the woman who is a protagonist in a lesbian pulp.

They sure do know themselves in this novel. Even the stand-out protagonist has become a stereotype over the last twenty years. This doesn't make the reading less entertaining or anything.

The Rules of Attractions by Bret Easton Ellis

I've only read three books by Ellis: American Psycho, Less Than Zero, and now this one.

Ellis is, truly, an existential writer. It hurts to read some of this stuff. Attraction swiftly carries you along. It's easy to read quickly because distinctions between minor characters become as meaningless to the reader as they are to the main characters. You just zip right along. It does have the feeling of capturing fleeting thoughts, their repetition, their meaninglessness, their overlooked attempts at insight.

So, I would say that this book, of the three, is the one that focuses on the particular existential angst of relationships. It can be summed up in the line repeated throughout, "Nobody ever really knows anybody else," and its additional idea: we just have to tolerate each other.

This book left me wondering if, indeed, I have a moral center. If everyone else in the world is just like me or if, perhaps, I have something or lack something that makes me essentially different. Then I wondered if we all have this sensation, in our own ways, from time to time. And so on.

Try to fill the void with sex, and you get these people: young, drunk, totally out of touch or maybe in touch. Who knows? Who can tell?

Not only am I very tired, I also have lost the initial passion I had about this book when I first read it. I would recommend it, as I would the other Ellis books, to young people with a streak of darkness in them, as well as a penchant for willful self-destruction under the guise of "fun."