Total Oblivion, More or Less by Alan DeNiro - A Review

<><> In Alan DeNiro's debut novel, Total Oblivion, More or Less, the world we know - Facebook statuses, text messages, 24-hour cable news, interstate travel, trustworthy friends - is gone.  In its place is a Midwest invaded by Scythian armies and wasp-fueled plagues that may not always kill you, but will definitely change you.  Welcome to this new world Macy Palmer, a sixteen year old girl who is traveling on a boat with her older sister, her wild brother, her sick mother, and her falling-apart-at-the-seams father and the not-quite-family dog, Xerxes.

Interspersed between the first person POV of Macy are interludes that delve into Macy's family's thoughts and actions.  For instance, Grace, Macy's mother, fears the worst after she is infected with the plague.  We learn that Sophia, the older sister, was attending college to be a midwife before the Scythians invaded.  Ciaran's fate is revealed through transcripts.

But this is hands-down Macy's story.  Total Oblivion is classic bildungsgroman.  Through various adventures downriver - including a wooden submarine, an albino, a talking dog, wargiraffes, and a constantly shifting landscape - Macy discovers her strengths and weaknesses and a reaffirmation of her love for her family.

Macy dreams big and so does Alan DeNiro: sometimes the prose is purely absurd and out of control.  The first two hundred pages read smoothly, if at times, as aforementioned, a bit absurdly wild, but the last third of the book feels incredibly rushed.  This is because the first two hundred pages are more travelogue than story and the last third suddenly turns into a story.  Rather than take his time to flesh out the ending, DeNiro throws it at the reader.  What's worse is that it's pretty predictable.

Total Oblivion tries to find its heart and, though Macy is an intriguing sympathetic character, the story falls short.

Final Verdict: Enjoyable enough that I didn't want to mash frogs with a hammer.


--Dustin J Monk

NaNoWriMo - Week 1: Thoughts

As many of you know, I, along with many of compatriots in the writingsphere, have taken on the NaNoWriMo project (http://www.nanowrimo.org/): writing 50,000 words during the month of November.  I've decided to document, in some fashion, this process, by blogging about at the end of each week.

This is quite an undertaking as anyone who is doing it will tell you.  Fifty thousand words in 30 days is a minimum of 1,667 words per day, without breaks; that's about half of a short story every day (15 short stories in 30 days then, yarz?), when a lot of writers take a month or more for one (1) short story!  Of course, there are naysayers to NaNoWriMo.  They'll tell you all you're going to write is crap for 30 days.  The thing of it is, they're at least half-right, but I can tell you from experience most of what I write is pure crap anyway.  Even so, any writer worth his or her nickel knows there is always always something worth keeping in the mudpile: an idea, however small; a turn of phrase; a line of dialogue; something. 

I chose to participate in NaNoWriMo for a number of reasons, but mostly because it would require me to write every day, regardless of my mood, my schedule, the mad ravings and finger-pointings at the short story I'm currently working on ("Why don't you have an ending!" "How dare you eat that pizza, Johnny Gorgeous!" "Mr. Frenchman, must you be so Phantom of the Opera-y?").

So, this is the end of the first week then or thereabouts.  It's Day 5 and I have 12,201 words written in a crazy, whacked-out novel.  Here's the premise that I full right to change at any time, without notice: Fish that can travel faster than the speed of light.  A bounty hunter obsessed with her lost lives, past and future.  A baritone in an a cappella group slash smuggler who just might be the guy to wreck the whole space travel thing.  A philosopher decrying the doom of mathematics.  And a drug dealer forms an uneasy partnership with a dancer to pull off the biggest heist in human history: matter theft.  Welcome to Poro, city of claw and eye.

I have no clue how I'm going to pull any of that off, even with 12,000 words written, but I'm getting closer to understanding how it all works in my mind.  Also, I'm not sure I want to pull it off.  The interesting part of doing this, for me at least, is writing it out, the act alone, letting my brain go, whatever comes out is what's written down.  Already, I've introduced a character I didn't think would matter and, as it turns out, matters very much.  It's a wonderful moment when the story takes control.  It's not something that happens much when I'm writing short stories.

Okay, though, the story in control of itself is only going to work for so long, I know that.  The other really fun part of this is that I'll have a novel at the end, one in which I can go back and reassert my control.  I'll revise, finding the parts that are worth keeping and disregarding the parts that aren't, working out what's cliche and what's original, however many revisions that takes.  For now, the story is on auto-pilot and it can take any turn it wants, even ones I don't agree with (at any rate, maybe the turns I don't agree with are the ones I should be keeping).

No matter what happens, at the end of first week, I can say without hesitation that this is a blast and I highly recommend everyone try it once.  It's really not even about getting those 50,000 words.  I don't think you win anything except a NaNoWriMo ribbon on your profile and the prestige of having completed 50,000 words.  If you don't make it, it's no big deal.  So long as you don't not make it because you're obsessing over the little details - you can do that in revision.  That's not what NaNoWriMo is about.  It's about writing every day and having fun doing it.

Top 10 Books I Read in 2010

How ya doin', kiddos?  In your "I-just-voted-now-what" revelry, I've gone ahead and made a list of the best books I've read in 2010.  Now, that isn't to say that all of these books were published in 2010, though some of the were, but these books are the ones that resonated with me the most.  A few I've read before because I reread them every year.  They're that good.  As with my Top 10 Records, there's no numbering system.  I absolutely refuse to put a number on things I like!

I wanted to give a fairly equal share of the love between non-genre and genre, fiction and nonfiction, because I read all of these; however this year I was accepted to Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers' Workshop in San Diego and I decided it was worth it to read a lot of genre work in preparation for the six-week workshop (and yes, two of the instructors are mentioned below, not because I'm trying to kiss their asses, but because their books are seriously two of the best books I've read this year; and okay, a little ass-kissing can't hurt).  The genre trend, even after the workshop, has kept up and, unfortunately, this year I've read very few nonfiction works.  I intend to change that at the beginning of the new year.

Okay.  Away we go.

Top 10 Books I Read in 2010 (not a David Letterman sketch)

The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich (Two Dollar Radio, 2010)
Hobo teen vampire junkie wandering the Pacific Northwest, high on meth and robitussin, and haunted by the disappearance of her sister while being chased by a serial killer.  And that's what the back of the book says.  What is this book really about?  To tell you that, I'd have to read it again and maybe a third time after that.  And I will read it again.  The first time through, however, is a stream-of-consciousness experience and the language is so vibrant, Krilanovich's sentences come to life.

The Hot Kid  by Elmore Leonard (William Morrow, Phoenix, HarperTorch, 2005)
Breezy crime noir doesn't get much better than Elmore Leonard.  This one takes place in Depression-era Oklahoma and it concerns oil and badass US Marshal, Carl Webster.  This is the kind of book you read in two days, but it's a fun and gloriously thrilling two days.

City of Saints & Madmen by Jeff Vandermeer (Tor, 2004)
Jeff happened to be one of my instructors at Clarion and I thought it was a good idea to get acquainted with my instructors through their work.  I was not let down here.  The book is four novella-length stories and then 400 pages of appendices, based on the fictional city of Ambergris.  There are more details about this city in this book than in a lot of history books about Rome - it's a good thing: Ambergris is one of the most fascinating places I've ever visited.  You've got the Festival of the King Squid, a fictional but realistic religion called Truffidianism, strange mushroom people who dwell beneath the city called gray caps, and so much more.

Nova by Samuel R. Delany (Doubleday, 1968)
Chip, as he's known in the field, was also an instructor of mine at Clarion.  I'd grown up with his divisive behemoth, Dhalgren, in my house as a kid.  I still see that deep orange sun on the cover, that first half-sentence, "to wound the autumnal city."  Say what you will about it, but I loved it.  It was, according to my father and I trust him, a testament to the fucked-upness of the sixties.  Nova is nothing like that.  Its plot is pretty typical space opera, but with Delany's singular disillusionment of  our dependence on resources and depth of character and detail.

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi (Night Shade Books, 2009)
Bangkok, the near-future, a calorie-fueled soceity, genetic manipulation, dirigibles.  This is pretty much everything I could want in reading a novel.  We're talking violence, heartbreak, sex, love, cruelty, ignorance, empowerment.  Bacigalupi is the writer to watch, in my opinion.  Not only is this book full of ideas and warnings for our own future, but it's extremely well-written too.  Bacigalupi is creating a new kind of cyberpunk and I'm in, definitely in.

Nobody Move by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2009)
This is Denis Johnson writing an Elmore Leonard novel! The only thing that could be better than this is if Quention Tarantino made a scifi movie.  Nobody Move was  an easy, swift read and excellent crime noir, definitely Johnson at his lightest.  After a heavy-hitter about the Vietnam War and intelligence or lack thereof in Tree of Smoke, I'd want to do something light too.  The rundown: dude gets caught up in some shit he shouldn't have, things get out of control, everybody wants a cut of the dough, and there's a pretty girl.  Awesome.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2002)
This is a book I read once every couple of years.  I love the hermaphrodite narrator, Cal/Calliope.  How s/he is able to back in time and be her grandmother and her father, witnessing the exodus from Asian Minor to Prohibition Era in the US, all of it a love story about Detroit, the ruined city.  It's heartbreaking.

Cathedral by Raymond Carver (Harvill Press, 1983)
This isn't a novel.  It's a book of short stories.  Carver writes about the regular guy purely, without any sentimentality and this is his finest collection.  I read this every year.  No other story like the first story, "Feathers," with its crazy peacock has influenced me more as a writer.  The final story, "Cathedral," is also worth the collection alone.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor (DAW Books, 2010)
I reviewed a few weeks ago.  Okorafor's future world is a bleak desert with broken-down computers and strange sorceries.  But it's about so much more: genocide, feminism, technology, etc.  And written with such lovely style and grace.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu (Pantheon, 2010)
I reviewed this book, too, way way way back in September.  If I had to choose (and I'm not, I tells ya, I'm not!) the number one book I read in 2010, it would be Yu's masterful, How to Live... Normally, I hate time travel stories because they're usually done very poorly with gaping holes and fundamental flaws.  If Yu's novel has any of those, I've yet to see them.  He has written the perfect time travel story; and, not only that, he's written a moving piece about a son searching for his father.  Kudos, sir, kudos.  You've won me over twice.


So there they are in all their glory.  I have about 25 books on my bookshelf that I still need to read this year.  I'm currently in the middle of Ian McDonald's Brasyl and it's swimmingly good (all about the multiverse and quantum computers and the country of Brazil, wild!).  Some more books on my list:

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell
The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jeminison
Oblivion, More or Less by Alan De Niro
The City & the City by China Mieville
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Anything else I should put on this list?  What are you reading?

I'm Floored by Stephen Fry

My 10 Favorite Records of 2010

I know what you're saying: "But, Dustin, it's not even Halloween yet.  There're two more months of possibly great music to come!"  It's true there may be something huge out there, waiting in the wings, some ghost mammoth of a record that will ruin me and this blogpost and throw the rest of the music world to its knees.  But I doubt it.  I've looked at the upcoming releases for the rest of the year and, unless Radiohead or Panda Bear put a date on their releases, it's unlikely any of the up-and-comers are going to take the place of these top 10, but if that happens, I'll gladly revise this list.

When the year began, I haughtily decreed it was the Return of the 90s (with ominous organ music).  While I still believe there is a lot of music that sounds like the music of my teenage years (no Nirvana ripoffs this year or, thank god, Creed wannabes though), the eighties had a big year again.  As a matter of fact, so did the seventies and  the sixties and the fifties.  What can I say about 2010 musically?  It's been an eclectic year: no scene is The Scene; or All Scenes are the scene (I don't condone scene-hopping anyway...) - what I'm getting at is: nothing stood out above the other as in previous years.  Chillwave, lo-fi, singer/songwriter, rock, techno, retro?  It's all equally supported.

Perhaps because of this mishmashing of sorts, I've discovered my top 10 records revolves mostly around my old standards - bands I've loved records from before - because, truthfully, not a whole lot surprised me this year.  That doesn't mean there wasn't great music, though.

A numbering system where I decide what record my favorite and/or most listened to record of the year seems crass.  So I haven't numbered them.  I won't decide which record is my 10 and which is my 1.  I can't.  Here they are, in no particular order:

MY TOP 10 RECORDS

The Walkmen - Lisbon
Talk about a record about production values!  I was slain.  Listen to the drums, to the guitars.  And the songs themselves are The Walkmen's finest to date.  Key Tracks: "Juveniles," "Angela Surf City," "Stranded."

The Arcade Fire - The Suburbs
Okay, so this record did surprise me.  After the heavy-handed, melodramatic Neon Bible, I was wary of anything Arcade Fiery.  This record still has some heavy moments, but even those seem light as air and full of nostalgia and hope.  Key Tracks: "The Suburbs," "Suburban War," "Sprawl II," "Modern Man."

Tame Impala - Innerspeaker
Dude sounds like George Harrison when he sings.  Imagine if George Harrison wrote this kind of psychedelia.  Maybe he did.  I don't know.  It's awesome.  Key Tracks: "It Is Not Meant To Be," Runaway, Houses, City, Clouds," Alter Ego," "I Don't Really Mind."

Surfer Blood - Astro Coast
High school music at its best.  Thes guys might be one-album wonders, but who cares.  This record was full of summer and lots of beers.  Key Tracks: "Swim," "Catholic Pagans," "Slow Jabroni."

Kissing Club - Hooks EP
Jake Miller is a chameleon.  His voice can get dry as a tumbleweed or smooth as a glass of milk.  No matter what form he's taken, this buddy of mine has released one of the best EPs of the year.  Key Tracks: "Bury Me," "Dirty Feet," "Water in the Pipes."

LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening
The first track scares you awake and the rest have you dancing for 50 minutes.  James Murphy is still having fun.  Key Tracks: "I Can Change, "You Wanted a Hit," "All I Want."

Deerhunter - Halcyon Digest
A Deerhunter record steeped in fifties throwback and nineties love?  Who woulda thunk?  Still, these guys make some of the best stuff around.  Bradford Cox and crew just seem to get it, you know?  Key Tracks: "Don't Cry," "Sailing, "He Would Have Laughed, "Helicopter, "Coronado."

The National - High Violet
I will admit this one took awhile to really get into.  It's always that way with The National for me.  But I like a challenge.  When you get down to the basics, this is The National's most fully formed songs, not to mention their most heartbreaking.  Key Tracks: "Terrible Love, "Anyon's Ghost, "Bloodbuzz Ohio."

Beach House - Teen Dream
Same as Deerhunter and The National, who woulda thunk it: another sad, dreamy-eyed set of broken-hearted songs from this duo?  And yet...And yet...It's their best record! Let me paraphrase my drummer, Pierce: walking around wintertime in Chicago, snow on the ground, city lights, well, there's no better time for Beach House.  Which is ironic, considering...  Key Tracks: "Zebra," "Real Love," "Norway."

James Blake - CMYK
Blake uses empty space to great effect.  The samples and dance beats aren't half-bad either.  Key Tracks: "CMYK," "Postpone."

There you have it.  These records have been in my car for weeks, months, some almost a year.  Here are some honorable mentions, records that, for whatever reasons, I listen to every now and again but just haven't gotten fully into.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Sufjan Stevens - The Age of Adz
The Fresh & Onlys - Play It Strange
The Love Language - Libraries
Woods - At Echo Lake
The Morning Benders - Big Echo

And some records slip through the cracks.  These are records I'm only just getting into:

Wild Nothing - Gemini
Twin Shadow - Forget
Owen Pallett - Heartland
Flying Lotus - Cosmogramma
Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles

What else have I missed?  What are you listening to?

(Coming Soon: Top 10 Books I've read in 2010...)

News of the Day: Recording

Saturday, Tin Tin Can recorded lots of bass and some vocals. The bass was recorded in our old practice space - empty now and it kind of looks like a prison cell without our equipment taking up the space. The room was still hot and smelled like stale beer. Oh, the memories...
Justin's song, "Helena, Helena" is nearly complete, except for some basic mixing. "Bandwagon (Abducted by Aliens)" is getting close: a few more instruments to add and then overdubs. We've got a couple others in the bag as well. Scratch tracks to some new Justin songs and some news of my own have been laid down too.

We're getting there, slow and sure, but there. Looks like we may have a 7" split with Kissing Club soon too. Jake's heading to Chicago in November to record a new song. If you haven't heard yet, you should go to www.prosperorecords.com to get his new EP, Hooks.
For your viewing pleasure, here's a taste of Chris working on some synth:

LOOK AT ALL THOSE KEYS!

News of the Day

First, a little Tin Tin Can news:

Recording is going well.  "Bandwagon (Abducted by Aliens)" is nearing the final touches.  We've got a song of Justin's, tentatively titled, "Helena, Helena," that needs some drums, maybe a horn or two, and bass.  "My Red Ant" is coming along nicely.  A few songs we're working on, but are in early stages so far: "What Fireworks," "City Lights," "Brand New Blue Jeans," and the as-yet-untitled Ghost Song.

The band is planning a big recording session during the penultimate weekend of October.  Lots of bass, lots of vocals, some of those fancy licks Chris is known for, maybe some drums.  Pierce demands recording his drums on the rooftop of his flat, so who knows with that guy...

We hope to have the album finished and pressed by December, but we're not making promises.  And yes, contrary to popular belief, this will be a full-length, 9 to 12 songs or thereabouts.

In the meantime:

The next week I'll be off to Carbondale, IL to spend some time with a good friend of mine, Mr. Josh Murphy.  We'll be drinking cheap wine into the late hours, I'm sure, and recording our own little spoken word/absurd record.  Extremely looking forward to this; and, if time allows, seeing a few other friends down south.

Also:

Most of my Clarionite buddies and I have joined NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, http://www.nanowrimo.org/), in which the goal is to write 50,000 words from Nov. 1st to midnight Nov.30th.  Roughly, that's 1667 words a day, without a break.  That's a lot of damn words.  Some people go into this with a complete plan for a novel, plot mapped out, characters of depth, etc.  I don't want to do that.  Firstly, because I've been reading a lot of stream-of-consciousness books lately (see: The Orange Eats Creeps, by Grace Krilanovich) and I want to give this a whirl - not that I'm saying stream-of-consciousness books aren't mapped out beforehand; I'm saying I don't want to overthink it.  All I know about what I want to write about is this: it's going to be vaguely Young Adult, the main character is named Moo, there is a circus involved, and something very absurd happens.

The point of NaNoWriMo, of course, is not to hash out a brilliant novel in a month.  Very, very few people can actually do this successfully anyway.  The point is to write like a fool and see what happens and then, if it's worth keeping, revise it later.

I'm hoping to finish one or two more short stories before November because I'd like to get about 7 or 8 in circulation before I disappear for a month into my "novel."

NOTEWORTHY FINALE:

What are you guys dressing up as for Halloween?  I'm going as the Headless Snuggie.

Banned Books Week

We're mid-way through Banned Books Week, an initiative launched by librarians and others to celebrate the freedom to read.  Since its inception in 1982, thousands of books have been challenged in schools and libraries; religious views, sexuality, violence, racial slurs, and explicit language are among the most cited reasons for these challenges.  While I may not always agree with the content of a book or the characters' choices or actions, one thing I cannot stand is the censorship of books.  Can you imagine a world where your child didn't get to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?  What Huck learns about himself and about Jim, about slavery, about freedom, is far too important in a young person's life (and an adult's too).  Censoring this type of book because it repeatedly uses a racial slur is just plain wrong.  The racial slur is there for a reason: a) it's how people spoke at the time and in that location and b) it's part of Huck's learning process.

This is but one example, and an old one at that, of books being challenged across the country in our schools and libraries.  Others include: The Harry Potter Series; The Perks of Being a Wallflower; The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things; and more. Books that makes us think, that teach us something about ourselves and our place in the world--those are the kind of books that should endure.

Because of events like Banned Books Week http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/ and other organizations, a lot of these books do endure.  Still, on the website listed above is a map of all the challenged books in the United States since 2007 and it's incredible.  I encourage everyone to go read a book that was banned or has been challenged this week or the next and see what all the hubub is about.

(Sidenote: a real surprise for me is that How to Kill a Mockinbird is still on the list of most challenged books.  Poor Scout.  She's had such a rough time already.)

Time of the Season: Records & Weather

Every time the weather changes I get the urge to put on certain records. It's as if my body is telling me I need to listen to these sets of songs in this order to fully comprehend the rain, snow, heat, falling leaves. It's not the same record or artist every fall or summer, but, if it changes, I've found that there is a similar atmosphere to the records I listen to during the changing of the seasons.


Fall is at our doorstep, begging like a broken-hearted lover to be let in. Since 2007, when it came out, there's been one record every fall that I must listen to. It's Jens Lekman'sNight Falls Over Kortedala.

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Immediately following the swells of the violin strings of album opener "And I Remember Every Kiss," I'm in the mood for jacket weather and cold rain. By the time Jens mentions apple cider in "Friday Night at the Drive-in Bingo," it's like he knew what I was thinking all along, and I'm off to the grocery store to get some unpasteurized cider myself. I have yet to find a better record to describe my late-twenties autumnal experience.


Nothing is better suited to the desolation of a Midwestern winter than The Walkmen's You & Me.

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The jangling guitars, the stark lyrics, the rumbling drums: these boys make barrenness feel like a hallelujah. The record is a lonesome one, with heartbreak at its center, but it's one wildly hopeful heart. It'll get you through those days when the sky's the color of drywall and your car won't start because, hell, even it's too damn cold.


Springtime. It's Neutral Milk Hotel. It's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. With songs like "Oh, Comely" and "Two-Headed Boy, Part 1," this record is the perfect prelude to summer. There's heat there, but there's also lightness, a lot of air, a lot of breeze. It's a beautiful record.

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Life works its magic in the stomachs of strangers, even as Jeff Mangum sings of death and stadiums and fetuses and drunken mothers. I can't say it enough: it's a beautiful record.


You know a summer record when you feel the sticky humidity coming off the songs. That record for me is Darkness on the Edge of Town by Bruce Springsteen.

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In "Factory," you feel that heat from the machines as the father works them. Or, how about "Racing in the Street?" You know the speaker of the song's "baby" is sitting on her Daddy's porch and her nightgown is clinging to her skin from the sweat.


I'm always looking for the record that gives a particular feeling or color(I see purple and yellow constantly when listening to The Beatles Abbey Road, for instance), so my seasonal records have changed over time. However, these four have been around for the past few years, and, in the case of NMH and the Boss, even longer.


What records do you have to listen to every time the weather changes? And, along those same lines, what records do you listen to for other reasons, such as childhood nostalgia, mend your broken heart, etc?