All Things Pankish

Wild by Cheryl Strayed (A Review by Alan Stewart Carl)

Alfred A. Knopf

336 pgs/$25.95

Whenever I’ve collected a particularly burdensome number of writing rejections, I like to make myself a thick-cut sandwich and fill a bottle with water and take a trail up into the hills. As I hike, my mind churns. As I rest at some vista, my mind goes still. I don’t think I’m unusual in my urge to turn to hiking when life gets difficult. In fact, in WILD, Cheryl Strayed has written an entire memoir about a hike taken to get away from troubles. Except these are no small troubles and this is no afternoon walk in the woods. This is a life-resetting, thousand-plus mile hike across the mountains of the Pacific Coast Trail.

I should say here that I know Cheryl Strayed. I’m a former student of hers and consider her a friend and a mentor. Before reading WILD, I assumed I’d leave the reviews to those who didn’t have such clear conflicts of interest. But some books, no matter how well you know their author, exist as a force of their own. They get inside you. They compel you to act.

The elevator-pitch for WILD is that it’s the story of a young, emotionally messed-up woman who decides to hike the PCT and does so without any substantive hiking knowledge or prior experience. That’s the plot. And that plot is riveting. WILD is a page turner, a classic adventure tale full of wilderness dangers and physical hardships and sweeping vistas which Strayed heart-achingly renders in her clean, clear-eyed prose. This is a good read. A damn fine read. But it’s something more than that, too. It has a purpose beyond the tales of bears and rattlesnakes and water filters and blisters.

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For Your Monday Morning Coffee

1. THE MAY ISSUE IS ALIVE.

2. Only a short amount of time until we invade Brooklyn again, this time with Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and we couldn’t be more excited. May 23rd, 7pm. WORD, 126 Franklin Street, Brooklyn. Featuring readings by Mensah Demary, Sean Doyle, Jennifer Pashley, Robb Todd, M.G. Martin, Tess Patalano, and Roxane Gay. RSVP here.

3. Regular submissions are closed until August 31. If you submitted before May 1 your submission is still under consideration as normal. Tip Jar Submissions are still open.

4. Also, Special Issue submissions are still open, submit here to the Pulp Issue.

Ask The Author: Christine Fadden

From the February Issue, this great little piece from Christine Fadden, “Little Rubber Houses.”

1. What food would you sit on naked?

I’ve always got at least five boxes of different cereals in rotation. If I’m staying somewhere and they have Lucky Charms, I’ll eat the entire box in two days. Those marshmallows are kind of slimy in your mouth, you know what I mean? But I love their psychedelic colors. That cereal is so fake. I don’t allow myself to buy it. And Cap’n Crunch will scour the roof of your mouth until it bleeds. It’s the sandpaper of cereals.Cereal: That’s about the only thing I have in common with Seinfeld.I don’t have the balls to do stand up, but people do laugh at me.

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Ask The Author: Mary Kovaleski Byrnes

Do you remember December? Remember December by reading these poems from Mary Kovaleski Byrnes and then reading this interview.

1. What does it take to rattle your world?

That weird, alien sound pond ice makes when it’s warming up.Tomatoes that don’t taste like anything. The repetition of the numbers 926 I have been seeing everywhere since I was about 16 (I should really play the lottery). A thunderstorm in winter (and that’s a good rattling).

2. How is a bed groggy?

I don’t know about you, but I usually wake up and do a few can-can kicks and yell “hello, world!” In seriousness, bed is where things are always half-way reality and half-way dream-world. That foggy, groggy place.

3. What would your bi-plane look like?

1940’s retro flamingo pink please, and with those things that let it land on water, too.

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Friday Five

1. This essay on the cultural relevance of reading from Vouched Guest Contributor Adam Robinson, at Vouched

2. These poems from Claudia Cortese, at DIAGRAM

3. These poems from Mary Kovaleski Byrnes, at Literary Bohemian

4. This letter to Don Draper from Adam Wilson, at The Paris Review Daily

5. Matt Bell’s Great Book Giveaway of 2012

With One’s Own Eyes by Sherwood Anderson (A Review by J. A. Tyler)

What follows is the third in J. A. Tyler’s full-press of Subito Press, a series of reviews appearing at [PANK] over the course of 2012, covering every title available from Subito Press. J. A. Tyler’s previous full-press series have appeared at Big Other (a full-press of Calamari Press) and with Mud Luscious Press’s online quarterly (a full-press of Publishing Genius Press).

To round out their 2008 catalog, Subito Press published With One’s Own Eyes: Sherwood Anderson’s Realities, a collection consisting of an introduction by Welford D. Taylor, a lecture that Sherwood Anderson gave on Realism in 1939, and the stories “Adventure” (originally published in Winesburg, Ohio, 1919) and “Death in the Woods” (originally published in The American Mercury, 1926); and while as such With One’s Own Eyes is a nice nod to the roots of Realism in American literature, it feels more like a project than a book, and its true value seems packed solely into the reprinted Sherwood Anderson lecture.

With One’s Own Eyes opens with Welford D. Taylor’s essay, a scholar of repute and a well-known researcher of Sherwood Anderson, but Taylor’s contribution is dry, steeped in tiresome academic references, and serves only as a reminder of what most students hate about the university years: those lectures that go on and on without them. In contrast, the stories reprinted in With One’s Own Eyes are interesting reads, and certainly solid representations of Sherwood Anderson’s style, but they do seem odd collected like this, since both are really more apt in their original contexts, “Adventure” within Winesburg, Ohio and “Death in the Woods” in Death in the Woods and Other Stories.

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A Forsley Feuilleton: Stanley Kubrick Wanted A Taste, A Second Taste, Of Terry Southern’s Lamb-Pit

I love fucking Terry Southern. . . that came out wrong.  I never fucked the writer, at least not proper fucked.  But I have been fucking him intellectually, off and on, for a few decades now.  By that I mean I’ve read his literary work – Flash and Filigree, Candy, The Magic Christian, and Blue Movie – on several occasions, going deeper each time.  But no matter how deep I go, Southern’s satiric send-ups, lyrical lines, crazy characters, and demented dialogue always leave me hard.  I never fully come. . . to a satisfying climax.  I’m always left with the feeling that I could go deeper – that I could explore more of the birth canal that is Terry Southern’s sardonic vision of America.

So, just the other day, after eating a few dozen oysters, I read Lee Hill’s biography, A Grand Guy, of that writer I love fucking so much – I mean that writer I fucking love so much – and, sure enough, it acted as the satisfying climax to the intellectual stimulation Southern’s writing induces. It’s the kind of stimulation that makes you hard for days, novel after novel, the kind that only a grand guy like Southern has the ability to induce.

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Ask The Author: Sophie Klahr

“Say When” from Sophie Klahr was published in the February Issue. You should read it now.

1. What animals, real or otherwise, is a woman made out of?

Sneaky ones.

2. Which crime would you prefer not to contain?

I contain all possible crimes.

3. What question should I contain? Why?

What else is possible? Why this is a good question should be self-evident.

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A Hollow Cube is a Lonely Space by S.D. Foster (A Review by David Atkinson)

Eraserhead Press

108 pgs/$9.95

 As a preliminary matter, I am not an expert on bizarro fiction. In all honesty, I’ve never been able to truly define what it is, or is not. I’ve never been able to really be sure whether a story is truly bizarro fiction or whether it is just strange.

I do happen to enjoy bizarre and absurd stories. In fact, I adore them. However, a great deal of what people tell me is bizarro fiction ends up confusing me. I can appreciate good writing when it is there, and I can enjoy the absurdity, but often I am left puzzled as to what exactly the story is. This is not a fault of the particular story in question, or at least not most of the time, but is actually an indictment of my apparent ability to understand a majority of the bizarro fiction that is out there.

Frankly, I find a lot of bizarro fiction incredibly difficult to follow. I am not a casual reader. I’ve enjoyed books such as Infinite Jest, In Search of Lost Time, The Recognitions, House of Leaves, and many other such books that could not possibly be considered light reading. Still, a lot of bizarro fiction seems to me to be more experimental, very convoluted and complex in both language and structure. In a great deal of cases, it seems incomprehensible to me.

You can imagine my hesitancy when I considered picking up Foster’s A Hollow Cube is a Lonely Space. However, the buzz I’d heard about the book piqued my interest to the point that I couldn’t refuse. My interest overcame my fears.

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Names: Beer, Food, Literature — “I don’t particularly give a damn about that sort of contradiction”

Two weeks ago, I talked about beer names. This week, I’ll talk about beer names [1]. Also food names and literature names. But first, names:

Names are supposed to let us know what we’re talking about, in one sense or another. I claimed [2] a couple of weeks ago that disputes seem to hinge on four qualities: adequacy of names, accuracy of names, origin of names, and intent of names.

Let’s talk about black IPAs. Just trying to get to the argument I want to talk about is going to take some parsing: a pale ale is an ale brewed from pale malt. An India pale ale was (historically) that sort of beer, but high in alcohol and heavily hopped, bound for British colonial India. An American IPA is sort of that sort of beer, but not produced for export to India, typically [3].

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