Ander MonsonKirja-arvosteluja

I don't think you have to be a librarian to enjoy this book, but you probably need to love libraries. And books. But Ander, darling, you must stop stealing stuff from special collections!

I loved this strange, inventive, beautiful collection of stories, halfway between poetry and insanity.

I love the lonely, fucked-up, snowy, magical setting of the UP. I love the radio schematics and diagrams. I especially love everything having to do with Liz, Carrie, and Yr Protagonist. There were a few stories I didn't love, but that doesn't dull my appreciation for the work as a whole.

I am really amazed by this guy's writing. Can't wait to read all his books.

SO MUCH SNOW COMING DOWN


If the pieces of the whole were mostly "luminous", were somehow made actual as in "galvanized", then the "scrambled"-ness of this editorial "experiment" may have proven to be more successful. Problem for me was I only believed one half of it and the "charge" was not as "sparkling" as it might (could) be.

I think the promise made by the Kentucky publisher, Sarabande Books, was a little beyond the pale when they claimed this work "...uncompromising and relentless, hypnotic and dreamlike, darkly humorous and surprisingly tender". Again, I would say maybe with a luckier draw they may have gotten something else half right. That is not to say there weren't some bright spots and near brilliance in this collection of stories for me. There were. But don't believe the hype.

Instead of a novel or a group of short stories I would much rather have from Monson mere doses of truth, or even false heads that feel like the truth, than whole stories made-up and sounding like they want to be seriously listened to. In other words, I prefer any day over these examples a Monson essay, or memoir, that isn't really or exactly true to these, for the most part, so-called fictions.

For the most part these essays of Monson's were so very good. The only reason I couldn't give this book five stars is I had to skip some because of their layouts. But the seven of twelve I did read were fantastic, amazing even, and I highly recommend this book to essay lovers. I write about it in more interesting detail here:

http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/hub/Neck-Deep-in-Ander-Monson

Not that anyone would give a hoot but I finally did get a correctly described copy of this book from a seller on amazon.com, and for that fact alone I am extremely happy. It is easy to discount the troubles, and even the successes of others, but you won't find any of that here coming from my lips, or even sparks off the blazing speed of my typewriter. I, too, like Ander, could type 55 words per minute in Mr. Sventko's typing class, and I probably could have done even better had he not been the feared football coach he was. My stupid spelling mistakes were what bothered me and made me have to slow down. His daughter Marcia consistently kicked my ass in typing and it gave her a superiority over me she probably needed in order to get through her routinely boring days. The recreational drugs that others of us engaged in made for a high school education a little bit more adventurous than the typical high school cheerleader like Marcia. Try taking mescaline and attending a Paul Butterfield trigonometry class. Or be a student teacher working under the tutelage of the school's golf coach in a special education classroom. Once I even dropped a hit of blotter acid too late in the day and had to play a qualifying round for placement seed in our following day's school-sponsored golf match. There was no possible way to keep track of where my new golf balls were flying off to after striking them so hard with the intensity of a rapidly blooming acid trip. Thank goodness I was playing with a young square geek who would go on after college to become the county's prosecuting attorney. Back then he had a proficiency for cheating on the golf course, so me offering him the freedom to blatantly adjust his own score if he would allow my reentry, without penalty, of a new golf ball in place of the lost one still flying around somewhere out there in the cosmos seemed like a very good deal for both of us. Neither one of us ever spoke of that day together on the golf course again, and we were both lucky not to have been found cheating on our scorecards. I am sort of a heal for bringing this subject up now but I wanted to make the point of how a born cheater can naturally years later slip into the county prosecutor's seat and seem to do a pretty good job of keeping accurate the public score against its own criminals.

Ander Monson wrote some pretty good pieces collected here in Vanishing Point. Were they perfect and without blemish? I think not. But nowhere as poor a showing as some critics here on goodreads.com have made them out to be. There were fits of brilliance to be found here and there, and as I said in another piece I wrote regarding this book, the first essay titled Voir Dire was fantastic. He also wrote of the Gerald R. Ford memorial funeral service and procession held in Grand Rapids as well as a lengthy, and quite interesting piece on the money brand of snack chips, Doritos. I did not much like the Dungeons & Dragons essay, but I am not born of that time period and have never played a Play Station type Game Boy slash computer game in my life. And for the record, I will state that Ander Monson is not David Foster Wallace, and in addition he is no Hunter S. Thompson. But I will vigorously say he is loads better than Jonathan Franzen and the other wannabes out there writing essays today. To have him compared to an inconsequential writer the likes of Tao Lin I do find more than a bit disconcerting. There is a whole lot of upside to Ander Monson and I think, almost snidely and certainly happily, that already Tao Lin has had his fifteen minutes of fame, and for what I clearly am not sure of. Another fairly new writer I am currently involved in reading goes by the name of John Jeremiah Sullivan and he is not too shabby, and his best work is surely ahead of him too. Look also for a fellow by the name of Lee Klein. His star is definitely rising. But I certainly do recommend this book to anyone wanting a new experience in the form of an essay. Monson is fresh, and like myself, was fortunate to be born in northern Michigan, and in his case, the Upper Peninsula in a cold and lonely town called Houghton.

For further word and more detail over what I think about Ander Monson click on the following link:
http://mewlhouse.hubpages.com/t/2fc892

There is no way I can declare this book as being good. The first poem gave hope and hints of possible greatness forthcoming but the list to follow was nothing short of disappointing. It is not enough to be clever with your words, pretentious even, but they must be in the right place at the right time. Ander Monson is a great essayist, but his fiction and poetry is vastly overrated and my guess is that those who praise it want to be his friend. I do too, but not at the cost of losing myself in the process. There is nothing redeeming in the pages of this book and it is typical of most Sarabande Books productions. As much as I wanted to discover a vastly superior writer who can work in several genres, I found a clam, and was extremely dismayed by my search so much so I shouldn't have even bothered.

Monson's conventional essays are intelligent, very well written and often funny in an understated way, despite the "offbeat" topics (frisbee golf, automated car washes, telegrams, etc.). But I ended up having to skip the more "experimental" essays, as they were cute and too clever by half.

For those wishing to visit the Keweenaw Peninsula, I would suggest reading Ander Monson's short but dense Other Electricities. It is a complex yet fascinating collection of stories or vignettes composing the gestalt of Michigan's UP. Sometimes direct, sometimes poetic, though always ethereal, Other Electricities deals with the hardness of living in a place as cold, bleak, and beautiful as upper Michigan. Monson expertly expresses the weirdness and hardship through a formidable cast of characters which, while representing the whole of a small community, actually resembles that of a family.

It is a place where the only guarantee is that every winter at least one snowmobile rider will succumb to the ice, where a father, perched in his attic will become obsessed with speaking code into his radio throughout the night. A place where an abandoned schoolbus forms a hideout for a disaffected teenager, taking his confusion out on stray cats. Where a weary snowplow worker reminisces over uncles dying in saunas and cousins holding up banks in the heart of winter, looking forward to nothing more than her stretch of the road. Where a schoolteacher is helpless to watch both the demolition of her school and her students.

Other Electricities is about a community of people and what they do to survive in an unacommodating environment. It's about the often unfortunate interconnectedness of their lives told from a stream-of-consciousness point of view. Beautifully written and imagined, it's an incredibly deep work, ominous like the lake surrounding the region it so coldly affects.