Mike Perry is Back

Life is suddenly full of drama for low-key Harley Jackson: A woman in a big red pickup has stolen his bachelor's heart, a Hummer-driving predatory developer is threatening to pave the last vestiges of his family farm, and inside his barn is a calf bearing the image of Jesus Christ.

Harley's best friend, Billy, a giant of a man who shares his trailer house with a herd of cats and tries to pass off country music lyrics as philosophy, urges him to avoid the woman, fight the developer, and get rich off the calf. But Harley takes the opposite tack, hoping to avoid what his devout, dearly departed mother would have called "a scene."

 

Then the secret gets out--right through the barn door, and Harley's "miracle" goes viral. Within hours pilgrims, grifters, and the media have descended on his quiet patch of Swivel, Wisconsin, looking for a glimpse (and a percentage) of the calf. Does Harley hide the famous, possibly holy calf and risk a riot, or give the people what they want-and raise enough money to keep his land-and, just possibly, win the woman and her big red pickup truck?

Harley goes all in, cutting a deal with a major Hollywood agent that transforms his little farm into an international spiritual theme park-think Lourdes, only with cheese curds and t-shirts. Soon, Harley has lots of money . . . and more trouble than he ever dreamed.

Funny, I can hear Mike's voice in my head as I read this fictional tale of the eccentric residents living in and around Boomler.  Funny how so many of them resemble the "real" characters he honors in his essay collections.  Methinks that for Mike, the line between fact and fiction is about as fluid as cow muck in a pasture after a driving rain.  Gotta love this guy and all the folks in his real and imagined lives.  

What am I reading?  Today I switch over to script reading for a little Hypothetical project a few friends have been tossing around.  We'll see....

Thanks for stopping by.

More Vampires

Still plugging away at Vampires in the Lemon Grove.  Heart-A-Rama slowed my reading down and I haven’t been able to get back at it.  Doing the undone (cleaning, laundry, answering chatty emails) has taken some time and today, I need to find the owners of all the left behinds.  Each year, after the show closes, a couple of us return to the venue to dismantle the show.  Somehow, I always end up being the custodian of left objects.  This year I have several cooking/baking items, a tennis racket, stuffed animals, aprons and more – all of which need to find their rightful owners.  So it goes.

 

As far as the book goes – right now I’m thinking we will have a short discussion on Friday. This isn’t a book for a casual discussion group, like ours – not that there’s anything wrong with that, we just don’t get too far into analysis of styles, symbolism and other rhetorical concepts.  We like to focus on plot, character, and motivation, believability.....

This is just a totally different piece, odd for sure, but packed with meaning that needs studied reading to appreciate.  I am enjoying the exercise.  A book hasn’t challenged me like this a long time and it feels good to know I can still read at a deeper level.  I find myself noting pages, phrases, jotting down questions and hopping on the computer to validate what I believe are literary, social, historical and cultural references in each story. 

This entire collection of short stories is unified by the themes of flight and transformation.  Russell even uses forms of  the word “metamorphosis” in various selections, an obvious nod to Kafka.  The second story - about women morphing into silk worms in duty to the state- (told you it was odd) echoes philosophies put forth by Karl Marx in The Communist Manifesto.  In fact, Marx even used a silkworm analogy to describe the importance of people knowing their place in a society. 

The third story has Greek influences including the wheel of fortune and fate.  The Greeks believed that we are all cold cocked at some point in our lives, but if we wait long enough, the wheel of fortune will spin in a more favorable direction.  They also believed that we cannot escape fate, which is exactly what the young man in the story discovers.  Choices will be presented to us and we have the freedom to choose from a number of alternatives.   However, the choices we make will always lead us to the inevitable pre-determined outcome – be it good or bad.  There’s also the whole search for self theme that comes through, but not as strongly as the other threads.

That’s as far as I have gotten, partly because I need catch-up time and partly because these are challenging stories that need some digestion.  Hopefully, I will be able to chew on a few more pages before our group meets on Friday.

Thanks for stopping by.

I Thought We Were Done with Vampire Stories!

To begin with, I have only read the first story in Karen Russell’s latest collection.  The story puzzles me.  Like most short stories, the opening is quick, characters appear fully developed on page one, no need to watch for great development throughout the action arc.  For sure, I know that this is the type of story I would have enjoyed teaching – sharing first the exquisite language with just the right amount of ornamentation, and then moving on to discovering the meaning behind the words.

Don’t let the vampire theme in the title story fool you – this is not about emotionless, blood sucking uglies that travel by night searching for innocents to induct into their secret society.  Instead, this story is a kind of meditation on the comforts of sameness and the challenges of change.

Clyde and his wife, Magreb no longer suck blood; it is no longer effective for them so they have sought substitutions finally settling in a lemon grove in Sorrento.  There they live on the juice of fallen lemons along with others secreted for them by a young grove worker whom they suspect understands them.  Long ago, Magreb taught Clyde that book generally held beliefs about vampires is inaccurate and so the couple  lives openly in the sun, sleeping wherever they can, but never in a coffin.

However, Magreb is restless and hints that it is time to move on.  With that simple suggestion, Clyde finds his world turned upside down, something which has become difficult in his advanced age - hanging upside down that is!  The comfort of his past calls to him and he chooses to act upon what he believed to be true for many, many years.  OK...a stronger resolution would have been more satisfying, but I’ll wait to see if soft endings are a theme throughout this collection.

Short stories.  I have always enjoyed them and am looking forward to reading more of Russell’s work.

What am I reading next?  Time for another Hemingway novel, I guess - but there's an inviting ARC on my desk called The Book of Speculation.  Both will have to wait until I finish a few more short stories.

Thanks for stopping by. 
Spring arrived.  Enjoy.