The Tumours Made Me Interesting, by Matthew Revert. Australia: Legumeman Books, 2011.
I’ve been a big fan of Revert since his scrotum-filled short story collection A Million Versions of Right came out in 2009. Labeled a “Bizarro” writer alongside such luminaries as Carlton Mellick III and D. Harlan Wilson, among others, Revert’s work is strange, grotesque, deeply symbolic, and hilarious. But I’m not doing it justice. There’s a saying that ‘one has to know the rules to break the rule,’ and Revert knows them well and breaks them beautifully.
The Tumours Made Me Interesting is at once parody but also strangely sincere. If life is a joke, Revert is laughing the loudest, and why not? The story follows Bruce Miles, a milquetoast who works for Nipple Blamers, a company that “makes its profit by abusing a legal loophole that allows the blame for certain criminal charges to be transferred to nipples” (26). When he was 12, a falcon carried away his father. His mother is slowly turning into a giant hand. And he is nothing. But Bruce achieves a kind of fame when he contracts cancer and begins to be pursued by a group of disease-fetishists who promise to take care of his mother if only he will let them do as they will with him.
There are many layers of humor in this onion of a novel, from the doctor who first examines Bruce exclaiming, “Yuck!” and “This is some sick shit!” as he performs a colonoscopy, to Bruce’s coworkers chipping in and getting him some bark as a condolence, to start off with. But isn’t there a kind of truth to these moments? Mustn’t a doctor actually think, at some point, that it is ‘some sick shit’ to stick his hand up somebody’s rectum and feel around? And wouldn’t any gifts sent by coworkers in this situation be about as useful as a bouquet of bark? Revert is getting at something in the absurdity of life, here. But he doesn’t take himself seriously enough to do more than poke fun at the whole idea of “meaning.”
And yet, Revert manages to be oddly touching at certain moments. Bruce’s relationship with his mother, for example, which is really the biggest part of his life, is touching, at times, and manages to feel real despite (or maybe because of) its absurdity. Later, as Bruce begins to understand his cancer and communicate with it, the cancer tumors become some of the more likeable characters in the book, saving him from jams at several points. Bruce’s motivations are clearly spelled out; he’s a believable and understandable character who exists in a crazy world, as are we all.
Revert comments on pop culture ruthlessly. After he’s diagnosed with cancer, Bruce goes out to a bar with a coworker whose waitresses are forced to wear tents in order to be trendy. The drinks served, also, include fermented bacon. Of course, the cancer admirers who ‘make Bruce interesting’ are really not so far removed from some of today’s reality TV fans.
But these are all just elements of the story, and it’s obvious that Revert’s true intention here is to simply tell an entertaining story, weird as it may be. He’s a talented writer who crafts pleasing lines just as easily as he crafts surreal imagery. He balances gross-out images with humor to make a very pleasing story. Revert’s debut rivals the masters of the genre, and I’m looking forward to reading more of his work.
-CL Bledsoe
Thursday, October 04, 2012
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Review of Greg Brownderville's Deep Down in the Delta
Deep Down in the Delta: Folktales and Poems, by Greg Alan Brownderville with paintings by Billy Moore. Little Rock: Butler Center Books, 2011. $19.95.
I had heard of a book by the Arkansas poet Greg Brownderville – a collection of folk tales from his hometown of Pumpkin Bend and the surrounding Woodruff County (right next door to my own, native Cross County) Arkansas, published by the now defunt Doodlum Brother Press, but it eluded me like the Fouke Monster (the Arkansan version of Bigfoot popularized in the Legend of Boggy Creek movies you may have seen on MST3K). Now, the Butler Center in Little Rock has put out a beautiful revised edition including artwork from folk artist Billy Moore. Brownderville credits not only the residents who shared these stories with him but also folklorists such as the legendary Vance Randolph (author of many collections of folk tales and songs, as well as being a central character in Donald Harington’s Butterfly Weed) and Richard Mercer Dorson for inspiration.
Most of the folk tales are brief. Many are humorous. Several fit in the genre of “rural legend” (as opposed to urban legend) though a handful also come from much older traditions that could be traced back to slavery, for example the “Big John” stories, which are essentially re-imaginings of “trickster” tales like the Anansi the Spider stories with the spider morphed into Big John, a slave who battles wits against Master. Another version of these stories would be the Br’er Rabbit stories from the Uncle Remus collection by Joel Chandler Harris and others. One example of this would be “Why Old Master’s Favorite Slave Was Killed,” which is a dark story about Old Master’s greed. “I don’t want nobody to fool with my treasure. I’m on bury it right here. And you got to be the one to see nobody bothers it,” Master says to John (pg. 75). The way he accomplishes this is by murdering the slave and burying him with the money in order to ‘curse it.” This is a telling commentary on the fruits of slavery and their karmic ramifications.
Many of the rural legend stories involve hauntings or encounters with magical creatures. “A Slip of Paper” tells the story of two girls who go to a fortune teller named Miss Mamie. Mamie tells one girl her future and writes the other’s down on a piece of paper with instructions “not to open it till she got to her destination.” On the way home, they have a wreck and the one girl dies. On the slip of paper was written “No Future” (pg. 20). “Shamefaced” gives hints on how to deal with a “midnight-colored panther: all you got to do is look him dead in his green eyes. He’ll put his paw up over them like they was stolen emeralds.” (pg. 7).
There’s a kind of poetry to many of these stories, and Brownderville has included a few examples of his own poetry inspired by folk tales as well. Brownderville has done a real service, here, chronicling these stories. Not only do they make for simply interesting reading, but they give us a real insight into the culture of rural, Southeast Arkansas. These storytellers are clever and funny, creative and unwilling to let themselves be restrained into a boring, 3-dimensional world. Perhaps there’s no such thing as ghosts. Okay. But isn’t it so much more interesting to, for even a moment, entertain the possibility? These stories entertain the possibility of not only ghosts, but all sorts of other supernatural and even commonplace things that our current overly-advertised world lacks. Also, living in the information age means that we all are inundated by the same information. Brownderville has given us a glimpse into a community that has managed to hold on to some of their own stories. He’s given us hope that things like folktales can survive without being internet memes. For that, we owe him a debt of thanks.
-CL Bledsoe
I had heard of a book by the Arkansas poet Greg Brownderville – a collection of folk tales from his hometown of Pumpkin Bend and the surrounding Woodruff County (right next door to my own, native Cross County) Arkansas, published by the now defunt Doodlum Brother Press, but it eluded me like the Fouke Monster (the Arkansan version of Bigfoot popularized in the Legend of Boggy Creek movies you may have seen on MST3K). Now, the Butler Center in Little Rock has put out a beautiful revised edition including artwork from folk artist Billy Moore. Brownderville credits not only the residents who shared these stories with him but also folklorists such as the legendary Vance Randolph (author of many collections of folk tales and songs, as well as being a central character in Donald Harington’s Butterfly Weed) and Richard Mercer Dorson for inspiration.
Most of the folk tales are brief. Many are humorous. Several fit in the genre of “rural legend” (as opposed to urban legend) though a handful also come from much older traditions that could be traced back to slavery, for example the “Big John” stories, which are essentially re-imaginings of “trickster” tales like the Anansi the Spider stories with the spider morphed into Big John, a slave who battles wits against Master. Another version of these stories would be the Br’er Rabbit stories from the Uncle Remus collection by Joel Chandler Harris and others. One example of this would be “Why Old Master’s Favorite Slave Was Killed,” which is a dark story about Old Master’s greed. “I don’t want nobody to fool with my treasure. I’m on bury it right here. And you got to be the one to see nobody bothers it,” Master says to John (pg. 75). The way he accomplishes this is by murdering the slave and burying him with the money in order to ‘curse it.” This is a telling commentary on the fruits of slavery and their karmic ramifications.
Many of the rural legend stories involve hauntings or encounters with magical creatures. “A Slip of Paper” tells the story of two girls who go to a fortune teller named Miss Mamie. Mamie tells one girl her future and writes the other’s down on a piece of paper with instructions “not to open it till she got to her destination.” On the way home, they have a wreck and the one girl dies. On the slip of paper was written “No Future” (pg. 20). “Shamefaced” gives hints on how to deal with a “midnight-colored panther: all you got to do is look him dead in his green eyes. He’ll put his paw up over them like they was stolen emeralds.” (pg. 7).
There’s a kind of poetry to many of these stories, and Brownderville has included a few examples of his own poetry inspired by folk tales as well. Brownderville has done a real service, here, chronicling these stories. Not only do they make for simply interesting reading, but they give us a real insight into the culture of rural, Southeast Arkansas. These storytellers are clever and funny, creative and unwilling to let themselves be restrained into a boring, 3-dimensional world. Perhaps there’s no such thing as ghosts. Okay. But isn’t it so much more interesting to, for even a moment, entertain the possibility? These stories entertain the possibility of not only ghosts, but all sorts of other supernatural and even commonplace things that our current overly-advertised world lacks. Also, living in the information age means that we all are inundated by the same information. Brownderville has given us a glimpse into a community that has managed to hold on to some of their own stories. He’s given us hope that things like folktales can survive without being internet memes. For that, we owe him a debt of thanks.
-CL Bledsoe
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