First French Kiss and Other Traumas by Adam Bagdasarian

11th November, 2009 by Veronica - 3 Comments

I am wild about short stories.  I know some people aren’t, but for me an excellent collection of short stories is like drinking whiskey neat on a cold night–pleasing to all the senses.  To me, the most successful short stories are like the landscape of an anal retentive neighbor–shrubs are neatly pruned, flowers are planted in line with the pathway.  You can’t overindulge in a short story; if you do, it becomes a sopping mess.

The short story, for whatever reason, also lends itself to strange, sometimes dark humor, and quirky, unconventional plots and characters and literary experimentation.  Perhaps this is because maintaining a novel on such plots and characters would be like asking a reader to play board games for three days–a board game is a fine distraction for a few hours, but it’s not like these custom-made wooden jigsaw puzzles that can be any shape and number of pieces,* leading to days of delicious obsession.**

I am weird, so I like weird characters.  Flannery O’Connor, Borges, and Lydia Davis (can’t wait to own her collected!) are some of my favorite short story writers, but I also love Wharton, and as I mentioned previously, Margaret Atwood and Ray Bradbury, whose short stories are highly underrated.  In recent memory, I particularly enjoyed Hannah Tinti’s Animal Crackers, and if I may take a moment to recommend Kevin Wilson’s Tunneling to the Center of the Earth as a most excellent, contemporary collection of stories with all the delightfully twisted, peculiar characters one can ask for from a short story.

I admit I haven’t really thought about the short story form in YA literature–I suppose I always considered the short story to be a more “adult” genre, perhaps in particular as I consider the blurring of form between short story and prose poem.  Though now that I put my mind to it, I suppose the Wayside School series are short stories, though they might be technically catalogued as chapter books, and there are other chapter books like that.  Roald Dahl wrote short stories (though I don’t know if they’re considered children’s), as does David Levithan. There is, of course, J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard, which brings us to one of the earliest short story forms:  the fairy/folk tale.

Adam Bagdasarian’s First French Kiss and Other Traumas is a collection of short stories exhibiting the warmth, humor, and unique narrative perspective that I like in “adult” short story collection.  The collection follows one boy, Will, through his boyhood and adolescence.  Will is bluster and bravado hiding sensitivity and confusion, oddly self-aware and yet completely out of touch.  We experience Will’s defeats and small triumphs as a boy–the betrayals by an older brother, the awkward carelessness in breaking up with a girlfriend, the childhood luxury of believing one is destined for greatness, the fear and sadness of seeing the older brother going off to college, confronting the truth that change is uncontrollable, and loss is unforeseeable.

The collection achieves poignancy through its matter-of-fact, unassuming storytelling.  Will takes himself very seriously, and you, as a reader, can’t help but to do it too.  It’s a smart book that doesn’t underestimate its reader.  Will reminds us how when we remember, we are reremembering–our memories, like ourselves, are fallible, and each time we look upon the past, it becomes something different.  While Will is writing his past he is, in a way, writing his present as well.  This is a very adult thing for me to say; perhaps Will would’ve been smart enough to think this at fourteen, but I am certain I was too concerned over how I could afford the knee-high Doc Martens I wanted at the mall.  But I do believe that my fourteen-year-old self would’ve fallen a little in love with Will’s almost-impossible, over-analytical voice and his unintentional misadventures while just living a life.  Here is Will explaining his “life and times” at age ten:

I am a decade old and cannot win a game of Monopoly to save my life…I have lots of baby fat, which my brother sometimes grabs.  My mother assures me that sometime soon I will lose my baby fat and grow into my ears, which are large by most standards.  My brother calls me Dumbo.  I laugh because I have absolutely no vanity.  As proof of this, I continue to have my hair cut at Dan’s Snip and Curl…Although gregarious and extroverted, I have a very definite private world.  In this world I am a secret agent, a star athlete, a ladies’ man.  I move like a cat and have catlike reflexes.  However, after watching Damn Yankeeseight times in one week…I develop a crush on Gwen Verdon and begin to move less like a cat and more like a dancer.

How can you not love a boy like that?  A boy who becomes an adult who writes his memoirs in his twenties and opens it with a letter to the reader explaining why, after being urged by his mother and brother to write a collection based on his childhood, instead:

I sat down and began writing a very serious and consequential novel about a bartender in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and James Joyce.  The writing of this novel was such a trying and laborious process that I was convinced I was creating a masterpiece.

Will decides to write the collection because it was freeing, and easier, and enjoyable.  I thank Bagdasarian for reminding me that some things in life are hard, yes, but not everything in life has to be, and life’s doleful moments are steps away from joyful ones.

*Thanks to Jen for alerting me to these!

**OMG, I AM A BIG DORK.

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Amnesia of the Future: The Naked Now

11th November, 2009 by Christina - 3 Comments

Hmm, I’m not sure where to begin with the second episode other than to say that this episode is rather perplexing and that 1987 was a lot more progressive than I had realized–the second episode jumps pretty quickly to a ship of dead people in their birthday suits.  I’ve heard a bit about how Captain Kirk was a bit of a space-whore getting it on with every alien chick in a few gazillion light-years radius and quite possibly Captain Picard is going to be just as randy based on the fact that he’s talking to a phone sex operator.

As the away crew beams over to check out the party boat and finds evidence of a frat party, I think that we’re getting involved in some sort of Circe’s Island memory wipe.  That might have been a more interesting plot line by the way.  Anyhoo.  No raver thunkthunkthunk music is going on despite the earlier background noise as the two ships communicated and as more naked and nakeder bodies are revealed, there’s no bow-chica-bow-bow porn music either.  Reagan is contemplating whether or not she was an obtuse child for not picking up on the orgy that had clearly been going on or if she had just never seen this particular episode.

Technical question tangent:  when Riker and Data discover that a hatch has been blown open, a) why are they not sucked out themselves…you know, all that jazz about space loathing itself for being an Electrolux?,  b) wouldn’t an open door to space mean no air?  Shouldn’t they have hallucinated and then suffocated in a span of two minutes?,* and c) if all the people who are now dead are frozen from the open door, why is no one on the away team even shivering?

The drunken behavior that infects the crew of the Enterprise is just weird.  Like creepy weird.  Most of the background characters are just hanging on one another as if they’re on some bad E trip, the assistant engineer is acting like a five-year-old attempting to master Jenga and Wesley Crusher is speaking way too coherently for a drunken fourteen-year-old. In fact, he doesn’t seem much different from the his previous episode overly-exuberant puppynerd self.  Shouldn’t a normal drunk teenager be slurring and trying to get laid? 

Dear Wesley, I hope you enjoy being a virgin for the rest of your life.  You might want to start stocking up on pocket protectors now.

Other things that bother me:  Why does everyone else start feeling the effects of the infection so quickly except Riker?  Does he have some sort of crazy advanced immune system?  Captain Picard is ready for a quickie on the bridge almost instantly while Riker manages to get through a goodly amount of time playing electrician. 

I guess what’s really confusing is that I know very little about these characters.  Riker is obviously a decent fellow for not taking advantage of Troi when she throws herself at him, but what about the Tasha storyline?  I thought she was a lesbian and now she’s throwing herself at the first android that comes along?  Why is she so desperate–self-esteem issues?  How come Geordi–who should be the drunkest seeing as he was the first to be infected–manages such self control to be able to calmly return and then stay in the sickbay while everyone else is partying like it’s 1999?

Again, I have two favorite moments for this episode, although neither as profound as my favorite moments in Encounter at Farpoint.

Moment 1:  Picard’s little skip as he enters sickbay.  Beautiful and subtle bit of acting. 

Moment 2:  The Data/Tasha seduction scene is pretty memorable, but it’s when he returns to the bridge that really gets me.  Between this and the aforementioned Picard moment, it would seem strong physical acting really stands out in this episode for me.  Based on this scene alone, Data is well on his way to becoming my favorite character.  I have such an android crush.

Memories of the Future:  Chapter 3

I’m so smart!  Wil Wheaton also feels that this episode came too soon.  I definitely think that moving it back to a later spot in the season would have been a wise move and an opportunity to play with the repressed desires of the characters that would be bound to come out when intoxicated.

Wil Wheaton continues to take the obnoxiousness of Wesley in stride and with good humor.  I think I get why so many fans of the series were not fans of young Crusher.  But the use of a brainiac computer whiz-kid isn’t exactly a new plot device, even Jurassic Park had one.  When I was watching SeaQuest DSV, you had Lucas Wolenczak as the smart kid, but you see the differences in that the time-frame of the show was three decades after computers had moved from being clunky machines in the workplace to less clunky home units affording people of all ages to become self-taught experts.  By the time Star Trek takes place, 400 years into the future, everyone should have been growing up in a culture with regular access to far superior technology from birth.  Lucas was building a piece of equipment to give a dolphin a larger English vocabulary–not saving the ship.  You assume that on Star Trek the adults SHOULD be smarter than the teenager in this area based solely on the amount of experience that comes with age and the fact that someone put them in charge of an enormous space ship/city.  Then again, government nepotism and bribery will probably still be an issue far into the future.

To give Wesley some credit, as cars, planes, and later, rockets, computers, etc. were built, there have always been kids so obsessed and inquisitive that they set out to learn everything there is about them and become experts in their own right.  But to run a ship like the Enterprise, you expect your Chief Engineer to be able to circumvent even the smart kid’s science project to take back control of the engine room a lot faster than happened in The Naked Now.

What makes this chapter of Memories of the Future stand out for me is the inclusion of REAL SCIENCE! to explain what was going on/being said on the show.  The brief paragraphs on the physical properties of a star and what would happen during the collapse of one is written in an entirely understandable fashion for the lay person.  (By the way, if you’re into the star thing and haven’t done so yet, you might want to check out this article on the possibility of a third type of super nova that’s recently been discovered and could affect our knowledge of cosmic distance.)

*Look, I have fancy science facts too: 

Various minor problems (sunburn, possibly “the bends,” certainly some [mild, reversible, painless] swelling of skin and underlying tissue) start after ten seconds or so.  At some point you lose consciousness from lack of oxygen.  Injuries accumulate.  After perhaps one or two minutes, you’re dying. The limits are not really known.

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