I discovered Joe Meno earlier this year, reading Demons in the Spring and later on Bluebird Used to Croon in the Choir. Both are collection of short stories, which I loved.

Meno isn’t new to novel writing, though this most recent book is the first novel of his I’ve read. I was curious about what reading a novel set in the recent, painful, disturbing and now history of the Bush White House years would be like — it seems there are so very many ways it could go wrong. I almost didn’t want to see him tackle something I imagined would be so easy to screw up, because of all the ways Meno’s stories usually go right.

I find giant squid fascinating. Not to the keeping the real world at a distance degree that Jonathan Casper does, but still. I can imagine pouring all uncertainty into an obsession. So Jonathan has his squid, his wife has her strangely violent lab pigeons, his daughters have their religious freakouts and political schemes, and his dad tries to escape from the facility he’s in.

No risk, no reward. Meno risks in this novel — he examines a family trying to be functional in its own way, but of course failing as often as not, because that is what real families do. The Casper family isn’t all that likeable, either. One of the things this book is about, after all, is cowardice.

At four hundred pages, the book is roomier than the stories are. Room to wander and obsess and explore how the hell things are going wrong, and just maybe, how they could go right.

The stories in this collection — and there a lot of ‘em, two dozen in about two hundred pages — reveal over and over the impossibility of real people’s lives. Our lives, only not exactly us, just us enough to recognize, wonder, and wince.

Many of them have the kind of weirdness that comes from supposing “what if?” the world really did work just a little bit differently, and you could go streetfishing, names disappeared, and dictionaries lied. In “The Summer Without Grown-Ups” the narrator’s dad falls apart, his friend comes to visit and winds up with girl he liked… and his grandmother has turned into a bird. There are other kinds of stories too, ones that play by real world rules (the unexplainable pain of fathers in “Wind”, the not right but not bizarrely wrong husband in “Valentine”).

I found the ones somewhere in the middle most fascinating. The title story is one of those — it reveals just how enormous the unsayable can grow between married folks, the size of a real elephant. “B Positive” is another, with its love, revenge, mayhem, and bears. A husband invites all the men his wife has had affairs with over to their house for two weeks instead of going away on vacation in “Green” and they all show up.

Not all of Czyzniewjewski’s characters are likeable (the wife in “Sleepmurder” comes to mind) but they are all interesting. The narrator in “Finding My Werewolf Mask in the Hide-a-Bed, July 4, 1994″ is a jackass, but the bitterness at the end of his story is still strikes a chord:

“Everyone figures out, sooner or later, that you should just blow the rocket off as soon as you get it, that you can always get another rocket, and even if you don’t, you’ll live. That things never really change because of a special day, of anything you’ve waited for, because of some pretty light up in the sky.”

I may be sorry I’m starting down this metaphorical path, but I think if Czyzniewjewski’s language were a kind of orange juice, it would be pulpy. He’s playful, but not fussy. He’s the fresh-squeezed real deal, not the pasteurized stuff, even if his characters are mostly the type who’d get regular OJ on sale at the grocery store, maybe in a frozen can of condensed Minute Maid. For example, “Hapax Legomenon” (see, playful) opens with this line: “The last thing I remember before blacking out was the phantom opossum pissing on my leg.” (Not fussy.) In that story, a would-be golf course owner/heir is repeatedly beaten up by the go-cart guys.

I really enjoyed reading this collection. It’s different. That’s fitting, given how many of the stories are about wishing things were different, but not completely devoid of crazy bursts of hope.

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Note: It bugged me I had no idea how to pronounce this guy’s name. I knew I was just doing murder to it in my head. Turns out, you say it Chiz-ny-EV-ski.

In one of those chains of connected reading, I decided to look for this book after reading things Matt Bell said about Evenson; I was reading Bell’s website because I really liked his story in Monkeybicycle 6.

Evenson writes intensely creepy, very good stories. Warped and wrong and probably the sort of thing you shouldn’t read after dark if you are alone, but of course if you have the book around, and you’ve already started it, you will.

You won’t actually regret it, but you might not sleep well on account of the paranoia, post-apocalyptic grimness, violence, or general unease. Evenson does reveal a sense of humor amid the horror, though. Opening lines like the one from “Invisible Box” are evidence of, if not a laugh out loud funny, a twisted but also kind of ha-ha funny: “In retrospect, it was easy for her to see it had been a mistake to have sex with a mime.”

As a collection, it is a dark, intriguing mix. A man’s brain causes his power of speech to fail, but that is only the obvious communication problem in “Mudder Tongue”. The “Girls in Tents” have been left alone, together, in the aftermath of their parents’ split. There are publishing industry workers acting like monsters (“Ninety Over Ninety”) as well as an actual monster (“Wander”) and this gets at what I found most fascinating in reading the stories — how anything, any possibility, seemed to be on the table, equally real, compelling attention and belief. That’s a hell of thing to be able to do.

The stories aren’t easy because they make you think, and that’s one of the best things I can say about a short story collection.

It seems sensationalist to mention sex, twins, and midgets… but I just did. Yes, they are all mentioned, and two out of three are star characters and a recurring story topic. It may seem even more strange to say the stories in this issue really aren’t lurid, but really they aren’t. Not even the story where the guy’s wang wants to be an astronaut.

Well, not lurid in a bad way.

You probably just figured out whether or not Monkeybicycle is for you. I hope it is, because it has lots of good stories in it. The sort that are painful in a good way, with things that made me wince, that I couldn’t believe but of course believed and kept turning pages.

The writers in Monkeybicycle were all new to me. I’ll certainly be on the lookout for more work from many of them. My favorites were:

• The opening story, “Gum Gutter” by Martha Clarkson. It’s about going for a walk on Thanksgiving, family bullshit, and a fake cop.
• Corey Mesler’s “From the Desk of Jojo Self” defines resistentialism, includes disappearing manuscripts, an eccentric shut-in and his blonde sexy neighbor, improbable events, amazing success… and yet.
• “Valentine” by Mike Czyzniejewski reveals the insane thinking of a guy whose wife’s annual gynecologist appointment is on February 14th.
• Drew Jackson’s “After Spaulding” evokes Gatsby, and is full of something-is-not-right here humid jungle wickedness.
• “The Girls of Channel 2112” by Matt Bell has, in the unlikely event you can’t guess from the title, the twins, sex, and a midget reference in the opening line. The unlikely part isn’t the webcam, but the high school crush revisited, the heartbreak, and how real these impossible people are.

I’m looking forward to the next issue.

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Note
Lucky me: PANK magazine gave me a two-issue subscription to Monkeybicyle, this is the first issue. I follow them on twitter, and if you are into this kind of thing, I recommend following them, and of course Monkeybicycle too.

The authors have turned the notion of “this is going on your permanent record” on its head: what’s on your record is something to embrace, not fear. You should seek to embrace and expose — help write your own record. Comments are open.

Given how long we’ve used the metaphor of paper for the web (it’s all pages, right?) it’s not that surprising. Chris and Julien (their tone is so conversational and approachable, referring to them by last name seems wrong and oddly distancing) make sense. They offer encouragement and practical advice about using social tools, but they don’t walk you through every step, just the key points.

That’s what I want to focus on, the (for me) key points in the book:

“Writing everything online, where it is eternally visible to everyone, forever, has value.” It’s an opportunity — even if only a few people see it, to “build up influence”. And it scales: you write once, post it online, and it becomes discoverable and infinitely shareable.

It’s not about being perfect, it’s about being human. “Since most of the Web isn’t trying to complete a transaction (things like spam not withstanding), people have the tendency to feel closer to each other there. People speak like humans on their blogs … Though it’s a part of trust many don’t take into consideration, intimacy is one of trust’s most powerful elements.”

The importance of being a real person online shouldn’t be obscured by the network: “Social networking is not about getting attention for attention’s sake, but rather about being a part of the network, making other people aware that you are there — and that you’ll be there in the future, too.” This reminds me of my favorite definition of community — you are part of community if they’ll go looking for you if you are missing.

So, it’s a philosophy of altruism. Self-interested altruism? “… helping others is probably one of the most effective ways of helping yourself. By spreading ideas that help others, you get credit and people get the help they need. It’s win-win. What a change from the scarcity mentality most people live with everyday, isn’t it? And that’s one of the best things about the social web; people are deeply interested in sharing with each other.”

All this new stuff — twitter, facebook, LinkedIn, blogging, etc. — is disruptive. What it is disrupting is an artificial way of doing things. We have the ability to move away from the old permanent records you feared because you couldn’t see or control them, and transparently write our own. As Chris and Julien put it, “Why we trust people is the same; it’s only the ways we come to be trusted that have been changing. And that’s because communication has been changing.”

That’s the philosophy. The book offers a framework for action based on it. There’s six pieces to it:

• Make Your Own Game Decide which rules are relevant, and which ones you need to create for yourself.
• One of Us Act like you belong, and you will. You do.
• Archimedes Effect Leverage. Understand it, how to use it.
• Agent Zero Have a wide network, by connecting with several smaller groups.
• Human Artist Treat people right, always.
• Build Armies Think you don’t scale? You do if you can train, inspire, and lead others.

I think the framework is solid because it isn’t based on the latest and greatest tech, but on behavior. By being mindful, paying attention to the right things, taking small actions that matter, staying in learning mode — that’s how to understand and take advantage of new tools, instead of being put off or baffled by them. They are preaching to the choir with a reader like me, though.

Their ideas may not appeal to everyone, but for folks trying to get their heads around how the current crop of web-based communication tools can help them, or working through what web 2.0 stuff means from a practical or business (vs technical) perspective, I highly recommend it. Anyone looking to be persuasive and use new/emerging tools should pick up Trust Agents. It has the virtue of seeming like common sense when you read it.