I wanted to read this book because I thought Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs) would be the perfect person to channel McLuhan. Turns out he probably is, but that isn’t as entertaining or enlightening as I thought it would be.

Not that this is a bad book, it isn’t. Because Coupland is Coupland, this isn’t a straightforward biography. He imagines his way into McLuhan’s life and work, makes conjectures based on psychology, neuroscience, and a shared Canadian sense of space. He sprinkles zippy aphoristic McLuhan quotes throughout, such as:

A point of view can be a dangerous luxury when substituted for insight and understanding.

Art is anything you can get away with.

Innumerable confusions and a feeling of profound despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions.

We shape our tools, and afterwards our tools shape us.

It’s a service, really, pulling out these bits from McLuhan’s text, as apparently he is mostly unreadable. In other words, McLuhan’s writing is dense, obtuse, and seemingly unconcerned with clear narrative: it’s the sort of thing that academics and lawyers specialize in. In a footnote, Coupland concedes that “there exists little self-apprehended grasp of the man’s thinking” and compares reading him to visiting Antarctica, as you “have to have time, patience, endurance, means, and stubbornness to do so”.

This caused me to reflect on my time in graduate school theory seminars where discussion was frequently fueled by bullshit: it must be profound because I don’t really understand it, and I can’t admit I don’t understand it so I’ll insist on its profundity. My personal belief that you aren’t being revolutionary if only ten people sitting around a seminar table can understand you was not so popular in the English department. I probably would have been entertained at the first of McLuhan’s lectures, and hated the rest.

Wired lists McLuhan as a patron saint; his ground-breaking media theorizing is often — incorrectly — conflated with support of new technologies. He was intellectually ambitious, quite conservative, and it is possible that brain damage from strokes explains more about some of his later behavior and work than any textual analysis could.

If you think you should read McLuhan and haven’t, you are probably the intended audience for this book. If you’ve read him and wondered what the giant fuss is, perhaps this will provide context that gives meaning to the fuss. That McLuhan was creating a theory of media was new and different and important at one point, even if what he was doing wasn’t always obvious or understandable.

The title story in this collection is darkly funny and will be recognized as such by anyone who has spent time in cubeville. I liked this story the most.

It isn’t that everything was a let down after reading the first story. I was drawn to the workers in “The Bridge”, disturbed by the narrator in “I Run Every Day” and appreciated the un- and intentional humor in “Officers Weep”. “Somoza’s Dream” is by far the longest story in the book, and in it Orozco shows what he can do with shifting perspective, but it didn’t get to me the way some of the others did. Presidente in Exile’s story wasn’t as compelling to me as the bridge painter’s, or the warehouse worker’s, or the temp’s. Orozco has a knack for identifying grinding foolishness in the modern workplace.

I’ll be curious to see what else Orozco writes.

The weird vintage photographs on the book cover drew me in. They are compellingly weird: whole-head masks and a coiled tube; a sad, jacketed boy in a bunny costume, and an eerily doubled reflection among others. If you don’t think these photos sound interesting, you can safely skip this book and the rest of this post. If you do think it sounds interesting, you’re probably wondering if it is as good as it seems.

The story is good — there are more strange photographs, and secrets, and special abilities. If this sounds at all familiar, it must be because you’ve read some of the most popular young adult titles ever: not just Harry Potter, but Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, too. And it appears it will be the first in a series, as a bidding war for the movie rights resulted in the announcement of a sequel. (I believe the book is nearly always better, though if Riggs gets his wish and Tilda Swinton plays Miss Peregrine, I will definitely go see it in the theater.)

So it is a good story. I want to say the book is great, but the writing falls a bit short of the magic I’d want to feel to say it was great. (By way of comparison, I thought Catherynne M. Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making had that magic.) If you want a good story, are intrigued by monsters, or are curious to see how a writer weaves a story from found artifacts (the photographs are all real vintage images) you’d probably like this.

This book is what happened as a result of July’s struggling to finish the screenplay for what would become her second movie, The Future. Of the screenplay, she tells us:

Again and again it was respectfully suggested to me that I cut Paw-Paw’s monologue. But I couldn’t kill him twice, and I thought his voice might be the distressing, ridiculous, problematic soul of what I was trying to make. Not that my conviction protected me; it’s always embarrassing to pin a tail onto thin air, nowhere near the donkey It might be wrong, it sure looks like it is — but then again, maybe the donkey’s in the wrong place, or there are two donkeys, and the tail just got there first.

I suspect July is the kind of artist you either really like, or she bugs the shit out of you. Reasons she may bug you: she seems to get away with doing whatever she wants; she does more than one kind of thing (writing, directing, creating art installations); she creates characters who could use a good proverbial smack upside the head at times; she might be considered twee; the Paw-Paw mentioned above is a cat.

I like her. I loved her short story collection No one belongs here more than you. This book, while all about stories, isn’t fiction. July is telling the story of being stuck in one creative pursuit and what emerges are many other stories, often of people being somehow stuck in their lives.

She and her assistant and a photographer go meet people who are selling things in the PennySaver: these are the stories she hears as a result. The PennySaver is the poor internet-less person’s Craigslist. Through her, we meet people selling old blowdryers, photo albums, leather jackets, tadpoles. They are sad, strange, funny, a bit repulsive, heartbreaking. July reveals what she is really looking for, by finding them:

All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life — where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.

I think this is the reason I like Miranda July. I want to know the same thing.

I get irritated when I read yet another article about how short stories don’t sell. I no longer read much past the headlines of these pieces, because I think they are foolish. People love stories. We never get sick of good stories, we’ll listen to them over and over (and read them more than once, too). Ok, fine, most people probably don’t buy them in book form as often as I do, but that is really because most people don’t buy as many books as I do.

I liked this collection of stories. They have good pain in them, the kind of thing that you recognize and maybe wince when you read. Johnson writes about real life (“My Neighbor Doesn’t Remember Everything She Forgets”) in such a way that even when she is referencing a famous movie character (“The Real Mrs. Robinson Takes a Moment to Reconsider”) you know she is talking about real things not movie and tv things, and certainly not “reality” tv things. She’s also funny, but in the less obvious, not a laugh track kind of way (“Marriage”, “Dragons”).

Because some of the stories feel like a gut punch — can you say that and add “in a good way” or is that too weird? as generally speaking gut punches are not good things — I will be looking forward to her next collection.