Tim Lieder

20. Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre by Tim Lieder - Back when I was in my 20s I was obsessed with two very stupid ideas - I was a genius writer and I needed to get published asap. I was partially disabused of this notion when I gave the first chapter of my novel in progress (Let's Live Suddenly Without Thinking - let's all enjoy that title. Best part of the book and I stole it from e.e. cummings) for his zine and then read the thing. I read it while I was working in the comic book store where he put all the free copies. I fucking hated everything that I wrote. There was a third stupid idea and that was the one where I should imitate Stephen King and write 2000 words a day, put it in a drawer and then revise six months later. It took me a long time to get to my current standard of "write write wait a bit write edit seriously edit steal some stuff if I'm stuck, etc. and then when done with the first draft keep editing until it's ready. And when is it ready? When I am editing and going "yeah, I like this." Two edits minimum. More.

Anyhow, call this book the "Tim realizes he's terrible at something - the editing edition." Ok, fast forward to my 30s and I'm a failure in every way that I was judging myself by with barely a "Henry Miller didn't publish until he was in his late 30s" to make me feel better about myself. I was still unpublished. Mostly. I might have had a couple things published in non-paying markets but as livejournal writers pointed out, that doesn't count. So I tried self-publishing in a way that wasn't admitting that it was self-publishing.

The story I wanted to include in this anthology was called "Shivering at the Homecoming Dance" where a lonely teenage boy based on me when I was a lonely teenage boy (watching fellow teenagers making out on the dance floor during one of the slow songs) and then going outside and finding out that a girl that considered him a friend (but whom he didn't care for because she annoyed him) was suicidal and how he learned all the wrong lessons from that encounter. I'm just saying that this story still has potential and I might return to it one of these days but not yet.

Ok. So this is the anthology that turned me into a publisher. It wasn't supposed to happen like that. It was supposed to be a team effort with a friend who was publishing his poetry under his independent press. It was also supposed to make a ton of money from royalty only (I was very stupid) and I was going to put my friends in it and it would be amazing. Only I was doing all the work. I was reading the slush pile (I like to advise people who want to put out anthologies or whatever to offer money, not just for the writers but also writers who actually send stories to no pay markets are not the best writers. Some are inexperienced. Others are just bad. Some are sending reprints and just want to expand their audience). Then I was editing the stories and working with the writers and by the end I had to start my own press and put this one out.

It sucks. I only read this book because I was doing tumblr reviews of the Stories of John Cheever and the chapters of the Book of Job and I figured I had my own book so why not review the stories like a writer from another anthology reviewed all the stories.

And I wanted to like it. I wanted to read through it and think "Well it's pretty rough but it really shows potential" but a lot of it was just bitter and nasty. There were some cute stories in there but those came from accidents like when I lost a friend (and the friend's story) and wanted another woman in that slot and a friend of a friend had something she wanted published. I seemed to like stories about tiny monsters being smartasses as I published two of them - one is a Scottish magic crab and the other one is an imaginary pig that keeps saying "wants to get into her knickers". But mostly there's a cruelty running through these stories. I think I was very much into noir at the time.

The better stories feel like sketches, like they could be the first chapters of pretty cool books if the writers ever return to them. Like the first one seems like the first pages of a zombie apocalypse book before anyone really knows what is going on. There's another one about a guy killing clowns. Are they actually evil clowns or is this guy just a psycho? Who knows?

So there you go - Teddy Bear Cannibal Massacre - a book that even its editor doesn't care for.

21. UFO in Her Eyes by Xiaolu Guo - I think this was a movie first. It's one of the her more experimental books but it's not terribly experimental. It's a series of interviews between two Beijing agents and the residents of a town where a woman swears that she saw a UFO. The woman also rescued a tourist on that same day and the tourist sent a gratitude check of $2000 to the village to thank them. And then things go very bad very fast. Because the village has money, suddenly there are dozens of projects that all sound great until you take the villagers into account as they are losing their businesses and their fishing spots and their rice fields.

Like damn, how is it that China can combine the worst aspects of capitalism and Communism? It's like a Republican wet dream. No oversight for business but a lot of shit coming at you for any expression that isn't cool with the CCP. Still, this book was originally published in China and so was the film, so some amount of criticism and parody is fine.

Anyhow, this is the kind of social parody that you might find in the beginning of the Industrial Age (Dickension!) where a little bit of industrialization just ruins everything for the people who were mostly happy in their current state. The book ends with riots and the one interviewer gets killed while the head of the town gets fired but the UFO statues is still there, as is the Olympic sized pool that is supposed to be there for the Olympics team to train. No one really needs the pool locally so maybe it will work better. And the pond where the one guy caught all his fish - it's polluted and disgusting.

This is a fascinating book of a slow moving disaster where a couple of things that were meant to make things better turned everything worse in that unintended consequences way. I hesitate to endorse it wholly since it also sounds like a Republican talking point, like how they want to gut all the public schools in order to funnel money to private schools through their charter school and voucher bullshit. The "throwing good money after bad" argument. But the main issue isn't the money so much as what these people do with it when they aren't actually listening to anyone local.