Tag: Books

John Dies At The End by David “Dave” Wong (pseudonym for Cracked.com editor Jason Pargin) is a novel that one would expect to be the output of an author hallucinating on acid, yet still have enough coherence to write jokes. The story is a written as a first-person narrative set in Undisclosed, Midwest America from the perspective of Dave who is recounting incidents he has lived through to a skeptical journalist. He, along with his friend John, meet a Jamaican drug dealer Robert Marley (but of course) who gets them get them on a drug that goes by the name Soy Sauce which makes them hallucinate and gives them super-enhanced sensory perceptions – the ability to see ghosts, among other things.

The book is steeped in demonology and mythology, with a narrative arc loosely centred around an evil malevolent deity known as Korrok who is trying to open a portal from his dimension into our world. But wait! Before I loose you to thinking that this book is some kind of Lord of the Rings-style fantasy (and/or that I play Dungeons & Dragons in my basement) let me stop you right there: this book’s genre is best described as satirical horror. The tone of the story throughout is the kind of playfully satirical humour made so popular by Douglas Adams (think Dirk Gently rather than Hitchhiker‘s). Think Ghostbusters meets Sherlock Holmes meets The Sixth Sense meets Monty Python.

David Wong doesn’t shy away from gore either with very graphic descriptions, making the horror elements work. What I liked particularly about the style of writing is that he also describes sounds, textures, and smells (without getting too distracted by them that it gets in the way of the story) that make the narrative come alive. The characters are colourful too: “shadow people”, a seemingly immortal dog, the aforementioned “Robert” Marley, Detective “Morgan Freeman” Appleton, frequent appearances by Fred Durst of Limp Bizkit…among many others.

There aren’t many books in which you will get to read anything along the lines of ‘The phrase “sodomized by a bratwurst poltergeist” suddenly flew through my mind’ and find yourself alternating between terror and laughter. John Dies At The End is perhaps the most insane book I have read, and I mean that in a good way.

I’ve never understood the ‘point’ behind haiku in English. Conceptually, I can grasp the idea that it’s just another form of poetry with its own rules – in this case, the restricting yourself to 17 syllables. (I’m referring to the looser form of haiku in English that isn’t necessarily associated with seasons and metaphors.) What I don’t get is how one can definitively count ’17 syllables’ for the purposes of haiku. I consider that in English the number of syllables in any given word can be ‘variable’ depending on what dialect of English it’s spoken in, unlike other tonal languages such as Japanese where the number of syllables for any character is fixed. What, then, is the bleeping point of haiku with this straitjacket if not just an exercise in control – and in showing off?

That is, until I read an excellent essay The Heart of Haiku  by Jane Hirshfield (exclusive to Amazon Kindle readers as a Kindle Single) which explains the essence of haiku through the life and work of Matsuo Bashō. I highly recommend this as a read if you like haiku / poetry, or even if you don’t because Hirshfield does such a good job of demonstrating how haiku is tied to higher concepts of Zen Buddhism and how the beauty of much of haiku gets lost in translation.

There’s one Bashō haiku that particularly stood out for me in its ingenuity.

looking exactly like
blue flag iris: blue flag iris
inside the water’s shadow

kakitsubata nitari ya nitari mizu no kage

I’ll let Hirshfield explain how ingenious this poem is in her own words:

The main point in the original Japanese is the poem’s mirroring construction: the two identical words at the haiku’s center replicate both visually and in sound what is being described. In Japanese, which is written vertically the visual onomotopoeia [sic] is even more clear; a small “cutting-word”, ya, creates the slim line of water dividing the flower stem’s two apparently equal stems.

That’s just brilliant, innit?! I desperately want to look at the original Japanese version now to see how magical this looks. (I’ve tried searching online for this, without success. I’d appreciate it if someone can post a link in the comments section if you do find it.)

I have an incredibly love-hate relationship with poetry in general. When it’s done right and is clever – like the example above – I can appreciate it and enjoy it. I also think that a poem should, in its own way, tell a story; perhaps that’s why The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is by far my most favourite poem. (The other reason being this poem is a major plot point in Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.)

What really turns me off from poetry sometimes is the sense of entitlement that poets and poetry lovers have, as if prose is somehow ‘easier’ to write or ‘worse’ at expressing thoughts and feelings. Good longform prose is hard to write and edit, just as clever poetry isn’t easy to write. Well-written poetry can be used to communicate complex feelings of a poet, but sometimes, poetry is merely used as a shortcut to writing less and yet still pretending that makes it better than prose that runs into a similar number of lines.