Thursday, March 8, 2012

According To Google, Ben Marcus Is Not Related To Peter Marcus: a review of two reviews


Ben Marcus wrote a book that I want to read. I usually don't like to read books unless they're going to be made into movies, or they they are TV shows called Friday Night Lights, or they are poetry. I don't think any of those things apply to Ben Marcus's book, The Flame Alphabet. What made me want to read a book that will not be a movie and is not a Friday Night Lights and is probably not strictly poetry? It was this awesome review on The New Inquiry. Just the quote from the article on their tumblr made me want to rub my face in the open pages of this book:
Certain forms of discourse — realist novels and poems, the bureaucratic dialects of authority and business — have been eroded and rendered meaningless, or they are obstacles put in place by power to preserve itself.
Right??? Makes you want to punch yourself in the face/genitals for getting an MFA/writing anything that doesn't have long strings of vowels inserted into the text according to the golden ratio or the actual ratios of my body or just white letters printed on white paper or write anything at all ever again ever. I wish I could say something smart about things people write. I really do. Instead I only relate to smart things people say with feelings or with other things.

So, read another review, at The Lit Pub about We Make Mud, a book out by Dzanc, that has some language that sounds pretty fresh and new and it made me wonder, what would the main character of Flame Alphabet think of Peter Marcus's We Make Mud? These are books I have not read (again, neither are Friday Night Lights or Hunger Games or poetry), so I don't know. It seems he would love it, as an attempt to create new, less toxic language (as it feels sort of antiquated or out of sync with normed language usage), or would hate it, find it toxic like his daughter's language. Has anyone read both of these books? More importantly, is google wrong; are these two authors related? I mean, they don't really look like each other, but still...

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