Re: Telling - Anthology of borrowed premises, stolen settings, purloined plots, and appropriated characters: How many times can Super Mario die? Did Borges visit Indiana, or did Indiana visit Borges?

Re: Telling, William Walsh, ed., Ampersand Books, 2011.




"How many times can Super Mario die? Did Borges visit Indiana, or did Indiana visit Borges? Does the devil drink milk and, if not, why does he like milkmaids so much? And where do our hero turtles go when there are no more foot soldiers to fight?

Welcome to Re:Telling, the anthology that answers these burning questions, and many, many more. This collection of fiction, poetry, and art features some of the independent publishing world s favourite, most talented writers using recycled material: purloined plots, stolen settings, borrowed premises, and appropriated characters. It is subversion; it is homage. It is a ransacking of the treasure troves in our cultural basement, and nothing is off limits. The stories range from retellings of Shakespeare to Law & Order, from classical theatre to video games. Each piece is something picked up and dusted off, reworked and made new.

Featuring:

Matt Bell Alicia Gifford Michael Martone Daniel Grandbois Darcie Dennigan Peter Connors Jim Ruland Samantha Hunt Blake Butler Tom La Farge Shya Scanlon Pedro Ponce Crispin Best Erin Fitzgerald J. Bradley Molly Gaudry Steve Himmer Josh Maday Henry Jenkins Michael Kimball Corey Mesler Roxane Gay Timothy Gager Heather Fowler Joseph Riippi Wendy Walker Zachary Mason Curtis Smith Jeff Brewer Kathleen Rooney & Lily Hoang With original artwork by Teresa Buzzard!"


"There’s something for everyone in Re: Telling.*

*Disclaimer: By “everyone,” I mean anyone with an interest in 1) literature and/or 2) pop culture. I would also be remiss if I didn’t break these admittedly broad categories down even further. From column one, this collection of “borrowed premises, stolen settings, purloined plots, and appropriated character” offers fresh and frequently offbeat takes on Borges, Nabokov, Melville, Miller, Updike, Dickens, and Homer (among others). From column two, there’s material drawn from Super Mario Brothers involving a prolonged yet exuberant meditation on free will and grace (which isn’t to say free Will and Grace but self-determination and divine intervention). There’s also a behind the scenes look at what Desi and Lucy got up to when the cameras weren’t rolling, what it might be like to step into one of David Lynch’s dreams (or to have him step into one of yours), and what the guy in the Godzilla suit is like in person. Deserving special attention is a quirky piece outlining the only seven episodes of an imagined version of Law and Order titled Viewers Like Us, the premise of which is that in a desperate act of pandering to the Facebook generation, the producers of the Law and Order franchise create a show following the adventures of Law and Order fans. And, finally, from column three (which I didn’t even mention earlier!), there’s the fact that some of my favorite indie-press writers appear within the pages of this collection, including Curtis Smith (The Species Crown, Sound + Noise, Truth, and Witness) and Blake Butler (Scorch Atlas). All of this is to say that if you have an interest in any of these things, then you will likely find something of interest in this anthology. Hence “something for everyone.” - Small Press Reviews

"The premise and promise of Re: Telling are maybe more exciting than the execution could ever quite fulfill. Writers repurpose the plots, characters and settings of various in-the-ether cultural touchstones. The ever-playful Walsh (his 2009 book, Questionstruck, was written entirely of questions taken from Calvin Trillin’s New Yorker pieces) has assembled a slew of experimental authors to have at the source material, and for the most part, create something shiny and new.
In particular, one standout contribution comes from Chicago’s Tim Jones-Yelvington. In “Law & Order: Viewers Like Us,” Dick Wolf attempts to save his flagging flagship shows by crafting a program about the people who watch the various Law & Order iterations, based on the idea that millennials are “more engaged by their own television-watching habits than by television itself.” The story then walks the reader through treatments of the first few episodes, in which we watch Simon Smith watch Law & Order. Though the piece is filled with very funny social satire, Jones-Yelvington also manages to craft a well-told story about Simon.
Several of the stories seem content simply to ape the source material for a gag, or vaguely gesture at it. The success of “Viewers Like Us” depends on a cultural critique of the actual show, and the most fully realized pieces present here (like Roxane Gay’s “Alias: The Complete Series,” and Jim Ruland’s “Jack and Jill”) multitask beautifully: telling their own story while bringing new meaning to an old tale." - Jonathan Messinger

"The subtitle summarizes the gimmick here, as does Matt Bell’s opener, a story wherein the plumber Mario (the one who is plagued by turtles, who “kills with his ass”) ponders the nature and motivations of God, this deity being, explicitly, one with a pocketful of quarters and the ability either to press Continue or to walk away. On the one hand, the project of this book is familiar ground. Revisions of fairy tales are the stuff of undergrad writing assignments decades back, source for countless poetry collections and critical polemics. And, yes, here we have a mournful Paul Bunyan, revenge as plotted by Humpty Dumpty’s brother, a radically truncated “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” But this is an anthology, too, of a certain subset of young writers, and the retellings here have that flavor, too, the taste of performance. We are given a revised history of ABBA, and we can almost hear the audience laughing in whatever bar such a story might have been first read.
The same holds true of a retake of “I Love Lucy” full of fornication, gonorrheal infections of the throat, female friends bonding over food. Another story reexamines one of the classical texts of female friendship as, instead, a threshing floor of sexual jealousy. Of Ruth’s famous declaration to Naomi (“wherever you go, I will go … Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God,” etc.), we are told “She would come to regret this decision almost immediately.”
What saves this volume from succumbing to smugness of forgetability is the strength of its writing. There are revisions that stab through the heart of the original, like Shya Scanlon’s hilarious “Tropic of Candor,” which imagines Henry Miller as a virgin, raiding his mother’s liquor cabinet and instant messaging into the night. “I know I said I’d ream out every wrinkle of your cunt, and I wanted to, for realz.” Yet there are also stories that stand as stories, regardless of the framework. Molly Gaudry gives us a brief, painful picture of childhood—of, specifically, two siblings dumping a dead pet frog into a river. Joseph Riippi gives us a high school student fantasizing about his blind English teacher. “Does she read enough to build calluses?” he wonders, contemplating his own calluses, which come from fantasies like this: “She reaches with antennae arms; her calluses feel wet face, open eyes. She reads to him from his acne.” Crispin Best (in the process of reimagining the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters) gives us a lonely creature who used to date a girl who “did all the recordings that play on the number 11 tram, the ones that say the name of the next stop.”
Most days Krang buys a ticket and just rides around on the number 11 tram.
Krang listens to her voice saying the names of the stops and sits there and tries to be calm.
He listens to her voice and scrolls through old text messages on his phone.
Then there are those pieces that explicitly reflect on the process of retelling, on the role familiar stories and characters play in our lives, how we embody them. Tim Jones-Yelvington presents yet another Law & Order spin-off, this one geared to theories about the “millenials”—that “self-referential generation”—as a potential market. “In the criminal justice system, there are the police who investigate crimes,” the show begins, “and the viewers who watch television shows about their investigations. These are the stories of viewers like us.” The chronicle that follows, episode by episode, parodies fandom’s obsession with pull quotes and trivia as well as that brand of intellectual inquiry inspired by fandom (think Stanley Fish on The Fugitive, only think of some slacker checking the chiming windows on a social networking site during the commercial breaks in the show). “In this episode,” reads one summary,
Jools engages Simon in a critical conversation about Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in which she attempts to deconstruct their mutual fascination with the series. Jools says that by producing the same anxieties it allays, the series is complicit in the so-called ‘culture of fear.’ According to Jools, this ‘culture of fear,’ which exploits middle America’s terror of urban crime, has enabled the United States to incarcerate more citizens than other ‘First World’ nations do, while establishing the construction and operation of prisons as profit-generating enterprises.
Soon these characters, their “viewers like us,” are embroiled in their own drama, mixing incest and incarceration and a brutal dose of sexual violence. A different twist on the conventions of fandom frame the contribution from Henry Jenkins, who presents commentary—as a scholar of such phenomenon—on his own attempt at slash fan fiction, in this case a brilliant re-engagement with the text of A Christmas Carol. “Every line in this scene comes directly from the novel,” Jenkins writes,
What I was doing here was recontextualizing Dicken’s (sic) original language to offer up an alternative interpretation of what the characters might have been thinking—this integration of original dialogue and internal monologue is a common literary device in fan fiction. I was rewriting it for the purpose of critical commentary and in the process, I was trying to include as many elements from the original novel as possible while offering explanations for the character issues which have long concerned literary critics writing about the book.
Scrooge, for instance, “always found excuses to prolong” that time he spent at the office, making money but also spending time with Marley.
The variety of engagement with retelling as act and idea makes this an exciting and intriguing volume. While Jenkins works within the pre-existing text to explain its logic, the emotional motivations of the characters, another of the best stories here takes as its pretext such a skeletal outline of a narrative—the story of “Jack and Jill”—that its author, Jim Ruland, has remarkable freedom to invent. Given a boy, a girl, an eventual fall, a tumbling after, all the other aspects—in this case, Amsterdam, drugs, the sex trade—are so much delicious detail, spun out like cotton candy, what the Dutch call, more menacingly, sugar-spider. This is the treat of retelling—and of RE: Telling—the startling juxtaposition, the blandly familiar suddenly made dangerously new." - Spencer Dew

"Some of them are renditions of tall tales:
You could hear his heart breaking like thunder. And I don’t mean “like thunder” the way a poet might mean it, no, I mean it actually sounded like thunder because he was just that damn big. And his heart was that much bigger. There’s nothing poetic about a man that size falling apart, not for the folks down below who may as well live in the shadow of a dam held together by cracks. (“Big Blue,” Steve Himmer)
Some of them are interpretations of video game characters:
The plumber always dies with the same surprised look on his face, his mouth hanging open as he flies upward through the air before being born again at the beginning of the world. He’s tiny and frightened without his mushrooms and his fireballs, desperately banging his head against blocks, looking for more. Sometimes, between reincarnations, the plumber thinks he senses God trying to decide whether to give him another chance or to just bag the whole thing. (“Mario’s Three Lives,” Matt Bell)
But all of them, as the subtitle of RE: Telling indicates, have their place in this “anthology of borrowed premises, stolen settings, purloined plots, and appropriated characters.” With a lineup as diverse as Michael Martone, Roxane Gay, Heather Fowler, Corey Mesler, Alicia Gifford, Tim Jones-Yelvington, Molly Gaudry, and Pedro Ponce, among others, you know it has to be good. And it is.
Some of the pieces are more experimental and fun to piece together, like Michael Martone’s short, “Borges in Indiana” (don’t miss the sorta-metacommentary piece by Josh Maday, “Distractus Refractus Ontologicus: The Dissemination of Michael Martone”) and others are hilarious re-interpretations of familiar characters, like the couples from I Love Lucy in Alicia Gifford’s “Desilu, Three Cameras.”
At one point, Jack and Jill spring to life, go to Amsterdam, live life on the edge, and end up broken (and broke) (“Jack and Jill,” Jim Ruland). The writing provides here, like in some of the most effective tales in the collection, fully realized characterization with the author at a complete remove, yet somehow those Lucille Balls and Marios are at the same time reflections of our own imperfect selves. The less effective stories in the collection are too abstract, bordering on indecipherable, but even those have their fun moments.
Josh Maday’s “Distractus Refractus Ontologicus: The Dissemination of Michael Martone,” is a signal story of the anthology. It is both postmodernist anthemic and a refraction of the entirety of the collection, just as “this Michael Martone may in fact be that and/or the other Michael Martone--Michael Martone the locksmith, the winemaker, the writer, the judge, the hockey player, the teacher; the fourth grader staring at the mirror reflecting the image of Michael Martone back into Michael Martone, where Michael Martone is appropriated, refracted, disseminated.” The collection likewise refracts and distorts the original stories as they interpreted, re-purposed, and framed anew.
Overall, the collections’s stories are well-selected and cohesive as an anthology. And P.S. “The Plot to Kidnap Stonehenge” by Corey Mesler is hilarious, especially for anyone who’s read the Arthurian legends." - Cynthia Reeser