University of Nebraska Press, 2022
Many authors have traveled and explored the out-of-doors, both in life and then in their books, proving themselves stalwart, audacious, even heroic; Andrew Farkas is not among them. He is brave enough to admit that the outdoors isn’t for him. Instead, in these essays Farkas reports on his bold explorations of a very different territory: the in-of-doors, the waiting rooms, kitchens, malls, bars, theaters, roadside motel rooms, and other places that feature temperature control, protection from rampaging predators, and a higher degree of comfort than can be found outside.
Farkas discovers that, just as the mannered and wonderfully (gloriously) artificial indoors influences us greatly, our lives are also controlled much more by fiction than by anything “real.” So come in out of the weather (it’s always terrible) and join the Great Indoorsman on his adventures, where he makes fun of pretty much everything, most of all himself.
"Ironic, joking, thoughtful, nostalgic, and moving, these lyric essays, reflections, lighthearted arguments, and odes meditate playfully on the peculiar human environments we discover indoors."—Hugh Sheehy, Full Stop Published On: 2022-05-20
"The Great Indoorsman is the work of a true craftsperson and the phrasing and structure feels akin to architecture, all lines, angles and inspired thinking, leavened with a pop culture and extended cultural knowingness that left me smiling and nodding my head throughout."—Ben Tanzer, litreactor.com Published On: 2022-08-17
“Absurdist and absurdly amusing, Andrew Farkas takes readers on a sublime tour through dive bars and coffeehouses, dilapidated movie theaters and dying malls. A doctor of knowledge, erudite but humble, Farkas creates an enchanting yet down-to-earth collection perfect for indoors, outdoors, or anywhere in between.”—Kathleen Rooney, author of Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey
“Andrew Farkas, the master renovator in these crafted and crafty essays, is the ultimate interior decorator of all things turned inside out. Here the reflections reflect infinite rooms where we are, at once, lost and found, found and lost with-in hallways of infinite with-in-ings.”—Michael Martone, editor of The Complete Writings of Art Smith, the Bird Boy of Fort Wayne
“Throughout this deliriously inventive collection, Andrew Farkas operates like a 1930s Rube Goldberg cartoon jalopy, nimbly galumphing through mundane worlds—a waiting room, a hamburger joint, Tuscaloosa. The elevated performance is grounded by a sincere, persistent question: Where is home?”—David Giffels, author of Barnstorming Ohio: To Understand America
There are too few champions of the indoors. The word itself has been sullied by incels and agoraphobes—malcontents and the discontented—connoting loneliness and isolation, despite its unassuming etymology. The indoors have languished in the cultural backwaters of nonfiction, pushed aside for the literally (literarily?) greener pastures of the travelogue, the naturalistic essay, and texts concerning Anthropocene. The Great Indoorsman seeks to remedy this concerning absence. In his kaleidoscopic collection of sixteen pinging essays, Andrew Farkas offers a fresh vision of the indoors, valiantly (and self-deprecatingly) rescuing the besmirched term with invention and hilarity. This is a book of yarns (stretched, spooled, and tangled) and we are compelled forward not only by that mercurial phenomenon of place and memory but by the pull of vivid characters. Trusted confidants, barroom strangers, and even imagined variations of the author himself make appearances, springing up like hostile replicants. All the while, Farkas, as guide, protagonist, and irreverent narrator makes for distinguished company, seeming to tap you on the shoulder and point toward the next oddity or intrigue.
Beginning with the beginning—a fragmented metanarrative as the opening essay—Farkas builds a working definition of the indoor/outdoor dichotomy and establishes his slippery, witty, and polytonal voice. We travel from dive bar to casino to failed camping trip, living unstuck through striking vignettes, receiving the undeterred wisdom of The Great Indoorsman, including fragmented texts from the figmented epic, The Indoorsiad, or The Epic of The Great Indoorsman. In one such aside, Farkas shares an anecdote about his accent—his European accent. Though he grew up in Ohio, a state less than notable for its indistinct vocal stylings, three relative strangers have all remarked that he has an accent associated with a continent containing 44 distinct countries. The humor and oddity of the interactions are then exploded into an amusing revelation, “Consequently, the outside exists in the same place as the European accent—both of them are vast liminal spaces defined by what they aren’t, rather than what they are, including the liminal space between existent and non-existent.” Funny and heady have never been such perfect pairs.
In “Wait Here?” Farkas transforms a mediation on the banality of waiting rooms into a volatile plea to seize the moment. Constructed entirely by questions, the essay explodes into revelation with the jaw-dropping nugget “Are all rooms waiting rooms?” before zooming off on a revelatory carpe diem. Next, Farkas takes us on a 90s video store quest for a copy of John Carpenter’s directorial debut, Dark Star. The cult film’s blend of low-budget sets and sci-fi comedy makes it a perfect obelisk for a tale of off-key oddity and long-distance friendship. Plus, the essay features a full exposé on the little-known musical sub-genre known as filk. Trust me, you want to know about it.
In “Pool Hall Legend,” Farkas quite literally sharks us. After unraveling the nicotine-stained mythology of the pool hall, after playfully undercutting the archetypes and legends of these mostly predictable spaces, and after thoroughly separating the actual pool hall from our idea of the pool hall like a vulgar semiotician, Farkas offers, “You can let things go the way they’re going, you can let the mystique of pool halls die and be replaced with banality, or … you could play me. You know I’m oh so very bad.”
Our wise narrator doesn’t always get the last laugh. In “On Drinking the Kool-Aid in a Coffeehouse,” he’s ostensibly hoisted by his own petard after passing judgment too quickly. With his observational awareness upended, he’s deflated into a self-made cliché. In “Noir Girl,” he’s fooled by a femme fatal without ever realizing he has stepped into mystery. Unable to recognize the sepia tones surrounding him, he succumbs to his own naïvety. These moments of playful shifting and reconfiguring reveal one of the collection’s most indelible characteristics. The essays carry us through revelations, assembling stories that seem to unfold right in front of us, effortlessly and unprescribed despite their formal invention, honed language, and thoughtful conceits. It’s the skill of a talented comedian providing the setup and delivering the punchline as though the thought has only just occurred. Another way to put it—equally relevant to this collection of essays—it’s a magic trick. For the detractors of stage illusions, parlor tricks, and mentalism, comparing literature to performance magic might seem akin to calling it a sham. But that’s not the case at all. Farkas is an honest conjurer, determined to earn the awes and accolades by letting you in on the trick as opposed to fleecing you with tricksterish guile. At the end of many essays, you’ll likely find yourself charmed and mildly delirious—spun ever so carefully to feel butterflies and never nausea.
Who would think such was possible within the confines of manmade spaces? Whether defending the sport (and I do mean sport) of bowling or exploring the infinite universes contained in a drugstore stockroom, The Great Indoorsman is never lacking for original subject matter. Cosmic horror in Kent, Ohio comic shops; Low-stakes gambling with a side of Heidegger; Seinfeld and Beckett battling for the attention of an English class—all this and more await you just inside this door. Somewhere between Akron’s Hamburger Station and the anonymous hotel room, Farkas has reestablished the indoors as the true destination for those seeking the sublime. Consider the trip. - Vincent James Perrone
https://heavyfeatherreview.org/2022/08/19/the-great-indoorsman/
Interview by Kathleen Rooney
https://brooklynrail.org/2022/04/books/Andrew-Farkas-with-Kathleen-Rooney
excerpt
Zeno's Shotgun Paradox
The Sunsphere is a 266-foot-tall green truss structure topped by a gold glass sphere that was built as the symbol of the 1982 World’s Fair (also known as the Knoxville International Energy Exposition). Actually, the Sunsphere stands 6,520 feet tall and is composed of a black, cylindrical base capped by a miniature neutron star. Well, the Sunsphere Shot Tower, made entirely of brick, manufactures shot for shotguns. But then, the Sunsphere is 1,000 feet tall and composed of a green tower and a pulsing orb of blue lightning. Really, the Sunsphere is dilapidated, covered in tarps, and likely to be torn down soon. Or maybe, Sunsphere Ziggurat is a massive conceptual art installation constructed by an underground organization called the KnoxVillains. Certainly, Sunsphere, a collection of nine formally innovative fictions, focuses on characters obsessed with ideas of energy and entropy, focuses on characters who are trying to figure out how to continue on in a world that is falling apart, who are trying to learn how to act in a world that is constantly changing. In the face of social collapse, some characters find solace in the logic of puzzles, in the conventions of art, in outdated ideas of empire and romance, in the lure of pop culture, in academia and politics. But at the core of this collection is a search for humanity, even when the very atmosphere appears to demand the inhumane.
This is a short story collection centered around the Sunsphere (the structure in Knoxville that was built for the 1982 World’s Fair), utilizing various concepts of energy as its central metaphors. Containing seven short stories, Sunsphere is in the tradition of such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Jorge Luis Borges (among others). The concepts of energy covered herein are “work,” in “Do Kids in California Dream of North Carolina?,” “potential energy,” in “Chekhov’s Shotgun,” “kinetic energy,” in “No Tomorrow” and “The Physics of the Bottomless Pit,” “internal energy,” in “Everything Under the Sunsphere” and “Wordsworth’s Volcano,” and “heat transfer,” in “The Colonization of Room 313.” There is also an Intro which states the author’s aesthetic beliefs, and an Outro which discusses his intent in each of the stories.
"This brilliantly satirical and playfully experimental collection upends all expectations--Sunsphere is the perfect book for our absurdist times. Each story is a new philosophical labyrinth of delicious, Barthelme-style surprises. Don a pair of ironic (or earnest!) sunglasses, and enjoy this incredible book." / —Alissa Nutting
How does the brain think about itself? The brainy Andrew Farkas answers endlessly in this crazed, cracked, creased collection of flipped-out origami, folding and unfolding fictions, Sunsphere, mapping the Borgesian brouhaha of seismic self-consciousness on steroids. These zesty vest-pocket labyrinths are tingling Tinguely machines—kinetic, corpuscular, cornucopic—saturated with negated negative spaces, foiled and foiling, as they tear themselves and all of us-es apart. —Michael Martone
“The Great Indoorsman, Part the First,” a serialized essay
Serialized Essay: “The Great Indoorsman, Part the Last” by Andrew Farkas
Part the Second: “The Great Indoorsman” by Andrew Farkas
Andrew Farkas, Self-Titled Debut, Subito Press, 2008
“Andrew Farkas is an infernal calculating engine producing in Self-Titled Debut a mess o’ finely machined machine-like fictions. There is a sublime relentlessness in the generative power of the permutations at all levels from word to sentence to paragraph to page. He exhausts exhaustion effortlessly. These inventive hypoxic hieroglyphs gin-up ingeniously a whole new notion of the genus: story and the species: short. Some debut indeed.” -Michael Martone
Excerpt:
That worthless pothead, your roommate, so the rumor runs, has sent a message to you, the straight-laced student, the tired-of-staying-up-so-late-every-night-because-someone-won’t-let-you-go-to-sleep guy snoozing on the other side of the room, the pothead from his miniature den of iniquity has sent a message to you alone. He has commanded, or at least asked nicely in his confused sort of way, for the messenger, his girlfriend, to lean closer to him as they both recline in bed, and has whispered the message to her; so much store did he lay on it that he repeated the message two or three times. Then, by a nod of the head, the girlfriend confirmed that she had no clue as to which message to deliver because, having repeated the message two or three times, the pothead had, indeed, communicated two or three different messages with nary a similarity between them. And since there was no one else, no one of import anyhow, to hear the message in your cramped, cluttered, claustrophobic dorm room, only the girlfriend knows the words your stoner roommate spoke. Never can the girlfriend deduce the actual meaning of the message because of the disparate communications and because she herself is trashed; hence, she would have had trouble comprehending a clearly stated message that had been repeated verbatim several times. Yet what does get through to this messenger is the fact that something (whatever it is) must be delivered to you. Oh, but the journey is so far! So arduous!
Fiction winner in the 2008 edition of Subito's annual competition, Andrew Farkas's story collection Self-Titled Debut is, on one hand, a book filled with intelligent and able-bodied stories, but on the other, a collection that unfortunately stops just shy of being a magnificent book, just short of delivering brilliance.
From the start, Farkas’s book reads as an exercise in obfuscation. The cover itself is a blurred image of a headless man, walking in an undeterminable landscape, bracketed in scars of unidentifiable light; and its title – ÂSelf-Titled Debut – is clearly mocking yet also latching onto this notion of indeterminacy. And while I’d love to say that there is value in this vagueness, that Farkas is using these motifs to talk about them, over the course of this eleven story collection I am not convinced.
Self-Titled Debut opens with ‘An Immaterial Message’, a flash piece where a message that we don’t know isn’t delivered to a person who is left constantly waiting – Farkas’s foray into Beckettian structures. And like a microcosm of the collection as a whole, this story is interesting and well-written, but I was instantly left wondering what it all meant, what it was for, where it was heading or where it wanted me to go. I was, like the recipient in the story, left waiting. In this way, Self-Titled Debut offers story after story that, each in their own way, offer up undeliverable messages, lost causes, conversations with one’s self, and other various modes of never-connections.
Farkas perhaps unintentionally describes this muddying best himself in ‘Oubliette’:
It had all begun so simply, so clearly. But from the outset of the evening the situation had become more and more inchoate, until now it was utterly entropic. It started innocently. There was the beautiful, symbolic night; the prospect of an adventure away from the norm; the vigor, the motility to pursue the adventure because of the night one hopes to wrap his mind around; the mystery of the alley (a mystery in a mystery); the deeper mystery of the hole (a mystery in a mystery in a mystery). But now the vigor was replaced with confusion. The confusion was represented by an intense yearning to burst forth in abstract rage, cursing the world for its ill-defined secrets.
In the end, this focus on the vague, on the indecipherable, makes Self-Titled Debut sound like a Poe fan’s wet dream, but the problem in Farkas’s collection is that the book never holds tightly enough to this theme, actually obscuring itself from it. So while this book could have been beautifully playful, Self-Titled Debut seems instead relinquished, at least in my mind, to be a book that is readable and smart, but that falls short of making the impact it had perhaps intended.
- J. A. Tyler
https://pankmagazine.com/2012/07/10/self-titled-debut-by-andrew-farkas-a-review-by-j-a-tyler/
Today’s post is about Andrew Farkas’ book, Self-Titled Debut, particularly the story “The Committee for Standing on Shoulders.” Self-Titled Debut was a winner of a Subito Prize in Experimental Fiction from Subito Press. I know Andy from Chicago—he got his PhD at UIC the same time I was living there—so I saw him around at readings and other events. Andy and I were also in the job market at the same time, and a couple of times, he’d walk out of a hotel room and I’d be waiting in the hall, next in line. One time I ran into him at the San Francisco airport at two in the morning. So, I know Andy and like him.
Farkas’ book is an experimental, absurdist romp! Or at least that’s what I would say if I need to write a one-line blurb for his book. I read a few stories from Self-Titled Debut today, in addition to the many others by Farkas I’ve read in the past, and always enjoy what he does (Farkas’ new collection has been a finalist in Moon City Press’ Short Fiction Competition, by the way). He has a unique voice, thought I picture Barthelme (the Donald variety) a lot when I read his work. There seems to a distance to his narration, one that’s analytical, almost deconstructive of the situations at hand. This technique allows Farkas to both criticize and elaborate, describe and evaluate. In the end, he has a lot of fun with it. And so do I.
“The Committee for Standing on Shoulders” follows this pattern, rendering the story both biting and hysterical. The story is about a brand-new nightclub named Orb3, a nightclub that is immediately a smash sensation. On opening night, the line is so long, they have to stop letting people in, but the guy in charge of that more or less fails, so before long, the place is shoulder-to-shoulder, breaking the fire code for maximum occupancy.
Since nobody wants to make anyone leave—that’s never brought up—and the owner, who’s also the bartender, has disappeared, nobody knows what to do. Then someone has a brilliant idea: They could fit three times as many people inside Orb3 if they stacked people on top of each other’s shoulders, three high, all the way into the rafters. It’s a logical idea—remember, absurdism—until the people on the bottom complain about being on the bottom, and the people on the top complain about being on top. The middle people? They’re not happy either.
This discontent leads to the formation of the Committee for Standing on Shoulders, who becomes in charge of deciding who stands on what level of the columns of people at Orb3. Like all committees, Farkas’ shoulder committee starts out pure, but then becomes corrupted, and by the end of the story, chaos ensues and the committee is no longer effective. More or less. The narrator—who reveals her/himself as a participant in this charade pretty late—is going to play a part that will change everything (which, of course, I won’t reveal).
And remember, this is all taking place on opening night.
I really like what Farkas does in “The Committee for Standing on Shoulders,” and in all of his stories. He has a vision, a perception of the world that’s a bit askew, but wonderfully unlike anything I read in anyone else’s work. I can’t recommend Self-Titled Debut, or anything you can read by Andrew Farkas, enough. -
story366blog.wordpress.com/2016/06/04/june-3-the-committee-for-standing-on-shoulders-by-andrew-farkas/
The Western Cannon (story)
Andrew Farkas, The Big Red Herring, KERNPUNKT Press, 2019
The Crying of Lot 49, but funny. A Confederacy of Dunces, but sharp. The Big Sleep, but on acid. In this latest work by Andrew Farkas, the United States and the Soviet Union were allies, not enemies. The moon landing was a hoax filmed by Stanley Kubrick. The Space Race and the Cold War were diversions enacted to cover up the biggest secret ever kept. But Wallace Heath Orcuson (Wall to his friends) has more immediate problems to deal with. He's just woken up in an apartment he's never seen before. There's a dead body under his couch. It's his girlfriend's husband, a man named "Senator" Kipper Maris.
Meanwhile, at a donut shop, a radio narrator, who's been forced to adopt the name Edward R. Murrow, reads Wall's story. He hates it. He wants to change it. The problem: Murrow is a narrator, not a writer, and the penalty for altering a manuscript is death. Luckily for Murrow, his boss, "Senator" Kipper Maris, was recently murdered. So maybe no one will notice. Or maybe there's a reason for the rule. But you can't find out what's in Pandora's box until it's opened, right? Who wants to see what's inside?
Andrew Farkas is the author of two short fiction collections: Sunsphere (BlazeVOX Books) and Self-Titled Debut (Subito Press), and a novel: The Big Red Herring (KERNPUNKT Press). His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, North American Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Florida Review, Western Humanities Review, Denver Quarterly, and elsewhere. He has been thrice nominated for a Pushcart Prize, including one Special Mention in Pushcart Prize XXXV and one Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2013. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, an M.F.A. from the University of Alabama, an M.A. from the University of Tennessee, and a B.A. from Kent State University. He is a fiction editor for The Collagist and an Assistant Professor of English at Washburn University. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.
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