Propeller No. 9, Fall 2011
Q&A's with Daniel Clowes, Mary Cappello, Bodies of Water, Vanessa Veselka, and Lisa Wells.Helyn Trickey on Sherman Alexie and Paul Simon. Fiction by Elizabeth Lopeman, poems from Ally Harris and Sara Nicholson. Also, "Reading the Longlist": reviews of each of the thirteen titles on the 2011 Man Booker Prize Longlist.
Propeller Quarterly: The Fall 2011 Issue
articles posted October through December 2011
"It almost feels like I made some kind of pact with the devil and then had it erased it from my memory." The creator of Eightball and Ghost World chats about what became of his childhood bullies, how hippies ruined Christmas and baseball, and admiration for Sgt. Joe Friday.
"I don't know if the world is ending any time soon, the songs have just been ending up being about destruction of one sort or another. Bakunin said that destruction is creation, but I don't think he was ever able to verify that." Bodies of Water's David Metcalf on the pros and cons of a home studio, Rod Stewart's early 70s sound, and his band's new album, Twist Again.
"The family would see the woman who'd perpetrated this strange act in the marketplace from time to time, and their blood would run cold." Mary Cappello discusses Swallow, her book on Chevalier Jackson and his collection of "objects swallowed or inhaled," as well as awkwardness, writing as reconstitution, and how "steadfast arrangements morph into a form of derangement." 
"They're all natural storytellers and truly strange and unique people. I think we've bleached out a lot of the bizarre in our culture, so it feels like life when you're around people who aren't so pinned down." Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen (Red Lemonade), talks driving cab.
"I soon found that the musician's anti-love song, in which he describes the 'conversations hard and wild' of a disintegrating marriage, fit the despondency I feel at play just under the surface in Alexie's work." By Helyn Trickey
"I don't think I've seen/read a depiction of bar culture that describes the physical and emotional toll it can take." Lisa Wells, author of Yeah. No. Totally. (Perfect Day Publishing) chats between (making) drinks.
"My name is Louisa Georgina, after my mother's mother, Louise, and my father's father, George. I will leave Nice on a train to Munich today to go and live with my father. He is German. Popup said, 'You are your father's child. I love you. But you belong to him, and cruel as it might sound, you're not mine.'"
"Her Twin Was After Me," "Rinse," and "Hunting Dogs."
"Organic Chemistry," "Theogony," "Fairy Tale," and three untitled poems.
One can always dream.Reading the Longlist
The 2011 Man Booker Nominees
The British take their lit awards seriously: Dissatisfaction with the Man Booker Prize has occasioned the The Guardian's "Not the Booker prize," as well as a new group of British authors and publishers who plan to start "The Literature Prize" next year, for the best novel written in English and published in the UK in a given year. "For many years this brief was fulfilled by the Booker (latterly the Man Booker) Prize. But as numerous statements by that prize's administrator and this year's judges illustrate, it now prioritises a notion of 'readability' over artistic achievement," this new award's board stated. We gathered a group writers to investigate this Anglophile angst by assigning them the thirteen titles on the Booker longlist. The results? See below.
"Plot that turns on letters from the past and the memories invoked can turn dry, stodgy. But the intensity of Tony's emotional response and the memory excavation that follows is affecting." Review by Benjamin Craig, with Cecily Peterson.
"Each encounter with a new character, and each turn around a new corner, leads the narrator deeper into an understanding of the character of the city he is inhabiting." Review by Paul Kind.
"DeWitt has crafted something here that is like the literary equivalent of a song with a theremin in it: one first feels that the exotic oscillation renders things immediately and irretrievably dark or otherwordly, but the fact is that in skilled hands, the theremin can also deliver 'Good Vibrations.'" Review by Dan DeWeese.
"What is the secret between Anneliese and the nanny that causes so much animosity--and love--between them? Is Pavel's right hand man really a Nazi spy? Is Anneliese cheating on Pavel with a Nazi soldier? Who can be trusted? The grand mystery, though, is: Who is narrating?" Review by Brian Rozendal.
"Before long, each character's fortune becomes intertwined with the fate of Tiberius, a race-horse named after a Roman emperor famous for two things: conquering, and then falling into a deep, reclusive depression." Review by Matthew Gallaher.
"Jinx's mother had but one flaw, though it was a doozy: 'Failure to Recognize a Bad Man.' FRBM is serious and, in the case of Jinx's mother, fatal, but it's not going to ruin a woman in quite the same way that FRGM (Failure to Recognize a Good Man) does." Review by Wendy Bourgeois.
"This is not a 'topical' nor 'historical' novel any more than it is a book explicitly about jazz and war. Half Blood Blues is a novel-long confession driven by a unique and effective dialect, one that launches each psychological salvo in alternating registers." Review by Patrick McGinty.
"Harri and his friend Dean are 'investigating' the murder of another child. They mimic the detectives of the television show 'CSI,' taking fingerprints and interviewing suspects, but they are much closer to the actual bad guys than they realize, and far more vulnerable than they think." Review by Benjamin Craig.
"In a short span of time, a passionate recollection of story fragments takes on a sort of mythic quality. The experience is like having a cup of tea in the kitchen of the twentieth century." Review by Sara Sutter.
"While it's certainly possible to write literary fiction with young protagonists, it isn't easy. A wave of novels in recent years have featured pre-teen characters, and have done so with varying success, but teenage protagonists are an altogether different problem." Review by Eli Lincoln.
"In a world where confession so often retraces familiar rhetorical paths to equally familiar rhetorical sanatoriums, it is refreshing to watch as a corrupt attorney chasing after a younger woman tries to convince himself, his bride-to-be, you, me, and the fencepost that he's only a sort of corrupt attorney chasing a younger woman he really really likes." Review by Lucas Bernhardt.
"Real events (the famed shipwreck of the Essex--Melville wrote about it too, in Moby-Dick) may have inspired Birch, but by filtering the facts through young Jaffy and through the creation of the dragon, Birch transforms history into a tale as philosophical and relevant as it is swashbuckling." Review by Mary Rechner.
"The man at the center of Hollinghurst's delicately crafted, privileged English world is Cecil Valance, a gregarious and hyper-sexed young poet with a knack for creating a whirlwind of lust around men and women alike." Review by Chelsea Bieker.
