Arse fixated

Behind every great woman is a man — trying to grab her ass.

Zombie Books: They’re everywhere, eating readers’ brains

What is it about zombies and books about zombies? Or for that matter, reviewers writing reviews about zombies?

Or maybe I should start this review like a 12 (stumbling) step, program. Hello, I’m Robert Burns, and I’m addicted to zombies — novels, movies, arcana — you name it, I’ll lap it up like spilled brains.

I remember to this day the zombie movie that got me hooked: It was Romero’s first make of Dawn of the Dead. I’m sure my fellow zombified fans remember this one: the shopping mall, the helicopter, the shopping zombies. The remake was good, but like a first fix, this is the one fest that irrevocably changed my brain chemistry.

I’ve been an admirer of Brooks since I picked up the Zombie survival guide. When I read it, I thought it sort of a sleeper novel from a parallel universe. One where aging Boy Scouts earn merit badges for zombie dispatching methods(did Brooks write that or did I imagine it?) and the progress of the power grid failing post the zombi-fication of all engineers is outlined in a day-by-day fashion reminiscent of how to put out a campfire.

Somehow, being off the TV powergrid myself these days and writing more than reading, I missed the appearance of World War Z on the bookshelves at B&N. I miss a lot there. And for some inscrutable reason, Amazon neglected to inform me when I logged on who-knows-how-many times, that given my past reading/purchasing history, I might be interested.

It took Scott, a bookseller friend at B&N, whom I’d bribed to read one of my unpublished novels, to alert me to the book. I promptly bought the Kindle edition.

There’s been a lot said already in other reviews. So I won’t recap; not too much anyway. The form differs the traditional “I said, he said, third person” narrative that’s been around since Flaubert and refuses to die despite the best efforts of post-modernists. Instead of such hack, Brooks relies on interview transcripts from some (unnamed?) journalist who travels about the post-apocalyptic (somehow) interviewing the all the players, the movers and the shakers if you’ll pardon the zombie pun, in the world-wide war against the zombies. This is itself, a time-honored novel style. For instance, Dracula is largely told by letters. But it’s less used, and therefore fresher, IMHO.

His epistolary form frees him from a lot of constraints that both plague and comfort modern journalist — oops, I mean novelists and writers. What we get is a freeing up of dripping creative juices. The technique allows Brooks to give us THE BIG PICTURE, from the front lines solider to the captain of a hijacked Red Chinese sub.

Underlying the gristliness and terror is a dark, infinite jest brand of humor. I marveled at this conjunction, the way one does at an alignment of planets in a winter’s sky. Where did it come from, I asked myself? Then I read Maximillian Michael Brook’s bio on Wikipedia and learned he is the son of director Mel Brooks and the late actress Anne Bancroft. I then understood; or thought I did, at least momentarily. Like the inevitability of the whole city or whole world going to shit fast as soon as the first zombie crunches in to the first skull, then Brooks was probably destined to write such a book by his genetic heritage. It’s simultaneously funny, dark, and philosophical.

I’m glad I bought it. I got my fix.

More ideas than writing time

I’ve been writing professionally — that is, writing for a living — for nearly thirty years.

That is, if you call daily journalism writing. Truman Capote’s famous quote is “that’s not writing; that’s typewriting. Somedays it feels that way. Journalism is highly formulaic writing. There’s little room for creativity. With the exception of lifestyle type columns, “creative” has bad connotations. There’s something subjective about being creative, and journalism is supposed to be all about the facts — and nothing but the facts. When I was working on my master’s in journalism at the University of Missouri, one of my professors summed it up with a criticism of me. “There’s too much of the writer in you,” she said.

I agreed, but kept it to myself because I needed the degree to get a job. The idea was to write journalism for a few years every day, tighten up my skills, and earn a regular paycheck.

I still wonder if my work experience made me a better or worse writer of fiction.  After a day of subpressing that creative impulse my professor so distrusted, it’s hard to click into the writer mode. In fact, I found I cannot goldbrick at work and sneak in some fiction writing no matter how I try. After thirty years of nothing but the facts, anything I write in a journalistic environment comes out a jejune mash of declaritive sentences.

I remember (vaguely) reading somewhere that Hemmingway regretted his experience as a journalist because he thought it has permanently stilted his style.

More about this later … but if you can either confirm or debunk this bit of Hemmingway trivia, I’d like to hear from you. And don’t bother to restrict your reply to nothing but the facts. I get enough of that sort of tunnel vision at my day job.

Robert B.