McSweeney’s is at the vanguard of the anthology cutting edge. McSweeney’s is, in a way, the very opposite of a brand (if we agree that a brand should offer the same experience irrespective of location). With McSweeney’s you never really know what to expect, which can be good (as in the case of McSweeney’s 13, edited by Chris Ware, and comprising all manner of comics beautifully presented in a lavish hardback), bad (there was a McSweeney’s, I recall, made to look like a morning postal delivery of junk mail that I found pretty hard going) or – well, not indifferent (because the people behind McSweeney’s obviously go to great lengths to commission and create each edition, it would be churlish of anyone to dismiss their hard work) exactly but let’s say more ambivalent. McSweeney’s 31 is, for this reader, a little on the ambivalent side.Subtitled ‘Vikings, Monks, Philosophers, Whores’ and then ‘Old Forms, Unearthed’, McSweeney’s 31 has – according to the introduction from Darren Franich and Graham Weatherly – ‘dug up old genres, dusted them off, and recruited writers to revitalise the ones we thought demanded it’. These genres include the pantoum (which is a poem composed in quatrains in which the second and fourth lines of each stanza reappear (with small alterations) as the first and third lines of the next stanza), the whore dialogue (an early type of erotic writing), the legendary saga (which tended to chronicle the conquests of famous Scandinavian adventurers of the tenth century), bijis (which contain legends, short anecdotes, scientific and anthropological notes and bits of local wisdom), nivolas (plotless novels, or rather novels in which the action is made up by characters in revolt against their creator), senryu (short unrhymed poems similar to haiku), Socratic dialogues (philosophical back-and-forths), Graustarkian romances (early travelogue-y Steampunk) and consuetudinaries (instructions for the day-to-day running of monasteries). Each ‘old form’ is presented with an actual example of the form (and so we are gifted with glimpses of ancient scrolls and photographs of books from 1660 AD) together with something new – and the something new is annotated along the margins with footnotes (or should that be ‘sidenotes’?) elucidating the ways in which the ‘new’ piece doffs its proverbial cap to the older form. Which means that you effectively read each new piece twice, once for the new piece and once for the foot/sidenotes.
Of the pantoums, ‘Jack Davis’ by Tony Trigilio leaps out (telling the story of Lee Harvey Oswald using this mesmerising, hypnotic pantoumic repetition) ahead of the others which (sorry to reveal my awful poetic ignorance) tend to revel in the obscure ooze from which they fail to crawl. The whore dialogue by Mary Miller (entitled ‘A Dialogue Between Two Maids in the Twenty-First Century, One of Whom is Skeezy’) is sort of McSweeney’s lite (in that you couldn’t imagine it existing anywhere outside of the pages of McSweeney’s). Will Sheff’s take on the legendary saga uses the black metal slayings perpetrated by Count Grishnackh in Norway in 1993 as a backdrop but doesn’t do too much with it beyond writing a legendary saga (you feel able to commend the architecture but it isn’t a building you’d like to live in). Douglas Coupland’s biji, ‘Survivor’ is the first essential contribution (and oh, you might say, how typical, the only ‘name’ author on the bill provides the best story – but sometimes there is a reason why a name author becomes a name author), with a story that follows a cameraman on a reality show that maroons vacuous idiots somewhere exotic in the days immediately prior to the end of the world. David Thomson’s Socratic dialogue – in which Susan Sontag, Franz Kafka, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Charlie Chaplin and, eventually, Orson Welles debate the greatest film ever made – is also very good. The Graustarkian romance produced by John Brandon shows promise and is sturdy enough to standalone outside of the pages of McSweeney’s 31. But it is Shelley Jackson’s ‘Consuetudinary of the Word Church, or the Church of the Dead Letter’ which wins the prize for best story in this particular McSweeney’s, providing, as it does, the day-to-day instructions for a church that seeks to replicate the speech of the dead (amongst other things), overlapping, somewhat, with the concerns Shelley Jackson explored in ‘My Friend Goo’, a story she wrote in one of my own critically derided anthologies.
Any Cop?: Whilst not the best or the most consistent McSweeney’s to have ever graced bookshelves, there is still enough to commend and recommend. After all, no home should be without a McSweeney’s subscription…
Bookmunch 