500 Word Synopsis: Welcome to a collection of worlds that collide, collude, conflict, cooperate or exist in indifferent isolation. When a father abandons his son, the son has no other choice but to inhabit a world of fantasy to deal with the resulting trauma. A young gay male in the late 1970s named Sunnie Deelite, with one foot still in the closet, looks forward to living and loving among the brothers of his gay tribe, in spite of his doubts and inexperience. Isabella Gloucester dreams of finding love and success in Lost Angelist, Amourrica Profunda, Blue Green Planet. She finds out the hard way that a price must be paid for the fulfillment of her dreams. Isabella falls on hard times, forcing her to seek out her bad-boy collaborator Bobby Chooshingoorah. At the nefarious 3001 Ulysses Disco in Questioning Ridge, Nueva Jork, they host a show and end up starting a war between the club's red and blue state clientele. Baba Yaga emerges from the banks of a ravine to terrorize the bourgeois neighborhood of Drowsydayle in the city of Near-Wanna, in the province of Orckario in the country of Narniada. South of the Narniadan border, the Evilangelists of the nation of Mourrzicka-Isolamicka throw their full support behind their trillionaire leader Turmerico Inflammatorio, whose unstable temperament and Machiavellian governing skills create havoc on the continent of Pangolina. Outside of the city of Branighan, Missoolah, Isolamicka, Big Mama and her son Bobby grow zombies in specially designed greenhouses; the zombies are then trained to work for The Center for the Appropriation of Valuables in Branighan. On Planet Gorp, the descendants of refugees from the Blue Green Planet transcend hypercapitalism through their supreme dedication to practices involving synesthesia and chromesthesia. Bryanna Dolls, a young girl obsessed with the year 1967, gives birth by Immaculate Conception to her doppelgänger, Clawdeeya. Upon reaching adulthood, Clawdeeya finds success in a career inspired by Schadenfreude, terrorizing the city of Near-Wanna and eventually the entire Blue Green Planet. Her ultimate goal is to ruin the lives of entitled, privileged males; her ambitions are supported by her connections to the warlock Antithesis Reticence and Bastet the Egyptian Cat Goddess. Bryanna Dolls tunes out reality by embarking on an unexpected dream journey in which she encounters psychedelic bands, Eurasian witches and decadent Southern Gothic culture. But her dream turns into a nightmare when she finds herself in the dungeon of Luchadora Madrugadora, Queen of Stepford Ken and Barbie Westworld. Tommy Massageny leaves behind his hardscrabble roots in Bitoxia, Archaicka, Isolamicka to become an intergalactic emcee. His career reaches new heights when he hosts a highly anticipated contest in the Galatea galaxy, in which four renowned women battle for interstellar supremacy. Meanwhile back in Amourrica Profunda, opportunists band together to alternately celebrate and disrespect the fading corporate behemoth that is Fascibook. Despite the fact that Fascibook has stolen their souls and left them addicted to social media, they remain undaunted; they make the best of a bad situation and party on into oblivion.
Clarion Rating: 3 out of 5
to be to is to was is an anti-establishment collection of stories that goes from real to surreal, from Middle America to space rock operas, with its outrageous characters.
Stephen C. Bird’s collection of short stories and vignettes to be to is to was is set in a parallel universe, in places that function as a fun house mirror of our own world. The stories’ settings and characters are sometimes familiar, but many have funny new names. Some are exaggerated grotesques. Distasteful places and outrageous people are described with relish; the boring sameness of the suburbs and common taste is exaggerated.
Here, McMansions are like sets for horror films, and tacky homes with “department store lamps” are criticized more than once. Proper nouns are treated with punny but jaded new names: Fox News-types are “Evilangelists” from the “Buy-Bull Belt” or the “Fartland.” Hippies, too, have their philosophies and tie-dyed T-shirts mocked, especially in the funny “Life on Planet Gorp,” where conflicts over trail mix are mediated by a leader named Anna Thesia.
There are unexpected forms throughout the book, including poems, lyrics, and many long speeches that are given by characters. The short, surreal first story, “Father and Son Cross the Bridge,” is lovely and visual. In the sort-of fairy tale that follows, “Sunny Deelite Comes of Age,” wide-eyed Sunnie leaves small-town New York in search of a gay community in California and meets two leathermen who are like a pair of fairy godmothers to him. These first two stories seem to function apart from the flamboyant women’s stories that populate most of the rest of the book.
Women in the book fit types, though they sometimes change between types—like a good girl, her bad girl alter ego, and the lovelorn rock star who transforms to deliver soliloquies in “the lazy, syrupy drawl of a neo-Nazi, Tea Party gal.” A stock Southern accent is employed with frequency, and some lines—such as one that states that people of one imagined place are “innately mentally superior” to those of another country—are polarizing. Many stories are more talk than action.
In “The Ultimate Contest,” characters show up for an intergalactic boxing match; the story is more about the emcee announcing them than it is about the fight, which is summed up in one anticlimactic paragraph. Pop culture references abound but to unclear ends, as when someone’s outfit is described as “a hybrid of Dune, Mary Poppins, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”—an intriguing image that bears, but does not receive, further exploration. Some details—genitals on faces, for example—seem included for shock value more than anything else. Ellipses are used to excess.
to be to is to was is an anti-establishment collection of stories that goes from real to surreal, from Middle America to space rock operas, with its outrageous characters whose caustic wordplay skewers boring American consumerism.
Reviewed by Meredith Grahl Counts
January 16, 2019
A collection offers satirical short stories set in a fictional land.
Bird (Catastrophically Consequential, 2012) conjures a wildly farcical cosmos that bears just enough resemblance to this one to be evocatively familiar, a place he calls Amourrica Profunda. He chronicles the peculiar but often endearing searches his protagonists conduct for love and purpose. In 1978, after graduating from Mrs. Scheissbook’s School for Fascist Piggies, Sunnie Deelite travels into the Western Desert Region, a gay man afraid to be labeled “a queen, a nelly, a pansy, a screamer.” Despite meeting friends who introduce him to libertine sexual experimentation, he only finds the “wreckage of the squandered opportunities of a lost soul.” Isabella Gloucester—raised in Miasma Falls, Puta Jork—desperately wants to be loved but finds herself trapped instead in a meaningless tryst with Flim Philanderer, who is only “in it for the sex.” Isabella finally leaves Flim and reunites with “bellicose bad boy” Bobby Chooshingoorah, and the pair forms a popular musical act. But Bobby continues to pressure her into making “ghoulish sex tapes for the red states”—he eventually leaves Isabella over her refusal—and she dedicates herself single-mindedly and ashamedly to the advancement of her career. The author also leaps into the future—to 5950—and prophesies the decline of Amourrica Profunda, ruined by “Evilangelists” as ignorant as they are unyieldingly dogmatic. Bird’s eccentric, impressionistic tales sometimes interlock but not meaningfully enough for the assemblage to constitute a coherent narrative whole—the twine that ties the eclectic stories together is the backdrop of Amourrica Profunda. The author’s writing is reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s—he skillfully constructs a counterfeit world designed to deliver a hyperbolic parody of this one, both a caricature and a mirror. But Bird’s characters feel like fictional symbols and lack the fleshy depth of Vonnegut’s creations. In addition, Bird’s lampoons begin to take on the shape of didactic, knowing scolds, one of the principal dangers of satirical works. The book ends with reproductions of the author’s visual art, which is striking.
Highly inventive but excessively moralizing tales.
