The city referred to in the title is Ambergris, and rather than tell the story of Ambergris in a traditional novel format, Vandermeer has instead pieced together short stories, biographies, history papers, and letters to weave an image of this terrifying city and its inhabitants.
Vandermeer wrote each piece, but many different voices tell the story of Ambergris. Usually I'm turned off by the collection of stories as novel format, but Saints and Madmen, would not work as well if presented as a traditional long novel. Instead what you have is a sort of found guidebook to a city you've never heard of, that you read anyway.
The pieces here reference one another, sometimes contradict one another, but always add a layer to the city's realness. The slow reveal pays off big time. The city is still alive in my mind days after finishing the book.
Vandermeer is a rising star, and this intriguing book left me eager to see what he does next.
Perhaps you've heard of Muxtape, the latest darling of the musically inclined web crowd. It's a neat interface for sharing your music, mixtape style.
The last mixtape I made was for a girl in a Mississippi city three hours away from my home in Baton Rouge close to 13 years ago. She and I made a lot of mixtapes that summer. Swapping them on weekends when one of us would drive in to see the other. They were actual tapes too, made on a dual cassette boombox. Pressing play on one tape, record on the other. Some of the songs were recorded straight from my local rock station100.7 The Tiger, or, better yet, the Zephyr out of New Orleans if the wind was right and the sky was clear.
I really want to make a Muxtape, but I have so much music now that almost nothing stands out. I've probably bought over twenty albums in 2008 so far. I like most of them. Some of them I've spun only once before moving on to the next one. Maybe I'll give those another listen, maybe I won't. I can think of at least two that were added to my iTunes library this year that I haven't even listened to.
Before digital music vendors like iTunes (if you must), eMusic and now AmazonMP3, I bought two-thirds less music than I do now. This meant I was spending a lot of time with each individual record. Getting into the nuances, finding the hidden gyms. I played most of those early albums so many times, that it's impossible for me, even now, not to think of the next song as the previous one fades out (Soul Coughing's "Soft Serve" will always make me think of "White Girl"). Now when I buy two or three albums in a single click, I may spend a day with one album, the next with another.
I applaud the fact that this allows for more experimentation with my music. I've bought several albums from eMusic that I would have passed over easily in a traditional record store. Most of those times I've been rewarded with the discovery of a great new artist. However I lament that I care about less music as a result. In order for a song to earn a place on a mixtape, it has to carry some significance. My relationship with most of the music in my collection is insignificant.
To combat this syndrome, I've been using a method similar to Daytrotter.com's Progressive Reviews, which involves spending an entire week with a single album. It's the way I used to listen to music before I bought an iPod. One album on endless repeat. Of course back then my commute was a lot longer: 40 minutes one way versus about 15, so it takes a few trips to even get through an album. Last week it was Destroyer's Rubies. This week it's Parc Avenue by Plants and Animals. Nothing drastic has happened, but I do appreciate the songs more on the third or fourth listen. Maybe one of them will make it onto a Muxtape before the RIAA takes the site down.
