The Lexical Funk (Clausen)

The Lexical Funk
by Daniel Clausen (2008)

(Not a review, just some notes to help me remember the things I've read. But written this way because it's the Internet, and some people will stumble across this page.)

This was the second edition from 2014.

I don't know where this popped up from, but I downloaded it for free. I didn't realize how old the book was (relatively speaking). It had an interesting cover, it called itself "a triumph of words", and I thought it was going to be a funny book.

I picked it up because I thought it was be a quick, little diversion from a non-fiction book I'm reading that's plodding along, and while I'm enjoying it, I needed a break.

It was not. It was quite introspective, but for the most part, I didn't really feel it or care about the introspection. The book contains five unreleated stories and an excerpt from a novel that I skipped. The acknowledgments says "many" of the stories were previously published and then lifts five publications, so I assume that all the stories were previously published.

The first story was "Imitation for Beginners" about androids that try to imitate human behavior as best they can. It was told in several numbered sections for no reason, and I worried that the entire book was going to be like this. Again, the android's introspection wasn't very interesting. The one twist was when the older model confronts the narrator telling him that he's nothing speical, and in fact that older model is actually a human imitating an android. The newer model considers this and figures that the older model has malfunctioned and does his duty and dismantles the older model. Now, there is nothing I can tell from the description whether or not the "older model" was either a human or an android. You would think that the reference to the cleaner robots would give a hint about this.

"The Lexical Funk: how the white boy learned to settle down and love the Afro" might be considered by some to be offensive these days. I just found it boring, with the following proviso: the author knows his language and did weave something together, and the entire story built to one amusing paragraph near the end.

"In a glass box over Osaka" is the story of someone who lost a job and is in a restaurant for either several hours or over a day. More introspection. No speculative element that I noticed.

"Rich Jacobs Searches for the Meaning of Life" gets speculative with the produce at the supermarket start talking to him. One of the better, if not stranger, of the stories.

"Starlight Terror and the Cappuccino Machine" is the highlight where a mysterious woman arrives and the main characters and the world around them slowly morph into a 50s-era B-flich. The author must be fond of these because it's not something easy to fake.

"Angela Killed Herself" is more introspective stuff with a giver and a taker, and the giver gives out.

If I were ever to use the review "It was a book", this would be the time to use it. Not quite but bordering on "What did I just read?" It took me a bit longer than a hour to read, probably because I kept wondering what I was reading.