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Book Review: Robot Of Leisure, Vol. One. Katharine Miller.

February 11th, 2011 | 1 Comment | Posted in reviews

OH_cover[1] I’ve been cafe hoping with Boris. We’re trying to put in an eight hour writing day, without wearing out our welcome anywhere. He’s a perfect companion, because he’s everything I’m not: polite, ernest, unassuming, delicate and cute as a hairless, metal puppy.

Book Review: Robot Of Leisure, Vol One. Boris and The Open House, by Katharine Miller.

by Michael Scott

http://woodenrocketpress.com

Boris is a limited capacity service robot:

“programmed with:

*20 alcoholic beverage recipes

*7 classic dance moves

*10 popular popular party games”

and is presumably designed to derive perfect satisfaction, in the performance of these simple tasks. In an elegant marriage of form and content, Katharine Miller has created a book as simple, careful and quite as its tittle character. Boris and The Open House will neither capture, nor command your attention, but it certainly deserves it.

The book’s gentle, pastel colour pallet and art-deco style illustration does not scream out to the senses.  Boris, ever the faithful servant, waits for you to address him. The reader who comes upon the book with an open heart, moving softly, as Boris moves, will reap much reward, from both the sweet, simple story and its elegant presentation.

It’s fun to watch Boris approach each of the days tasks, to see him negotiate small obstacles, and to observe his simple pleasure at each stage of completion. Some jobs prove more troublesome than others, but they never become too cartoony. At first, Miller seems as single-minded as her robot. She tells us about the joy of easy tasks easily accomplished, but eventually begins to wonder about a different kind of joy: a dangerous, and ecstatic freedom, derived from real, and ultimate failure.

What happens when even the most attainable of goals, the most basic of tasks, proves impossible? What if ones every choice had been based on a fundamental, and profound misunderstanding?

These are big questions for a little robot. Ones Boris only begins to address in this, the first of a planned six volumes.

Miller’s story telling is almost wholly visual. Boris, being the only character, never needs to speak. What text we do see — cleverly representative of Boris’ interaction with his own operating system — is strictly peripheral, amounting to little more than contextual detail or chapter heading.

Her cartooning style oozes with charm. Her chunky and sympathetically emotive tittle character is imposed upon painfully intricate, geometrical backgrounds. It is interesting to see the things of man rendered digitally, while the robotic character is hand drawn allowing for a measure of human error.

My chief complaint is a lack of content.  The hundred page book had far too much negative space.  The story would have easily fit into a volume half this size, saving money for both the publisher and consumer.  I greatly admire the stylistic simplicity, and do not favour unnecessary padding, but there must be some way that Miller could have added more story without damaging her pathos.

I like Boris more than enough to read a hundred pages of him.

by

Michael Scott

Buy Boris and the Open House and Vol. 2 Boris Makes a Friend here: http://www.robotofleisure.com

Buy books from us at: http://woodenrocketpress.com

There Are Still Buffalo: Three True Stories.

February 4th, 2011 | 1 Comment | Posted in Essays
It is my oldest and sincerest wish to be a member of the last generation.  Humanity has created a lot of beautiful things in its time, but always, those beautiful things have been built at the expense of other things, which were even more beautiful.  In my fantasies I am usually still alive, at least for a few years, following the apocalypse.  I get to see the first of the bridges fall.  The first of the trees take root in the concrete.  The first of the wolves wander into the cities.  I know this may not be how it happens.  I might be one of the first to die.  I’m fine with that.

I’ve been positing a lot of things, lately, about what a faithful person I am.  Now let’s talk about something I don’t believe in.

There are still Buffalo. Three true stories.

by Michael Scott

http://woodenrocketpress.com

Buffalo was always on fire.

When I was seven or eight, my father enrolled me in a house league for five pin bowling.  I’m not a very competitive person.  Even then I liked bowling more than other sports, because I liked the idea of trying to improve myself more then the idea of competing against someone else.  I bowled every Saturday morning for what seemed like a life time.  Practices took place extremely early in the morning.  I don’t know when I was waking up, but I know I woke earlier for bowling then I did for school.

Eventually I became cognizant of the competitive element, and had to give it up.  It happened all at once, and it was too much pressure for me.  Suddenly, the success of the team was riding on my shoulders, while previously  I hadn’t even realized I was on a team.  I thought we were just people who took turns bowling.

Another big factor, was that bowling interfered with the best T.V..  W.N.E.D. had a killer Saturday morning line up, back in 1987.  Leaving for bowling meant that I was missing out on The Hilarious House of Frightenstein.

Not leaving for bowling, though, meant that I usually slept through Hilarious House of Frightenstein, and didn’t wake up until it was time for W.N.E.D.’s Buffalo news.  Nothing works out the way we plan it.

Still, I felt lucky.  I was living in Scarborough.  Much better than Buffalo, which, as I was quickly learning, was always on fire.

There are no such thing as buffalo.

It started as a joke.

Five of us were on a dinner break from our acting class.  We went to school in a Mall, so there was a little more choice for dinner than is usual for a college student.  Most people exploited the resources of the food court, but always a few with extra money, and extra balls, would sneak off to The Rockwater for beer and bar fair.  On this day, I was among those sneaking in a seriously frowned upon pint.

Ashton Catherwood ordered a Bison burger.  This provoked debate.  The table discussed whether or not a bison was the same as a buffalo.  What the population numbers might have been.  Whether or not Ashton’s particular animal had likely been wild game, or the product of some farming experiment.  I, for both comical and political reasons, insisted that “Bison” was only a marketing term.  There were, in fact, no such thing as buffalo.

I was kindly asked to shut my god damn mouth, as I often am when I speak honestly.  My opinions are too loud for most peoples taste.  To me though, it didn’t matter whether or not I was technically “right.”  What mattered was the atrocity of the idea.

Once, the North American Bison were so plentiful that they defied all attempt to noun them collectively.  One buffalo is a ” buffalo.”  In groups they are called some “buffalo.”  Linguistically, Buffalo are treated as a substance.  It is reminiscent of the time when they flowed across the landscape like water, an elemental component of North America.

For me though, at the age of 25, this Bison Burger, an object which could easily be pluralised (burger, burgers), was my first personal contact with the animal.

I was sad.  I was angry.  “There are no such thing as buffalo,” was a mantra I carried for the next five years.  It was symbolic of everything that was wrong with the world.  I repeated it.  I believed it.  It broke my heart, and I used it to break the hearts of others.

Once, the word “Buffalo” was synonymous with “life” for hundreds of thousands of people on the north American continent.  Now Buffalo was just a city.  And it was in poverty.  And it was burning down.

There are still Buffalo.

On Christmas eve, Sandra and I stopped in high park, and took her little dog for a walk.  In my memory it was snowing.  We wandered through the little zoo, and saw all the different kinds of cows.  Her dog marched, and kicked, and was happy.

It was a short walk, maybe twenty minutes, before we saw the Buffalo.

Buffalo is a diminutive term.  It emphasizes their smallness of stature, by comparison to their European cousins.  They were big enough, though, to fill my entire mind.  I stood for a life time looking at those animals.  I was the last person on Earth.  I had memories of running naked, like Kevin Costner, though the snow.

There were about five individuals.  Two stood quite close.  One ate.  Ate.  It was alive.  It ate.  My eyes though, were locked on the stillness of a larger example, sitting on the opposite side of the pen. Chewing maybe.  Doing not much of anything.  I didn’t breathe.

Sandra pulled on my arm.  I looked over my shoulder, at the most impossible creature I’d ever seen, as we walked back to her car.  I felt as if I’d seen a dragon.

In Sandra’s apartment, that night, I held her against my my chest.  I buried my face in her neck, and sobbed.  It was a messy sort of crying.  Wet, and hard, and long. She was gentle.  She pet my head.  In the end we agreed:

There are still buffalo.

By Michael Scott

http://woodenrocketpress.com