THREE TENSES: A Transmission from the Nineties, do a vibe check...should it be 1998 outside? here's you a book

THREE TENSES: A Transmission from the Nineties
ED PARK
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An elegant, iridescent mosaic of autobiographical fragments, both real and invented, forming a portrait of a creative life, from the life of the Pulitzer Prize finalist for Same Bed Different Dreams

In 1998, Ed Park wrote a memoir and saved it to the vanishing technology of the floppy disk, losing it for more than twenty years. Until one day, emptying out an old, unmarked box in his family’s cramped New York City home, he came across a hefty manila folder. Out slid the only remaining copy of Three Tenses.

The piece of writing that Park found—“a voice lesson, a language experiment, an autobiography with lies, a document of sustained artistic bliss of a sort that I have never found again”—was an assemblage of beguiling anecdotes, sly observations, and collected esoterica, produced within the confines of the shoebox apartment of his twenties and only now allowed to see the light of day. Two Ed Parks emerge on the within the prose of the young, struggling writer arises the voice of the artist he would become.

Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, Three Tenses is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.

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My Review: I've always felt oddly indifferent to memoirs, assuming they're pretty much always a load of fantasies piled up in a kind of rough shape sort of evoking a person's past. Trust them? Trust them to what? No one's memory is perfect, often it's at complete cross purposes with others who were (probably, allegedly) there, and in any case is the purpose of a memoir to be a record, settle scores—or to tell people how the writer sees the past that made them, from the ground they stand on in the present?

Ed Park takes bits and fragments of observations, memories, dreams, flat-out stuff he wishes was true, shakes 'em out of a shoebox, makes a beautiful mosaic of prose that thinks it's poetry, and says "here, read this," with a bashful smile.

I believe that woman on the subway wished people a terrible day, but not that she had black teeth. Or she had black teeth and wouldn't speak, only how then would he know she had the black teeth? Why did his parents emigrate from Korea to the US? What the hell brought them to, of all places...Buffalo?!

All the stops on the tour of his life led to his present. That's enough to tell me-the-reader that these fragments, too small to be more than thoughts that don't have deep enough edges to interconnect, exist for themselves. We already know Ed Park's work. His life is in it already, his world-view is in it already, his memoir has no heavy lifting to do that an autobiography, or later a biography, couldn't, won't, do better.

Except tell you how he felt. That's what kicked my indifference aside as I sat in the middle of the piles of thoughts and ideas wondering how I should piece them together. I shouldn't. I should respect that he didn't do it for me, so maybe the point was not to follow a narrative on its arc. That surprised me because this was Ed Park's life.

Comes the dawn....

What's more important to know about someone you care about, care for...what happened, or how they're feeling...feeling about what happened/didn't happen/could happen/might have happened? Why do so many of us have therapists if not to have someone to tell the truth about how we're feeling and maybe why we think we're feeling that way?

It's probably as coherent in this book as it is in Ed Park's mind. I don't think the framing device, discovering the floppy disk (!!) in a box during the pandemic, is really anything to get humg up on but many Goodreaders seem to have beef with it. Beats me why. Gotta start somewhere and the mass-death event only a couple years ago seems like a pretty significant road sign.

At all events I'm glad I got to know Ed Park a little, curated bit. I think I'll read his next published fiction with some added fellow-feeling.

AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS, Ed Park's story collection spanning 25 years-plus

AN ORAL HISTORY OF ATLANTIS
ED PARK
Random House
$13.99 ebook, available now

Time's The 100 Must-Read Books of 2025 selection

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A deadpan, wildly imaginative collection of stories that slices clean through the mundanity and absurdity of modern life, from the author of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winner and Pulitzer Prize finalist Same Bed Different Dreams

In “Machine City,” a college student’s role in a friend’s movie causes lines to blur between his character and his true self. In “Slide to Unlock,” a man comes to terms with his life, via the passwords he struggles to remember in a moment of extremis. And in “Weird Menace,” a director and faded movie star discuss science fiction, memory, and lost loves on a commentary track for a film from the ’80s that neither seems to remember all that well.

In Ed Park’s utterly original collection, An Oral History of Atlantis, characters question the fleetingness of youth and art, reckon with the consequences of the everyday, and find solace in the absurd, the beautiful, and the sublime. Throughout, Park deploys his trademark wit to create a world both strikingly recognizable and delightfully other. All together, these sixteen stories have much to say about the meaning—and transitory nature—of our lives. And they are proof positive that Ed Park is one of the most insightful and imaginative writers working today.

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My Review: What I have not highlighted that could make a difference to your pleasure...or not...is something I didn't notice until after I read the whole collection: There seems to be interconnection of settings and/or characters in many of the stories. As these stories have appeared over the course of years, this must reflect Author Park's real interests. It does indeed show. A collection sure to please Park fans and anyone who likes a laugh with their "hmm" sci fi. I mean, who among us does not love "His thoughts were shrouded in rumor, perfumed with adventure and abstruse interlinear controversy" as a quotable quote? One knows one's own.

Comme d'habitude, these sixteen stories will be dealt with by the Bryce Method of general remarks followed by brief responses to each one below.


A Note to My Translator is the funniest takedown of the Culture Industry℠'s bizarre effort to translate the work of an author into a local cultural property, thus causing huge misunderstanding and much ill-will:

Page eight, a little lower down: The doctrine of transubstantiation has nothing to do with pinball.
Page nine: Solomon Eveready reappears, smoking cut-grade reefer and imitating a trout. Explain this to me. Explain also the presence of scuba gear that "reeks of melon."

Honestly, I've read translations that felt as though they must've been the subject of a correspondence much like this.

It was hilarious to me, and sets an irreverent, mischievous tone I batten on. 5*

Bring on the Dancing Horses's unnamed narrator hit me with "Penumbra College in Vermont" and made me cackle, then his girlfriend's name "Tabitha Grammaticus"...and that housecoat...! Seriously, I'm still trying to sketch it to understand the topology.

The story itself, well, what a sad little incel this guy is, if I didn't know better I'd say he was fever-dreaming it all. You know what...maybe he is. 3.5*

The Wife on Ambien sketches anomie in cold relief as "the wife on Ambien" does things our Prufrockian putz of a narrator would never dare to do, I half expected her to eat a peach for gods' sake. I wished the refrain wasn't quite so Lucy-Ellmanly.

The wife on Ambien recites the poetry of T. S. Eliot, sings the music of the Jesus and Mary Chain, calculates how much we need to save to retire. Her figures vary. The wife on Ambien also tells me it doesn’t matter, that the sun will swallow the earth exactly eight billion years, or thirteen weeks, or twenty-four hours from now. The wife on Ambien hails Uber after Uber. The cars stream toward us like a series of sharks. It’s four a.m. Drivers from many countries gather on the corner, fling curses at our window, break out the booze, and promise each other their children in marriage. The wife on Ambien hacks into my Facebook account and leaves slurs on the pages of my enemies. Get a life, you’re a joke. She joins political causes directly opposed to her own. I spend an hour every morning cleaning up the digital trail.

3.5*
Machine City makes that film-student friend into a last gasp of the end-of-adolescence pretentiousness. Bethany Blanket...sounds like a manic pixie girl, right?...puts "Ed" in her student film requiring him to be honest and natural with the girl he just got broken up with by her also-Korean parents objecting to his ancestry. Now, of course, he's a lawyer with a fancy life thinking about les jadis. Not fascinating but oddly...compelling...familiar maybe. 4*

An Accurate Account proves that drama is easy, comedy is *hard*. A stand-up routine that, for me, was a real misfire...like a less-offensive Matt Rife set. 3*

The Air as Air is elegiac in tone, is the air's testator, is clearly about the processing of profound sadness, grief, loneliness: "The jukebox kicked in. Some song I used to hate, but at the moment it made me sad. It pinned me down."

It pinned down the entire mechanism of gaining, painfully and slowly, perspective. The narrator (PTSD and all) and his father, whom he calls "The Big Man" at the man's insistence:

"So you know about Uncle Buck," he said. "The movie?" "What movie? I’m talking about your Uncle Buck. He went on that show where they give you a makeover. It was Lindy’s idea, the whole stupid TV thing. She has connections. You know Buck. He dresses worse than I do. He dresses like he smeared rubber cement on his chest and rolled around in a pile of undershirts. So they show the episode and it went a little too well, if you get my gist."

Sad, funny, unfortunately very relatable...they're not communicating or connecting even a little bit. 4.5*

Seven Women has a therapist elucidating the long and grueling self-confrontation of therapy from her point of view, the way she thinks about the deep-dives into other people's emotions. "Sometimes people tell stories and they leave out the feelings—My job is to show them where the feelings are." 5* for that insight alone...Hannah the patient's a really crappy human being.

The Gift offers me a course I really want to take: "Advanced Aphorism" though not with Dublinski necessarily. The letter to the alumni magazine being written says it was never offered again. I demand a retake on all my school years so I can take this course! Fun wordplay, slight idea. 4*

Watch Your Step is a log-line for a technothriller that feels like it was being fleshed out; as the story progresses, I was trying to think of reasons Author Park left it here, when there's enough, to my story-ear, to support a novella. What gives? 3.5* because it's marooned without coming into port.

Two Laptops does nothing for me because the "man loses family through no fault of his own" trope bugs me. The wife and son he's misplaced live close but...never mind, no point really, as he is reduced to a skype face to the son, I realized he deserved it. 3* for choice of subject matter.

Weird Menace stresses the role memory can't help but play in our relationships to our past, to the people in our lives, and to this weird idea we think is a reality called the self. It's all dialogue, all the time, and all the more fun for that, since I like "Toner Low" as the director's name. DVD commentary was never like this when I was watching horror movies! 4*

Thought and Memory centers transness, but managed to make me wince by leaving in "transgendered" which ain't a good thing. I wish it had not been there like a turd in the punchbowl. Still, a decent and overall surprisingly good effort for someone not trans. 3.5*

Well-Moistened with Cheap Wine, the Sailor and the Wayfarer Sing of Their Absent Sweethearts didn't really excite me much...Tabby doesn't inspire sympathy as she is presented here...and her career is very amusing indeed, but doesn't make up for the sour note of the narrator's overall dissatisfaction, his dislike and disdain for so many around him. "My girlfriend, Tabby, reviews science fiction for a living, which just goes to show you that America is still the greatest, most useless country in the world," sums it up on the tone front; not my fave but very well-written, with some humor that broke through my dissatisfaction. 4*

Eat Pray Click might hit you differently than it did me...my boyfriend is in Chat psychosis so the way the machine comes alive, sort of, and what it does, just did not feel fictional, while feeling mentally disturbing. No rating.

Slide to Unlock might be the most unnerving story in here...almost horror...memory problems scare me leaky. It's a modern problem, trying to keep clear in one's mind the very complicated ways we're required to interface with a world gone digital...in fact, it's not much more complicated than the past, only the medium's changed from speaking to a fallible human to fallibly humanly speaking to a system made by fallible humans. I got the wry humor in here in my bones. 5*

An Oral History of Atlantis isn't so much a story as a proof of concept...every emotional register, every techno-detail, every beat in this collection gets its bones into this stew. What I couldn't find was a through-line to make me invest in it the way MtPR was meant to. 3.25*

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS, just-barely-too-long alt-Korea novel

SAME BED DIFFERENT DREAMS
ED PARK
Random House (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$5.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A wild, sweeping novel that imagines an alternate secret history of Korea and the traces it leaves on the present—loaded with assassins and mad poets, RPGs and slasher films, K-pop bands and the perils of social media.

In 1919, far-flung Korean patriots establish the Korean Provisional Government to protest the Japanese occupation of their country. This government-in-exile proves mostly symbolic, though, and after Japan’s defeat in World War II, the KPG dissolves and civil war erupts, resulting in the North-South split that remains today.

But what if the KPG still existed now, today—working toward a unified Korea, secretly harnessing the might of a giant tech company to further its aims? That’s the outrageous premise of Same Bed Different Dreams, which weaves together three distinct narrative voices and an archive of mysterious images and twists reality like a kaleidoscope, spinning Korean history, American pop culture, and our tech-fraught lives into an extraordinary and unforgettable novel.

Early on we meet Soon Sheen, who works at the sprawling international technology company GLOAT, and comes into possession of an unfinished book authored by the KPG. The manuscript is a mysterious, revisionist history, tying famous names and obscure bit players to the KPG’s grand project. This strange manuscript links together figures from architect-poet Yi Sang to Jack London to Marilyn Monroe. M*A*S*H is in here, too, and the Moonies, and a history of violence extending from the assassination of President McKinley to the Soviet downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

Just as foreign countries have imposed their desires on Korea, so too has Park tucked different dreamers into this sprawling bed of a novel. Among them: Parker Jotter, Korean War vet and appliance-store owner, who saw something—a UFO?—while flying over North Korea; Nora You, nail salon magnate; and Monk Zingapan, game designer turned writing guru. Their links are revealed over time, even as the dreamers remain in the dark as to their own interconnectedness. A thrilling feat of imagination and a step forward from an award-winning author, Same Bed Different Dreams begins as a comic novel and gradually pulls readers into another dimension—one in which utopia is possible.

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My Review: GLOAT now enters my lexicon as an acronymic shorthand for "evil bastard corporate actor" alongside its sixtyish ancestor CHOAM from Dune. As Soon, the character who works at GoogleGLOAT, drifts in and out of the narrative, I thought I was supposed to attach meaning to these time-shifts into either the *Korea MS or Parker Jotter the SF writer manqué's PoV...but there was not something I could find that reliably sent me off to another narrative strand. It could be that I'm just not sophisticated enough, or attentive enough, to identify it; nonetheless its invisibility to me (whatever the cause) cost me fluid readability.

I'm not proficient in Korean history so I went into the read expecting to need St. Wiki's help untangling what/when/who nexuses. Author Park offers clues that feel very helpful. The problem is these clues aren't terribly well signposted. By which I mean I think he went out of his way to bury them in odd places.

"Flounder" is my verb for this read. I floundered from the beginning to the end. I splashed in a kiddie pool that floated into the Indiana Natatorium. I'm pretty sure most of the time I was listing perilously in the diving well...deep but not lethal.

I'm giving you the impression that this wasn't fun, but oh boy was it! Like being in a giant playtank without adult supervision always is! Splash into the Korean Provisional Government's truly jaw-dropping existence; then to the Korean War vet (my dad was one, too) Parker's awful struggles, Soon's crisis of conscience; the story didn't help me figure out where I was or who I was with. Author Park trusted me to figure it out.

How often do you get that experience? I'm not sure when I was last left alone by a US writer to slug through a learning curve. It was heady stuff. As was its quiet-part-aloud disdain for crony capitalism. The main reason people rise in the current capitalist hellscape is mostly down to who they know and how much they can spend on the crappy people who gatekeep access to the ocean of money (fake, fiat money has no logical reason for scarcity) need to do...anything...hence GLOAT.

It won't be everyone's jam. If you found Cloud Atlas impenetrable, this isn't your book. OTOH, if you're into bibimbap already, the food references will feel like horrible torture unless you live near a Korean place. Hanjeongsik is in my very near future if I have anything to say about it...but that's beside the point. You need to have a willingness to keep going in spite of wondering what this or that person's name is, this or that historical event's factuality is, and be ready to accept the "aha!" moments as they come.

A strong anti-crony capitalist theme in a book that allows me to learn things for myself. Had it been 100pp shorter I'd be full-five-starring it. But at 520-plus pages it felt bloated, slightly self-indulgent. A story I recommend with mild reservations, not a "just READ it gorram you!" shove.