Burnt

by Lance Olsen

From Publishers Weekly

The author of the Philip K. Dick Award finalist Tonguing the Zeitgeist, Olsen blends elements of chaos theory, deconstruction and more into a humorous novel that is part environmental dystopia, part academic farce. Murphy Porter is a tenured professor in the English department of Central Kentucky University. Increasingly cynical about academe, he is starting to find out that there's more truth in the tabloids that he and his wife, Tanya, read compulsively than in his own work on, say, "Bakhtinian Polyphonic Narratology in Gay Bikers from Hell." The government really is planning to send up space stations to house the lucky few in the event of nuclear winter; there may be ETs (someone's talking to Porter's inner consciousness); people are suffering from EI, environmental illness; and animals are mutating?particularly local squirrels, which have become violently aggressive and immune to everything except a blast from a .22. His faith in his institution is further dimmed by the heavy-handed pressure exerted to pass the football team's barely sentient star quarterback. In good po-mo fashion, there's plenty of musing about reality and appearances sandwiched between grocery lists of brand names; of T-shirt and bumper-sticker slogans; of statistics proving what fools we are for destroying the Earth. Olsen treads a fine line, occasionally threatening to become unbearably cool, but he doesn't. Tempered by the tender love between Murphy and Tanya, by a subtly frightening vision of ecological degradation and most of all by true wit, he's instead offered a funny cautionary tale.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

171 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1996

About the author

Lance Olsen was born in 1956 and received his B.A. from the University of Wisconsin (1978, honors), his M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers Workshop (1980), and his M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1985) from the University of Virginia.

He is author of eleven novels, one hypertext, four critical studies, four short-story collections, a poetry chapbook, and a textbook about fiction writing, as well as editor of two collections of essays about innovative contemporary fiction. His short stories, essays, poems, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, Fiction International, Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Village Voice, Time Out New York, BOMB, Gulf Coast, McSweeney's, and Best American Non-Required Reading.

Olsen is an N.E.A. fellowship and Pushcart prize recipient, and former governor-appointed Idaho Writer-in-Residence. His novel Tonguing the Zeitgeist was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award. His work has been translated into Italian, Polish, Turkish, Finnish, and Portuguese. He has taught at the University of Idaho, the University of Kentucky, the University of Iowa, the University of Virginia, on summer- and semester-abroad programs in Oxford and London, on a Fulbright in Finland, at various writing conferences, and elsewhere.

Olsen currently teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah. He serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at Fiction Collective Two; founded in 1974, FC2 is one of America's best-known ongoing literary experiments and progressive art communities.

He is Fiction Editor at Western Humanities Review. With his wife, assemblage-artist and filmmaker Andi Olsen, he divides his time between Salt Lake City and the mountains of central Idaho.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

In the liberal (important) spirit of you can make it mean whatever you want to.

Here's Burnt by Nobody Special.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aicak...

Nobody Special was this xian punk band from the '80s. One of the first such. Really made a splash when the vinyl hit the scene. There's a little obscure history of pop=music here no=one need care about. See the guy behind Nobody Special, Pat Nobody, is the brother of this other ground=breaking musician Joey Taylor, aka Ojo Taylor. Ojo was the guy behind what more or less counts as the first xian punk band, Undercover. Here's their classic anthem God Rules!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjfOM...

Ojo went on to release some of the more thoughtful/intelligent xian albums of the time. Like this solo album for which I still hold a special soft=spot ::
https://ojotaylor.bandcamp.com/album/...

Odd thing is Ojo went on to convert to Atheism under the tutelage of the new atheists (which I find unfathomable, but what the hell). Last I checked up on him, he's still a nice guy and seems to have avoided the rabies which are usually symptomatic of the new atheists. Anyways, if you're interested, here's an interview about that ::
https://ojotaylor.wordpress.com/2017/...
[Joe Taylor is now a music prof at james madison u, if i've got my facts straight]

And if you're going to dig into this obscure buried moment of xian pop=music of the more extreme variety there are three bands/albums you absolutely must know about ::

One Bad Pig's A Christian Banned ::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79BkL...
[they went on to make some nicely humored albums (typical xian=punk politics aside) and even recorded with Johnny Cash]

The Lead's The Past Behind ::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRaKW...
[the most extreme thing to be found upon the xian=landscape of the time]

The Crucified's Take Up Your Cross
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui1Lu...
[apologies, but like every xian=punk band at the time had to have (at least) one anti=abortion song. sick shit]

And though too, honorable mention, to wash=out all the right wing shit these bands were involved in, there was one band out of JPUSA (you'll know them already as the community Rez Band comes from) --
Crashdog's My God ::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnwlT...
which just goes to show that in reality, there was also a left wing element of evangelicalism.


At any rate, this Review has nothing to do with the book at hand. But what the hell. We can do anything we want to in these Review Boxes, no? Including letting the free association roll. Right?

One last number from Nobody Special -- Dissertation ::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aM3Ln...

[Mike Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

My first book by Olsen, expected something weird and funny, perhaps experimental. Not weird with the exception of a minor cheesy sci fi plot which was also somewhat humorous, as well as a few chuckles from Al’s pontificating. Otherwise boring waiting for something to happen. My main problem with the book is when something does happen, it’s out of nowhere and completely unbelievable. It involves the main character and his wife, he’s a professor being pressured into passing a star football player who is flunking badly so he can win the championship. They hatch a plot to make things right that is not only idiotic, it’s totally out of character. The plot goes horribly wrong, but there’s essentially no consequences, no remorse, and no tension whatsoever, just back to boring land. This is one of three books i bought by Olson a lot on ebay cheap. So I guess I’ll try one more without high expectations. Freknest or Time Famine.

[Markel Tumlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A short, entertaining novel set on and around a fictional university campus in Kentucky. The narrator is an English professor who relates a series of events transpiring near the end of the fall semester including his unorthodox response to the pressure he is feeling to give a passing grade to the school’s star quarterback. This is happening in a world of environmental collapse that is literally driving animals crazy. There are squirrels that repeatedly invade his house. There is a lot of humor here, and there is a lot of strangeness too. If you like your fiction offbeat, you might enjoy this novel.