City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where aspirants are knighted in Forest Park, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store.
While I’m writing a story, I am subject to a set of tensions indistinguishable from those that overtake me when I write poems. The distinction is most of all technical, because I find the idea of “poetic stories” more horrifying than yellow fever, and I am always very careful that what happens in my stories suggests to the reader a definite structure, a given reality, as unreal as it might seem to the eyes of a newspaper reader and those beings with-their-feet-on-the-ground. (What are feet? What is the ground?) If I find in your stories a fraternity that excites me and makes me want to be your friend, it is precisely the supreme nerve with which you plant your word trees.
The book established Whitehead’s intelligence and originality as a novelist, but I wasn’t too excited by the world of elevator inspection, and I was frankly irritated by the author’s choice of Lila Mae as the protagonist. Although it’s technically impressive and theoretically laudable when a male novelist succeeds in inhabiting a female persona, something about the actual practice makes me uneasy. Is the heroine doing double duty as the novelist’s fantasy sex object? Is the writer trying to colonize fictional territory that rightfully belongs to women? Or does the young literato, lacking the perks of power and feeling generally smallened by the culture, perhaps believe himself to be, at some deep level, not male at all?
I think “solidarity” is what Freaky Tales would call it, a movie which, believe it or not, I’m actually going to talk about. But again: I’ve given myself permission to write the longest essay anyone will write about Freaky Tales, as an exercise, experiment, statement, and/or self-indulgence; I like writing, and I am enjoying writing this, so I am. But the more I write, the more that length gives permission to anyone who doesn’t want to read it—even encourages them—to close the browser and move on. You’re not stuck with me, after all, the way you have no choice but to see a mural as you drive past it each day. You can go find something you like better and leave me to my fun.
Buttons clatter and clack as spindled fingers clamp his shoulders, push the one, pull the other, twisting him about, “whoa,” he’s saying, “whoa,” as he plants his feet to hold him fast, but the elderly man’s relentless, tugging and shoving as all over his grimy denim jacket those badges and buttons and pins so strikingly colored, distinctly sloganed, PROTECT each OTHER, says one, and Star Grease another, ACT-UP, HE / HIM, Think Younger ’74, Queer But Tired jangle and clank until he’s turned about just so, his back to the ruddy, low-slung sedan parked athwart an otherwise empty street, “Boy,” the elderly man is saying, “I put up with far too much the last few days to have any patience left in these my bones,” the face of him weathered away to extraordinary furrows and prominences, eyes sunk deep in calderas beneath the whitely shagged escarpment of his brow, pinched mouth set in a wrinkled moraine, “so kindly do us a solid, and hold still.”
“What he said,” from the kid, sat back against the fender, scowling under a matted pompadour.
The elderly man opens the long driver-side door, squats in his shapeless linen suit to lever up the front seat, “Go on,” he’s saying as he does so, “she just wants to talk.”
“Who?” says the young man in the denim jacket, “Who?” even as the elderly man is tugging and pushing, folding him into the back seat of the car, closing up the door of it with a gentle chunk that’s nonetheless terribly loud in the silence about them, and not even a susurrant rumble or whir of traffic on the overpasses laced above.
“Jack,” she says.
Her hair a bit too ruddy to be brown, per se, pushed back to sweep her shoulders, black top turtlenecked, sleeveless, bare arms folded, those eyes the color of mud to either side of that nose, looking at him with such, such concern.
“Fuck you,” he says, looking away with a clack of buttons.
“The characters are both subtly human and bold rock-opera caricatures and why do they both work—”
“It’s like Twin Peaks had a baby with Once Upon a Time.”
“Also there’s some bits that are sexy as hell so like, be prepared for that…”
