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.
A sharp eye might’ve noticed some changes to the various outlets listed on the Books page, as other places where: Spectator Books in Oakland has been added, there’s a selection of zines on the shelves there now, so if you find yourself on that side of the Bay, head on over, say hi; and but also, Smashwords has been removed.
It’s early, of a dim and sodden morning. Thin light seeps through enormous flower-shapes painted across the window-glass to settle on the high thick mattress laid upon the floor, gently picking rumples and folds from among the tangled sheets, the pillows piled, lightening them, but not enough to draw out any differences between the pastels lurked within, only just enough to define the heights, the crumpled peaks and ridgelines, the window-facing slopes. He shifts, the shape of him turning from side to back, a massif obliterating, remaking the bedscape, crumpling ranges, raising up plains, geologic time made legible for one brief turbulent moment before all is settled in a new configuration. His face now visible, the summit of his nose, that light too weak to find many at all of the white hairs hatching the lush black copse of his mustache. A snort, air roaring through the caverns of his nostrils, and he blinking opens the lightless tarns of his eyes, “Gloria?” he says, when he can.
She’s sat at the foot of the mattress, jet-black hair a finely threaded shawl to drape the bulk of her shoulders, spill down her pale bare back.
“Sweetling,” he says. “Your friend will be fine. All is well.”
That hair unsettles as her shoulders lift, a sigh, a slump to still again. “You don’t know Olivia.”
He sits up, sheets slipping, “It happens,” he says, “the first time one,” a breath, “overindulges,” he reaches for her, but falters, falls short, his hand settling instead on his sheeted knee. “An embarrassment, yes, but hardly more than a wince and a blush, and it’s not as if she’s part and parcel of what goes on hereabouts, your friend from school. And when her father came to fetch her, he was none the wiser,” but he surges up sheets falling away to take hold of those heaving shoulders as she chokes out a sob, “oh,” he says, roughly gentle, “my deckled dove, my darling dear, what is it, what,” his arms about her now, rough cheek against hers shining wetly, holding her until she catches hold of herself, her sobs resolving in a deeply determined breath.
“Very enjoyable bit of urban fantasy kit—”
“—over the top, long winded, unnecessary, grossly elaborate and just bloated beyond all proportion.”
