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.
Bootheels thunder down stairs from weakly sunstruck balustrades of glass above past yellow and grey of underlayment atop those joists and beams the color of old coffee into the softly shadows of that long and slender open porch beneath, and the screams, the relentless raw, full-throated screams from that far end, frantic pulsing bleats shoved out between desperate yelping breaths hauled in enough to draw another ragged howl of anguish, rage, of pain and terror, harrowing despair, wordless, shapeless, formless, ceaseless, echoing over the vertiginous drop beyond, the screen of trees quite dark against a whitely haze of sky. Luys leaps the last few steps at the bottom to crouching lope the length of the porch, the table gleaming endlessly to one side, the wall to the other opening on a widely solid bannister, the needled trees beyond, rattled thunder become a scuffled scrape as he skids to a halt at the far end, reaches for the squalling squealing screaming tangle of blankets in the slant of sunlight there, “My lord!” from the stairs behind, the Viscount Agravante descending with only a whit more deliberation, a dash less alacrity, “my lord Mason, do not!”
A fold of blanket loosening as he seizes it, drooping from a pinkly enormous white-crowned burden, and the screams it seems had until now been muffled, as that burden tips up, that nose, those crinkled eyes, those cracked lips yawling spreading wide to make room for a piercing yowl so much louder than any that had come before, and wincing, grimacing Luys yanks at the blankets, tugging them free, digging for something, a shoulder, an arm to grip, but there’s nothing, nothing but blankets and that enormous rolling shrieking head that he catches in his hands, pressing palm to cheek as that scream is swallowed by a sobbing breath, air desperately sucked into nowhere at all, and another, another, quick yelps as percussive as hiccups as Luys struggles to hold the twisting yanking slowing twitching gentling breaths that come more easily now, and the screaming’s stopped. “My lord Pinabel?” says Luys, perplexed.
Tiny eyes blink open to focus, darkly, on him. “Candy floss,” mutters the other, swiveling savagely to clamp that mouth about the heel of Luys’s hand.
“—to explain how this is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks plus Portlandia with a smattering of Little, Big and Chinatown.”
“The characters are both subtly human and bold rock-opera caricatures and why do they both work—”
