City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: an urban fantasy mixing magical realism with gonzo noirish prose, where duels are fought in Pioneer Square, and river gods retire to comfortably shabby apartments.
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.
Boots Riley
So for me, the question isn’t “Is the public ready?” I start from: the public already knows things are messed up. The public is more open than we’re told. The question I ask myself is: how do I move people emotionally towards imagining something they can do? Not “the” solution, but a solution—something that shifts them from “It’s all hopeless” to “Maybe we can try this.” That’s what I’m after.
A lonesome banjo plucked and bent over makeshift percussion, a warmly disinterested voice, Burlington Northern pulling out of the world, she twists a key, shuts off engine, radio, headlights all at once. The only streetlight, a ways ahead, shines mostly on the rough stone wall that steeply rises to the right, the sidewalk narrow at its base. Across the street a curve of houses, demurely lit, and each at first seems discretely different from the rest of them about, yet all of them, every one, of a size, a type, with their scraps of yard, their brief driveways, their artfully unkempt flowerbeds and shrubs, that each ends up looking much like the others.
The key tucked away in her hoodie, she opens the toolbox on the seat beside her. Lifts aside a massive cleaver and a thinly elegant honing steel to pull out a tiny knife, the blade of it maybe half the length of its handle, whittled to a wicked point. She tucks it away in her hoodie. Takes another knife, as pointed but much longer, in her left hand, blade of it laid back against her forearm, and one more item, a lumpy wad of something rubbery and brown. Snap and clack the lid of the toolbox.
Quick across the street and up the shallow curl of driveway past a garage door shut up tight to the corner where she crouches, back to the house, silently panting through her wide-open mouth. Shakes out the wad, blankly goggled, blackly crackle, and, careful of the handle of the knife, ducks to slip it on, a horse’s head, loosely floppy, a lopping wobble as she tugs it into place.
From the corner into darkness, through stiff hedge-sheaves with a minimum of rustle, then wary, sidelong steps down a steepening slope, fingertips brushing the wall beside her as the the bulk of the house lofts from the ground into darkness, just the hint of a flicker, candlelight, perhaps, ahead. When she can she ducks beneath, a step, two, criss-cross to a shadow solid enough to hold, a piling, and another, there.
“Just a glorious bit of writing, I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
