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.
The light is changing. She peers up beneath a shading hand as she steps off a number fifteen bus at the corner, there. The sun, having past its zenith, begins its inexorable descent toward a monstrous wall of rain-heavy cloud already stretched across one whole side of the sky, bulwarks that swell from stoney blues and greys up and up through warming browns to hazy, shredded palisades and parapets of ivory, and already the towers of downtown have been overwhelmed. The bus unkneels with sigh behind her, pulls away with a snort, on up the hill.
Across the street and down, a couple of similar brick buildings shoulder up three or four storeys together, the one at this corner higher than the one at the next as the street slopes before them. Above her, the skeletal frame of what had once been a grand awning to cover the sidewalk, though the wide windows of the storefront are newly, clearly clean. Inside, wide sheets of graffiti’d plywood neatly stacked to one side of the space, lengths of cyclone fencing laid upright against the other wall, and plastic signs lapped one atop another that say Wilson Properties, Sutherlin Bank, Anaphenics. Tools neatly racked against a bar back there, shovels, bolt-cutters, pry bars, and a fading mural on the back wall, of a leaning, red-roofed tower over sketches of olive trees. Lido, the letters cursive above. The next and lower storefront, windows similarly sparkling, and the letters on them freshly painted, red that’s lined and edged with black, Monte Carlo, they say. Pizza. Steaks.
“Two Italian restaurants,” says Ellen Oh.
“It’s serial fiction done right.”
