february 2023

City of Night, John Rechy. 400pp. Local library. Half-finished.

Fat stack of 1950s Beat hustler slang and eye dialect. Semi-memoir: Rechy really did turn tricks in California. Gets slightly repetitive after a point but so does smoking weed every night at the same three bars. The nearly antipathetic attitude toward the scene and its players, especially the queens, is a cruel counterpoint to Stonewall nostalgia. (Similar in Forbidden Colours, below.) Pleasure of language buoyed me through the first half but the library took it back. Will probably try again someday.

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The Life and Death of the SLA, Les Payne and Tim Findley with Carolyn Craven. 369pp. University library.

The SLA’s leader DeFreeze supposedly inspired The Stand’s Randall Flagg during the Hearst case. Payne does the counter-work of much good crime reporting: framing the mastermind as kind of a dope. The window into 1970s radical culture makes you grateful for the cellphone-socialism of the 21st century, where at least you don’t have to fuck everyone in your group house or do push-ups. Contains especially candid analysis of the racial dynamics between DeFreeze, his fellow black activists, and the many white women who appear to have been running around bombing banks fifty years ago. (No black women obvious among SLA soldiers, though a few Asian-American names appear. Payne notes that the black female tutors who knew DeFreeze in Soledad all saw through him. Presumably women like Shakur were in with a higher calibre of revolutionary.)

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Hurricane Season (Temporada de huracanes), Fernanda Melchor. 210pp. Local library.

Melchor’s second book Paradais was a revelation in the category of fiction that that makes you want to drive a car off a cliff. This earlier more expansive exercise in the same style and tone is also a knockout, but the claustrophobia and dread of Paradais might better balance Melchor’s frenetic relentless prose style. As I read I thought I don’t know if I would read a third novel in this style, which can start to have a rote quality in which new horrors are the only punctuation of flow. But the very final scene is brutally powerful; certainly Melchor has more of importance to say in this thematic vein.

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Forbidden Colours (禁色, Kinjiki) Yukio Mishima. 1968. 403pp. Local library.

It seems to me that Mishima understood the core of the world: the mad desire for beauty, which is the desire for transcendence and union. Supposedly this novel was an early influence in butoh, which brought us, by some lineages, harsh noise music. Therefore I expected a somber trembling razor of a novel like Confessions of a Mask, but actually this book is, of all things, maliciously funny. Wildean? Dense with acute blooms of idea and language like an uneasy feeling arising mid-bit.

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Movies:

• Mysterious Skin (2004) dir. Gregg Araki
• Magnolia (1999) dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

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march 2023

To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf. 1927. 151pp. Rainbow’s End Books and Discs in Wolfville, NS.

Slim, deft and ultimate. The middle sections in which the house falls to ruin provoke you to imagine every abandoned house in the world has a light-filled dinner party somewhere in its past full of complex inflections of love and unlove which have been lost to all living memory. Has not stayed with me as much as I thought it might.

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Best Canadian Stories 2020, ed. Paige Cooper. 2021. 239pp. Local library.

Cooper’s collection of hazy, vicious short stories in Zolitude promised interesting taste. Many standouts here, including one that made me cry on a plane (Thea Lim’s “If You Start Breathing”) Another handful with all the same awkwardness: death and power and cruelty are already more terrible and strange than any imagined fantastic mechanism. Death needs no veiling. My preference is for surreality that is confrontational and unintelligible as metaphor. Contrast the bold half-mean strangeness of Madeleine Maillet's "Mother Tongue" or Naben Ruthnum's "Common Whipping".

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Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut. 1969. 215pp. Little free library.

Maybe when I read this a second or third time I’ll have something new and useful to say about it. Of course, masterful. Catching up on a number of these classic midcentury disillusion books by scattered male writers which will form a pattern by April; this was the most human and genuine of my readings from that cluster, the one I reacted to most as a spiritual document and least as an intellectual exercise.

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True Grit, Charles Portis. 1968. 223pp. Café Books in Canmore, AB.

Bright funny novel perfectly scattered with salt and ash. No more to say but left with the pleasant uneasy feeling that there is more to say that I don't know. Some things are stated so plainly yet one has the feeling the space around the plainness defines another higher statement.

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Movies:

• The Quiet Girl (2022) dir. Colm Bairéad
• California Split (1974) dir. Robert Altman
• Hard Eight (1996) dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

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