july 2023

Asphalt, Carl Hancock Rux. 2004. 255pp. Little free library.

This novel seems in hindsight to have a place in my world of ideas where I should have known something would fit. I can sense I will recommend it someday to somebody who will need it. Initially presents itself as a story about a stoic drifter with no past who agrees to DJ parties at a squat in a wartorn alternate Brooklyn, and spirals off into many unusual places, not all of which I understand on first reading. Contemplative, drifting, yet immediate and particular, capable of sudden blows of meaning that leave you weak and dizzy. Occasionally the ramshackle sentences threaten a wince, especially in moments of gothic-lurid family tragedy. But Rux has a certain undeniable control.

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Blankets, Craig Thompson. 2003. 582pp (graphic novel). Pages bookstore, Calgary, AB.

Centres around an intense week’s meeting between two long-distance teenage lovers, one of whom, the male writer, is deeply religious. Its rhythm captures a special voiceless pensiveness particular in my mind to the form of the graphic novel. In winter I hiked into a snow-covered canyon and sat alone on a fallen tree and listened out under the bright sun. The empty plate of the snow carried sound for kilometres. I heard a branch snap and then for a while rustling nothing. That not-quite-silence is what I can hear in my mind in the book. The love scenes are extremely moving, and not only because I obtained this book during an intense week’s meeting with someone I love who lives far away, but for that reason too.

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Ducks, Kate Beaton. 2022. 430pp (graphic novel). Borrowed from roommate.

Beaton’s memoir of working in the Alberta oil fields as a young Newfoundlander. My first time seeing these peculiarly Canadian, peculiarly Albertan, permutations of capitalist alienation drawn out (ha ha). In our country which we ourselves barely consider as a philosophical object, in those parts of our country with gravel roads where your birthplace can still be identified by your accent and surname. Our country on which oligarchs in suits in rooms play out their insecurities against the swinging dick of the States using men with backaches to operate huge bristling machines; the men with backaches play out their insecurities using the women. Here and there the vignettes are precariously stacked or on-the-nose, and yet, the subject is so vividly evoked, the details chosen are in some cases so poignant, that ultimately, without your noticing, Beaton’s nails dig in. I burst into tears twice in the last four pages. In my city, at almost every cocktail bar, you can buy a thousand-dollar ounce of liquor. That money from the sludge gets spent like it'll be worthless tomorrow.

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Double Teenage, Joni Murphy. 2016. 197pp. Won in a draw from Shelf Life Books, Calgary.

Beautiful work. Murphy’s prose in the narrative portions is flawless, effortless. The coming-of-age of two girl-women from Las Cruces, New Mexico, dissolves toward the end in a collage of theory which in my (uneducated) sense does not attain the depth and delicacy of feeling the actual story attains at its best. (Of course this move out and in from ironic meta-distance can be beautiful and productive, but is it enough on its own?) The most heartbreaking development occurs at the end of the first act. That could have been alone a generational novella. I guess I may be searching for something this work is not. I'm becoming primed by skimming Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing (next month's post?) to defend the humble novel in which events occur to people. Perhaps I tend to sense cynically that theory-novelists allow themselves to draw back from ending their novels because ending a novel very well is sometimes more difficult than saying what you mean outright, with citations. God knows most of us struggle with either. 

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Movies:

• Asteroid City (2023) dir. Wes Anderson

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