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.
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.
It’s not a terribly thick folder she drops on the table, just a handful of freshly printed pages in a crisp blue jacket. Beside it she sets a spiral-bound stenographer’s pad and two ballpoint pens, clack, tack, and last, a short brown paper cup with the tags of a couple of teabags peeping from under its white plastic lid. Scrape as she pulls out a chrome-framed black-cushioned chair, creak as she settles her bulk in it. Her slacks a slickly brown, her half-zip pullover softly grey, her silver hair close-cropped. She opens the jacket, flips back the cover of the stenographer’s pad, takes up a pen, click-lick, click-lick, and squints at the woman across the battered table from her, younger, smaller, downright scrawny, wrists manacled to a bracket welded to the tabletop, arms bared and shoulders, shivering, dressed only in filthy jeans and a grey bralette, her hair-colored hair a matted, tangled curtain dropped before her face.
“Chilly?” says the silver-haired woman. Not even a clink of the cuffs in response.
“Okay!” Another click-lick of the pen. “This is Detective Sally Bauer, Bee Ay You Ee Are, on the Homicide Detail. Date is Friday, twenty-fifth May; time, oh-seven eighteen hours; case number,” and here she checks the first page of the file, “two seven two, four nine eight. We are currently in an interview room in the confines of the Portland Police Bureau, Eleven Eleven Southwest Second, on the thirteenth floor.” Turning a page. “State your name for the record.” Looking up. That curtain of hair not even stirred by a breath.
“This strong and silent schtick won’t get you anywhere, okay? We took your prints. You’re in the system? We’ll know who you are in not too much longer. You’re not? Though, I gotta tell you, to look at you, this is not your first rodeo. Folks who, it’s their first time? Never been through this before? Tend to be a little more,” a shrug, “agitated.”
A shiver strong enough to chime the manacles.
“Who else could cause an LLM to hallucinate Emma Goldman, John Berryman, and an Irish sea god?”
“The surrealism, the lush detail, and the loving attention to local Portland culture…”
