City of Roses is a serialized epic firmly set in Portland, Oregon, only with more sword fights: a wicked concoction of urban pastoral and incantatory fantastic, where aspirants are knighted in Forest Park, and the Devil keeps a morgue in an abandoned big-box store.
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.
A look of such keen uncertainty, such anguished delicacy, as her breath catches, a happy sob, a nod, her face tipped up, to spill black curls along her heaving back.
He closes up the phone in his hand, scowl losing itself in the shadows as the light of the screen is folded away.
She’s overwhelmed, again, eyes widening in greenly consternation as her head’s jerked upright, oohing mouth as her white jacket slips from her shoulders as she lowers a hand, her hands, golden halter draped over her rising breast and falling with a breath, fingers stroking severely yellow hair, the head of the woman knelt before her, the head of the woman knelt behind, the same pale naked swoops of torsos that bookend her, pale hands clutching olive thighs, bare hips, white trousers loosely pooled about her ankles, there on the lapping rugs.
Light blooms unnoticed beside him, flaring from his hand, lasting barely long enough to glimpse once more that scowl, yes, framed by ashen curls, his necktie neatly knotted, the smoothly gleaming wooden haft his descending fingers curl about, the tooling that filigrees the butt and cheek of the axe-head at the top before slipping entirely back to darkness.
Pale shoulders rolling those yellow heads swiveling twisting pressing mouths to work, to lick, kissing sucking nipping and licking again together until the one behind lifts up, sits back, removing her lips to make way for fingers, and between the two of them she throws out her free hand for balance.
He steps from behind the column, toward the three of them, the spread of rugs and pillows, the brightly burning candles, the haft of that axe in both his hands the head of it dropped down swung back and then up, behind and above his shoulders.
“—to explain how this is Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks plus Portlandia with a smattering of Little, Big and Chinatown.”
