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.
This tub’s of beaten copper, not of wood, set in the midst of the trim green lawn stretched flatly out to parapets of brick. Panels of palest gauzy blue shiver in an intermittent breeze, screening the tub from the backsides of the buildings at the high end of the block. Above, shreds and scuds of darkening clouds slink from the setting sun, and those last bright beams of daylight strike window-glass and metalled trim, shine slantwise over graveled roof and silhouetted copse, softening as they fall to wash the edges and details away, dissolving all that distance to a deepening haze outshone already by storefront and streetlit intersection, artificial colors sharper, more precise, though small, and thin, to be so sharp. Jo’s sat at the one end, shoulders lapped by faintly steaming water, head hung low. Knelt behind her on the grass Queen Ysabel in a rough white robe, leaned over the beaten rim of the tub to rub and knead Jo’s wet-dark hair with sopping clouds of suds. Jo flinches, and she halts, her hands become cradles, “Did they hurt you?”
“They, ah,” says Jo, turning away, “they weren’t that careful, putting me in the car.”
Her hands now combs, to sluice away the suds. “My poor Gallowglas.”
“Are we done?” Slop of water restless against copper.
“Rinse,” says Ysabel, lifting away her hands to blot them, front and back, on the nubbled lapels of her robe. Jo dunks her head, then pushes out into the middle of the bath, her wake a soapy iridescence. Ysabel looks back, over her shoulder, “It seems it’s time,” she says, to no one in particular, “for refreshment, and illumination.” Parting those lapels to draw aside, let slip, down her arms and off. She lifts a bare leg over the rim, slowly to settle herself with a beatific wince, the water displaced rolled silkily across to lick the edges, lift Jo’s hair, brush her ducked chin as she looks away. The sun gone down, away behind the hills, the city turned toward night below.
“Our reviewers loved the world-building and well-drawn characters.”
“The surrealism, the lush detail, and the loving attention to local Portland culture…”
“I think it’s the only time I’ve fallen in love with a city through a novel.”
