Sunday, October 13th. 3-5pm Occidental Center for the Arts’ Book Launch Series. Helen’s Crusade, local author and artist, Trula M. LaCalle’s riveting debut novel. Selected readings and conversation with the author, book sales and signing. Free admission, donations welcome. Refreshments by donation, beer/wine for sale. OCA is located at 3850 Doris Murphy Court, Bohemian Hwy at Graton Rd. and is accessible to people with disabilities. For more info: 707-874-9392 or occidentalcenterforthearts.org
In E.R. Ramzipoor’s novel The Ventriloquists, a cadre of Belgian resistance journalists risk their lives to lampoon Nazi propaganda. Almost unbelievably, the story is based on a real part of history: a group of the Belgian resistance really did get together to write and distribute a false version of the Nazi-led newspaper Le Soir. Most of them lost their lives for the project. All of the text from the satirical paper reproduced in the book is authentic. Some characters are composites of or riffs on real people; some are made up from whole cloth, like the narrator, a young girl disguised as a newsboy who acts as the story’s anchor. We enter the story when we meet the newsboy, now an old woman reminiscing about her history. If all of this sounds complex, it is, but Ramzipoor juggles it deftly, helped by glittering prose, snappy pacing, and a keen sense of humor.
World War II has been so studied, so overexposed, that it’s become a very broad canvas for different artists to assay—still life, with Nazis. It’s a genre in itself, which isn’t bad: we’re left with little need to fill in the context behind what we read. Ramzipoor acknowledges the nature of her endeavor through one of her characters, the titular ventriloquist, who at one point in the delightfully twisting plot has to mimic the voices of Winston Churchill and FDR in order to goad an RAF commander into bombing their city. “His job was usually to reconstruct a voice from a whisper; now, he felt as though he was reconstructing shouts from an echo.” Ramzipoor, too, writes about one small corner of what is one of the most echoed and magnified periods in history. She benefits from the wealth of media surrounding the period she addresses. The characters’ wry, sharp dialogue and its sometimes slapstick sensibility owe much to the legacy of Charlie Chaplin and the Marx Brothers. I noticed the book’s sense of humor because it’s at odds with today’s memetic one. It’s very much of the 1940s, and it’s very funny.
The Ventriloquists also gives us something that would have been only subtext in times past: a queer relationship at the heart of the story. Better yet, it’s a relationship in which queerness doesn’t make up the central drama. Instead, the conflict in the relationship is over a question of morality in war, not the forbidden nature of gay love. Likewise, the young narrator’s crossdressing isn’t treated as an essential conflict; it only becomes one at a single point in the plot. Instead, it’s an interesting facet of a character, a sign of gender fluidity that’s realistically accepted by most others in the story. These themes do not feel forced, but instead feel like a true part of history, a part that is too often elided in fiction.
As for the plot, it’s a rollicking, twisting, turning adventure that’s almost unbelievably complicated, and hangs together on a delicate frame of multiple-point-of-view narration. There’s a gay Jewish man imprisoned and forced into collaboration with the Nazis, a marginally sympathetic Nazi partisan, and a dashingly quixotic satire-writer. There’s a smuggler/prostitute, not part of the historical record, but rather a composite of characters too often stricken from that record. There are real names from history, like the linotypists who gave their lives to print the satirical paper. And, of course, there’s the protagonist, the young girl-as-newsboy. If I had any quibble with the book, it’s that the multiple points of view take some time to coalesce. The characters don’t feel distinct until about 150 pages into the 544-page book. But that’s a minor issue, and it’s well worth your time to get past the bumpy beginning.
More than anything, I love how apt it is to write a book about the power of writing. A group of writers really did give up their lives in the service of satire, and it’s always made clear that the project is not just for the aggrandizement of the resistance. Instead, it’s meant for the Belgian people. Ramzipoor takes a moment out of the text to celebrate the heroism of ordinary people of the sort who do not often find fame, like a postal worker who smuggles yellow stars out of the post office rather than distribute them to the Jews of her town. Rampizoor’s attention to the small details missed by larger tellings of history animate the book, and it’s the light of her perspective that makes it something worth reading, which will stay with you long after you’ve put it down.
The Ventriloquists By E.R. Ramzipoor Park Row Books Hardcover, 9780778308157, 544 pp. August 2019
It is common to hear queer origin stories: without representation, we wither and die. Mythos, birth, coming into being—these are all invaluable totems of being truly alive for those forced into the margins. Coming out stories are radical and necessary, especially in the current political landscape, for they make space for others to find their own voices, their own stories. They clear a little patch in the grass and say, Come sit a spell.
However, what’s less common is an origin story rooted in what someone did in order to not come out. And that is the story of Dara, a self-identified non-practicing lesbian from the middle of Texas. After falling in love with a girl named Rhodie, Dara escapes into the drudgery of work. She takes a job at Sugar Land Prison, where she works for ten years before marrying the Warden and starting a new life. Dara does a pretty passable job escaping the terrors of out-queerness until the sudden death of her husband upends her life again.
This novel is a fun and quick read, and a quirky change from the usual, rural coming out story. The characters are humorous and self-effacing, and their wit holds up even more starkly against the harsh landscape of the Texas politics they find themselves enmeshed in. What’s more is that Dara is an excellent reminder that not all lives go in one direction: coming into oneself can happen at 15, or it can happen at 65.
Nine lost stories by acclaimed French author Marcel Proust will be published this fall.
According to the Guardian, the stories were first penned in the 1890s when Proust was in his ’20s. The stories, which delved into his homosexuality, were meant to be included in his first book “Plaisirs et les jours (Pleasures and Days),” a collection of poems and short stories. However, Proust chose not to include them. The Guardian calls the stories “a mix of fairytales, fantasy and dialogues with the dead.”
The stories were discovered by Proust specialist Bernard de Fallois, who started the publishing house Editions de Fallois, in the 1950s. Editions de Fallois will publish the lost stories under the title “Le Mystérieux Correspondant (The Mysterious Correspondent).” The 180-page book will be released on Oct. 9.
Proust is best known for writing “À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).” The masterwork was published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1917.
So many things make up a successfully written novel—two of the most important being plot and character. Henry Alley masters both in his latest novel, Men Touching, but it’s his characters, both three-dimensional and subtly nuanced, that drive the narrative with their convincing faults and merits. This is the story of a flawed protagonist—one that’s so human and so relatable that you never stop pulling for him, even when he seems to give up on himself and in turn, those he loves.
Robb is a divorced Vietnam veteran living the life of a supposedly liberated gay man in the city of Seattle. As the book opens, he is a man in love with the beauty of men—a near obsession with the surface. He may seem to be that emancipated gay man of the mid-1980s, but he’s fighting some personal demons, such as an Ativan habit he’s ended up with due to anxiety and PTSD stemming from an incident that sent him home soon after joining the war. When he attempts to quit, he discovers he’s more in the grips of addiction than he realized, and the battle is far from over. In Robb, Alley paints a harrowing and authentic picture of substance abuse and the damage it does to an individual and those who love him. This fight with addiction reveals a serious battle for Robb’s mental health and as a reader, you’re often left wondering if he’ll ever emerge whole.
Surrounding Robb and fighting in his corner are his ex-wife, teenage step-daughter, and sister, but their love and commitment are sorely tested by Robb and his actions. Also on his side, but with his loyalty sorely tested, is Robb’s partner Bart, a high school drama teacher dealing with the loss of a dear friend to the early AIDS crisis. As with much of Alley’s work, AIDS isn’t the main theme, but because of the period in which the novel takes place, it is introduced and written about with great thought and sensitivity. It is almost another character, ringing as true as any of the characters in this piece. This is the real genius in Alley’s work—his beautifully drawn characters. You feel you know them; their motives, their attributes, their flaws all touch you deeply. Alley may be at his best when writing of gay men of a certain age, but gay or straight, he understands the human heart and what drives a person to love. He demonstrates this in this work, as well as others, writing of a gay male character’s initial relationships with women. Robb’s relationship with his ex-wife is complex and weaves in and out of his current life and partnership with Bart in ways both subtle and complex, making for a unique dynamic between the two men.
It could be said that Men Touching is a story of redemption, but it’s so much more. It’s a story of a gay man’s struggle with his identity as well as the ghosts of his past. It’s also the story of a veteran and the complex mental health issues that face the men and women returning from war. And, not least, it’s a brilliant look at the disease of addiction, and mental health in general. Alley has a firm grasp on the realities of these conditions. In the end, though, it’s something else—it’s a love story, and an unpredictable and unexpected one. Nothing comes easy for the main character: I was often on the edge of my seat, and found myself cursing his decisions and choices, as well as his fate, but I never stopped rooting for him. This is a book that will pull you into its world and the lives of the people in it. You’ll be sorry to see them go by its end, and if you’re new to this author’s work, you will now be an admirer of it.
Men Touching By Henry Alley Chelsea Station Editions Paperback, 9781937627355, 300 pp. March 2019
It’s another morning in small-town Central Florida, and outside the local taxidermy shop stands a middle-aged woman in a nightgown and fuzzy slippers, tapping a cigarette into a coffee mug and admiring the pornographic window display she’s created with the shop’s wares. For her daughter, Jessa Morton, it’s one more thing to deal with on top of her father’s recent suicide and her less-recent abandonment by her lover, who was also her brother’s wife.
So begins Mostly Dead Things, the first novel by the writer and Twitter virtuoso Kristen Arnett. Despite its raw materials, it is neither a slab of Southern Gothic nor a zany romp through the land of Florida Man. To its protagonist and her author, taxidermy is no joke. It’s an art, and even a kind of nurture: “Animals that might have weathered into nothing got to live on indefinitely through our care,” Jessa says. It’s also a bottomless source of metaphor for Arnett—sometimes forced, but just as often fertile
Like mediums and morticians, taxidermists hold a uniquely proprietary relation to the dead. By carrying on her father’s business, Jessa intends to preserve in formaldehyde the memory of a loving but inflexible patriarch, who would have preferred that his shiftless son Milo follow in the family trade but ultimately settled for turning his daughter into his “little miniature.” Arnett adeptly captures the comfort an odd, unfeminine girl might find in this model of close-mouthed masculinity. Jessa recalls roadkill-harvesting missions on which father and daughter rode in happy silence in a truck that “smelled like gasoline and heated vinyl. Receipts slid along the dashboard with a satisfying hiss every time he’d turn a corner or switch lanes.”
The other great lost love of Jessa’s life is Brynn, hopelessly entangled with both Morton siblings since childhood. Into a family that doesn’t “discuss each other’s business,” she brings a vitality that overflows into chaos, “shouting her feelings at the top of her lungs so everyone could experience them with her.” She’s “curvier and funnier and meaner than anyone,” both a type familiar to many a queer woman who’s had a teenage crush encouraged by a putatively straight girl and one of Arnett’s most original creations. Their relationship plays out in moments stolen at sleepovers, amid preparations for Brynn’s wedding, and, later, as Milo’s away struggling to fulfill his role as breadwinner, all masterfully rendered by Arnett. It’s no surprise that Brynn leaves, or that Jessa feels permanently undone when she does.
Compromised as her attachments to the departed may be, Jessa is most at home in the past. Curiously, so is the novel itself. Compared with the visceral longings and disturbances of Jessa’s adolescence, present-day plotlines like the one involving the widowed Mrs. Morton’s nascent art career feel less charged with lived experience. In the present, characters wrangle exposition into dialogue (“The economy’s not great, and there’s no money from life insurance, since … you know”) and have their motivations laid out plainly: Mrs. Morton, we are informed, enjoyed making her R-rated art “because she felt a wild kind of freedom that she’d never had access to before.”
Throughout, many, many animal corpses are dissected and desecrated in many creative ways. (I grew up among hunters and their trophies—no stranger to the sight of, say, a gun rack formed from deer hooves upturned in surrender—and still found some passages difficult to stomach. If you read at the table, be warned.) Not that Arnett is necessarily aiming to shock. Her eye seems naturally and continually drawn to dust, grime, guts; even beyond the taxidermy table, there’s hardly a clean surface in the book. She’s at her best elbow-deep in the details, sorting through the mess of family history to determine what can be salvaged and what should be laid to rest.
Mostly Dead Things By Kristen Arnett Tin House Books Hardcover, 9781947793309, 354 pp. June 2019
I first discovered the work of writer and poet Gil Cuadros at an exhibit on Laura Aguilar at the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago. Aguilar is a lesbian Chicana artist known for her gorgeous photography that explores identity, the queer body, and the natural world. The exhibit featured an altar Aguilar had constructed honoring Cuadros’ life. Cuadros was a close friend of Aguilar’s until his death in 1996 from AIDS. Aguilar appears in his poem “Bordertowns” about a visit to Tijuana: Laura’s arms are crossed/to sleep, her body/ vibrates from the road. I love the way the poem concerns itself with borders literal and figurative, while also invoking a queer intimacy beyond sexuality: We hardly speak to each other/ but I turn back to see she’s there./ The vendors think we are married/ the way she snaps at me. “Bordertowns” appears in Cuadros’ book, City of God, which is split into short stories and poetry. Although it is his only full-length work, City of God remains an underrated masterpiece of gay Chicano literature.
In City of God, Cuadros fuses past, present, and future to give us his dark vision of what it’s like to be a gay Chicano man in America. Though Cuadros’ importance has been discussed by writers from Justin Torres to Sarah Schulman, he remains widely unread outside academic settings and anthologies of LGBTQ writing from the 1980s. Those who are familiar with his work love it almost to the point of obsession, or as Wanda Coleman wrote, people “accuse him of heart-bashing.” This is why Cuadros is owed a renaissance; his words are simply too beautiful to languish in obscurity. He strips language down to the bone, refusing to protect us from the truth. In doing so he gives readers a rare gift: an unfiltered window into an artist’s mind.
The brevity of Cuadros’ life, and the knowledge that he would soon die, adds a fierce urgency to City of God. He is in the company of visionaries such as David Wojnarowicz, who did not have the luxury of euphemisms or endless time.Here is a man who will not go quietly, who will not forget, who must leave a stain behind. Cuadros’ writing is infected with justified anger; he has watched numerous friends and lovers die, the world around him is apathetic to his pain, and he is haunted by ghosts everywhere he looks. City of God is his attempt to tell his story and bear witness before everything is lost.
Cuadros’ short stories are rooted in his Chicano heritage, drawing on Mexican folklore and mythology. He references Aztlan, the mythical homeland of Aztecs along with other archetypes of indigenous mythology. His writing attempts to reconcile mythology with reality and create a space for queer masculinity in Chicano culture. Reflecting this tension, his stories alternate between realistic and surreal: two young boys smearing strawberries over their naked bodies, a Chicano man acknowledging the racism of his white lover, a ghost that leaves golden coins, a young girl dealing with rape. In his poetry, the surreal is replaced by a bold and explicit physicality of expression. The defiance in these poems is their greatest strength. By refusing to shield the reader, Cuadros manages to capture truth where flowery language cannot:
I am just like any other queer, I’ve sucked down enough come to know that I’m infected. The doctor thumbs my folder looks like my father behind those glasses, and I hold back my tears. He runs his hands down my neck like a lover, checking for swollen glands and even for this he wears gloves.
In this short passage Cuadros includes so much: the failure of the body, intimacy, the pain of stigma, guilt, and self-blame, the family, and beauty even in the worst of moments. Cuadros’ work is filled with passages like these that hold space for a complex mixture of emotions.
The titular “City of God” is Los Angeles, and much like in Samuel Delany’sTimes Square Red, Times Square Blue, the reader gets a rare view of a city through its queer underbelly. The final poem in City of God uses the demise of the Egyptian movie theater, a popular cruising spot, as a metaphor for the decay of the human body. Cuadros captures the excitement of meeting a stranger on the street and having sex in the bathroom of the nearly empty theater, but even in this there are hints of tragedy to come. There’s a nihilism to the poem in the limit of human experience, the futility of being “nameless creatures fucking in plain sight.” Cuadros was one of many artists at the time to note how the destruction of buildings and cultural landmarks in cities paralleled the loss of creative communities due to HIV/AIDS and displacement. “I look like the city. only bare bones of what I used to be,” he writes. In this last poem (entitled “Conquering Immortality”), he includes research on the funeral rites of the Egyptians such as embalming and mummification. These are the grim preoccupations of a man who realizes his morality is imminent. Yet through City of God, he manages to achieve a kind of immorality in his writing. Although he was unfairly robbed of a full life, as a writer Cuadros ensured that his words would survive for generations—bloody, fresh, and demanding to be heard.
“There are horror movies about women behaving this way. There are romantic comedies about men doing the same.”—100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism
The new book by Chavisa Woods, which was released on June 25th of this year, sat unread on my nightstand for a good week before I managed the courage to pick it up. The title alone terrified me: 100 Times: A Memoir of Sexism. As a person who is sexually harassed regularly and has been sexually harassed for the majority of my adult life, it seemed like reading a book that dives into the compounding trauma of frequent sexual harassment would be traumatizing, or at least something I’d not want to do for recreational sport. Which reading is, of course—recreational sport.
Still, the very upfront title had both repelled and intrigued me, and once I started the book I didn’t put it down until I’d finished it. The book details one hundred different instances of gender-based harassment, violence, dismissal, and/or oppression, from verbal slights to overt assault. As the book progresses, we see the ways this constant harassment changes Woods, who becomes a person ever-ready for attack—a person who fights back:
Then he looked scared of me, and stepped away quickly, and looked me up and down. A few punk queers who were in the bar applauded. (This was a punk bar). The man went and set down his drink at the far end of the bar, and didn’t talk to me again. I heard about man his age tell him, “Damn, that little girl in the miniskirt knocked you out!”
Here’s the trick about this book, which despite detailing one hundred different ways Woods has been harassed and assaulted, feels short: the days and weeks after I read the book, I noticed threat everywhere. I thought about how easily I could write a memoir like this of my own—I could write 100 Times about just a year of my life. So could most people I know. What Woods has done in chronicling her experiences is multifaceted: she has created a prism that shows the true, lived experiences of feminized bodies in the world; she has shown the progress of compounded trauma; and she has, by naming it and logging it, shown how persistent, every day, and accepted the behavior is.
We need work like Woods’ memoir in the world. Repetition is a strong form for delivering important political messages—Gertrude Stein deployed repetition in Lifting Belly in a time when she was not allowed to love the way she loved. Woods deploys it in a different, albeit laterally powerful, move; by showing the omnipresence of gendered violence, she is showing the seams of patriarchy.
This text is not only a vital read for those who have experienced gender violence, but also for those looking to enact real allyship and create real change in the world. I suspect this text will become a vital tool for teaching, reclaiming, and collectively mourning for years to come.
The line of history and legend blends easily the further away one gets from the event or the era of the figure. Historical figures begin to take on mythical and messianic reputations to the point where they often cease to seem like they were once ordinary men and women. It’s also with the adage of time that the perceptions and reactions to these historical events and figures adapt and take new meaning with sociopolitical paradigm shifts, turning heroic figures into figures of derision, or vice versa. It’s through these cultural shifts that it becomes clear that the nature of story, identity, and legend becomes a reflection of the present more than a representation of some bygone era.
In Pajtim Statovci’s newest novel, Crossing, the reader follows two teenagers in Albania across the ’90s and early 2000s. The nation is going through some heavy changes with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the loss of its Communist head of state, Enver Hoxha. The story follows Bujar, who has lost his father from cancer and is watching his family fall apart, and Agim, Bujar’s best friend who is starting to come into their identity as a transwoman. Together, the story follows Bujar and Agim as they leave their old lives behind and try to make a new one however they can, moving from city to city, country to country, and from identity to identity. Both characters undergo massive changes, rejecting their original names and nationalities to become what they think the world will want of them and what they feel is the best versions of themselves to present to the world.
Statovci, whose family fled Kosovo to Finland to escape the Yugoslav Wars, imbues both Bujar and Agim with the sense of survival and strength that comes from living in Eastern Europe in the late 20th century. Both characters are relatable as they deal with a difficult sociopolitical climate, but still carry some universal challenges themselves. Like most teenagers, both struggle with their sense of identity and purpose, but grow up much faster as they lose any stability or foundations in their previous lives. They’re forced to deal with the culture shock that comes from moving to nations like Italy and Germany, and how they have to grapple with their sexuality and gender identity across different cultural divides.
Despite how grim and challenging the situation is, the story never gets lost in the misery of the environment. The characters are able to find peaceful moments despite the constant challenges they face, and while most of these moments are fleeting, the novel’s tone never makes it appear like it will always go wrong or be too miserable for them. There’s always a way for Bujar and Agim to gain something from their situation, and it’s nice that the story refuses to completely give in to despair, despite how easily it could fall into such an abyss.
The characters also recount various folk legends and myths of their nation throughout the book, and this helps make their own story seem like more of a legend. From stories about burying a woman alive to keep a fortress wall from collapsing to a story about a feud between two families, these help the reader understand how these stories could shape Albania and feature into the story of our protagonists. When Bujar and Agim remember these tales, not only is it a tie to their cultural and national identity (despite how much Agim wishes to no longer identify as Albanian), but it also makes their story seem more like a legend, akin to a hero’s journey. There’s a nomadic feel to their travels, there are difficult obstacles along the way, and the characters continually develop in a natural arc based on their trials. By the end of the story, the reader will see that the characters at the start are not the ones at the end and are left to wonder what this will mean for them going forward.
Overall, Crossing is a very emotional and intense read, full of relatable characters and a loving, but critical, tribute to Albanian culture. While it can be distracting at times with its mystery of who the narrator is and that some of the vignettes are at times too similar to previous ones, Statovci’s novel is a page-turner with serious emotional investment. There’s a constant sense of danger and uncertainty, both from the situation of Albania after the fall of Communism and from the nomadic lifestyle of Bujar and Agim, but there’s always a glimmer of hope that the protagonists can find some relief and certainty in the world, and as time has shown, there’s always a chance that the challenges of life can become less painful as time passes.
Crossing By Pajtim Statovci Pantheon Hardcover, 9781524747497, 272 pp. April 2019
“to be or fare well/now and in the hour of our death” — from “Ave I Via,” Pet Sounds
How does a poet tackle the purposefully-gigantic topic of identity in an age like ours? As Eileen Myles says of Pet Sounds: “Stephanie’s seriously interested in a total ride through relationship and humanity, song, family and what else.” Or, as Anna Moschovakis says, this book (or love) “lets the bullshit in and survives it.”
Sentimentality isn’t the cliché we all throw at it; rather, it’s the crime of oversimplification. Love poems fall into the same taxonomy as identity poems for often this same reason: we aren’t always equipped to allow in all of the parts that fester, stink, rejoice, fill with pus and are lanced away. In order for a collection about identity to thrive and resonate, it must be a collection that lets everything in: that truly shows the nuances and complications of categories and relationships living alongside one another. Young seems to instinctively and lyrically know this; what’s more, she positions the poems within the complicated schema of modern-day Oakland, with the “bungalows ready for your move-in” and whiteness. In a poem that names recent victims of racialized violence, Young ends with an acknowledgement of race (something that Claudia Rankine has gone on record saying white people rarely do): “what didn’t kill us/didn’t kill us.”
The positioning of identity is reached for through the way Young describes her marriage and gender and sexuality, and how they are often at odds with one another: “because something is wrong with my brain/because I believe I’m a dumb girl/and men of a certain class know more than me” and “by the time we slept together/it felt perverse, fucking a man.”
The form enacts content well, here—both in the acknowledgement of the fragmentation inherent in the title (Pet Sounds being a Beach Boys album that is notoriously juxtaposed and fraught, but is also tied to so many in the zeitgeist of memories and relationship memories) and also in that the book is essentially a book-length poem. This shows the continuity, the living-alongsideness that both identity and love require, in order to complicate them.
Pet Sounds By Stephanie Young Nightboat Books Paperback, 9781937658946, 88 pp. April 2019
