Contrite, abject, mythic

The sight must've been high tragedy, that's what I thought. A fucking junky, dying on his ass, starving, face like a corpse, apologizing to a baby that hadn't even been born and a woman he no longer knew. Absolutely wretched. Imagine the portrait.

And there I caught myself.

I was imagining the picture, and it was absolutely romantic. Romantic like the boy who fantasizes dying on a field of war, killing a thousand enemies before being cut down. Romantic as the girl who envisions poisoning herself, leaving a corpse that'll indict the one who finds it, a plucked and corrupted rose. A man, coming to an end like mine, should perish in this pose: contrite, abject, mythic.

Is this really all I am? I wondered. A grown man acting no better than a teenager?

I've been wanting to read Victor Lavalle's Big Machine for quite some time, and it never seemed like the right time.

It's about an ex-junkie who quits his job as a janitor when he gets a bus ticket in the mail, which turns out to have been issued by a secret society that's recruiting him to conduct paranormal investigations. It turns out also that he was raised in a cult. What's not to love? This book should've been a riot.

For some reason I thought the right time to read it would be while dating an ex-junkie who believes in karma and aliens. Not so. Even more not so when he told me he couldn't see me for a while. The book cover is a perfect match for the dress I was wearing that night. (That's me. Romantic. Feeling like a fucking teenager.)

For the most part, I found I was simply turning the pages, not enjoying it. But I'm pretty sure it's not you, Big Machine; it's me and my fallow headspace.

At the sentence level, this book is terrifically well written.

I only knew Wilfred was gone because of this tongue. It hung down between his teeth, oily and pink, and it brushed against the old pillowcases under his chin. Loose, limp, a piece of stretched taffy. That one thing, that's all it took to convert him into a corpse.

But I didn't see how he could've died so quickly. He hadn't been shot or stabbed, hadn't been beat. So what had done it? Maybe none of us had actually lived through that night in the stairway so many years before. It just took some of us longer to realize we were dead.

And it's funny. (For example, "The room was decorated in a style I'll call Near-Bum, the distinction being that this mess was in a hotel and not on a cart in the street.")

For a good portion of book, I was thinking Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. I can't find the blurb that might've inspired me to think that. A lot of the blurbs evoke Murakami; I don't really see it.

I much preferred the first third or so of the book, being the set up for the actual adventure. I found the pacing of the adventure proper suffered from all the flashbacks to Ricky's youth. I would've trimmed a good 100 pages, but it did pick up toward the end.

There's a thing about guilt and parenting, and how the force of the guilt is not in letting your child down, letting whoever down, doing whatever less than stellar thing you do or don't do; it's in how easy it is to do that thing. How easy to conveniently forget your responsibility. That's a powerful distinction, and a powerful truth about the nature of guilt, about all my guilt, and this realization alone is worth the price of admission.

Excerpt.

Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.

Sinking into a tapioca hammock

For people who've never shot up or snorted or smoked heroin, it can be hard to understand the allure. Catch sight of a man or woman whose arms are purple from old needle bites, look at the sunken face of a long-time user, how could anyone want to end up that way? But that's like passing a car accident and wondering why anyone, anywhere, drives. Don't focus on the mishaps; consider the pleasures instead. Taking heroin is like sinking into a tapioca hammock. If that doesn't sound good, then congratulations, you will not enjoy heroin.

— from Big Machine, by Victor Lavalle.

I'm lucky, my expensive mattress gives me that delicious tapioca hammock feeling.

The swamp gas of European anxiety

Mystery lingered in the air like the scent of a scorched book.

As a teenager I tried reading H.P. Lovecraft — my big brother wouldn't shut up about him. But I didn't get very far; it just wasn't for me. I tried again in my twenties. This time, with a decent liberal arts education behind me, while the concepts intrigued, I just couldn't get past the poor quality of the writing. Today, I have a passing familiarity the Cthulhu mythos, despite never having read the source material.

The Ballad of Black Tom, by Victor Lavalle, is a retelling of Lovecraft's 1925 story The Horror at Red Hook, generally acknowledged to be not particularly good. The original story is also widely considered to be offensive in its bigoted, xenophobic attitude. (After finishing Lavalle's Ballad, I decided to skim through the source. I am ashamed to admit that the racism wasn't entirely obvious to me; if I weren't looking for it, I might miss it, not because it's not there, but because it is so much a part of my cultural context. Is the story exceptionally offensive for its time or merely a mirror of society? Am I that oblivious? I don't know.)

"Your people," Robert Suydam began. "Your people are forced to live in mazes of hybrid squalor. It's all sound and filth and spiritual putrescence."

Lavalle manages to spin the negativity and bring it front and centre, making it essential to this story of otherness, of anger, corruption, power, entitlement.

The Ballad is told in two parts, the first from the perspective of minor hustler Charles Thomas Tester, the second from police detective Malone. Malone has for some time been watching the activities of Robert Suydam, a rich old eccentric, who is apparently connected to various nefarious goings-on relating to the immigrant community of Red Hook.

Locals attributed the rumors of abduction to the swamp gas of European anxiety known to flare up with a neighborhood's proximity to Red Hook.

Tommy Tester finds his marks, picks up jobs, while playing his guitar on sidewalks. He's not very good, so why would Suydam hire him to play for a party he's giving?

The idea troubled him like a pinched nerve.

Of course it's part of Suydam's bid for world domination, and his plan to summon Cthulhu. But, surprise: things go terribly wrong.

There's a fantastic review at Fantasy Fiction that explains the story better than I ever could (but be warned, it's rife with spoilers).
I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Ballad of Black Tom, and the experience has been truly enriched by reading commentary about it.

One interview with Lavalle in particular in The Lovecraft eZine gave me a great deal of perspective:

I switched to Malone for a few reasons, but one of the biggest was that I wanted to spend time with Malone and show the journey of a white character who is a passive racist. There's a private detective in the book, Mr. Howard, who is the more virulent — and easily dismissed — kind of racist. He says terrible things about black people, he’s physically abusive to black people, he kills them without any guilt. Of course he's terrible. Malone, on the other hand, seems to have a greater respect for Tommy. He doesn't say racist things and he doesn't seem to relish being brutal to black people. And yet he never stands up against the system in which he works. He sits at the same table as police who have very recently murdered an innocent black man and he doesn't object, or try to bring criminal charges against them. He's good in the sense that he isn't overtly evil but if that's the best he can do then what the hell good is he? I wanted to write that guy because I find that kind of perspective interesting. "Well I've never called anyone a nigger." Or, "But my family never owned slaves." It's that kind of person, the one who simply stays silent in the face of oppression, who in fact looks away from it when he sees it, that is as much to blame for the situation as the more overt Mr. Howard. I didn't worry about making him too sympathetic, instead I simply tried to show him as someone who was blind but didn’t know he was blind. I've known lots of people like that. I've liked many of them but that didn't make them blameless.

Lavalle's novella ends with "Zig zag zig." It kind of made sense, in a passively random this-is-the-way-the-world-ends way, but it didn't make any sense at all, so I looked it up. The last letter of the Supreme Alphabet, signifying "from knowledge to wisdom to understanding." This be the last page of the book Tommy Tester is delivering when the novella opens, a page he withheld.

This makes me want to read the novella all over again, realizing that there are other mythologies woven into this story, that there a different levels of knowledge, types of arcana — the Ballad is rich with it. The writing is compelling, the plot and characters are well crafted, and there's a wonderful sense of unease throughout, making this my kind of horror story. Plus, a new kind of swamp gas of anxiety hangs is the air, which makes it relevant.

This is how you hustle the arcane. Skirt the rules but don't break them.

On not buying books

Yesterday for lunch I went to the bookstore. Food for thought, food for the soul. Usually I just like to browse, just being in a bookstore brings me comfort (and I'm lucky to have recently found a non-big-box-chain store near my office — I blame the shifting streets of Old Montreal, like mischievous Hogwarts staircases, for keeping it hidden from me for so long), but yesterday, uncharacteristically, I splurged on impulse.

I have tried to keep in check the acquisition of books, but when displaying my spoils back at the office (just three books), a coworker, having witnessed me purchase books on two occasions and at other times open packages of books, called me on this delusion of mine.

Since September,

• The Ballad of Black Tom, Victor LaValle — because a review made me want it, it's Lovecraftian
• Le Chat, Georges Simenon — to practice my French
• The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon — because I've been planning to read it for years, so finally now
• The Door, Magda Szabó — because I wanted Iza's Ballad (because the name) but it wasn't available, and NYRB Classics books are beautiful
• Exercises in Style, Raymond Queneau — because it's exercises in style, so I can argue that it's related to my work
• The Familiar, Volume 2, Mark Z Danielewski — because volume 1 was exhilarating, and it's fascinating as an object
• The Hand, Georges Simenon — because I'd never heard of it, and since it's not available in Canada it's that much more precious
• The Invisible Library, Genevieve Cogman — because it was on all sorts of books-to-watch-for lists and it cost less than 2 dollars, and it might be about a library
• The Last Days of New Paris, China Miéville — because Miéville is one of the few authors about whom I feel I must own his entire oeuvre
• The Loney, Andrew Michael Hurley — because I had it on a list somewhere, I don't know why
• Monday Starts on Saturday, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky — because now available in English, plus it's an excellent title
• So You Don't Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, Patrick Modiano — because I'd never heard of it, and I felt a connection to Modiano this summer, and it was shelved in the thriller section
• The Vegetarian, Han Kang — because I've been wanting to see what the fuss is about, but it wasn't available at my library, and I know I can hand it off to someone afterward

And before September, the last time I purchased a book was August, and before that was June. If you don't count the travel guide I picked up in July, along with some other vacation-reading material.

That's not counting the books I've purchased as gifts for other people, which typically occasion an oh-I'll-just-pick-up-a-little-something-for-myself-then-too moment, which helped contribute to the above.

Some of the above books were rationalized in a my-birthday-is-coming-soon way, and then an it-was-just-my-birthday-so-of-course-I-should-treat-myself way.

I'm proud to be using the library more regularly this year (quite suddenly they have a decent selection of ebooks), and when I'm hankering for something new I'm likely to browse NetGalley review copy offerings. At least some of the books listed above are ebooks (for which I'll rarely allow myself to spend more $5). I have not listed here the free ebooks I've acquired.

But believe me when I say it's not a spending problem so much as a space problem. I've become adept at slipping books in and overlooking them mentally; physically, it's a bit more challenging. Surely I'm a victim of book creep — the steady but so-slow-as-to-be-almost-imperceptible advance of books from designated shelves and corners onto most surfaces of my living space.

Me not buying books? Not very good at it.

An insane tree

Lucretia and the Kroons, by Victor Lavalle, is short (I read it over two evenings), intense, scary, sad, weird, and more than a little surprising.

[I'm not sure how I came to be reading this novella — I think I had the author mixed up with someone else. It turns out: I had not read anything by Victor Lavalle previously. But I will be sure to look up more of his books now.]

The story starts on Loochie's 12th birthday, and her best friend can't make the party because she's dying of cancer. (Had I known about this, I probably would not have picked up this book.) When Sunny gets out of the hospital, the girls plan a crazy afternoon to make up for lost time.

She was trembling again. She was used to climbing fire escapes, but hadn't ever scaled a tree. It didn't help that this was an insane tree in an insane woods in an insane park that had appeared — insanely — in this apartment.

These trees weren't at all like the ones she'd seen on trips to the Queens Botanical Garden or Flushing Meadows Park. These trees were like their demented cousins. They were so tall they seemed to run as high as her entire apartment building. Sixty feet straight up, that big. Their trunks were misshapen, bubbling out here and there in thick knots, and their outer barks gray and ashen, as if burned. In places the bark showed great tears and the inner bark was sickly white, the color of bones. She didn't want to climb this tree. She didn't even want to touch it. But then she heard the calls out in the meadow once again and she had no choice. She reached for the lowest branch of the nearest tree and climbed.

It's amazing what a person can do when her life depends on it.

That afternoon is a rollercoaster of a metaphor that veers off into unforeseen directions. Yes, Lucretia must come to terms with losing her best friend. But there's no maudlin sentimentality here. This is a horror story, with creatures lurking in shadows and worlds turned upside down. And then there's the ending, which churns everything over again.

I might compare it to Henry James's Turn of the Screw insofar as it's not clear whether events are occuring in an objective reality or inside someone's head, but Lucretia is decidedly modern and urban in feel. Also it's a little like Neil Gaiman's Coraline. At least, I felt a similar frisson reading Lucretia.

Your sense of creepiness may vary, but I highly recommend this story.