“you’re glad to have a uniform, right? / cool. / find another. some of us live in this one.” – Brandon O’Brien, “the repossession of skin”
Maaaaaaan I do not like the United States of America but boy howdy I sure do love the Fourth of July! Beach (my four-year-old willingly played in the lake this year!), grilling (smoked parmesan-stuffed mushrooms! My beloved cheeseburgers!), go up on the roof to watch the neighbors set off panoramic fireworks (not participating myself! This is important)—it’s just Peak Summer. Hope your Fourth was similarly summery. Now go read some Frederick Douglass.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
I said I’d finish No Gods For Drowning, and I did. Boy, did that turn out to be so much more than “a braided detectives/municipal services vs. serial killer narrative!” Then I decided to throw a little more cosmic horror in the mix and check out Can You Sign My Tentacle? by Brandon O’Brien.
No Gods For Drowning by Hailey Piper: How would humans act if we knew, indisputably knew, that we were not the most important entity on the planet? (I believe that’s already true, but I feel like I’m in the minority). In this novel—which is a gory, bloody delight that has reawakened my desire to read books that aren’t simply horror but ones with supernatural worldbuilding—the events are determined by bickering, self-important, indifferent Gods. Ones who physically inhabit the world. Not to mention there’s a sea monster and some humanoid/monstrous hybrid creatures at war with humans. How would humans behave? One of our main characters takes to human sacrificing—like a lot—in this book. Another questions whether the Gods have any morality at all. There’s a big conflict about the value of the human soul. Idk man, this novel got the ol’ wheels spinning about humanity’s place in the cosmos, which I’ve liked to do since this blog started. This isn’t one of them “oooh I want to write this” novels, but one of them “oooh I’m going to have fun thinking about this world for a long time after” novels. I still say someone throw huge piles of money at Hailey and make this a miniseries, it’s a visually stunning book.
Can You Sign My Tentacle? by Brandon O’Brien: Another entry into two sub-genres I’m learning I love: long, story-like genre poems (not unlike Escaping The Body by Chloe N. Clark) and Black writers interrogating the Cthulhu Mythos (not unlike The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle). These poems are wonderfully and casually grotesque, playful with their detached-yet-starstruck-ness towards both Cthylla and Hastur or Kendrick Lamar and Donald Glover. Narrative might twists and unfurl, but as multimodal as the poems get, they don’t forget they are poems. The collection’s awesome, and the end author’s note—self-consciously placing itself in and aiming to invert the lineage of works like Lovecraft Country or The Ballad of Black Tom, while calling “for Blackness to be seen as radically significant.”
LINKS!
Blessings and love to both 40th Ward Aldergoon Andre Vasquez and the Winnemac Park Fourth of July Fireworks Celebration. If you never experienced this warzone-like shitshow of a panoramic unlicensed fireworks celebration, you missed out. Picture not Winnemac Park as it actually is, but an impossible map of roughly hundreds of baseball fields, acres of gardens, and children’s playgrounds nestled between only a couple of blocks of residential city streets with multiple apartment buildings. Now imagine every firework that can fit in the back of a Subaru driven into the bowels on Indiana on gloomy June day has been set off in all directions of that impossibly claustrophobic glitchy map of a park I described. It was the best. It should have been shut down years ago. I know I said Leticia Bufoni can kickflip velociraptors all she wants, but Dad Voice is right about regulating Winnemac Park. Andre’s getting a lot of “aww, maaaaan” for shutting it down, but let’s remember that Andre’s one of the Good Aldergoons. He’s a socialist, he actually seriously cares about his ward, and maybe most importantly, he’s responsible for a ton of murals around my neighborhood. The Winnemac Park Fourth of July Celebration was too beautiful to live.
Please read this story of Renton Sinclair, a trans man who has found happiness both in transition and as co-owner and sous chef of a pub despite his mom being a real Amber Gemstone. Renton’s description of his anxiety melting away, of his body being in less pain as he got on testosterone—idk man, I got choked up reading it. Let trans people be themselves.
Hey check this out: “On a ship full of women, clashes of personality are to be expected. I know from the day we set out from Thyborøn that my crewmaters harbored doubts…” Right?? Don’t you want to keep reading? Here’s “White Water” by Katie McIvor in Uncharted.
Let’s keep this trend of sea horror with kickass titles going, here’s “Monsters of the Drunken Shore” by Nic Anstett in Light Speed. “Amy held it together until hole nine of pirate golf on Thursday. To stop her tears, you gifted her a parade of ice cream, tacos, and pet hermit crabs and the boys next door gave her eight shots of Svedka and a Jägerbomb.” Go ahead and click on over.
The homie from Cracked Cezary Jan Strusiewicz is back in Tokyo Weekender, going in on the comics of Toba Sojo. Or as Cezary puts it, “Besides trying to achieve enlightenment and ascend beyond this mortal plane of desire and suffering, the priest’s other hobby allegedly included inventing manga in the form of paintings of animals acting silly.” Cezary’s articles on Japanese history, whether for Cracked or Tokyo Weekender, are an automatic click for me.
A con I’ve started running is telling my kid I can’t change the music in the car while I’m driving. This is true because you shouldn’t touch your phone while you’re driving, but it’s especially true because I don’t want to listen to “I’m a Scatman” by Scatman John any more than I already have to, which is enough that I have learned how to play the synth part. Anyway, I’m discovering a bunch of a new music because Apple just goes nuts when an album finishes, so here’s this kickass band Save Us From The Archon—who I learned about while driving home to finish this column—playing at Chicago’s Own Audiotree:
It’s Peak Summer right now, go to the beach!
Sorry you got an email,
Chris