“…I was too young to know what was routine and what was unusual, and how everyone mixes up the two. The dead leave us with trash to pick up and hide.” – LJ Pemberton, ‘Still Alive’
This is the trip that has finally made me see the appeal of New York. It’s still Chicago Over Everything, but I get it now. The density, everyone on the streets talking to each other, the constant stream of endless goings-on, the miles of Central Park being somehow so much cooler than what they show in movies, bodega sandwiches. As for Maine? The drive up was beautiful. Portland is super cool. I’m a sucker for coastal towns. There’s something about them—Baltimore, St. Simon’s Island, San Diego, and Progreso, Yucatán have also done this to me—that makes truly visualize uprooting my family and relocating.1We took a ferry ride out to Peaks Island, we ate our weight in seafood, it was phenomenal.
The reading was incredible. My set was 30 minutes! What fun! Everyone who read at the open mic was great, like, honestly. Strangely, it felt like our poems went together—lots of shared themes. Love when the poetry stars align. Many thank yous to Maya Williams for the invitation, much love to Port Veritas for being an amazingly welcoming place (especially for my wife and kid) with a kickass library.
I’ll be at Tuesday Funk at Hop Leaf in Andersonville this Tuesday, 7/1. I am seriously enjoying doing readings for the first time in 10 years. If you’re in Chicago and need a reader, hit me up. Let’s keep this going.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
A book that it would be cliche to call ‘Proustian,’ so let’s just get it out of the way that this is heavily about memory. I’ve never read Proust. To me, it’s a higher compliment to say this book is like Aimee Bender’s The Butterfly Lampshade as written by Diane Seuss. It’s a higher compliment to say this book and its narrator reminded me of years ago, when Diannely Antigua was on The Line Break, saying she wanted to wring as much as possible from life, saying something along the lines of “my grandmother fucking lived, and I want to, too.” A book narrated by a character the author calls “disaster bi,” and that seems about right. I’m talking, of course, about Still Alive by LJ Pemberton.
I’ve mentioned the idea of “mirror” and “window” books before, and boy is this first-person narrative a window. Something I’ve learned about myself (and that I have in common with Tom Waits, apparently) is that despite my love for adventure, need for novelty, and comfort among the stranger elements, I do actually crave stability in my personal life. I have no desire to ever do anything to rock the boat in my marriage, I don’t do any drugs except weed, coffee, and kayaking, and—again, same as Tom Waits—I like chaperoning my kid’s field trips. Got a free trip to the Shedd this year.
“Hey Chris why’d you waste a whole paragraph of book analysis talking about yourself?” Because this novel, with its intense yet explanationless interrogation of narrator V’s life, makes you think a lot about why people do the things they do. If there’s an inciting incident, it’s the car crash that happens in front of V’s childhood home. V sees a decapitated head roll across her yard, watches a passenger die, and will spend the rest of her life occasionally return to the crash site to think. But I don’t know that the car crash fully explains why V flits from temp job to temp job, never really pursues her writing even as her partner becomes a semi-successful painter and gallery curator, and why V remains restless and unsettled, even when she gets what she wants. Maybe V is the way she is because her mother was similarly restless and unsettled, or her brother, James, is (James is like if the wannabe Buddhist kid from White Lotus S3 had a spine). Or maybe the crash and family predilections don’t matter as much as the fact that capitalism encourages unhappiness, and living in the 21st United States is trying to scratch an itch on a body part you don’t know you have. V makes no excuses for herself, and she wouldn’t want you to, either, but you can’t help but understand her, even though she’s not asking you to.
(Some spoilers for the first half of the novel): Let’s talk about that partner. Lex is a cool-as-hell, shaved head painter who, despite being V’s moon and stars, still feels somewhat hazy at book’s end. I say that not as a critique of the writing—I think one of V’s major issues is she’s too in her own head to form a complete picture of anyone but herself. It is Lex who first cheats and V who first ends the relationship, but when they reconcile, it’s V who starts messing everything up. Neither of the two is “the good guy” or “the bad guy,” but it’s a fascinating narrative move, watching as Lex goes from being V’s everything to slowly fading out of frame.
All of which is a very long way of saying this: spending 280 pages in V’s head was as foreign and strange to me as any horror or sci-fi I’ve ever read. It’s every bit the thrill ride, too, even if the thrills are more contemplative, domestic. Read this book.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Have I ever linked to Simon Micas II’s nylon cover of Chon’s “Rosewood?” Apologies if so. But not really, it’s worth listening to again.
- Check out the homie Bijhan Agha’s super cool ongoing comic, Kobra Olympus, which is very close to fully funding its Kickstarter for issue 3! Close out Pride Month by supporting an indie trans artist, yeah?
- Let’s do some more beestung poems, here’s Mathew Yates with “dear mud”
- A reminder that famous people aren’t rich, and being a musician is not glamorous: here’s Dan Reilly at Vulture talking to seven musicians about health insurance.
- Another beestung, “This Has Never Been My America (a Burning Haibun)” by Jason B. Crawford
- Laslty, a real goddamn fun Chicago one, courtesy of Leor Galil writing in Reader‘s Gossip Wolf column: there’s going to be a new House music-themed 5k in Chicago, they’re calling it the Chicago House Run. The lakefront stretch from Soldier Field south will have six DJ stations set up, that’s one every half mile, roughly? Pretty sick. Pretty Chicago.
What’re you still doing here? Don’t you know that Micah and Brendan have a show?
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. May your days be filled with chopped cheeses and lobster rolls, paintings of John Brown at the Met, and oysters from my guy Jonah on Peaks Island just a ferry’s ride from Portland. He harvests them in the morning, and shucks them from a stand in his front yard all afternoon. What a life!
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
- genuinely feel like I have a lot to offer that kind of community: I’ve been a coast-guard certified deckhand, I can play reggae or Creedence covers or whatever kind of bar music, and I could easily do some ocean stencil drawings with lines of poetry scrawled on them to sell at gift shops. ↩︎