“If I can’t return to water, / then lay me on a bed of rice.” – Jasminne Mendez, “Scene 4”
Nothing to promote up top—no Behind With Knife, no podcasts, no new music, no reading series. Do I even know how to write intro paragraphs anymore? Is this what the Christians call Ordinary Time?
Of course not. It’s NOIRVEMBER!
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Once again, two books that paired surprisingly well. I picked them because they both had the word “city” in the title, and then they both behaved differently than what I expected. Pleasantly, I might add. There’s a lot going on in both books, and although I enjoyed both very much, I kinda want to re-read with the foreknowledge of everything that happens. Not saying that everything didn’t come together, more that I think a re-read would help me see how *Maynard James Keenan voice* the pieces fit. Luckily, these are both extremely re-readable books. Not because they breeze by! They’re both pretty dense, actually. But delightful and intriguing and inviting further exploration. Let’s get into City Of Smoke And Sea by Malia Márquez and City Without Altar by Jasminne Mendez.
City Of Smoke And Sea by Malia Márquez: perhaps the most perfect book to transition from horror month to Noirvember? Our first-person narrator, Queenie Rivers, is your typical noir protagonist—a semi-clear-eyed fuckup who is disappointed in her life as recovering drug addict who works in seedy industries, but she has a heart of gold. Her egocentric cokehead of an ex is an aspiring TV writer, and she wants to write, too. Her mother has been missing since she was a toddler. Her grandmother’s death kicks off some research into her family’s past. Queenie learns the extent of her Roma grandmother’s experience with Nazi concentration camps (not uncommon) and that her grandmother and all her friends are centuries-old magical beings (less common). There is a schism, a feud between two of the more powerful magical beings, and Queenie, by investigating her grandmother’s death, is pulled directly into the middle of that feud. It’s like The Big Sleep or Under The Silver Lake crossed with Twilight or The Old Guard. No vampires or werewolves, I should say. Ancient feuds amongst magical beings, though.
The novel has mythical elements, and I want to quote Malia’s acknowledgements real quick: “As a person of (complex) Indigenous descent (New Mexico, Colorado, & Mexico), my goal is to offer the Native cultural & mythological elements in this novel as an acknowledgement & recenting of local land-stories, but also an act of borrowing & adapting from cultures not my own…In the spirit of myth making & fictional storytelling traditions that hopefully contain kernels of truth, honoring Native & transplanted peoples who call Los Angeles/Tovaangar home, past, present, emerging, thank you.” You know yr man the shipwrecked sailor loves some mythology grafted on to a contemporary narrative. I wonder if a little more knowledge on my part would’ve made things come together better for me. It’s unusual for me to say I wish a book was longer, but I genuinely wish I had more time with these fascinating characters. These are centuries-old magical beings who disguise themselves by running a fine dining restaurant on the beach! I wanna kick it with them, no matter how shady they are! More importantly, it feels like characters’ attitudes and motivations shift a little too quickly, the plot sometimes moves because it has to do so. I don’t like levying that criticism after one read, though—it’s completely possible that I was just stressed the fuck out this week (see below), and my brain wasn’t all the way working. So I will be returning to this. Especially since it is a genuinely good read, and Queenie Rivers rules so much.
City Without Altar by Jasminne Mendez: a lot going on with this book. Not in a bad way, but in a hard-to-know-where-to-start way. Jasminne is using poetry, prose, and playwriting to tell a story of inherited trauma. The first page is the author’s birth certificate with certain private information blacked out, but also highlighting that the author and her parents are officially Dominican, not Haitian. “This is legal…All items listed are accurate. And complete,” the prose reads, inviting us to wonder exactly how accurate and complete it is (I’m in Chicago during the ICE invasion, I already know legality is a slippery concept). From there, we get a tracing of how Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo ordered mass slaughter of Haitians along the two countries’ border. We get voices from the past and present interacting. We get x-ray images and prose/poetic descriptions of the author’s Scleroderma (“Tiny ulcers form and fester on the tips of my fingers. Cuticles blister, burn and erupt, a volcano of pus and blood. The skin, the nail, the bone a slow decay of rotting cells that refuse to heal. There is nothing left to do but amputate.”), which is juxtaposed against being taught how to use a machete to cut a coconut, which comes right after descriptions of machetes being used to massacre Haitians. It’s a meditation on and dramatization of generational trauma and what happens when you cut things—all the ways you can cut many different kinds of things—and it is more than I can properly describe here. The poem is that which resists paraphrase. This book is very much that.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Listen, I gotta confess: it’s a lot of emotions, going out on ICE patrols. As I write this particular paragraph on Tuesday, I still have not seen the fuckers since two weeks ago. Wednesday update: I went out for two hours, walked all over the north side, and then as soon as I got home? Whistles blaring through my windows. Signal chats coming in. ICE kidnapped someone three blocks from my house. Still, some small victories: we can’t know, but there is evidence that one of the patrols I was on prevented an abduction this week. There were also abductions on the north/northwest side and in the burbs that we couldn’t prevent. Every time I come home—like, both from ICE patrols and just walking my kid home safely from school—an extreme heaviness sets in. I sit on the stairs to take off my shoes, and sometimes I stay there without a thought in my head for like five minutes. I should not be complaining. Reporter for The Triibe Dave Byrnes was in court this week hearing testimony about what’s going on in the Broadview concentration camp and it is horrifying. I should not be complaining. Still, emotions are emotions. I’ve been listening to a lot of Meat Wave. Apologies if I’ve posted Meat Wave here recently, I simply don’t have the energy to check. Besides, don’t you want to listen to Meat Wave? Here’s my favorite song of theirs, “Disney.” Live in Chicago.
- So listen, important thing before we get to ICE’s occupation of Chicago: DICK CHENEY DIED. Vince Mancini at The Content Report details how Cheney dying a free man should shame us all. Spencer Ackerman at The Nation with a banger of a headline: His Works Completed, Dick Cheney, Mass Murderer of Iraqis and American Democracy, Dies. Albert Burneko at Defector reminds us that this is the world Dick Cheney made. Pull quotes, because Burneko’s piece is gold and Defector is subscription-based (but worth it!): “At its heart, American conservatism is a fantasy. It’s a vision of a world too evil to be saved or cared about, and fearsome enough to justify any and every impulse toward cruelty and violence that a person might have. A world resolutely unworthy of knowing, except as a danger…Dick Cheney got luckier than most American right-wingers could ever dream…No one has ever welcomed their firstborn child to the world with greater joy than that with which the American reactionary greets a Pearl Harbor, a 9/11, a dead cop, an assassinated YouTube bigot. Dick Cheney’s celebration lasted more than 20 years…”
- From The Triibe this week: REFLECTION: I was tear-gassed, and everyday Chicagoans came to my rescue by Tonia Hill
- From Block Club this week: Homeland Security Boss Says Federal Immigration Agents Haven’t Detained US Citizens. She’s Wrong by Mack Liederman (my quibble with this headline is Kristi Noem is lying and wrong. Purposefully wrong. At Boston Globe, Spotlight found that DHS’s claims about arresting Cartel members was also wrong). Also by Mack: Detainees Describe Filthy, Inhumane Conditions At Broadview ICE Facility: ‘It Was Too Much’. Here’s a disgusting one: Daycare Teacher Pulled Out Of Preschool By Armed Federal Agents, ‘Traumatizing’ Families by Mack Liederman and Molly DeVore. Tahman Bradley, Marisa Rodriguez, and Brónagh Tumulty covered that for WGN News, too. After Daycare Teacher Taken By Feds, Local Officials Fight For Her Release: ‘This Is Not Normal’ by Madison Savedra and Francia Garcia Hernandez. Priest Describes Being Tear-Gassed In Broadview During Pivotal Hearing In Federal First Amendment Case by Mina Bloom. Local Officials Face Harassment, Doxxing After Sharing ICE Alerts With Residents by Patrick Filbin. From Chicago To LA, Neighborly Solidarity Fuels Resistance To ICE by Francia Garcia Hernandez and Martín Macías from LA Public Press. Chicago Laundromats Targeted By Immigration Agents Struggle With Low Sales, Fearful Employees by Ariel Parrella-Aureli. Broadview ICE Facility Must Provide Basics Like Water, Calls With Attorneys Under Judge’s Order by Mack Liederman.
- From South Side Weekly this week: Lawsuit Alleges Inhumane Conditions at Broadview ICE Facility by Dave Byrnes. After ICE Raid, Vendors Push for Safety at Swap-O-Rama by José Abonce. Over at Chicago Reader, Devyn-Marshall Brown wrote about ICE terrorizing rideshare drivers at O’Hare. Reader also published Many unhoused Chicagoans uncounted among the disappeared by Katie Prout. Here’s one from The Guardian that’s pretty awful: ‘He didn’t deserve that’: widow speaks out after husband’s violent death at ICE facility by Justo Robles. Hey, at least two Illinois National Guard members refused orders to deploy because they wouldn’t be deployed against their neighbors, Nicole Sganga at CBS reports (will this be the last honest report from the Bari Weiss-controlled CBS?)
- Lastly, for the sake of my phone’s functionality and the honoring of my friends and comrades, here are some poems and stories and an interview: two from Elena Zhang in hex, “In Defense Of A ‘Bad Habit'” by Maya Williams in Oddball Magazine, “The Last Night and the Last Morning” by Corey Farrenkopf in Nocturne, “The Saddest Fuckers of All” by Kathy Fish in Ghost Parachute, and a fun get-to-know-you with Lisa Thorton in JMWW
What’re you still doing here? Are you wondering if I’m going to link to articles about how everyday Chicagoans are stepping up to keep people fed as SNAP benefits go away? Are you wondering if I’m going to link to the fight over a budget for Illinois transit? Look, I am not a reporter (I mean, I can be, but not on this website). It is important to me to keep the focus on ICE and Midway Blitz right now. Go to those websites above and look for those stories. Also, 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. Hey, you probably don’t need to be told this, but. Like. If your boss, the head bartender, the head host, and the head chef ask you to get on a boat? Don’t, if you can help it.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris