Cyn Vargas 'On The Way' / Rey Andújar 'Saturnalia'

So.

First off.

There's not really too much of a reason to lump these two books together. Other than the fact that they are both collections of short stories written by authors living in Chicago, put out by Chicago presses, and I finished reading both on the same day. And the settings for both alternate between various locations in Latin America and the United States. Other than that, there's not much of a connection, and I'm writing about them together solely based on my timing of reading them. Let's start with On The Way.

I picked this book up at City Lit about a month ago. I'm always game to try anything Curbside Splendor puts out, even if the epigraph is a Radiohead lyric. But a blurb on the back from Bonnie Jo Campbell meant I would pick it up anyway.

Let's start with this: these stories are not uplifting. They're not always tragic, but they are often heartbreaking. It's not the fact that death always awaits us (it does sometimes), but that more often, bad things happen and the devastation permeates itself in its wake throughout a life; lucky are we who don't have to identify with many of these stories. The protagonists are generally women. They've been abused, they've been cheated on, they've been divorced, they've been abandoned in physical and existential ways. Vargas writes about women young and old, who've experienced a lot and who've experienced a lot of pain. Rarely do they find redemption. In an interview with Kati Heng, Vargas revealed her personal connection with some of these characters, how she identifies with them, and why they need their voices to be heard: "To appreciate the joy, you have to have the pain too. I think I am able to write bittersweet stories because I have lived through it."

Kathy Acker (Pt 2)

I'd put this book down for awhile and finally finished it the other week (part one here). Acker is...well, you probably already know about her reputation. Difficult is one word. Some call her problematic. The last piece in this book, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, is the testimony of The Federal Inspection Office for Publications Harmful to Minors in Germany and their reasons for banning the book Tough Girls Don't Cry. In addition to the hypersexual content and coarse language throughout, they cite the book as being difficult to follow, adopting too many styles, and for plagiarism.

I can't argue that this book should be read my minors. I've thought about this in the past when I first read Naked Lunch. Or first heard the Velvet Underground. I wonder if I have kids what kind of media I would expose them to, or what of mine they would find on their own. I'm all for the possibility of expansion of ideas especially in children and teenagers. But how does one determine when one can begin to handle such dark and surreal or evocative and cerebral texts? Making works taboo only makes them more attractive.

The disjointedness of Acker makes me think I won't read anything of hers again, or at least any non-non-fiction work (essays, interviews, etc). I like her thoughts but can't get into the prose. I think I could have appreciated this experimental writing style actually if I were still in high school or college. She eschews conventional tactics entirely. Of course, this is also a work of her earliest material, and maybe I need to find the Acker that's best for me.

I've thought a lot lately too about conventional texts and sounds. Music becomes more monotonous to me over time. Musicians have decided that one note must be followed by another of only two or three notes, or can be played simultaneously with a handful of notes. It's boring. Granted, I've heard much more music than I have read literature. But will we get to the point where writing too becomes so predictable? That any given word can only be followed by a handful of words? Are we already there?

Anyway, here's a now defunct website that put Kathy Acker lines into the comic Cathy.

Ron Currie Jr. - 'Everything Matters!'

I had high hopes for this book especially after how much I gushed about God is Dead. I don't know, even though I finished this book within 36 hours, I wasn't as blown away as I expected to be.

On the plus side, there was plenty of Literary Chicago, since one of the main characters plays for the Cubs.

"Partying means drinking. It also means playing records by Lou Reed and Chicago, which I thought was a city but is also a band it turns out. Uncle Rodney explained this to me. It's a band and a city and when I'm older he'll take me to Chicago to see Chicago play, he says."

"Chicago is not the ideal place to go to when you've recently lost your mind and plan to curl up in the bottom of a bottle and wait for the feeling of having your insides ripped repeatedly from your body to subside."

"...except this time you were not a toddler but a twenty-year-old man, lying on a bench near the Dearborn Street bridge, staring straight up to where the stars would have been were they not  obscured by the megawatt towers..."

Pitchfork Music Festival 2015

The following is a bit of notes I took on Saturday afternoon. An existential/Wallace Shawn style exploration on identity and creation. 

Attention. That's what's on my mind right now, sitting in the grass in Union Park at the Pitchfork Music Festival. What am I here to devote my attention to? How do I decide how to use my attention? Is attention the most important thing at an environment like this? Or is it best to have divided attention?

Are we here for art or diversion? Or other? (commerce)

Bully from Nashville starts. I'm still sitting. There's a decent crowd for the early side of the day on the smaller stage. Various forms of attention are around me. People totally focused, me with divided attention, as my attention is primarily on my thoughts. But I'm also processing the music.

If what and how we consume is dictated by marketing, is what and how we create also a product of that same marketing? Does the "I" ever have a say in creation? Is creation just an expression of consumption?, ie, what am I doing here? Is there an "I" here? Or is my "I" just someone else's creations that I've consumed? And if I've never decided what I've consumed, then how can I say I've created anything? And what have I consumed to have made me think these thoughts?

So why am I here? What's the difference between habit and ritual? There's supposed to be something sacred about ritual, right? (I may just be thinking that because a church is looking down at me) But what if you hold nothing sacred? Can that be true though, literature, the Clash, the simple act of helping someone up off the ground.

Reading list (1/2)'15

First half of 2015 is up. Been keeping busy this year. I'm a firm believer that you can't be a better writer without being a better reader. Here's what I read for the first half of the year. Bolded my favorites. Gonna try to devote the second half of the year to reading more 2015 stuff.

Uki Goni - The Real Odessa (2002)
Kazuo Ishiguro - Never Let Me Go (2005)
James Tadd Adcox - Does Not Love (2014)
Jami Attenberg - The Melting Season (2011)
John Darnielle - Wolf in White Van (2014)
Leslie Jamison - The Empathy Exams (2014)
Aleksandar Hemon - Nowhere Man (2002)
Eugene Ionesco - Rhinoceros and Other Plays (1994 edition / originally written in 1959)
Louise Erdich - The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)
Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red (1998)
Ron Currie Jr - God is Dead (2007)
Albert Camus - The Rebel (1951)
Djuna Barnes - Nightwood (1936)
Wallace Shawn - the Fever (1990)
Italo Calvino - Marcovaldo (1963)
Jack Kerouac - The Dharma Bums (1958)
Jessica Hopper - The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic (2015)
Aleksandar Hemon - The Making of Zombie Wars (2015)
Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

Ron Currie, Jr. - Everything Matters! (2009)

Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. - Slaughterhouse Five (1969) (reread) (just as good as it was in high school)
Wallace Shawn - The Designated Mourner (1996) (reread)

Apparently The Empathy Exams is my favorite book I've read recently I haven't written about. I think I was so surprised by how captivating it was that I didn't realize how much I was in love with it until much later on. Not to mention it's one of the few non-fiction books I've read this year. Anyway. That is all. On to the next ones...

Jessica Hopper - 'The First Collection of Criticism By A Living Female Rock Critic'

There's been oodles of praise for this book. And not without reason. Hopper is a tremendous writer with a true voice of her own. She has an incredible ability to make connections between various artists that I would never associate with each other. She actually made me care about reading reviews of Pearl Jam and Lana Del Rey and Miley Cyrus and Van Morrison. The collection is short, sweet, and rightfully gives her interview with Jim DeRo re: R.Kelley a needed print copy for posterity. The gilded edges of the pages are a bonus snazzy touch.

There's no reason to review the book because everyone else has already harped so much praise about it. So why does this feel like this is me leading up to writing something negative? Because it is...

Jack Kerouac - 'The Dharma Bums'

I read this book even though I had no intention of doing so. It was sitting at my girlfriend's apartment. I'd just finished reading Italo Calvino's munchkin sized yarn Marcovaldo and needed something new. I started reading and just couldn't stop. The only other book I've read by Kerouac was On The Road, and that one is truly a masterpiece. To cover so much ground, the descriptions of so many settings in one narrative is quite impressive, and even though its primary focus on drugs and woman are certainly more appealing to an adolescent andhertz, they'd probably still resonate with a slightly older / still not fully matured andhertz. So maybe that's why I haven't read anything else by Kerouac, because I knew I would like it even though I didn't want to. Oh well. Pigeonholes be damned. I flew through this thing and found some great segments for Literary Chicago along the way. 

"That's Rhonda, my sister, I grew up with her in the woods in Oregon. She's gonna marry this rich jerk from Chicago, a real square."

"Japhy and I were sitting around in the shack in a drowsy afternoon and suddenly she was in the door, slim and blond and pretty, with her well-dressed Chicago fiance, a very handsome man."

Kathy Acker (Pt 1)

I've never read anything by Kathy Acker before today. I've seen her name all over the place, name-checked by everyone from Kathleen Hannah to Richard Hell to Kate Zambreno. But every time I venture into a book store, new or used, I fail to find any primary texts from the writer herself. While I'm sure I could have read (and probably have read short texts of) her work online, I've never immersed myself in a novel or collection of essays. I finally found a copy of work with her name on the cover, Hannibal Lecter, My Father, a collection of interviews, prose, dramatic work, essays, and more.

The first piece of the collection, and my introduction to her greater themes, was a couple of interviews from 1989-90 with French literary critic Sylvère Lotringer. The two discuss memory, identity, community, plagiarism, censorship, tattoos, and mythology. The part I really liked was about plagiarism and how we use other people's work. Acker recognizes it's impossible to create without experience in reality, and for her, words and text are just as much a staple of reality as material and experiences. She explains: "What I'm doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text." Of course, I'm yet to read any examples of her doing this, but I hope to change that soon.

Wallace Shawn's 'The Fever'

One day last week, I woke up with one thing on my immediate to-do list: read The Fever by Wallace Shawn. So I did it. I bought the book at Open Books during their final weekend at the River North location. It was listed in the theater section (or was it dramatic literature?) but it's not a play in the conventional sense. There is no action, no dialogue, no characters really. Rather, it is a 67-page monologue about celebrating life and the inherent guilt that thrives in the awareness of living a privileged existence. The fever of the title strikes the narrator while traveling in a country in which they do not speak the language and in which they are forced to viscerally confront poverty and suffering, in a way which their cushy life never even thought to contemplate before hand.

I've read some of Shawn's essays in the past and the dramatic work The Designated Mourner is one of my favorite pieces of anything ever. The Fever, in fact, could be considered a precursor to The Designated Mourner, that although features three characters, they still depend on monologues and rarely interact with each other. I found The Designated Mourner to be more compelling and to go deeper than The Fever, though that may be because it came out seven years after, giving Shawn plenty of time to ruminate on identity, anxiety, man's relationship to the exterior world, and other themes that pop up in his work. In fact, I'll probably reread The Designated Mourner (soon) (again) and see if it's still as compelling (it will be).

Tony Fitzpatrick and Spring

Last night I attended part of a Words+Music event at the Empty Bottle. Unexpectedly, the event seemed to had started on time, so I missed readings by JR Nelson and Jim DeRogatis. But I did see Jessica Hopper read her review of Miley Cyrus's Bangerz, and manage to hear the illuminant Tony Fitzpatrick read some recent articles of his that will appear in the forthcoming book Dime Stories that collects his column from New City over the past few years.

I've seen Fitzpatrick read at one of these events before, and have seen him perform elsewhere. He is a Chicago writer through and through: Nelson Algren and Mike Royko have undeniably left their mark on Fitzpatrick. If, as Ernest Hemingway states, "you should not read [Algren] if you cannot take a punch," then know that Algren's protege is an even more formidable wielder of the written word. His vulgar wit and sardonic humor are instantly recognizable, and have little match in the ring of literature.

And yet, Fitzpatrick seemed a little off his game this evening, as if the gloves weren't on as tight as usual. True to form, he was conscious of this unlikely wavering in his reading. He reminded the audience of his heart surgery a few months ago before reading a post-surgery reflection on life (appropriately titled, It's Spring).

The piece he read aloud has been on my mind since I first read it a few weeks back. The main point of it is to not let the little bullshit of life stack up and distract you from what you want to accomplish. This doesn't mean over-worry yourself with work however. For Tony, it means going to more baseball games, spending more time with his family, going for more walks, enjoying every breeze, the flowers, the birds; "put your cell phone in a drawer." It's a transition for Tony, even so late in life, from hanging up the gloves to finding more poetic ways to reassert how necessary it is to stop and smell the cliche roses; a lover yet still a fighter.

For my part, I've been creating a list of new places - restaurants, art galleries, bars, cultural institutions, old buildings - that I want to explore in and around the city, in neighborhoods I'm already familiar with and ones I've never stepped foot in. It's easy to get comfortable going to the same bars, seeing the same bands, biking down the same boulevards and streets, seeing the same people, eating the same things. This easiness leads to routine, and routine will make your life pass by quicker than you intend to. I'm 27 and I already know that. You can't have new thoughts and new feelings if you don't go to new places.

Of course, here's the dilemma. Routine, repetition, schedules - these don't necessarily lead to stagnation of the mind. These can lead to strong community building, whether that community is in a neighborhood, in artistic, or business. But the best way to help strengthen that community is inevitably to get outside of it, to introduce an outside perspective, and perhaps even bond your own community to another one. This is called growth.

So this year, I'm going to new places and new spaces, to get to know this city even more outside of the bubble I've grown familiar in. Yesterday, this included: a visit to Open Books in River North before they move to the West Loop next week; a small tour of the Midwest Buddhist Temple in Old Town, hosted by Jesse; hanging out at Oz Park in Old Town listening to a trombonist practice his scales and dog-watching; buying even more books at Bookworks in Wrigleyville; hanging out on the patio at Sheffield's than catching the first half of Reading Under the Influence; and then not something new but something always enjoyable, the aforementioned Words+Music at the Empty Bottle.

Onward to spring, and to life.



(note: this wasn't my exact route, but changing things on Google can be such a pain in the ass)