Friday Five w/ Jamie tomorrow!
Prose. Poems. A Novel.
by Jamie Iredell
Orange Alert Press, 2009Contained in three sections, Prose. Poems. A Novel is a series of loosely connected vignettes about the narrator's time "Before Nevada" "In Nevada" and "In Atlanta" heavily dependent on the surroundings and the people surrounding the narrator.
All of the tales (usually contained on one page) describe an element of growing up and aging--and how relationships change with the ages--they are stories/examples of relationships in adolescence ("Before Nevada"), as young adults ("In Nevada"), then settling to more quiet bars with mature conversations ("In Atlanta").
The stories open with a bear in a neighbor's cabin, and I didn't understand this example at first; how it RELATES--but it does, it does, the narrator is that BEAR, stumbling around trying to navigate an unfamiliar world. These are stories/examples/specific incidences of that navigation.
Don't worry, there are not broad sweeping generalizations weighing this book down like weighs this review down; nothing is heavy-handed or overanalyzed--instead it's a pleasure to read.
I'm not really fascinated by landscapes, not that this book is all about landscapes, but most of it is about the WEST which I don't know much about and there are a couple of raucous scenes of DRINKING, PARTYING, and DRUG USE but not really in the way you think about those scenes, not in an MTV/The Hills sort of way--not that Iredell discusses them passively, those events are presented as more of a way to pass the time, to deal, to understand the relationships between FRIENDS.
Connections must be sought between each story, each piece of a story, or they don't have to be sought at all because each piece stands on its own.
Most pages end not on a couplet, but with a memorable image, a phrase that turns and captures everything set before it, such as these: "Instead of trout, there are tourists, which are almost the same thing" and "It's only now that I can look back and say what kind of idiot I've become."
Those two sit only a page apart, in the first section, mostly about a cabin in the woods and the narrator's memories about cabins, and this was my favorite section. More interesting here are the strings that Iredell attaches between the first residents of Lake Tahoe and its landscape and what the landscape has now become--small cabins and Taco Bells and whatever James Michener has written about and whatever he writes about. It is change, it is not change, it always changes.
Section two is more of the same, but not: an older voice emerges, something fraught with the heave-ho give and go of the modern (or the perceived-modern) "going out" to somewhere culture, even if there is nowhere to go. And fights break out and there is a good illustration of a bitten ear, like what Mike Tyson did to Evander Holyfield.
Again, this section goes back to nature, to snakes, to trying to understand if we know anything at all, which it is generally assumed that we don't, except for where to find drugs, but even that is nonchalant in Iredell's descriptions.
Section three, I enjoyed the specific mentions of Atlanta streets, because I used to live in Atlanta. Selfish. Excellent parts about the narrator and a character named Sally trekking Kennesaw Mountain, once again landscapes and the narrator's interaction with them--always kind of sort of stumbling, like that bear again.
Don't think I really like or "get" the illustrations, but there are some funny captions and I'm glad the illustrations are there, just didn't do much for me. I want this book to go a bit longer, to explore a little more, especially section three, I feel there is more to add, more to be had in the exploration stages of Atlanta, like the other landscapes of the novel are explored, maybe that these are three chapbooks adds to that, but I'll take what is given.
Those expecting a novel, don't go into it with those eyes, go into it expecting an in-the-moment meditation on people and circumstances without context and you'll be much more satisfied. I'm against genres and classifications anyway, for the most part, and I think Iredell is too, except I don't want to speak for him, so I won't except to say, if you find yourself an opportunity to read this slim volume of goodness, I would do it.
More after the jump...
Sunlight at Midnight, Darkness at Noon
by Hosho McCreesh and Christopher Cunningham
Edited by Jason Behrends
Orange Alert Press, 2009
I am bloody and world-weary from this book, beat up not from its opposition, but from its sheer determination. It got me down, it brought me up, it scraped my knees, made my brain bleed. Sunlight at Midnight, Darkness at Noon is the figurative war of ideas, told in a mad, mad, mad rush of typewritten missives. I wanted to read it in one frantic stand, all in a one five, six, seven hour sitting on my porch in the middle of summer with only coffee and candy bars to understand its blistering pace. I couldn't do it.
And I don't see how they did it, how Christopher Cunningham and Hosho McCreesh were able to come up with these grand narratives on almost a daily basis in letters to one another. Their well of critical, observational and descriptive powers is deep. They shamed me. They are probably disappointed that I even attempt this "writing" thing--my greatest efforts seem like mere trifle to their castoff correspondence.
In their symbiotic relationship, Cunningham and McCreesh veer between consumerism to war politics to the blandness of American culture. Written in letters seven years ago, some of their complaints are now all too familiar--not their fault, but their outrage about the Patriot Act et. al. will poke the embers of the minds that read it in 2009. They give these old arguments a fresh urgency again, they remind why outrage is needed and necessary.
Their correspondence is rarely catch-up about life, the significant other, the cats, the dogs. These are not friendly letters (at least the ones printed). These are not essays, but screeds. Like scripture, in some places. Dogears, extra bookmarks and underlined sentences fill my copy. Cunningham and McCreesh ebb and flow, a flux that sometimes makes their voices indistinguishable. But somewhere along the line I became a Cunningham man over McCreesh--his Southern views inflected with hope amidst suburban slog, compared to McCreesh's mostly Southwestern (and sometimes Swiss) appreciation of nature.
Perhaps my favorite part is when Cunningham fears that after a drought of correspondence from McCreesh that he has become ill, dead, missing whatever. Not that I think Cunningham seriously believed it, but he turned the phrase "You better not be dead, motherf*****" into a refrain as he described the loneliness of a mid-summer June day:
"sitting here in the stillborn night of far off screams and chained dogs pleading for mercy in the hot dark everywhere. bass drums always echo between houses built too close together, yards high with uncut summer grass. I hear water sloshing in old iron pipes rusting below my feet in the subterranean crawlspace where the multitude of spiders plot their eventual invasion..."
That is the style, the place, the time fraught with concern about what war-time politics might bring. That is my only complaint, I guess, sometimes the heavy-handed political preaching wore on for a few too many pages in the middle, but the overall effect of their descriptive style complemented with plenty of "yr" and "&" to the backbeat of Miles Davis on the failings, successes, generosity (or lack thereof) in America makes me use a phrase I don't want to, but need to--they are beat, "beat to their soul", embodying it in the truest form, not in the way that culture has taken it, monopolized it, corrupted it. Cunningham and McCreesh are the Beats for the modern day--they've created a potent political and cultural critique mixed with a shorthand style and bopsody pace all their own.
More after the jump...
