Friday Links: Vampires Are Very Real Edition
"I want you like that—enough to gnash you / into a silence made from pieces of silver." - Natalie Diaz, "Toward the Amaranth Gates of War or Love"
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Still thinking about metaphor. Maybe I’m always thinking about metaphor. Anyway, much as I love and am currently watching What We Do In The Shadows, much as I once loved and should probably re-read the Anne Rice vampire novels, much as Mallory and I watch Francis Ford Coppola Presents Bram Stoker’s Dracula religiously every year in October—I do think vampires are most effective when they are not aristocratic fuck-up main characters, but tertiary to real people with real difficulties. Sorta like all of us, reading this blog, are real people, suffering under the neck-fit bootheel of Wall Street/Silicon Valley/D.C. vampires.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
But first, this is a literary blog. The books are the fun part! We got some good ones this week, too. Both pretty scary, but only one you’d shelve under horror. Both not necessarily about but very much a product of the deeply inequitable and racist activities on this continent. Seriously, I’m more and more glad that I did that Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz/Four Hundred Souls/Howard Zinn project in January, because it has really given me an intellectual foundation to my understanding of the world, and added depth to my experience of reading. Reading about addiction and vampires. I’m talking, of course, about When My Brother Was An Aztec by Natalie Diaz and Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas.
When My Brother Was An Aztec by Natalie Diaz: how do you write about addiction that is not your own? When someone you live with is captured by the demons, when the problem isn’t you but the problem is a family’s to deal with? It’s an even more harrowing read, watching everyone else’s powerlessness and despair.
To talk only of Diaz’s brother’s addiction would be reductive, though, and a disservice to these breathtaking poems. There’s a real density here, meaning and metaphor packed in each line like flour pressed into a measuring cup. The poems are lengthy and musical without being overwrought. This book reminded me a little of Jaswinder Bolina, another Copper Canyon author I picked up at AWP. Spoiler for next week: I’m reading Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem and super stoked.
Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas: come on now, you know I loved this book. I used to think I didn’t like historical fiction, but maybe that was born out of growing up in Tennessee and thinking “historical fiction” meant “books with the Confederate flag on the cover.” Plus, this novel is more of a gothic romance with leftist politics and vampires. Nightmarishly gross nosferatu, too, with holes where their eyes should be and too many teeth and a proclivity for moving around on all fours. One even eats a Texas Ranger—some of the most despicable people to ever walk the earth. That’s how you get yr friendly neighborhood shipwrecked sailor to yell HELL YEAH while reading.
Be not mistaken, though, homies—los vampiros are background. This is a gothic romance, and our two narrators, Nena and Néstor, have a major class divide to contend with. Néstor is born a peon and grows up to be a free vaquero, but Nena is a daughter of la casa mayor and expected to marry someone of similar status. If, like, my parents are reading and thinking “this sounds like a book you’ve turned your nose up at before,” then this is a good time to highlight what a brilliant sentence-maker Isabel Cañas is. Each paragraph absolutely sings, and the historical/environmental details breathe easily into the narrative. I was reminded a little of Swamplandia! by Karen Russell, the way lush details about the desert heat and various fauna of the chaparral and rancho perfume the text. A little of The Devourers too, though maybe nothing will ever be as lush as that book. Still, you could teach these two side-by-side, and if Universal ever wants to get serious about a decent monster movieverse, they should option Vampires of El Norte and The Devourers and give us vampires and werewolves with some actual teeth.
Also—Cañas includes an afterword about the writing process, which 1) rules, I love seeing writers talk about their process after I’ve finished the book, and 2) did you know that Mexican polymath Juan Nepomuceno “Cheno” Cortina was referring to USian invaders from the north as “vampires” in 1859? Decades before Dracula, decades before Carmilla, decades before Marx and Engels referring to capitalists as vampires? Vaquero tall tales and folklore abound in this novel, a sense of the non-empirical pervades. Cañas says she worried initially that the supernatural felt shoehorned in. There’s definitely a way this book could have been ham-fisted, in less caring hands. Isabel, I assure you, it does not feel that way in the final publication.
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? I’ve linked LA LOM recently, but they came out with a new video as I was writing this, so here’s “Cómo Te Voy A Olvidar:”
Great piece in Flaming Hydra, a new collective of writers, by JJ Solnik: “Love + Work.” It’s a celebration of playing music with your friends, union organizing, and dealing with layoffs. But mostly the joy of playing music with your friends. Not gonna lie, I felt a like vulnerable and exposed after Wednesday’s column, and this piece made me feel less like that.
I’m not subscribed to Flaming Hydra because I am [between money-making opportunities], but I plan to. It’s only $3 a month. Anyway, the headline and first couple grafs of this Osita Nwanevu, imploring us to “check out the punk scene” and asking “what’s more punk than the public library?” is something I’m coming back to soon.
Scott Horsley in NPR on why home and auto insurance premiums are rising. This blog could probably have a dedicated “everything goes up but the wages” segment if I thought about it. It is not a good thing for the barrier of entry into society to be so high. It is not a good thing, in a country where you (yes, fucking you) are one bad break from homelessness, and the cost of getting back into stable living is so high.
We return for a minute to Aaron Bushnell, because his sacrifice is not something you write about one week and then drop. This piece in Defector from , “Why Did Aaron Bushnell Burn?” is excellent. A pull quote, because Defector is subscription-based (but worth it!): “Ideally, America could produce a presidential candidate and enough congressional candidates that voters would be able to stop these extremely unpopular things from happening. The vast majority of Americans support a ceasefire in Palestine…if American media would bother covering what was happening in the Horn of Africa, the sentiment would almost certainly be similar. But that majority does not have a real voice, and the minority of people who want these atrocities to keep happening in their name will get their way, because Aaron Bushnell’s America exists under minority rule: generally that of the white and the wealthy and the mainline or the evangelical.”
Let’s end on something a little uplifting about the collective power we can have, huh? Here’s Amanda Rozon and Michael Hill in Gothamist explaining Community Boards. My involvement with local Chicago politics comes in fits and starts because of [gestures at five-year-old and aforementioned between money-making opportunities situation], so when I read the article, I’m thinking about what more I can do. Maybe think about what you can do, too. Unless you’re a Republican. Then—why are you reading this blog?—tie cement blocks to your shoes and enjoy Lake Michigan.
What’re you still doing here? We’re like three months away from kayaking season! I’m gonna go do some push-ups.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Remember: all of your customers have a Yanqui vampire lurking inside them, but you have love on your side.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris