For the Coming Tomorrow

Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler, 1993

The suffocating power of this book isn’t just it’s total command of what our present was in the past, nor is it the harrowing and compassionate and gripping journey out of right-now. It isn’t that Butler will not let you forget how horrible humans can be to each other, or how quickly we accept becoming animals. Butler has mastered every detail and breath of surviving in a world not that far away from ours, but so much worse.

America two-steps into a reality of slavery, prostitution, rape and murder as a daily backdrop to the walled in cul-de-sacs left over and surrounded by the chaos of the majority poor. Every face is a thieves, but a thieves driven by desperation and unending hunger. But the most dangerous are the addicts killing for a narcotic which transmutes fire into an experience better than sex. And, so, they burn everything. All while wholesale and unpoliced murder rampages through the last illusions of civilization.

What makes this book so eviscerating is the Balanok, the much older lover to Lauren Olamida the protagonist and leader of a survivors colony as they daily escape robbery or carnivorous rape from fellow escapees heading north out of California to a larger disaster. It is a world plagued by climate change; it hasn’t rained in Los Angeles in six years. It is one where community is the sole means of survival, even if everyone you know is burned to death. We may pray that Ms. Butler’s vision is never realized, because she has put before us something terrible and perfect. And even on her last page’s salvation, you cut your finger on the inexorable finality

Prix Renaudot

Leaden penetrations, as when a hard and horrible truth finally bashes its way in front of your attention, are the most burdensome but blessedly, the most rapid to pass. The big stuff; getting shitcanned over a ludicrous idea; the death of a pet; a compound- fracture car accident; being foreclosed. Or an insidious thin noise, everpresent, heard just behind every word being spoken to you, as what happens during a slow and maschocistic break-up. This is how Separation, by Dan Franck, makes every page ring in sadness and anger, but all the more so, by making his essential truths draw out in cathartic strokes.

The breakup realizes immediately on the first page, and as you look through the smoke of the bomb that just blew up in your hands you spend the next two hundred pages trying to fathom the casualties. Not one thing ends happily, and Franck makes it detestably good. Each page squeezes the heart a little tighter, as the narrator and his wife of seven years separate. The one-up-manship thrilled and disgusted; the couple break-up all over Paris and the melancholy rollick which by the end has your lungs as wet as the slaughtered couple.

The book was found for me at the library, when we were looking for books set in France ahead of an upcoming trip. Franck scores wonders. Each savory place and setting was kept crisp and inspired, and it kept me awash in memory. The narrator's battlegrounds with his wife are made just the more evocative. I finished the book with scortched hands.

Johnnyweed

Michael Pollan's excellent "Botany of Desire", a Christmas gift that I am only now getting a chance to enjoy, is a work that immediately leaves you wet in the mouth and burning to start-up a garden. However doomed that latter enterprise would be, for me personally, it does not distract for what is ultimately Pollan's thesis, that humans are much more domesticated by the plants we enjoy than the other way around. Pollan gives us an eye-opening reductionist survey of illusion of human control, and begs essential questions about our own adaptability and coevolutionary fitness.

Up against the apple, a being of wonderful genetic diversity, our own germline makes all of us look like inbred jackasses. That every conserved variety of apple can trace it's lineage back to a single tree that had the luck of making itself delicious to humans speaks to the inexorable way in which specie interdependence plays out. Otherwise, apples would proliferate in varieties that we would find alien - it is only the varieties that we desire that make it to cultivation.

Pollan then examines the tulip and how a fairly ordinary flower brought the 17th Century global economy to its knees. His full account of the cultivation and speculation into the flower are masterful, from it's diversity of bright and hardy colors to the inflationary froth that halted global commerce once the tulip-bubble collapsed.

Likewise, with the cultivation of marijuana, and Pollan's own white-knuckled gardening adventure with the weed, we see how a hemp regulation and the constant desire for altered states has consumed thousands of man-hours in regulation and lost time over what was once considered a miracle fiber.

But Pollan's opus concludes on a high note when he looks at the humble potato. Well, humble might not fit - glorious, rainbow shades of potato, home grown with nutty and explosive flavors that most Americans will never taste. Instead, we eat a genetically modified potato that holds several patents and is grown exclusively for mass consumption in fried form, devoid of all the properties that make potatoes so nutritious. They stand as witness to the mass cultivation and marketing that goes into so much of the food we eat every day. With the potato as microcosm, we get a larger look into how we eat everyday.

This is a splendid book, and I've now picked up The Omnivore's Dilemma which I am really looking forward to. Without writers like Pollan, we risk losing the last remaining threads to the earth that tolerates us, and to not read him is to further our species peril.

I piss here too!

Fuck me if it isn't tough finding a proper toilet at 5:30 on a Monday evening. I know, I know, Nate you say, I've been drinking all afternoon to forget my problems and I forgot to go behind the dumpster where I stash my fifths of Barcardi. Drunk friend, I dig! You have nothing to explain to me!

The cops however, will want an explanation. Especially after you shed your clothes, whip out your dong and write your name on the disabled passenger seats. I know! If they're disabled they have their own seats, the ones with wheels, so by all means, dump your pisser there. So what if the police don't understand. So what if they make you put on your clothes and a pair of handcuffs. You went out of your way to show us working tool-bags that we too could be wrecked at 5:30 and naked down to our socks if we wanted to. Friend. America and I salute you.

Red State Hangover

Oh man, awesome. The canker sore that's blown up in my mouth is truly a sight to see, so calloused from rubbing up against my rotting molars that it looks like the bottom of my worn-out foot. When it comes up for air, it bears a striking resemblance to Rudy "noun, verb, 9/11" Guilianni, who yesterday had a bad day to end all bad days.

Also, go read History of Love, and if you can ignore the fact that Krause is married to Jonathan Safran Foer, you'll really enjoy it.

Oops, I moved

Wound up in Brooklyn, Park Slope neighborhood where I come to find that YES! The MTA B Line is my closest subway stop. Huzzah. The cat and the missus survived the journey. For the record, the move to New York was the right decision. The sushi alone is worth the trip, no matter if you turn into a mercurial tunnel beast from over-eating the yellow-fin.

Read a book about a president.