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Zambra, Patchen, Enrigue and the Outlaw Country Cruise

Greetings from St. Thomas!

When you read this I’ll be on a cruise ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean but I’m writing this on Tuesday while we’re in port because the internet onboard is very expensive and very unreliable.

I’m here as part of the Outlaw Country Cruise. Now, you may be wondering, what’s a Jim doing on the Outlaw Country Cruise?

Well, last night I was watching Jello Biafra perform with Rip Dash Rock and the Toadliquors. What was Jello Biafra of all people doing on the Outlaw Country Cruise performing with Rip Dash Rock and the Toadliquors?

Well, you’re just going to have to wait for the story, but I will say that I didn’t know that watching Jello belt out “House of the Rising Sun” was something I needed to see but here we are.

I’ll have more to say about all of this, much more, but if you’re wondering if this is the same operation that ran the Flogging Molly Cruise last week that featured the Circle Jerks, the answer is yes. Same outfit, same ship, same crew.

That means around the same time that Keith Morris was disembarking this very boat last week, Jello Biafra was boarding. Maybe they gave each other high fives on the gangway.

This is the first cruise I’ve been on since I got out of the Navy and as you might imagine a lot of memories have come flooding back. I spend a lot of time topside looking out sea, listening to the sound of the wind and the waves, feeling the motion of the ship, which rocks and rolls and shimmies and flexes a great deal more than I expected considering its great bulk.

When the cruise ships pull into San Diego, they look like Vegas hotels knocked over on their side, but this ship is very much a ship. I’m hoping they let me on the bridge.

A lot of writers have written about how awful these cruises are, but I have to say I’m having a blast. Walking the weather decks, drinking strong coffee out of a plastic mug, holding on to my hat as I go up and down the ladders, has been like going back in time. The clouds, the waves, the lights at nights. I never thought I’d say this, but maybe this is my happy place?

Not having Internet has been great. I’ve seen a lot of talented musicians perform, gotten a ton of work done, and while I haven’t had much time for reading, the reading has been deeper and more satisfying because it’s been relatively distraction free.

I’m finishing a short story collection that I put down last year: My Documents by Alejandro Zambra and translated by Megan McDowell. I loved his story “Thank You.” It’s one of those stories when you finish you have to set the book down and think about it for a while. For whatever reason I never picked it up again until now. I read “Family Life,” another stunner, this morning.

Yesterday I read Kenneth Patchen’s Panels for the Walls of Heaven, an early collection of his from the 1940s and easily one of my favorites. It’s just so wondrously strange.

“O I say look at your hands they are smeared with the blood of human beings and O I say look at your lives and at all your smug works they are smeared with the blood of human beings and I tell you there is no different between murdering the human beings you have already murdered and murdering every human being on earth O I weep at the monstrous horror of the crime against man and against God! If you have blood on your hands take them off this page.”

This was published in 1946 but it kind of makes you think, doesn’t it? (I got the line in the headline from this same section of the book.)

Yesterday I finished reading You Dreamed of Empires by Álvaro Enrigue. It’s a hallucinatory counterfactual tale about the first contact between Cortes and Montezuma written like a Shakespearean drama by an architecture-obsessed pharmacologist. Let me just say that losing entire years to reading Conan novels with their stories of wicked viziers, scheming courtesans, and meathead freebooters prepared me for this book.

What I loved most was its daring, the metafictional asides, flickers of direct address, the author inserting himself, all of us really, into the novel. Enrique imagines an alternate encounter, which makes it an act of eradication as horrifying as any colonial project.

This is a novel I’m going to read over and over again, until I’m intimate with it as say, Hamlet or Apocalypse Now, to which is bears no small resemblance. I also want to thank the bookseller who put this in my hands.

The week before last I drove to LA in the rain. I arrived early for a meeting and went to Book Soup to kill time. I got to talking with the bookseller, which is kind of rare. Oftentimes the booksellers at LA bookstores are like record store clerks in the 80s: haughty and imperious. Not this guy. He was so taken with the novel’s opening pages that he couldn’t stop talking about it. I bought the book and read those pages at Dialog Café down the street where I paid a shocking amount of money for a coffee and a croissant, like three to five times more than what it would cost in Barcelona.

The bookseller was right. The opening scene was marvelous. On my way back to my car, I popped into Book Soup again and thanked him for the recommendation. Twelve days later I finished the book on the fantail of a cruise ship, somewhere between the Bahamas and the U.S. Virgin Islands, reading the final lines in the perfumed air as the sun lit up the clouds with my imagination ensconced in the gleaming city of Tenochtitlan collaborating on the meeting of two empires that shaped the course of human history.

I’ll be back in a few days, just in time for a pair of readings in the desert I mentioned last week.

Yes, that’s Mr. Earbrass in the middle. Just wanted to see if you were paying attention. If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel about healthcare vigilantes Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider checking out my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.