What If You Left It All Behind

Henry Rollins, Anna Kavan, Carmen Maria Machado & Kali Fajardo-Anstine

This weekend we escaped the heat wave that descended on Southern California and used some reward points to check into a hotel for a few days. We live in a condo that doesn’t have AC. It’s only uncomfortable for two weeks out of the year but we’re close enough to the harbor that no matter how hot it gets during the day the building cools off at night. 

But with back-to-back days in the 100s we decided to get out. We picked a hotel in an office park in Kearny Villa far from San Diego’s many tourist destinations. Other than driving to pick up takeout, we didn’t leave the hotel. We worked a little. Nuvia binge watched a show. I read a couple books. It was extremely chill.

But it’s a strange thing to stay at a hotel in the city in which you live. I kept thinking I was somewhere in Orange County or L.A. My body was convinced I’d taken it someplace. My mind felt elsewhere. 

Part of it has to do with the fires burning all over California. Haze hangs over vast swaths of the coast, turning the sky into a weird orange-grayish color. It just feels off. 

But I think something happens to our mind when we wake up in an unfamiliar bed. Our brain desires to know where it is. But I hadn’t gone anywhere. Not really. So I had no new information to give it. Hence the confusion.

When we checked out this morning, it was 73 degrees and kind of raining. Bizarre. 

I haven’t quite shaken off the effects of the wrong-colored sky and the wild temperature swings and sleeping in a strange bed. And now as I type this on Tuesday evening the Santa Ana’s are blowing and it’s hard to have a good feeling about anything. 

As I promised last week, here’s a round-up of some books I’ve been reading.

All Coppers Are Bastards but Very Few Books Are

Art to Choke Hearts & Pissing in the Gene Pool by Henry Rollins.

Has anyone every hated cops as much as Henry Rollins? Good lord there’s a lot of cop hating here. This is actually two books that were initially published separately. Scenes from Pissing in the Gene Pool, which comes first despite the title, were taken from Rollins’ journals from 1985 to 1986 and Art to Choke Hearts picks up from there and goes to early 1987. 1986 is when Black Flag came to an end. In Get in the Van Rollins reports on the things that happened while he was on tour.Black Flag ends and the Rollins Band pick up immediately after with zero reflection on how this came to pass or what he thought about it. This book, and others like it, go deep into his psyche and I was curious to read his innermost thoughts about the end of the band he gave more than five years of his life to. 

But Rollins doesn’t process his emotions: he pulverizes them with intense scenes of murder and mayhem. There are brief moments of tenderness, like when he’s feeling nostalgic about Washington, D.C. but most of the pages are full of violence and misogyny. Rollins is an equal opportunity extremist: everyone gets it, and no one more so than himself. It’s not quite Jim Goad-level of transgressive writing; Rollins’ trip is more inwardly directed, but he’s just not equipped to reflect on how he feels on an emotional level. 

What’s fascinating to me is that immediately after Black Flag ends, the ultra-violent scenes go away for a while. There’s still a lot of misanthropic energy but now it’s more observational as he focuses his attention on the scenes outside his apartment window in Venice Beach. It’s almost as if the source of his anger and frustration has been taken away. There’s even some humor where Rollins riffs in the style of a spoken word performer, a genre in which he had an even greater impact than he did punk rock, which is saying something. Eventually the bloodshed returns to the page and when it does Rollins directs a lot of it at the police. It’s the most consistent theme across all 250 pages of these books. The last line reads, “It’s time to kill some pigs and party down.” So if nothing else it’s timely. 

Machines in the Head: Selected Stories by Anna Kravan

I have a confession to make: I am obsessed with stories about people who abandon their lives and start over. The man who finds his home has been firebombed and allows the authorities to think he is dead so he can deliver his own brand of justice under an assumed name. The woman who leaves her home to pick up flowers for the party she is throwing for her husband and just keeps driving. The traveler who changes flights at the airport on a whim and starts over in some distant city. I have a friend who, right this very moment, is starting a new life as a digital nomad. (Hi, Siel!)

It’s not that I’m envious of these alternate lives so much as I’m envious of the courage they require. I think something about the Navy instilled this reticence in me. There’s no such thing as being late for work in the Navy. That’s called Unauthorized Absence. And there’s no calling in sick for a mental health day. That’s called Absence Without Leave, for which you can be court martialed. 

I’m telling you all this so you understand why I’m attracted to the work of an author who not only started her life over, but did so under the name of a fictional character that she created. 

So Helen Woods is born to wealthy European parents. She marries an English dude, has two kids, and moves to Burma. Helen says, “Fuck this,” I want to be an artist. She attends art school in London and starts taking heroin. She marries another dude and writes a bunch of novels, but things don’t work out and as war is breaking out across Europe she survives a suicide attempt and is committed to an asylum. She has a breakthrough and begins writing under the name Anna Kravan, a character who appears in two of her novels. 

In the early twentieth century, if a man did this and “bettered” himself, he was regarded as something of a hero. This is the blueprint for Paul Gauguin more or less and countless other artists. Leaving a dreary life as a cog in the machine to pursue one’s art is heroic, these narratives tell us, even if those who are left behind suffer terribly. Of course, the story only gets told his way if the artist is a man. If the artist is a woman, then the story is framed differently. She went against her maternal instinct, betrayed her husband, and abandoned her children, etc. In other words, what she did is unnatural. In other words, monstrous. 

But shouldn’t it be the other way around? In a system where men have all the power, which they certainly have had for much of human history, women were burdened with expectations and obligations based solely on their gender. When they did seek alternatives, they had fewer financial resources to effect meaningful change. Aren’t those who escape this fate the real heroes?  I think so. 

Now I know very little about Kavan. I haven’t even read the introduction because so many of these shits spoil the story. She may be a monster for all I know. She seems to have had more privilege than most. I’m still working my way through the collection because it’s not the kind of book you read quickly. The stories are short but intense and exquisitely wrought. Check out the opening paragraph to “At Night”:

“How slowly the minutes pass in the winter night, and yet the hours themselves do not seem so long. Already the church clock is calling the hour again in its dull country voice that sounds half stupefied by the cold. I lie in bed, and like a well-drilled prisoner, an old-timer, I resign myself to the familiar pattern of sleeplessness. It is a routine I know only too well.”

The story is a protracted metaphor for insomnia. Not much happens—just a person alone in a room—and yet one feels as if the narrator is in great peril and the stakes are sky-high. The set-up is not that different than many of Rollins scenes, but where Rollins lashes out for someone to shoot or kill, Kravan tries not to give in to the feeling of creeping dread that it’s all in her head. 

But don’t worry. I’m not planning on abandoning my family and starting over again anytime soon, but if I do disappear don’t be surprised if a character named Pemberton pops up in Las Vegas…  

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

I’d been looking forward to reading this ever since I saw Machado read from it last summer at Mysterious Galaxy here in San Diego. Machado’s memoir describes her tumultuous long-distance relationship with an emotionally abusive partner. The details of this relationship matter, of course, but that’s not what makes the book so compelling. 

The first half of the book tantalizes the reader with the slow reveal of a partner who is not quite the person they seem to be; the second half describes how the protagonist extricates herself from the relationship, which isn’t terribly difficult since she doesn’t actually live with her partner. It’s an unconventional story because it’s a same-sex relationship and the abuse never quite rises to the level where one is concerned for the protagonist’s safety. Damage is damage but I’m sure many readers have been in relationships that were more violent, dangerous, or traumatizing, than the one Machado describes. (Compare Machado’s story with Rollins who was physically assaulted nearly every night he was on tour, or Kravan who was institutionalized in an asylum and the stakes seem a wee bit lower here.) Possibly, it’s the whiff of grad school that hangs over everything that drains the danger out of the story. That’s my bias and I’ll own it. 

What’s remarkable about In the Dream House is the manner in which the narrative is expressed, what Machado calls “the formal play” of the book. Machado uses the Dream House—an actual place but also a metaphor for her best hopes—as a series of lenses through which to tell her story. Dream House as Murder Mystery, Dream House as Myth, Dream House as Epiphany and so on. The way the architecture of the Dream House shifts from chapter to chapter makes for an engaging read.  

Sabrina & Corina by Kali Fajardo-Anstine

I was drawn to this book by the cover art, which I immediately recognized as the work of Gustavo Rimada, who briefly had a studio in Barrio Logan across the street from Golondrina. I met him one night and was just blown away by his talent. I bought a print that night but wish I could have bought an original because he left San Diego for Palm Springs not long afterwards. 

That's an unusual way to come to a book, but I'm really glad I did. Sabrina & Corina is an incredibly moving collection of stories. I’m really impressed with the way the narratives are put together. The most dramatic aspect of the story is rarely the central focus. Rather, Fajardo-Anstine is interested in the relationships between people who know just about everything about each other—sisters, cousins, lovers, parents and grandparents—except the one thing that matters most. These stories are like tightly coiled springs that release all their energy off the page. 

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of stories that fire the imagination, but each one of Fajardo-Anstine’s emotionally resonant stories made me feel something.

Perhaps we’ve been feeling too much this year. Maybe we haven’t been feeling enough. I don’t know where I sit on this spectrum, but I’m ready for whatever comes next.

Stay safe. Wear a mask. And for the love of Baphomet stop with the gender reveal parties.