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You Play Too Rough
Apr. 18th, 2011 10:02 amCal still has his cold. No Mom. Watched five hours of TV last night, which would have been acceptable had it all been stuff like The Borgias, Breakout Kings and The Killing, except that there was a Storage Wars marathon on while I was cooking, so I ended up watching waaay too much of that. Worked out both days, though; at least I have that going for me.
One of the books which came too late for Shirley Jackson Awards consideration--I'm not sure about other people, but it arrived at my place literally the same day we made our final round of picks--was The Color of Night, by Madison Smartt Bell. I glanced at it at the time, thought it might've been a straight-up mystery (we got a lot of those, for some reason), and passed it on to Mom. When I went over to her place on Thursday, I picked it up and started reading it, and realized the wonderful truth...
The Color of Night is, in fact, a re-telling of the Manson Family legend from the point of view of one of the girls who didn't get busted. She now deals blackjack in Las Vegas, and spends her nights scoping things out through a long-range rifle she got from a gangster fuck-buddy of hers. During the aftermath of 9-11, she's watching Twin Towers footage and thinks she sees another former "Manson" girl--the only one she really cared about, her lover, friend and partner in ecstatic crime--stumbling through the dust. She tracks this woman's phone number down, reaches out, and begins to remember; bad stuff follows.
But all that's not the best part: Our antiheroine, Mae Chorea (I kid you not), has known herself to be hideously psychologically scarred since long before she hooked up with the cult she calls "The People"--she's an abuse survivor, a former Tenderloin hooker with a bayonet and a stone knife in her pack, well aware of the ways she does and doesn't like to be hurt, and carries an almost genetic fixation on the ancient Greek legends she sees play out all around her, constantly. Granted, having taken loads of LSD over the years probably doesn't help, but the fact is that Manson as written intersects beautifully with the Dionysiac, Orphic and Bacchante mysteries, long before Mae starts talking about meeting a rock star named "O----" and his tragic girlfriend "Eerie", or relating how she and her BFF Laurel eventually killed him for the grand crime of being too down over Eerie's death to party.
In much the same way that Mae considers Manson/"D----" a rudely-vacated former avatar of The God whose imprisoned shell of a body simply belongs to a former pimp, con and con-man, Mae thinks she and Laurel were once goddesses who could never die so long as they did what they were made for. So long as they were borne along on the tide of ecstatic frenzy. And now she has to find Laurel again, to either recapture that feeling or at least give Laurel the grand death she deserves, one almost as epic as the apocalyptic death she recently escaped.
It's a fast read, full of lovely language; Smartt Bell's style reminds me a lot of Joyce Carol Oates at her best, as in things like Monster, and I love how opaque yet self-aware Mae is...she believes in predestination, in the playing out of ritual, and says: "I have no other tale to tell but this one", less sad than proud to be so absolutely completed. I'm also very attracted to the Iris Murdoch quote he begins the book with (from The Unicorn, apparently):
Forgive is too weak a word. Recall the idea of Ate, which was so real to the Greeks. Ate is the name of the almost automatic transfer of suffering from one being to another. Power is a form of Ate. The victims of power, and any power has its victims, are themselves infected. They have then to pass it on, to use the power on others.
So yeah: Glad I read it, sorry I couldn't vote for it. But I do recommend it, without reservation.;)
One of the books which came too late for Shirley Jackson Awards consideration--I'm not sure about other people, but it arrived at my place literally the same day we made our final round of picks--was The Color of Night, by Madison Smartt Bell. I glanced at it at the time, thought it might've been a straight-up mystery (we got a lot of those, for some reason), and passed it on to Mom. When I went over to her place on Thursday, I picked it up and started reading it, and realized the wonderful truth...
The Color of Night is, in fact, a re-telling of the Manson Family legend from the point of view of one of the girls who didn't get busted. She now deals blackjack in Las Vegas, and spends her nights scoping things out through a long-range rifle she got from a gangster fuck-buddy of hers. During the aftermath of 9-11, she's watching Twin Towers footage and thinks she sees another former "Manson" girl--the only one she really cared about, her lover, friend and partner in ecstatic crime--stumbling through the dust. She tracks this woman's phone number down, reaches out, and begins to remember; bad stuff follows.
But all that's not the best part: Our antiheroine, Mae Chorea (I kid you not), has known herself to be hideously psychologically scarred since long before she hooked up with the cult she calls "The People"--she's an abuse survivor, a former Tenderloin hooker with a bayonet and a stone knife in her pack, well aware of the ways she does and doesn't like to be hurt, and carries an almost genetic fixation on the ancient Greek legends she sees play out all around her, constantly. Granted, having taken loads of LSD over the years probably doesn't help, but the fact is that Manson as written intersects beautifully with the Dionysiac, Orphic and Bacchante mysteries, long before Mae starts talking about meeting a rock star named "O----" and his tragic girlfriend "Eerie", or relating how she and her BFF Laurel eventually killed him for the grand crime of being too down over Eerie's death to party.
In much the same way that Mae considers Manson/"D----" a rudely-vacated former avatar of The God whose imprisoned shell of a body simply belongs to a former pimp, con and con-man, Mae thinks she and Laurel were once goddesses who could never die so long as they did what they were made for. So long as they were borne along on the tide of ecstatic frenzy. And now she has to find Laurel again, to either recapture that feeling or at least give Laurel the grand death she deserves, one almost as epic as the apocalyptic death she recently escaped.
It's a fast read, full of lovely language; Smartt Bell's style reminds me a lot of Joyce Carol Oates at her best, as in things like Monster, and I love how opaque yet self-aware Mae is...she believes in predestination, in the playing out of ritual, and says: "I have no other tale to tell but this one", less sad than proud to be so absolutely completed. I'm also very attracted to the Iris Murdoch quote he begins the book with (from The Unicorn, apparently):
Forgive is too weak a word. Recall the idea of Ate, which was so real to the Greeks. Ate is the name of the almost automatic transfer of suffering from one being to another. Power is a form of Ate. The victims of power, and any power has its victims, are themselves infected. They have then to pass it on, to use the power on others.
So yeah: Glad I read it, sorry I couldn't vote for it. But I do recommend it, without reservation.;)
