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by Rochell D. Hart
(O.G. Productions, CD, $15)
Set to a slow and often sensual beat, Portland poet Rochell D. Hart's new CD, P.I.M.P., mixes hip-hop rhythms with real-world street lyrics, black feminist pride and abundant intelligence in order to create a "higher level of spoken word."
Exploding with self-confidence, honesty and conviction, Hart's voice, backed by O.G. One, paints a vivid portrait of black America and addresses such issues as the self-ghettoization of black youths, racism and the antagonistic attitude of the police. P.I.M.P. also delves into the idea of a "reborn black woman," a black queen free from both the constraints of history and the current MTV hip-hop attitude toward black women as easy ho's or as shallow materialistic bitches.
In her track "Don't Wana Be" she states, "My inner spirit called out and demanded that I be more than the images I too often see/ because I don't wana be another booty-bouncin', loud-talkin' ghetto-unfabulous girl." Instead, she calls for a black woman who is more than a stereotype imposed by white America or black culture.
Black men are also scrutinized. In "I Got a Bone to Pick," Hart attacks the glorified vision of gangsters, hustlers and pimps in black culture, stating that "to those who think a pager and a cell phone means having big things/ to those who think that waiting on a once-a-month county check is having a dream/ I got a bone to pick/...hustling on the block is not an accepted alternate to a 9-5, and that gun-toting rough-neck mentality is just a contribution to genocide."
Hart reveals the power and beauty, as well as the flaws, of her world, and in doing so she stands out as an original and intelligent voice struggling free from a crowd of one-dimensional stereotypes.
Cris Day
down to a soundless sea
by Thomas Steinbeck
(Ballantine Books, 283 pages, $24.95)
John Steinbeck published his first novel, Cup of Gold, in 1929. Its release won him little attention, and his name would not ring familiar until the 1935 release of Tortilla Flat. His literary career from then on is well-known: Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men. All cast a giant shadow over the 20th century's literary canon.
It's a shadow that also looms over Thomas Steinbeck, John's son. Owing much to his father's name, Steinbeck fils' Down to a Soundless Sea will not struggle to be noticed. Nonetheless, this promising debut is quite capable of standing on its own merits.
Published on the centennial of his father's birth, Steinbeck's book is filled with wonderfully written stories about human toil and the search for love in a hard world. His pieces do bear some resemblance to his father's, in that the land (his father's beloved California) and human vulnerability are at the core of both. But Thomas Steinbeck stresses the metaphoric in a gritty, rich poetic prose style that reveals him to be less interested than his father in providing a tendentious social barometer.
Thomas Steinbeck is also interested in the mystical, and many of these stories are laced with the fantastical's intrusion upon the "real," producing a motley crowd of extraordinary characters whose emotions and fragility remain all too human.
His distinct style, and the "man against nature" subject matter of many of the tales, saddles him closer to Cormac McCarthy and E. Annie Proulx. Thomas Steinbeck clearly doesn't want to ape John's work, but his talent with language shows he's worthy of his father's pen. Nick Obourn
somebody
by Laurie Blauner
(Black Heron Press, 249 pages, $22.95)
It is obvious from the opening lines of Laurie Blauner's first novel that she is first and foremost a very talented poet. After the publication of four books of poetry, she has turned her remarkable skill toward prose, and in doing so has created a book that blends a poetic understanding of the everyday with characters almost too honest to bear.
Somebody is a novel of unique poetic insight into life and its abundant cruelties, and into the binds that hold people together when the world seems as though it should just give up and fall apart. Although Blauner's tale tells a familiar story of broken families--of absent fathers, dysfunctional mother-daughter relationships, and a search for self-definition--what sets this novel above others in the field is Blauner's unique way of seeing the world. Rather than dryly reporting on the daily mundane (the reflection of outside streetlights on a white wall, the image of goldfish gliding under the surface of a pond), Blauner creates images rich with feeling and color, transforming the seemingly insignificant into the extraordinary. A red shirt is "snapped from its hanger like a bird startled in flight," sweat is a "wet shadow."
The one complaint with this novel is that sometimes the images are so complex and surreal that one has to stop and reread a paragraph in order to get the full feeling of the words. This isn't really a complaint, however, but a reminder that, as with most things, Somebody is better when savored. Cris Day
hello to the cannibals
by Richard Bausch
(Harper Collins, 662 pages, $27.95)
Bausch appears at Twenty-third Avenue Books, 1015 NW 23rd Ave, 224-6203. 7:30 pm Thursday, Oct. 17.
Admirers of Richard Bausch's earlier novels and short stories will find his new book a crushing disappointment. The novel's premise is inviting enough: Lily Austin, a daughter of professional actors, gives up her own acting career to write a play based on the life of 19th-century African explorer Mary Kingsley.
Bausch tantalizes his readers with richly imagined glimpses of Kingsley's suppressed emotional life in Victorian England only to flash forward to the excruciating soap opera unfolding around Lily in late-1980s America. There are virtually no discernible parallels between the two characters. Kingsley, who never married, spent most of her adulthood caring for her invalid mother while her explorer father trotted the globe. When both parents died, Kingsley embarked on her own celebrated career exploring and writing about West and Central Africa (she died at 37 while serving as a nurse during the Boer War).
Inexplicably, Bausch devotes fully two-thirds of his narrative to Lily, pushing most of the infinitely more interesting passages about Kingsley to the final half of the book. Lily drops out of college only days before graduation to elope with a man she barely knows. They move to Mississippi, where her new husband has been offered a job selling cars for his stepfather, whom he's never met and who ran off with his mother when he was a child.
Apparently none of this strikes anybody but the reader as a really bad idea. Not surprisingly, Lily's husband is hiding a secret that, once revealed, threatens to tear their lives apart. At one point, Lily says she's heard that hell is other people, but that she's come to believe it means living with oneself. Lily (and Sartre) are wrong: Hell is this book. Matt Buckingham
To be considered
for listings, send information at least two weeks in advance to Words, WW, 822 SW 10th Ave., Portland, OR 97205
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blood song: a silent ballad
by Eric Drooker, foreword by Joe Sacco
(Harcourt, 202 pages, $20)
Eric Drooker will speak at the Red & Black Cafe, 2138 SE Division St., 274-1449. 7 pm Monday, Oct. 21.
Eric Drooker's graphic novel is about as straightforward as you can get for a book without words. First, there's the whole galaxy, then Earth, then there's a fish, which gets caught by a peasant who lives in a thatch hut with his wife and daughter. While the daughter is out getting water, thuggish soldiers with machine guns attack her village. Pursued, she runs through the forest, finds a boat and flees across the ocean to a Fritz Langian American metropolis. Here, she hooks up with a saxophone player, who eventually gets thrown in the slammer for belting out True Shit on street corners, which The Man hates. The girl is left to have the sax player's baby on a rooftop all alone in the middle of winter, followed by one final wide shot of outer space.
Blood Song is all about the meaningless cacophony that surrounds a culture after it's been forcibly tracheotomized. What's left of the original signal is indiscernible as it's buried in noise. Just like the girl, our culture stepped out for a minute, came back and found itself under attack, but with empty slogans and logos.
Herein lies the point of Drooker's story. It's not just some village out in the killing fields that's getting silenced; it's happening everywhere. The art imparts a sense of urgency to this message, with dramatic swaths of ink equally capable of implying the movement of life or the stillness of death. The deliberate, imposing blackness is set in contrast to the washed-out, ethereal colors that serve to further heighten the tension. Mike Campbell
skirt and the fiddle
by Tristan Egolf
(Grove Press, 224 pages, $23)
Tristan Egolf will read at Powell's Books on Hawthorne, 3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd., 238-1668. 7:30 Tuesday, Oct. 22. .
Tristan Egolf's second novel, Skirt and the Fiddle, wants to be good. It arrives on the literary scene following the young writer's triumphant debut novel, Lord of the Barnyard, and, therefore, demands to be read.
The novel unfolds with a humorous, intriguing incident involving a crop of classically trained violin masters, including the book's proposed protagonist, Charlie Evans, opening a comeback tour for a heinous death-metal band. It is a beautifully ironic build-up. After this unexpected booking, Charlie, the "Cambodian-Negro," decides to leave it all behind. He tosses his instrument into the gutter and, with no options, settles down in the Desmon Hotel, the epicenter for vagrants of the town. There, Charlie meets up with Tinsel Greetz, and the two soon form a bond.
Greetz is an overdeveloped loudmouth with a tumultuous mind. Greetz is so much larger than life in Egolf's hands that Charlie soon falls into his shadow, an odd place for the book's primary character, which leaves the first part of the book feeling unbalanced.
Charlie's resuscitation (both in the narrative and in the reader's estimation) comes with his meeting Louise Gascoyne, a gold card-carrying French elite socialite. Through Gascoyne, Charlie sees who Greetz really is, finds clarity and ultimately decides his own fate, evening out the earlier imbalance.
Egolf is a good writer and a master of the fast-paced. But 224 pages of chaos and discord could give any reader vertigo. Also, the profusion of mishaps and misadventures leads to thin characters that seem formed out of plot demands rather than psychology. Nick Obourn
WWeek 2015