Santa Cruz Noir--blogging the book, Day Three. "What Ever Happened to Skinny Jane?" by Ariel Gore

(To learn more about my "blogging the book" challenge to myself, go HERE.)

Ariel Gore is in many ways at the other end of the spectrum from the author of the first story in this anthology, in that she has written many books and founded Hip Mama, an alternative parenting magazine. As with so many other writers in this anthology, you can tell she has spent time (I was going to write"done time") in Santa Cruz because of a particular striking paragraph.

It's the next day and I'm down at the Clock Tower 'cause Food Not Bombs is serving lunch without a permit and I'm not hungry or anything, but I just dropped another tab and I'm in the mood to start some shit with the police. Before I even get a chance, here comes this skinny girl in a skirt and no fuckin' shirt on and she's all limbs and yellow hair and pink tits and she's hungry, she's practically starving, right?

For those of you who don't know the town, the Clock Tower is a tower at the top of Pacific Avenue that has been the meeting place for much political protest and the Food Not Bombs tables are set up to feed the hungry and homeless, not without some push back from the powers that be. As for the girl, it would be easy to think that she was just made up for the purposes of fiction, but as someone who worked downtown for many years, I am sure I have seen something very similar to this scene. In fact,  just yesterday I was downtown about to walk into the Trader Joe's there when a young woman wearing a backpack walked out of it. It took me a moment to realize in profile that she was also completely naked. She came out to Front Street set down the pack, pulled some garment out of it and began to dress, as calmly as though she had just gotten out of the shower. Inside the TJ's people looked on in somewhat baffled amusement. 

Audible sample of "Whatever happened to Skinny Jane?" by Ariel Gore HERE

Santa Cruz Noir, blogging the book--Day Two, "Buck Low" by Tommy Moore

(To learn more about my "blogging the book" challenge to myself, go HERE.)

The first story in this collection is also Tommy Moore's first published story, which is quite a coup when you think about it. "Buck Low" draws from Tommy's experience of living in Santa Cruz. Not everyone arrives in Santa Cruz via Silicon Valley, and as he told it as his reading at Skylight Books a couple of weeks ago, he ran into some of the darker elements of the community. As someone who used to live down by the Boardwalk and walk back and forth to downtown on the river levee, this doesn't surprise me. I met a few people who were a little like his drifter protagonist (but I hope not too much like him.)

An arresting passage that tells us volumes about the narrator in a small action:

Feeding crabs to the anemones has become automatic, almost meditative. I ram the last hermit crab deep into the anemone's distended blossom, overflowing with empty shells. It chokes on the meat and spews forth whole, half-digested crabs.

Yikes.

Audible has made samples of each author's story available, and you can listen to Tommy Moore's sample HERE.

Santa Cruz Noir--blogging the book, Day One--The Introduction, by Susie Bright

See yesterday's post for an explanation of this experiment.

I'm starting out today with the introduction to the book. That may seem a little unusual, but this is very much Susie Bright's book and she really gets the anthology rolling here. When I mentioned to people that I had a story in Santa Cruz Noir, some were amused. "Santa Cruz" and "noir" didn't seem to go in the same sentence. But sometimes the sunniest places have the darkest shadows. And Susie gets that.

We live in what's called "paradise," where you can wake up in a pool of blood with the first pink rays of the sunrise peeking out over the mountain range. The dewy mist lifts from the bay. Don't hate us because we're beautiful--we were made that way, like Venus rising off the foam with a brick in her hand. We can't help it if you fall for it every time.

See what I mean?

Santa Cruz Noir edited by Susie Bright

I'm going to try a little experiment here on my rather neglected reviewing blog. I have a story in the new anthology Santa Cruz Noir, and thought I could do a little something by way of helping with its publicity. To that end, I'm challenging myself to write something up on each of the stories in the collection, one day at a time. Then I'll tweet the post on Twitter. These won't be true reviews, as I don't think that's appropriate in this situation, but I'll instead be writing about something that interested or intrigued me about each story. I'll even have something to say about my own.

Whether or not this will help the book in any way, I don't know. But I've already read all the stories and I do think it will be a fun project. If you'd like to read an actual review of the book, Escape Into Life's own Kathleen Kirk posted a fine one today. You can find it here. Then keep an eye peeled for the first post here tomorrow.

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

Posted from my Good Reads review

This was a book that I never would have read if it hadn't been a selection of my book group. It came laden with associations from my childhood of a work carrying the Book-of-the-Month-Club seal of approval, and I thought it would be old-fashioned and sentimental. The fact that it became an Oprah pick seemed like just a modern day version of that old model. Moral uplift and edification.

I just read Celeste Ng's review of the book, which I happened upon here at Good Reads. She hates the book and has good reasons for doing so. Her complete diatribe (and I say that in praise, not condemnation) can be found at The Huffington Post. But she admits that her critique is really of the way the West embraced the book and took it as a sort of one volume encyclopedia on all things Chinese. As Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie says in her Ted Talk The Danger of a Single Story, we get into trouble when we infer too much from one person's story, making them stand for a much more complex whole.

But I don't think Buck was attempting to interpret the whole of China for us. I don't even know that she was trying to write a realistic novel. The Good Earth came across to me as more of a fable. Her storytelling style struck me not so much as literary than as biblical or saga-like, and as someone who came from a missionary family, she was probably more formed by that book's way of speaking than many of us are.

Wang Lung, her protagonist, is not interesting because he is Chinese. He is an everyman figure. He could be a peasant farmer in any culture where most people live at a subsistence level. Buck is more interested, I think, in showing us his drive to succeed and the inherent pitfalls in that sort of monomania. In the end it is more of a morality tale than an anthropological study. To her credit, there is no missionary proselytizing in her story. At perhaps the only point that Christianity overtly enters the story, it comes across as incomprehensible to Wang Lung.

Perhaps Buck's greatest accomplishment in this story was not to 'explain China' to the West, but to get her readers to empathize with Wang Lung as a human being with ambitions and faults (or if not with him, with his long suffering wife, O-lan) but also virtues, similar to our own. At the time of its publication in 1931, anti-Chinese sentiments were still alive and well in America, which is not to say they have died off even now.

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Posting this on from my Good Reads review.

The Last Straw by Ed Duncan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was offered a review copy of The Last Straw after reviewing the first book in this series, Pigeon-Blood Red. I enjoyed this book for some of the same reasons I did that one, including its fast paced, easy to read storyline. Although this second book involves several of the characters from the first, I think Duncan has upped his game a bit with this one. There is more introspection on the part of the two main characters, hitman Rico and lawyer Paul Elliott, and a relationship between them is slowly evolving. In fact, you might say that the characters are becoming more like each other, although since they come very different places, they still have a long way to go before you could call them anything like the same.

There are several compelling women in the book, and one of the interesting things about the story is that the women all question the men's actions and motivations, getting into some interesting conversations about whether what they are contemplating doing is right. True, the men usually just go ahead and do what they were planning to do anyway, but even the most violent of them seem to hold a respect for the woman in their life's viewpoint. And it changes his outlook a little, even if it doesn't change his actions.

Most of what you need to know from the first book is retold in this one, but I would recommend starting with Pigeon-Blood Red to really appreciate the arc of the story. I am assuming this isn't the last time we'll be hearing about Rico and Paul Elliott.


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A Case of Noir, by Paul D. Brazill

I've had this short book on my shelf for far too long to come up with any plausible excuses for not reading it sooner. Five interlocking stories take us around what I suppose I can still call the E.U., at least for now. Each story takes us deeper into the adventures of the struggling journalist Luke Case and on to a new city. The reasons for this will be explained as we go along. Let's just say for now that in every city he visits, Case winds up in a new bar (or three), and there is usually an attractive woman who shows up somewhere along the way.

Paul D. Brazill, who was born in Britain and has ended up in Poland as an English teacher has marked out his own niche in the crime writing world, and it's a seamy, salty one, so you stand forewarned. Although I've read many of his stories over time, with this volume I was struck by how at home he is with the expat life on the edge, where small time schemers and hustlers live after their dreams and schemes have failed to completely work out. Those with illusions of grandeur mix with those who have no illusions left, often coming together in odd orbits, since they all seem to be traveling the same circuit, where sooner or later, everybody knows everybody. Drugs, alcohol and prostitutes are a very common feature.

If perhaps this all seems a little too sordid for you, well, I might once have thought the same. However, what I've learned about Brazill is that he knows how to tell a good story and to put a twist in where you aren't expecting it.

And after all, it's not called noir for nothing.

(I've posted the image of the edition I have, but if you're looking for a copy, it may look more like this.This is the newer, Near to the Knuckle edition)