Have You Read Live Nude Girls?

LIVE NUDE GIRLS

Hope might be a trap. It might be what keeps us all going, but it might destroy you. Or it might just be what gets you on Oprah.

Kevin Postupack wrote this incredible novel ostensibly about a bisexual stripper with an overactive mind and who's maybe too much of an autodidact. She's a voracious reader with ADHD and an extreme imagination. But what the novel's really about is identity.

What's in a name?

Every character in the book has an alias, and you'd think this'd be a little confusing but it isn't. People are able to be two things at once, and rather than make this liminal space off-limits to the reader, Postupack invites you to inhabit it with Daphne and her assassin cat, Noodles. It's easy to do because the narrator is operating under the assumption that we all contain multitudes.

Like Schrödinger's cat, we're alive and dead at the same time, but rather than keep that proverbial box closed, Postupack spends his time ripping the tops off them like Cracker Jack boxes looking for prizes. Sometimes there's a prize, and sometimes you get a dead cat, but the courage to keep opening them is something worth celebrating, and I think Kevin Postupack's novel does that with aplomb.

Live Nude Girls is sexy without being crude, deep without being preachy, and hilarious without being corny. Those are all hard balancing acts.

There's even a Nazi-hunter, a self-declared goddess/restaurateur, and a Cuban strip-club-owner who claims to have prescient visions. The name of the strip club? Pandora's. You can't help but open that one.

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Prometheus could see the future, and Epimetheus could see the past. Epimetheus is often called the "foolish brother" but how could he be? Wouldn't an accurate and crystal clear remembrance of the past endow you with great wisdom? Wouldn't you almost be able to predict the future based on the events of the past? After all, that's how statistics work.

Anyway, the box: It was given to Pandora as a dowry after Hephaestus built her with beauty and cunning. But it was Zeus's plan to unleash plagues onto man via her box to take them down a notch. They'd recently been blessed with agriculture and fire. So out of her jar came disease and famine and hard work and all the other evil fates that befall men. . . but only one is mentioned by name. Elpis, hid under the lid, claiming instead to be the only palliative to assuage the plight of man. Elpis means Hope.

But I think Elpis was simply the most clever of the fates, endeavoring to stay close to us in order to inflict the most constant, enduring pain of all.

The Sheltering Sky

Many years ago, an American friend of mine in Germany handed me a book and told me I had to read it. I promptly ignored him but carried around the book wherever I lived convinced I would one day make good on my promise. 

I'm in this minimalist mode right now. I'm going to read all the books I possess either for the first time or one last time and then cast them unto the world via Goodwill. It was finally time to read The Sheltering Sky.

I understand why my friend wanted me to read this masterpiece by Paul Bowles; I am one of those spirits who explore the world looking for an escape from the cold, a place to be warm, like the one of the three protagonists in this novel, Port. I too have searched and been tortured by the very people who told me they loved me.

This friend of mine also used to always say,"the right book at the right time." Prophetic. How could he have known I would be newly wounded and alone when I finally came to it? An omniscient narrator tells the story of three friends, two of whom are married, who travel into Africa for new experiences. Their American sensibilities become haunting ghosts, and their own selves develop into lupus. They tumble into tragedy and madness to a point that the story almost resembles Lovecraftian tales of horror. 

If you read it, read it in winter when the nights are long, and the cold is oppressive. Read it when the darkness seems interminable, and friends seems sparse.

American Books One Might Want to Get to Before Others

I have a new friend from England, C. C admits to being woefully underread when it comes to "American Classics."

C wanted a list of American books I thought were worth reading, so I made one. I stuck to ten novels. Here's my list:

• To Kill a Mockingbird: Harper Lee wrote one of those books you can never unread. It's simply the truest American story ever told.
• The crying of Lot 49: Thomas Pynchon's shortest novel isn't his best, but it's the best to get to know this writer and see if you want to try out heftier tomes like Gravity's Rainbow and V., which is my personal favorite.
• On the Road: Kerouac beats Thompson when it comes to writing about the American Dream. I think I've read everything by Kerouac, and I like Lonesome Traveler more than On the Road, but you have to start at the beginning.
• Lolita: Nabokov wrote possibly the best novel of the 20th century, called himself an American novelist, and the book takes place in the US, so don't try to tell me this doesn't count. If you can read, you have to read this.
• The Sun Also Rises: Fucking Hemingway had to write this one first. I think it's his best book, and I think the way the Lost Generation felt might be the way this one does in a lot of ways. Anyway, I think it's timeless.
• Sea Wolf: Jack London wrote the greatest sea adventure ever written, according to Carl Sandburg. How he's more famous for his dog books, I'll never understand. Anyway, this book is about a poet trapped on a ship with Nietzsche, and supposedly the captain is based on a real guy who used to go to one of my favorite bars on the planet: Heinhold's First and Last Chance Saloon.
• Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer: You have to read one or both. It's mandatory. Race, youth, class, yeah, Mark Twain had it all.
• The Catcher in the Rye: They make people read this one too young. Then they bury you with criticism about it. I think I've read this book four times. Each time, I get something different and hate my teachers more. 
• Moby Dick: Melville's better book might be White Jacket, some people say, but I never read White Jacket more than once. Moby Dick is possibly the greatest novel ever written and is experimental by even today's standards. If you say it's slow, watch a YouTube video instead. Yes, when I read this the first time as a young man, I struggled through some of it, but argh, thank god I did. 
• A Movable Feast: I feel a little guilty putting Papa on here twice. I'm not really a Hemingway freak, but this book has so much going for it. Wonder what it was like in Paris after the war? Read this. Gertrude Stein is in it. I love this book.

On a personal note:

• Legend of Greystoke: When it comes to prolific sci-fi writers, Edgar Rice Burroughs is, in my opinion, the best. I know, Lovecraft. Yeah, Lovecraft is wonderful, and everyone should read at least the Mountains of Madness, but I had to cut him because Edgar Rice Burroughs is just a better writer in the end.

Canadian Honorable Mentions:

• Yann Martel: Life of Pi and Virgil and Beatrice.
• Douglas Coupland: Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma, Life after God, Generation X
• Margaret Attwood: Handmaid's Tale

White guys I wanted to put on this list but didn't make it:

• Truman Capote
• Cormac McCarthy
• William Faulkner
• Thomas Wolfe
• Henry Miller
• Others already mentioned and even more I don't want to.

Women I should have put on this list:

• Zora Neal Hurston
• Toni Morrison
• Kate Chopin

Black guys I should have put on this list:

• Chester Himes
• Ralph Ellison
• Richard Wright
• Ishmael Reed
• Amiri Baraka

Anyway, that's my list. The last thing is, I think Howl should be mandatory American reading. It's a book of poetry, but I didn't want to leave this post without explicitly mentioning HOWL by Alan Ginsberg. I'll have to find C. a copy somewhere.