http://www.bookslut.com/blog/archives/2013_12.php#020458

In honor of our upcoming Turducken Salon/Orphans' Christmas -- you still have time to RSVP -- I asked our wonderful guest Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (who wrote one of my favorite books of the year, The End of San Francisco), to list her favorite books of the year. Below is her response.)

“In diaspora all things are possible, so many things yet remain unseen.”
Thomas Glave, Among the Bloodpeople: Politics and Flesh

At first I wanted to say that I’ve never started an essay with a quote before, but that couldn’t be true, especially when your staircase becomes a cold white blanket, beautiful to look at but hard to climb. You look for the water but it isn’t there, under water turned to white. I’m saying that the snow in Boston right now is beautiful, so this might be a good time to tell you about my favorite books of 2013 (the ones I read this year, that is).

Thomas Glave’s Among the Bloodpeople (Akashic Books) is about the violence of machetes and bombs, the silencing of literature and skin. Listen: “It is something to know that you so dearly and even desperately love a country in which you know that you are not, in fact, safe, no matter the seductiveness of your illusions; no matter your desire for safety (actual safety itself, whatever it actually is)…” Do you see how this book circles around itself, our selves? It’s about Jamaica, and the US, interwoven legacies of colonialism and homophobia and that gasp for fresh air, the way the light gives way to darkness, and how we move from literal to figurative, and whether this helps us, and when that matters.

Refusing to give in to selective amnesia or fatalistic despair, Thomas Glave dares us to examine the contradictions in tyranny and love, desire and hope and yearning and betrayal, personal and structural, our lives and lies, breathing, falling down, getting up again, breathing, yes, breathing. One of the reasons we need bookstores is to find work like this -- I already knew Glave’s work, but I didn’t know about this new book until I found it at a storied place I’ve always been somewhat enthralled by, in spite of the employees who are haughty at best, especially those two guys in the back. Maybe they’ve been friendly to you?

I found Adam Peterson’s The Flasher (SpringGun Press) at McNally Jackson Books in New York, where whoever curates the chapbook/micropress section is really good at it. “He realizes how we’re all just these buildings with bad superintendents and maybe we should move out please don’t move out.” Exposing and exposed, The Flasher is a series of short prose pieces that all start with something the flasher does or doesn’t do. For example, in “The flasher tries to be a nudist,” “it might be easier without the coat.” Humor coats us, rambunctious in its assertiveness, language as conversation and pet.

So you’re “skipping into the sunset hand-in-hand, not stopping to look into the other hand, not worried about the moment they realize it is empty.” The Flasher is about relationships, and bagels disguised as muffins, handprints in your eyes “as he studies the salad in the sink,” the morning, permanence, and a parachute. It is a parachute, all these flashes: “Some words are unforgivable even when they don’t mean anything to the person saying them.” Which reminds me of those Norton Anthologies, can you believe people still read those Dead White Men and a few others occasionally melting snow? One solution is obvious: every edition of The Norton Anthology of Poetry should be immediately replaced with Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt Norton (Les Figues Press), which I also found at McNally Jackson.

For better or worse (worse, I would say), McNally Jackson’s front table mostly features the usual things that every bookstore of a certain stature features (and that is the problem, stature), but also they have these other great things, also on display. And, did I mention that every person working there was incredibly friendly, personable, engaged? So, even though I was on tour for my latest book, The End of San Francisco, and they didn’t have it in the store, I ended up liking them anyway. And going back three times. To get more books. (Maybe they have The End of San Francisco now. Feel free to check.)

There’s always a danger that independent bookstores will become little more than elite venues for yuppie consumption, showcasing the same corporate crap (literary or otherwise) that you can find anywhere; in many cases this is already true. We need more bookstores that show us something we never imagined, help us to imagine. Which brings me back to Dodie Bellamy, who replaces the greats with grates, blows them up so far that they can only pop: “So this is my pussy, the outer compulsion, yet surrounded, driving your car.”

Then there’s The Zoo, A Going: (The Tropic House) (Sunnyoutside), by J.A. Tyler, who I think must be inside my head or the head of someone like me, someone like me as a child, in the zoo, scared but not by the animals, the way that creature we call family can be so much more frightening. The beauty in the awkwardness of the syntax makes me think of Douglas Martin’s Once You Go Back, which is one of my favorite books. And, I just found out that this chapbook is a chapter in a longer title called The Zoo, A Going, coming out from Dzanc Books in February 2014. “My mom is more than my dad, this way, like them, these butterflies flying this room. They land on the flowers, the leaves, the borders of a path.”

We all want to land on flowers, if only they could catch us, the ones we’re not allergic to. I almost forgot that I read Kate Zambreno’s Heroines (Semiotext(e)) this year, but then I remembered walking to Elliott Bay Book Company, my neighborhood bookstore, with Mairead Case after she interviewed me for The Rumpus (yes, in-person), and Mairead reminded me about Heroines so I bought a copy right then. (Later, I also got a copy of Zambreno’s essay “Apoplexia, Toxic Shock, & Toilet Bowl: Some Notes on Why I Write,” published by Guillotine as a chapbook). Isn’t it great to live in a neighborhood where you can actually find good books? Sadly, this is becoming harder and harder, I know.

Heroines should be required reading for anyone investigating the Modernist canon in literature (or art). Part of the problem with any canon is that it always becomes the cannon, and Zambreno investigates how the big guns of Modernism (T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, etc.) used the creativity of the women in their lives (especially those they married, Vivienne Eliot and Zelda Fitzgerald in this case) to create their famous works of literature, while banishing their wives to sanitariums (or worse). Heroines is heartbreaking, and visionary. Written in an elliptical style that makes poetry out of revelation, the book is part philosophy, part rumination, and part expository dance. I would quote from it at length, but unfortunately my copy of the book is 3000 miles away, in that place that I guess is home, or I’m hoping it will feel that way when I get back after three months. Diaspora implies that there once was (or will be) a home; sometimes this is difficult for me to imagine.

Did I mention that I’m in Boston to do immersive writing on my next novel, Sketchtasy, (which takes place in Boston in 1995/’96)? It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, this month in Boston for my writing: just look at the John Hancock tower and how it becomes a paper doll. Writing is always part of reading is part of writing (for me, at least, and most writers, I imagine). The other day I visited Calamus Bookstore (one of the few bookstores in this country still dedicated to gay/queer/LGBT work), and I discovered a gorgeous art book called An Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward, edited by Justin Spring (Antinous Books). But, I only had a chance to glance at the contents before I noticed the book costs $150. Yikes! So, if anyone is planning on sending me a New Year’s gift…

I wonder about recommending books I’m conflicted about, but then I remember something Dodie Bellamy said about how a little Kathy Acker goes a long way. In other words, you might read 10 pages, and get stuck there, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t change you. Rob Halpern’s Music for Porn (Nightboat Books) has some of the most breathtaking prose juxtapositions about war and desire, the war of desire, a desire for war, even if the repetition in the second half ended up boring me (not that it’s not supposed to). Fannie + Freddie: The Sentimentality of Post-9/11 Pornography by Amy Sara Caroll (Fordham University Press) is awe-inspiring in the way it layers conceptual art project over photography over strikethrough over greyscale over feminist gallery art over the financial crisis over your heart; halfway through, though, it felt too cold, so I stopped. This doesn’t mean you will stop. Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, edited by TC Tolbert and Tim Trace Peterson (Nightboat Books) is almost as big as those Norton books, but it’s guaranteed to contain way more revelation.

Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father (W.W. Norton) describes Abbott’s life growing up in San Francisco with her writer father Steve Abbott in a counterculture of artists and queers and freaks and druggies. Steve Abbott died of AIDS in 1992 (the same year I moved to San Francisco in search of people like him), and the letters between Alysia and her father are gorgeous in their raw intimacy, in the way they show us a lost world, not just Steve and Alysia’s world but our own, yours and mine, even if it’s just the way we imagine. But sometimes the narrative structure felt too tidy for the messy life it sought to convey, tailored for an audience unaware about queer world-making; I’m always perturbed when anything speaks to an imagined center because I think if we are going to imagine we need to imagine something else. I just met Alysia, actually. We had tea and she asked similar questions of her own work, which impressed me. She also spoke of a project that sent a current through my body, a family tree documenting gay men and other queers on Haight Street from the 1960s through the ‘80s, so many of them now dead (and, others who Alysia discovered through the publication of Fairyland). A family tree, that’s what I felt right then, a tingling, an aliveness.

-- Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore