REVIEW: badbadbad by Jesus Angel Garcia

badbadbad
Jesus Angel Garcia
New Pulp Press
240 pp / $14.95

Taking after the old pulp tradition, badbadbad starts off on a sharp note: A man has been left by his wife, taking their son along with her. The prose is as razor sharp as you’d expect in old hardboiled paperbacks, with the same juxtaposition of opposites creating the same tension we’ve come to love from the genre, and the cover is designed with the same campy grittiness in mind. badbadbad, however, isn’t a pulp novel, but a taut psychological examination, a blueprint into madness, all wrapped up in a nice pulp package. This is an important distinction to note because the novel is shot through with this sentiment, this idea of covertness, of hidden layers, of people masquerading as things they’re not.

The Artifice of Media

Jesus Angel Garcia, the narrator, has just been left by his wife, who took their son with her. Looking for money in order to hire a divorce lawyer, he’s hired by the Reverend Puck to be webmaster for the First Church Before Church, helping build their online presence. The community grows so large that he’s picked up by other area churches. Around this time, he meets Cyrus, the ex-communicated son of Rev Puck. Cyrus and JAG bond over music on almost a molecular level. They are fluent in punk, jazz, soul and communicate through in the innate language of aesthetes. He also introduces JAG to fallenangels, a website forum created as a safe haven for fetishists. It’s this site that triggers a revelation for Jesus, that it is his calling to be a sexual messiah for these broken women, fulfilling their needs.

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Doing Drugs with Gary Indiana & Melissa Febos

 

1. Performance artist Sini Anderson with reader Melissa Febos. 2. Gary Indiana on stage. 

 

There are many things that a person could do on a Saturday afternoon, but there’s only one best thing to do. And if you’re going to take my recommendation, then that best thing involves heading over to Cake Shop on the LES for the Enclave Reading Series, which had its fall kick-off edition this past Saturday. This month’s installation featured two of my favorite things — drugs and depravity — brought to you by two awesome writers, Melissa Febos and Gary Indiana.

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From P-Town… House Hunting with Annie Proulx

1. Annie Proulx at the Schnitz. 2. Wine line is short, but the show starts in five minutes. 3. Alan and Leslie in the good seats. Alan hopes the good seats translate into deep understanding. Leslie loves the almost front-row view of some of the best and most talented literary artists in the country.

  

Annie Proulx kicked off the 2011-12 Portland Arts & Lectures season at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall by telling the audience that every time she comes to Portland, she wonders what it would be like to live here. She admitted to the expensive and dangerous habit of falling in love with places.

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Meanwhile, in California… Lightning People Release Party @ The Soho House

1. I made sure to take in the lights of the view, because even though this was my first literary release party, Bollen’s editor Dan Smetanka assured me this was about the flashiest I’d likely ever see. 2. Bollen’s publisher at Counterpoint Press, Charlie Winton, Dan Smetanka, and the publicist for the event, Julia Drake. After attending the book’s other release parties in Miami and NY, Dan smiled and toasted, “To breathing Bel Air.”

  


I’ve never felt underdressed walking into an elevator before, but that’s how I felt as I rode up to the  Soho House.  My baggy cargo pants surrounded by crushed, black velvet curtains, I was immediately out of my element.  Christopher Bollen, author of Lightning People, has a day job serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Interview magazine, so he knows how to throw a party.  Suit jackets, rotating hors d’oeuvres, and Kate Bosworth– but where’s the Charles Shaw, where’s the rickety podium?  As I took in my surroundings with Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” providing a more than appropriate soundtrack, I realized I was again in the kind of LA crowd that made me wish I had a side job selling beard trimmers.




                

                
            

                                

                

                    
From P-Town: Ben Loory and Rae Bryant at Powell’s

                

                

                	
1. Moose Fiction Fans:  Jeremy Robert Johnson thinks Loory writes the finest, most cathartic moose-based fiction since Gary Larson picked up a paint brush. Cameron Pierce agreed, saying “a moose a moose a moose a moose a moose a moose a moose.” Kirsten Alene complimented the sentiment; Loory’s moose tale is the best story about a moose ever written. 2. Loory says something funny. The crowd goes wild.


 


 


The Ben Loory and Rae Bryant reading at the Hawthorne Powell’s began with the ordinary and switched to something else.


Bryant read from her collection of short stories, The Indefinite State of Imaginary Morals. I can only describe her reading as analogous to carving a pumpkin: Sharpened words and  phrases cut against the narrative under her guidance, not with the dexterity of a surgeon, but with the uncertain clarity of a woman who looks for love near sex. In the two stories she read, her characters dealt with their unenthusiastic one-nights with logic rather than emotion.


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MEGA BROOKLYN BOOK FEST SMASHDOWN!

                

                

                	
This weekend saw the sixth annual Brooklyn Book Festival, which took place in downtown Brooklyn. Over 260 writers were featured in the panels and readings, not to mention the hundreds of booths occupied by literary mags and publishers. In addition to the Book Festival itself, this year’s celebration was expanded to four days and included “Bookend” events at venues throughout the borough, including BAM, BookCourt, Brooklyn Bowl, Brooklyn Winery, Greenlight Bookstore, and powerHouse Arena. Of course, such an event made for ideal Dishing, and therefore we unleashed a team of bloggers on the unsuspecting literary world. Below are our collective experiences of the Book Fest’s big day, and you can see our coverage of Bookend events here, here, and here.


1. Authors David Goodwillie (American Subversive), Justin Taylor (The Gospel of Anarchy) and Amanda Bullock, Events Coordinator for Housing Works, fresh-faced before the morning panel. 2. Book Festival participants Carol and Lynne ponder their next move.


 


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REVIEW: Noon by Aatish Taseer

                

                

                	
Noon

Aatish Taseer

Faber & Faber

300 pp / $25


In January 2011, Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistan’s Punjab province, was assassinated in Islamabad by his own bodyguard.  As the world took stock of this brutal killing, passed off as an act of patriotism, so too did Salman’s estranged half-Indian son Aatish.


Aatish Taseer is the author of two already notable works.  The Temple-Goers is his debut novel, a tense political thriller full of bribery, betrayal, and murder.  His sophomore effort, Stranger to History, is a memoir analyzing the Muslim world, and its scathing critiques strained his already distant relationship with his father.  Taseer was all set to climb out of polemics and delve back into the world of fiction when his father was surprisingly murdered.  This tragedy adds palpable urgency to Noon, a sprawling account of moral degradation in late 20th/early 21st century India and Pakistan.


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How To Quit Smoking

                

                

                	
Read a pack a day


From fur-covered covers to pink cheetah print Kindle skins, books (or at least their appearances) don’t have to be boring. TakeTankBooks, for example, who has released a series of classic short stories in the form of cigarette packs.


“The flip-top cigarette pack is one of the most successful pieces of packaging design in history. TankBooks pay homage to this iconic form by employing it in the service of great literature.”


Electric Literature publishes in every viable medium (from paperback to enhanced PDF) in order to deliver top-notch literature into the hands of readers however they choose to read. And unconventional covers can be just as captivating as the content, or, at the very least, can capture the attention of new readers.


As any smoker knows, there’s something comforting about the dimensions of a pack of cigarettes. TankBooks says their cigarette series is the perfect size for “throwing into a pocket or handbag – an instantly familiar object to carry with you.” Maybe these stories can serve as a healthy substitute to smoking, they’re certainly preferable to those gaudy electronic cigarettes.


[via Maxwell Neely-Cohen]


– Benjamin Samuel is the Online Editor of Electric Literature. He just bought another pair of running shoes, which he’s certain he’ll never use.