Gunfight at the OK Cathedral

I read Queercore and Cahokia Jazz

Creatures, if you live in the Bay Area, I must warn you: I have a learner’s permit. (Oh, are you finally going to learn something? —Ed. Everyone’s a critic.)

In less-terrifying news, I read a couple books about music, sort of, and about the way music can become a haven in a homeless world.

Queercore: How to Punk a Revolution is outtakes from a documentary of the same name, and it’s about as haphazard as you’d expect. I enjoyed it! Had not realized that Bruce LaBruce and G.B. Jones basically invented “the Toronto queer punk scene” out of whole cloth. Genuinely appreciated how early they start the story—I think the earliest incidents described go back to the late or maybe even mid-’60s, and feel recognizable, part of the scene I knew in the ’90s.

Readers of this newsletter may especially appreciate this bit about “Shred of Dignity House… a queer anarchist collective of organizers, artists, technicians, rabble rousers”:

Jody Bleyle: Donna told me how at the Shred of Dignity warehouse they would tell people—Come! You, person that doesn’t live in San Francisco, that’s trapped in this terrible family situation—come stay here! And of course people did. It was the same with us, we would say in interviews, Come to Portland. There’s a place for you! Now I would never say something like that, because I take everything more seriously—I’d think, I can’t actually take care of them. But at the time we were young and we wanted other kids like us to know that they had a family.

Queercore is mostly feel-good for the bad kids, but it never feels like it’s trying to make punk wholesome or (as we would say) positive. Perhaps because it’s willing to leave in one or two feudettes:

Dennis Cooper: The rivalry between Bruce and Johnny was intense.

Johnny Noxzema: Me? Bruce? No, no, no… I mean… well, we had our issues. [...]

Glenn Belverio: ...And then there was Bimbox, which was Johnny Noxzema and his psychiatrist husband.

Bruce LaBruce: Bimbox was published by a very strange duo—these two gay men, a one-legged psychiatrist and his kept boy. I called them Pegleg and the Demented Chicken, because Noxzema had a rooster-like haircut. They were actually quite wealthy….

An unnecessary pleasure, for those who partake.

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I also read Francis Spufford’s Cahokia Jazz, a mystical noir set in an alternate-history Midwest where American Indians flourished after 1492 instead of being decimated. It opens with two cops standing on the roof of the Land Trust, where a man has been murdered and his heart ripped out in an imitation of an Aztec sacrifice. Have the old gods returned to this Catholic city?

Spufford wrote a book of Christian apologetic called Unapologetic, and also a sort of Communist… alternate history? … called Red Plenty, but I haven’t read either of those. What I’ve read by him is the fantastic I May Be Some Time: Ice and the English Imagination, about the age of polar exploration, why the English specifically kept exploring in a deranged way rather than in a survivable way, and, like, the sublime.

All of which is fitting Cahokia Jazz into one kind of picture. There’s another way of approaching it, through its own genre, where it’s most obviously comparable to Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union (my review here), a noir set in an alternate history where postwar Jews established a temporary and threatened state in Alaska. I loved Cahokia at first, then became increasingly ambivalent about it, but I came around again at the end, closing it with a feeling of satisfaction and even a horizon glow of awe, and that’s because its strengths and flaws were basically the opposite of the Chabon novel’s.

Yiddish is pulpy in its language, tricky, studded with repurposed language: What do they call a cell phone in the land of Yiddishkeit? The prose feels slightly drunk. Spufford’s prose was more sober for me, harder to love… fussy to the point of ugliness, he’s got a thing for words like “blebbing” and “smeech.” “[B]ut riverwards still a gloom stuck with the shriveled glints of streetlamps”: that’s so relentlessly rhythmical, so sonorous and Royal Shakespeare Company, and yet it isn’t actually beautiful; the river/shriveled thing seems unpleasantly synaesthetic. At least to me. Spufford uses a kind of developed variant of a real trade language for his Cahokian local tongue (called Anopa). Very responsible choice, very sober. I liked it, especially because using the Anopa terms for race keeps you always subterraneanly aware of the difference between a world of white, black, and Indian and a world of takouma, taklousa, and takata. But I would have loved some slang.

One thing I loved in Cahokia is the portrait of the world. We get hints of how this world was made out of what could have been our world: hints about a “Plague Prince,” about the strange Aztec influence running through this city far from Tenochtitlan. It’s a Catholic city, but Catholic in a way that has also developed differently from how the Church developed in our timeline: a Midwestern Catholicism that feels almost Californian, because the Spanish influence is so much stronger, and a Catholicism intent on “enculturation,” baptizing as much of the old Indian way as possible. A city of masks and sacred flames. I’ll remember for a long time the masked figures of the Four Winds Society filling the narrow alleyways of the Quarters, preventing police work, called out by a mysterious command.

Mystery is the other element Spufford really excels at. I yowled and hissed, when I read Chabon’s novel, about how he sets up a story about apocalypse and Messiah and The Jewish People, and then in the end it turns out all he cares about is the romantic couple. Since when do the Jews get private lives? By contrast, Spufford cares about the romance—more on this in a moment—but it isn’t what he cares about most. He’s a religious writer more than a romantic one.

He’s alive to all the ways the premodern might pierce the rational modern world: the indefensible persistence of the supposedly-abolished Anopa monarchy, for example. (This is a book where the phrase “a republican form of government” is said with something close to a sneer!) He writes like someone who may or may not share the beliefs behind every symbol, but who always intuits some kind of reality behind the symbol. Myths, religions, crowns—I think in this book they’re all human expressions, not divine gifts, but they are human attempts to express the divine gifts. To sing, in our smaller music, with whatever moves the stars.

Okay but they’re also politics. The Church and the founding myths, and especially the monarchy, are also politics: sites of human sacrifice. The political structure Spufford imagines feels urgent and convincing. Cahokia runs on time-limited leases of resources ultimately owned by the community, and that’s not how the rest of the USA works, so let’s all remember once again that Chinatown is a movie about water rights.

But unlike in that film, politics is where Cahokia feels least noir. Our hero, the mixed-race cop and jazzman Barrow, is on an upward moral arc. He discovers that sexual harassment is bad. He discovers that the Klan is really bad, and in fact monstrous, squirming. It feels good to watch them lose and flee. They aren’t like us in any way, not really. I dislike this! There’s a moral confidence in this narrative, even at the end where I think we’re supposed to feel that we are in the classic noir world where everyone’s complicit. What I like in noir is when I, as a reader, feel that something sordid or squirming or defeated in me has been exposed. Instead the arc of the plot just keeps exposing how good and noble and etc etc Barrow really is.

The romance is where he gets the most scuffed-up. Barrow’s caught in a kind of love square: tempted by modern respectability in the plump petite person of his coworker Miss Chokfi, and by modern degeneracy in the person of a redheaded gutter-press reportrix; and, most deeply, by the woman known as the Moon. She is a member of the city’s unofficial ruling house. She’s taut and harrowed, and she keeps secrets.

She, too, is a little too noble even when she’s committing mortal sin. So maybe I’ll say that the real romantic heroine of this novel is jazz. She appears in its frequent syncopations: people, items, events where they aren’t expected; people out of place; people just missing each other, not quite in harmony, not quite in touch.

A pianist’s hands, photographed by Guang Yang/“seamus,” via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.