On Daniel José Older's novel, Half-Resurrection Blues

I already noted that the dude's first novel is going to burn up USican speculative literature, much like Junot Díaz's novels scorched literary fiction. Or like Raymond Chandler helped prop the pulp-bar for crime-detective fiction. Problem is, some critics have no idea what DJ wrote. I won't bet my last bottle of Don Pedro that I do, either. Daniel Olivas already did The Review of Older, but I got cosas to add.

Reviewers have called this novel: spectral noir, hard-core fantasy, genre fiction, urban fantasy, Noir, a literary .44 [magnum], mystery, suspense, supernatural thriller, ghost-detective, plus, there's also "diverse." If your hood hasn't been totally gentrified-razed of culture, and you can find a bookstore, I won't guess where you'll find this book. Except, probably on the chingón-bestseller table. Where Nora Robert's and Michael Crichton's tomes are trying to edge themselves away from DanielJosé's, to not get their white pages sullied by some street Newyorquian noir.

Check it, people--Half-Resurrection was released. One. Whole. Month. Ago. Jan. 6th. Two weeks--a mere fokkin' 14 days--later comes this announcement:

"Tony Award-winning actress Anika Noni Rose has optioned TV/film rights to Daniel José Older’s urban fantasy series Bone Street Rumba."

Sheeeet! Not just his first novel optioned, all his pinche Rumbas. A debut novelist's dream is to get 1 book optioned. But a whole series? That's no dream; that's Great Sea Mother Yemaya cradling you, mowing your detractors with her machete, and blessing your progeny with free-rides through Columbia Univ. So, someone besides me thinks Older's Rumba books are worth more than a read.

Like some hallucination, while reading Half-Resurrection Blues, it came to me to compare/contrast DanielJosé with Chandler and Junot. Chandler's dead and won't give much of a fokk anymore, and Junot may not concur, pero, así va.

He just did't get blacks.

From Chandler, mostly, The Big Sleep:

"The streets were dark with something more than night." [Walter Mosley might define this is THE writing--terse, snappy, quick-and-move-on-ly.]

"From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away." [Ignoring his white-machismo, this is smooooth.]

“I don't mind your showing me your legs. They're very swell legs and it's a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don't mind if you don't like my manners. They're pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter nights.”

“She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theatre curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.”

DanielJosé doesn't compare to Chandler, though he can chandler when he's in the mood. I put one pata en mi boca and state, sin miedo, that DanielJosé is deeper than Chandler. Period.

Here's some Junot [Díaz]:

“She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.” [Male authors of all colors must write about las mujeres as undiscovered territory, revealed, que no?]

“You really want to know what being an X-Man feels like? Just be a smart bookish boy of color in a contemporary U.S. ghetto. Mamma mia! Like having bat wings or a pair of tentacles growing out of your chest.”

“Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.” [Mujeres as objetos, again.]

“In a better world I would have kissed her over the ice trays and that would have been the end of all our troubles. But you know exactly what kind of world we live in. It ain't no fucking Middle-earth. I just nodded my head, said, See you around, Lola, and drove home.”

“She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black [better than Chandler's above?], the plum of the day’s light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorias, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.” [Compare to Chandler's paws in the air.]

Chandler's world had "one white dude to rule them all"--Phillip Marlowe, who knew some Spanish and some mexicanos. Chandler wrote pulp, knew it, maybe sometimes regretted it, but that was how his U.S. was and how he worked it.

Junot works the other side of the alley, the immigrant dominicano better read than described, by me anyway. My point to using him is to get to unas migas of DanielJosé [from Half-Resurrection]:

DanielJosé

"I dip into a brightly lit tobacco store for some Malagueñas and a pocket-sized rum. The rum goes into my flask and one of the Malagueñas goes into my mouth. I light it, walk back out to the street, and weave through the crowds. When I move quickly, no one notices my strange gait or the long wooden cane I use to favor my right leg. I've gotten the flow down so smooth I almost glide along toward the milky darkness of Prospect Park. There's too much information here in the streets--each passing body gives up a whole symphony of smells and memories and genetics. It can help pass the time if you're bored, but tonight, I'm far from bored.

     Tonight I am hunting." [There's a gist of the plot, prosaically.]

"I make a grunty-affirmative noise. When they send me after a normal ol' fully dead ghost, it's usually to toss their translucent asses back into Hell or, when they're really acting out, slice 'em to the Deeper Death. That means they're gone-for-good gone, not just kinda-sorta gone. It takes some getting used to, yeah, but you figure, hey--they were already dead once. Not everyone comes back even as a spook, so they had that second chance and jacked it up by playing the fool. The final good-bye ain't that big a deal in that sense. But this one . . . this strange, gray-like-me man with his wild schemes and last-gasp poetics . . . his death hasn't left me since New Year's.

     Neither has his sister's perfect smile." [More about the plot.]

"The feeling follows us down the block, even lingers as a dull whisper while we trudge up the creaking steps at Mama Esther's. Then we enter the library, the only room in the entire house with any furniture, and everything's all right again. There aren't even shelves, just stacks and stacks of books from floor to ceiling. You'd think it'd be a chaotic mess, all packed in there like that, but somehow there's a harmony to it; the books seem almost suspended in midair. They're everywhere, and the room is wide and tall enough that it doesn't feel cluttered. If I don't clean my little spot in more than a week, it starts to close in on me, so how Esther keeps this utterly full room spacious is beyond me. Some ghost shit, I suppose. Either way, it's oddly comforting.

     Esther's floating in her usual spot right in the center of the room. That's where the head is anyway. Beneath that great girthy smile, her wide body stretches out into invisibility in a way that lets you know she's got the whole house tucked within those fat ghostly folds. "Boys." She nods at us; the warmth of that smile is a sunbath after the grimness of the ngk." [To learn about the ngk, read the book; they're more than "imps."]

Maybe all that my selections prove is that I'm horible at examples. But if you want easy quippy, go pulpy Chandler. If you want Junot, go Junot. But if you want refreshing, street-smooth, page-flowing noir and Latino spec--ungenred--go DanielJosé.

Publisher's synopsis of Half-Resurrected: "Carlos Delacruz is one of the New York Council of the Dead’s most unusual agents—an inbetweener, partially resurrected from a death he barely recalls suffering, after a life that’s missing from his memory. He thinks he is one of a kind—until he encounters other entities walking the fine line between life and death.

     "One inbetweener is a sorcerer. He’s summoned a horde of implike ngks capable of eliminating spirits, and they’re spreading through the city like a plague. They’ve already taken out some of NY Council of the Dead’s finest, leaving Carlos desperate to stop their master before he opens up the entrada to the Underworld—which would destroy the balance between the living and the dead.

     "But in uncovering this man’s identity, Carlos confronts the truth of his own life—and death."

Quién sabe whether DanielJosé wrote this synopsis, but it leaves me flojo-limp. A plot synopsis goes weak, not providing the reader much hint of the powerful writing within. On a better day, minus a hangover, when I was young-sharp, I'd'a shot higher. But maybe that's just me. Decide whether to purchase the book, by a read of half a random page; the sucker flows más suave than Carlos glides through las calles de la Nueva.

Las embras who couldn't get past Yunior's mujeriego to read Oscar Wao, can enjoy Carlos, however gray his half-deadness, which incidentally doesn't reek of morbidity. There's love, of a different kind because it's of a different world. Yemaya's.

The man paved the way for our spanglishes.

Here's una cosa I wonder about DanielJosé's work that Junot carried to the penultimate: the novel's boriqua Spanish is light, however great the sabor--sporadic, casi. Junot blew the lid off the exclusionary Anglo-English-ceiling with a major body-slam [yeah, so sue me for metaphorical mix] that USican audiences are ready for bestsellers profuse with nuestra lengua (or at least can pretend to be, entering gentry bistros with Oscar Wao tucked in their man-purse). I'd prefer more lengua boriqua from DanielJosé. Maybe he was testing the literary waters. Maybe that's simplemente his voice, at the moment. Yo no sé, but I'll ask.

DON'T buy or shoplift Half-Resurrection expecting Yvonne Navarro-horror. DanielJosé doesn't try to gore your groin or twang your things-under-the-bed neuroses. He shoots for lifting our sorry-ass, neglected literary intellects to invented realms of noir experience. Think--Yunior the immigrant wandering through women to find no truths, brutalized by colonialist reality, except in Carlos's case, supernatural navigation is what-we-do, and do fairly well. To plug myself, my Chicano protagonist got bounced around the walls of his alternate-world, trying to escape. Carlos is sophisticated enough to chill in his mundo and fulfill his mission. It's a wild, enjoyable, funk-ride to get there. I recommend you take it. Later, you might be lucky enough to see it on-screen.

This pic is an Anika Noni-reminder

One note about that. The film, the TV series, the whatever, might become the next blockbuster, but it will fail like a blind, Carlos-crippled m-f-er the further it meanders from DanielJosé's prose. Sure his dialogue rules, and, not that I know jack about movie directing, but por favor, Anika Noni, consider employing an off-screen narrator, a la Anthony Mendez of Jane the Virgin. En serio, Esa, that's where the art breathes.

A last great lesson I learned from my read of Half-Resurrection pertains to the mierda about genre. How especially Latino authors bitch and moan and wonder more where their work will be slotted. Chuck that. This novels tells me, "Dump the rules, slaughter the bookstores' shelves-by-genre and publishers' imprint guidelines. Write your art. Speak yourself. Give your readers what you want. Let the accolades fall as far from you as they care to. Then again, you might just be more than noticed, and then get hit with a goddamn-the-dude's-unfairly-lucky TV/movie option.

Best author profile ever

Not that I compare--yet--to DanielJosé, but Latin Post features an author profile on me that I believe you might enjoy, un montón, however strange some of the revelations. I'd appreciate your leaving comments there to justify my existence on its pages. With enough readers doing so, I might be asked for a return engagement. Gracias.

Palabras:  How Blogger & Author Rudy Ch. Garcia's Life Experiences Helped Form His Identity as Chicano Writer

Next This year, en Havana

Whoever reads this and owns a yacht, meet me in Matamoros and I'll bring the Negra Modelos and we'll head to La Isla, before all the turistas invade. Me tengo que ir, este año. Or, a lo menos, before me muero. ITM, if you're in AridZona next week, La Bloga's amigo Tom Miller is one of the panelists. Miller knows more about Cuba than anyone but Fidel. Wishing I could be in either locale:

Es todo, hoy,

RudyG, a.k.a., part-time cheerleader for Half-Resurrection, in case you missed that,

and Chicano fantasy author Rudy Ch. Garcia who creates equally strange worlds

Spic vs spec - 2. Chicanos/latinos & sci-fi lit

by Rudy Ch. Garcia

continued from last week's post. . .

As with mainstream literary works, U.S. gringo-corporate publishers shy away from SciFi featuring latino characters, cultural settings and Spanish dialogue/prose. We all know why. And yes, it has changed, somewhat.

But despite the mushrooming, latino demographics, the unspoken corollary persists--Chicanos, Latinos don't read, i.e. buy, sci-fi lit. So why publish or write it? I asked such questions on the new LinkedIn discussion group, "Latino and Latina writers group" last week and got one response. Getting so few wasn't surprising. It reflects the sci-fi that's out there.

[To focus and develop this topic according to genre terms and history, I relegate fantasy lit to the next part of this series. There are several reasons for this, which I'll get to.]

A search at Amazon for "Chicano science fiction" produced 3 books, only one of which was sci-fi, Ernest Hogan's classic, Cortez on Jupiter. Next came: "Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy," a nonfiction book that intends to "give special attention to multicultural and feminist concerns," but in the 100 books it cites, there's not one novel by a (recognizable) latino. I can't speak to the overall content of the book.

Third came, Dogs Descend on Chiapas: Proof of Tzoquito by Dominic Ambrose, who looks like a latino, though I couldn't verify his latinismo. Nevertheless, Tzoquito appears to be a fantasy novel, rather than sci-fi.

Even a search on Wikipedia--not the final word on veracity--for Chicano sci-fi turned up 0, cero, zero.

In contrast to this paucity of material, the first La Bloga post generated several comments. Below are my takes [tagged RG] on those comments, to encourage wider discussion than just my posting.

Fellow sci-fi/fantasy author and Thursday's Bloguero Ernest Hogan wrote:
"A lot of food for thought here. We need to make contact with the Spanish-speaking, sci-fi world -- there are several blogs en español that I'm following . . . As for this side of the Border, it's an interesting story -- my dad read science fiction magazines in East L.A. back in the Forties -- in the Seventies, some Chicano activists thought that sci-fi and technology were tools of the Anglo oppressors. Of course, today Chicano hackers are part of Aztlán landscape. I guess I have some work to do . . . I almost forgot! Spic Spec Fic! I can see it on a book cover!"
RG: Sophia Flores, a bilingual boriqua at scifilatino.com, has been carrying her own torch for sci-fi on her website for years, and other than mondoernesto.com--your website--no hay mucho. Connecting to the español sci-fi world would seem appropriate.

Ah, those Chicano activists--sometimes we didn't know caca. Hogan's father and mine also read sci-fi, leading to our reading it. Is there un patron here? About the title SpicSpecFic--I think the culturally-correct gente might boycott it.

Manuel Ramos commented:
"The current issue of The New Yorker has a "sci-fi" (somebody doesn't like that term, really?) theme and, sabes qué, there's a story by the one and only Junot Diaz (and also stories/articles by Jonathem Lethem, Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury (QEPD), Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, etc. Le Guin's article talks about the gender ghetto of science fiction. I think her point is to write good stuff and it will be read."

RG: Well, at least one latino made it into the issue. I guess one fulfills their Spanish-speaking quota, but don't they have an ethnicity quota, too? Or did that get replaced by a "looks latino" quota?
Seriously, Junot's Oscar Wao is more than just a good read. Where most Spanish-speaking writers might exclude sci-fi thematic elements in a mainstream work, Juno utilized his novel's many sci-fi references and footnotes to underscore the absurd elements of Dominican-dictatorship history.
Oscar Wao is also unique in that a latino mainstream writer has his Dominican character Oscar de Leon obsessed with sci-fi [yes, and fantasy]. In one footnote he writes: "Where this outsized love of genre jumped off from no one quite seems to know. It might have been a consequence of being Antillean (who's more sci-fi than us?)"
As sci-fi anciano Ernest Hogan would not doubt agree, also, who's more sci-fi than us Chicanos? We whose gov't builds high-tech electronic fences to keep us agabachado, where on this side of the border our genetic make-up has been altered by radioactive fallout from nuclear testing? And on the other side, our gente live lives more gruesome than anything portrayed on the planet Lagarto in the dark sci-fi series KOP? Hunger Games is not sci-fi to us, it's just latinos' last couple hundred years surviving in or under the U.S.
Ramos's final point doesn't guarantee that our "good stuff" will get published. But take it as a call that without a lot of latinos writing this in genre, there will not be much "good stuff" created to make it to the top or ever be read.

BellaVida Letty said...
"I'm Boricua, I read sci-fi and am writing a sci-fi screenplay."
RG: Okay, Letty, first question--did your parent(s) read sci-fi? Secondly, here's our open invitation to pitch your script on La Bloga, after you've registered/copywrited it. Now, where's the Chicana sci-fi scripts?

David Garcia, Jr. wrote:
"I used to not like science fiction literature, thinking that writers didn't have to go to outer space to find characters, settings and conflicts worth writing about, when we have all of the above aplenty here on earth. Childhood's End changed all that. I realized that I liked science fiction films and that I had a limited view of science fiction lit (bug-eyed monsters). I'm now aware of the breadth of the lit genre, from hardwired to gutterpunk and have a lot of respect for its writers. How's this for a character arc: I'm the author of "Destiny's Quest: Transformation" a YA novel manuscript about a teenager who discovers that she has powers and has to rescue her brother from some hybrid monsters."
RG: La Bloga is about promoting literacy, literature and writers, so we're all for David G. Jr. plugging his MS. Actually, some of us wish more readers would use us that way. I'm going to risk saying that his MS sounds like a fantasy, not sci-fi, but that's just to clarify the sequence of this series. Fantasy will come next.

Jose Antonio Romero commented:
"I watched the movie Prometheus and my girlfriend mentioned there were no Brown gente in the film. I didn't expect there to be any. This led me think about the topic you bring up about the lack of Sci-Fi literature coming from the Latino community. I remember hearing the term afro-futurism from a compañera, and I thought about what that might encompass and thought it would be great idea to incorporate that genre into the Brown community and develop the concept. I thought about a world in which various barrios began to create a community based on healthy lifestyles that would promote quantum leaps into autonomous education. This education would give the access to leaps and bounds into a world that would be a truly advanced civilization. My imagination went wild when I thought of the ancient indigenous cultures that had existed and the barrios coming into full contact with these lost knowledge systems. What would happen if they re-examined these ancient knowledge systems and incorporated them into their daily lives and synthesized something completely unique and free from conventional advanced technology. This is a topic I feel worth touching on because it's not a popular idea that I feel gets easily overlooked because of the social stigmas conceived of the brown communities. That is why the potential of a truly rich sci-fi story coming from the barrios could and will blow away wigs."
RG: Jose Antonio raises relevant points. Sci-fi movies constitute 5 of the 10 [12 of the top 20] top-grossing US films, if your interest is dinero. And every film came from a WRITTEN script. Maybe Jose Antonio should take his interest to the composing level with his ideas, because he's got visions longing to fill blank pages.

ggwritespoetry [who lists Fahrenheit 451 as a favorite book] wrote:
"I was just talking about this with Rene Saldana [RG: the YA author?] and David Bowles at TLA last month. I am Latina, Mexicana actually. My second novel, Summer of the Mariposas from TU Books is fantasy/ magical realism, and I have another SF novel in the works. But I agree with you; we definitely, absolutely, positively need more Hispanics writing SF."
RG: Okay, gg [Pura Belpre award winner Guadalupe Garcia McCall} crossed the line between sci-fi and fantasy, but her discussion with the others is evidence of interest in the topic. Her YA book in the fantasy genre is what we need more of coming from a sci-fi Chicano/latino community of writers. We wish her well with her SF novel.

Next week I'll get more into why gg's last sentence means more than we commonly think. Keep the comments coming and please pass links to this discussion on to others.

Es todo, hoy,
RudyG

Pensamientos about Chicano writers

by Rudy Ch. Garcia

With exceptions, being a writer is one of the loneliest occupations anyone can undertake.

Hours, days and years go into producing stories or articles, with the prospect of success maybe as far as decades away. I don't know what the statistics are on how many people take up writing and later discard it, but it wouldn't be surprising to hear it had some staggering number of those who give up on it.

I'm one who left writing for decades, but then returned for more decades of lonesome work. Writing alone is inherent to the occupation. The solitary feelings come from not seeing your works out in the world and being read by others.

Of necessity then, writers' goals include getting their works published, but given how infrequent this may happen, that can't be the immediate goal. Maybe writers have a lot in common with gamblers who hope to win The Big One. Both types can have distant hopes that they maintain through their daily passion or addiction to the "game."

. . . . . .

Aspiring writers who latch onto publishing as an immediate goal can transform into frustrated artists who yell at their kids and wives, see fault in others' writing, and eventually drop the whole idea, especially if publishing of their work doesn't soon appear.

That's how one of the most common questions from non-writing people, "Why haven't you published it yet?" can get under the skin of writers. If only my friends and family knew how difficult getting published was, they'd never ask this question.

In that sense, aspiring writers have a lot in common with artists who draw, paint or scupt; they're both hoping to be discovered; in the writer's case, preferably by a publisher with hard-copy imprints, not just E-published works.

. . . . . .

Being a Chicano writer in a Blanco-dominated market adds to the solitary feelings that are intensified from a publisher's rejection letter. One can't help wondering, sometimes, if a Blanco writers gets as many rejections. Assumedly, they do.

. . . . . .

When the field of work is narrowed further to fantasy and science fiction, the chances of getting your work published narrow even further. After all, as everyone knows, Chicanos don't read much fantasy and it's assumed they read even less sci-fi. When you write such short stories or novels with Chicano characters, your appeal to a publisher is further limited, because publishers may think that a Chicano sci-fi character could only work as a minor character, except in a case like Avatar where Neytiri is photoshopped into an indigenous role or Michelle Rodriguez plays human Trudy Chacon.

Publishers, like movie directors, worry that a Chicano or minority character might not appeal to the majority Blanco audience. And then, or course, they know that Chicanos don't read sci-fi, so there's no audience appeal there, either. At least that's the assumption.

Then along comes someone like Junot Diaz with his The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, disproving all the assumptions, winning literary prizes hand-over-fist, and becoming a big best seller. Diaz's characters Oscar de Leon or Yunior de Las Casas who turns out to be the narrator, are Dominican-national characters who decidedly appealed to the Blanco audience. [Curiously, among other things, Oscar is obsessed with sci-fi and fantasy novels.]

Bless Me, Última by Rudy Anaya is considered the best-selling Chicano novel and has sold less than 200,00 copies in the four decades since its release. Oscar Wao sold a quarter of a million in 2009, alone. Both figures speak to aspiring writers, some of whom would cut off their left index finger to achieve one tenth of those numbers.

When an aspiring writer gives up on new stories, revising other stories or submitting works to publishers, he likewise has given up where Rudy Anaya and Junot Diaz persisted. Rudy and Junot's world is the same lonely writing world that every aspiring writer resides in; theirs becomes not so lonely when they leave their desk or computer and venture outside to hear what others think of their work. Otherwise, it's the same.

. . . . . .

No matter the nationality, the genre, the decade or the success, writing is essentially what it always has been. Lewis Carroll was driven to write his outrageous fantasy novel about Alice. Back in the 1860s, he must have seemed out of place to publishers because twenty years later it wasn't even considered a popular children's story.

On the other end of the spectrum, Ernest Hogan's Cortez on Jupiter (1990), called a minor sci-fi masterpiece by some, was never marketed to success and disappeared for decades. His Chicano Pablo Cortez character became a casualty of the East Coast publishing mire. (It is now available as en E-book here.)

Writers write. If they give up on it, they go into the past-tense, even if they have hard-copy laurels to rest on. Write, rewrite, revise, edit, submit, send out, get rejections, repeat the cycles. And every once in a while, letters that read, "Your work has been accepted."

. . . . . .

That's our world. It's not for everyone. Only for those who can thrive in its lonesome environs. Not worrying about immediate publication. Writing for the passion. In some cases, the recognition will come.

Es todo, hoy RudyG