5 Recent Reads with Grace Krilanovich

By Josh Spilker » Hobo vampire junkies, Robitussin and Twin Peaks references, nice.

Two Dollar Radio has been putting out the awesome as of late. This time the awesome comes in the form of Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich. Hobo vampire junkies, Robitussin and Twin Peaks references equal intrigue in a smash of the high and low.

The first chapter can be read at the Two Dollar Radio site. And Grace was nice enough to tell us what she's been reading lately:

01 Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, by Gregory Boyle

A transformative book for dark days. Headlines say researchers have uncovered a dearth of empathy of late (apparently this can be measured) and tough times have compelled Homeboy Industries, the Los Angeles-based gang intervention/job training program founded by Father Gregory Boyle, to lay off 300 of its employees – mere months prior to the publication of this book. Tattoos on the Heart compiles 25 years of homily-like “teachable moments” that are occasionally funny and often very sad. Fazed but not giving up, Boyle summons the strength to continue his mission despite the endless succession of funerals for his friends, mostly kids, many of whom tried with everything they had to regain the dignity and purpose which is every person’s right – only to be killed on the streets for no reason at all.

02 A Taste of Country Cooking, by Edna Lewis

A narrative cookbook, detailing a year in the food life of a self-sufficient Virginia farming community in the early decades of the 20th century. Anticipated the current vogue for “slow food” by 30 years, having been published initially in 1976. Now, touting raw milk, local chard and artesian bacon is a lifestyle choice. Back then, there was no choice but to follow the agro-culinary path as it had been set down hundreds of years before – based on trial and error and farming know-how honed through the generations. You either followed the letter of the community farming law – ate shad in spring and blackberries in summer and hung up your various pork products for winter -- or you didn’t eat at all.

Throughout there’s a sense of loss, not because hardship and want imbue these pages (they don’t; Freetown people seemed to have it pretty good), but because it reminds me how much has been lost in our trade-off for enjoying a world of choice. Yes, they knew nothing of Thai takeout, burgers or gnocchi; yes, they had little time for anything aside from creating foodstuffs, but out of their “lack” comes a dazzling, abundant, self-sustaining cuisine. What Lewis describes is so out of the range of our ability to replicate that the book reads more like a protracted reverie, a dream of a past that seemed to be a food wonderland, one that was mindful of what the landscape would and wouldn’t allow. Isn’t that how it should be? Well, who can say? Can it be any more than a dream, a fabulous story?

03 Dearest Creature, by Amy Gerstler

Gerstler’s latest collection of poems involves a letter from the Middle Ages, an interview with a dog, a chorus of hallucinogenic plants and elegies for the dead amid the muted humming of moths and other luminous flora. In “Always”: “Her name was Cloudveil. She claimed to have been raised in a sunless, flowerless cave. Her handwriting was worse than a nervous first grader’s. While toweling off one night, I caught her gulping my bathwater from cupped hands. At first I though, yuck! Then it struck me: this is love…”

04 Warlock, by Oakley Hall

A Western written during the McCarthy era. Artful, agenda-less; blindingly bright in its focus on one tiny non-town in a southwest territory in the 1880s. Oakley Hall (prolific author of 20-plus novels) here crafts a masterful, expansive narrative, corralling a world’s worth of doomed, self-involved townspeople along with the requisite shifting allegiances, power grabs, soured friendships and murky rationalizations familiar to the genre – all set against the backdrop of a brewing labor strike down at the silver mine. On multiple occasions the town judge is described as cradling a whiskey bottle while speaking in soft tones to it. The flashy non-lawman Clay Blaisedell’s folly is sketched quite brilliantly alongside the novel’s various other scrappy non-villains, n’er do wells, loose women, schemers, dreamers and the like.

05 "Obituary of Coots Matthews," -- New York Times

“Coots Matthews, Cantankerous Hellfighter, Dies at 86.” A bombastic tribute for what appeared to be some kind of TNT-slinging ur-cowboy with a penchant for marrying the same woman again and again. Who’s that? Oh, just old Coots, wasting PC hounds with the brush of his hand, blowing shit up, ready to saw his own leg off, if it’ll free him... Uh, well that’s not exactly how it was said in the obit, but damn if he doesn’t invite embellishment. Cantankerous Hellfighters are like that. It’s all in there: stints at Halliburton, company car wrecks, pithy thank you notes… “Mr. Matthews, like his colleagues, was an expert in the perilous art of detonating dynamite in oil well infernos to starve the fire of oxygen, thereby killing it. Real hellfighters insist on the word ‘kill’ over wimpier alternatives like ‘extinguish.’”An obituary of this nature must be earned, of course -- yet the great thing is, it can be admired by anybody

Posted on September 10, 2010. More on: codex, books, grace krilanovich