The Coldest Warmest Night (Fiction)

  The beautiful old apartment had windows on the east and west side of the room. This is an unusual feature for the city. To the cat sitter this was an enviable breezy luxury escape from the hot close humidity of Manhattan summers, but on this, coldest windiest night of the year, it wasn’t the greatest. The wind seemed to pass right through the windows. Nothing stops the wind. 

The cat sitter looked for any available spare blankets as the wind howled outside. He put on his microfiber long underwear, his knit hat, his socks, till finally, with piles of double bed sized blankets folded two layers for his single sleeping, he drifted to dreamland.

She is getting into bed with him, she really is, she was here. She came for the warmth. He needed warmth. She needed warmth. His warm heart welcomed her. 

(The same heart that had hardened itself when he had thought he needed to walk away, save her from the aging depleted self he had become. He couldn’t save his 19 year old mother from himself, but make up for it here.

It pained her to be saved. He couldn’t communicate these things to her. It was his worst mistake, a deeply regretful one after she had shown him what it feels like to have a lonely broken heart by cutting off all communication, freezing him out from his only real human contact. No she wouldn’t still be “friends”. It was a lesson he needed. It felt like a final, most important lesson that showed him what he was to women and what he had done to so many before her.) 

But now here she was. Open again, forgiving, willing to share their warmth. The freeze in the world more unbearable than that of their fears. This was the real, living creature reality. The need more powerful than the abstract self hating cold fear of his ultimate impoverished death that he had let drive him to separate.

She enters the bed to the warmth of the moment and that is all that is necessary.
That is all they need. No performance toward physical ecstasy, or possession, is necessary or welcome. Touch, tenderness, and warmth is all that is. All that is ever really wanted, all that is really needed, all that is beyond the fear and the culturally confining notions of what a man and a woman are, ought to be, or want. Nothing that had separated them is there, and never is it to return. There is no time for it to return. There is no time. They are one. He doesn’t understand, but at the same time, completely understands, and knows why she is here.

He woke as usual alone, the blankets were too warm and sliding off the side of the bed. The old man used the bathroom as he did it more than once each night he returned to the bed cuddling within himself. It wasn’t sad.

 
She is here in his forever, warm within him. Somehow he knew she knows miles away, connected. He was not a man to keep anything other than to keep moving. He hardly wanted to keep any memories. He would hold this dream of the dream that she was as long as he could.

He wanted o more human touch in his life. They had shown one another that touch only really causes mutual pain. He has turned away from all the complications of making dreams of connection a wholesome reality in a world that has imploded. His final movements,  attempts do escape that black hole.

The memory of soft skin, this dream reality is all he would ever dare to want again. 

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"Hearts shaped like valentines aren't at all the fashion. What is more in demand are hearts with a bit of iron and a twist to the iron at that. A streamlined heart, say, with a claw like a hammer's claw, better used for ripping than for tapping at old repairs that's what's needed to get by these days. It's the new style in hearts. The non-corrugated kind don't wear well any longer."

Nelson Algren from his 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm

The Magic Kingdom by Russell Banks

 The new Russell Banks novel is an epic history of our times. Our times move fast. So an epic novel need not cover a multi-generational timeline of slow change. 

In The Magic Kingdom the sweeping change of times and physical landscape is shown in the environment of a single lifetime of one man.   

The character and first person narrator of the story is Harley Mann, an 82 years old resident of St. Cloud Florida. He was born in 1890. 
The set up of the novel is that in 1972 he recorded, on reel to reel tapes, the story of the first 20 or so years of his life. It is a very unusual story and life. 

He is the child of a family who lived in the Ruskin Colony in Tennessee and later in Waycross Georgia. These were designed to be utopian examples of how we could live in a more cooperative socialist structure.    
After the death of his father, child Harley moves with his mother, his twin brother, his other set of twin brothers, and baby sister to a dismal sort of plantation that is more or less a prison including overseers with bullwhips. 
It’s the system of indentured slavery where one can never work off the debt owed to the master of the place, a strange little rich man who lives in a mansion on the grounds. 

This family is rescued by a man who is the head of a Shaker community in the Florida Everglades. Elder John buys off the family debt and takes them to the New Bethany colony when Harley is around 11 and the story moves on from there. 

Early on in the novel Banks shows us a part of the history of the USA which is little known and actually not the kind of thing that our mainstream goes out of it way to show us, being more inclined to celebrate capitalism over socialist cooperative systems as if capitalism and the business community is really the only American Way.  The bulk of the story takes place in New Betheny and the nearby city of St Cloud. Although a mere 110 or so years ago the area was almost pioneer territory for these white oddball utopian Christian characters, the seminole people having been killed off or otherwise removed not that long before.    

Harley and family, coming from the Ruskin experience, are secular whereas the Shakers are very religious, although both the secular and neo-Christians want to live in a cooperative economic system. This is another instructive aspect of this fine novel. The reader gets a certain amount of information about what the Shakers were all about. We learn that the Shakers believed in Christ but also a woman who was an 18th Century founder of the sect and brought them from England to New York State. She established the Shaker celibacy. Though long dead she, Mother Ann Lee, is worshiped along with Christ. In The Magic Kingdom the Shakers colony can only survive via recruitment, being unable to reproduce new Shakers via bringing their own children into the religion. Although not clearly stated, that is the reason that Elder John rescued Harley and family from the plantation. These five children learn to become Shakers. They are free to accept the doctrine when they come of age, confess to the elder or woman elder. and then be Shakers and continue the colony. Or go elsewhere, live in The World.   

The Shakers reject profit from usury. But people are surrounded by economic challenges which can make their Biblical moral foundations sometimes on ground with sinkholes.    

The emotional heart of the story is an odd love that Harley finds and comes to cherish. The Magic Kingdom is a love story. A story of what humans will do for love, be it something justifiable or not, as a young man follows his heart.   

The core of the novel is this love and shame in a restrictive community. It is not at all a didactic slog about religious and cooperative communities.
It’s an involving page turner, a gripping story of a young man’s love.

All in the land of the corporate Magic Kingdom of Disney World only a few decades later.

Russell Banks remains one of our greatest novelist.

Groupies by Sarah Priscus

 Are we all groupies one way or another?

With Groupies, Sarah Priscus has produced a fine first novel with an engaging story and a handful of believably human characters.

It is a period piece set in the late 1970s mostly in Los Angeles. This is the world of young women orbiting around the male power center of a famous, very successful, rock band.
How successful? There is a scene in which the band, Holiday Sun, flies to NYC to appear on a TV show modeled after Saturday Night Live, so THAT successful and high profile. 

The story is told in first person by Faun, a young woman from Massachusetts who has just arrived in LA to live with a childhood friend. 

This old friend has been out there for a while and has become the girlfriend of the lead guy in Holiday Sun, a British musician Cal. Faun is a photographer who shoots polaroid instant image film. She intends to use the association with the band to help launch herself into a successful photography career.

Given the time/place setting in high profile showbiz the novel could attract readers interested in the music business and this LA period in particular. In that way, it could find readers who look at the story closely, search for clues, and speculate on historic models of the characters and band.
Perhaps the novel is better viewed in the wide angle of American culture beyond the music biz; seeing it as a story of people attracted to power and attempting to get something for themselves from it. This gives the whole story and greater meaning and a significance beyond a rock or showbiz novel.

Much of the dynamics of the theme could be shifted to a story about cults or political power. In the story the rock dudes find themselves in power. That offers them via female fans. In this way the novel looks into the world of male stars who feel entitled to “grab them by the pussy”. Priscus tells us that the women, the groupies are primarily there for a type of supportive loyalty that can be assumed and relied upon by the power males. They pump the boys up.

The men/boys are at core needy, insecure in their precarious power positions. They need the backup of these attractive young women. The women are expected to be “true fans”, sincere and loyal. They need them in a way similar to a Keith Raniere, Harbhajan Singh Khalsa, or back to the LA music scene, Phil Specter, who was so needy he would repeatedly, for decades, put a pistol to the heads of women who wanted to leave to make them stay with the ultimate result of that.

In a way it is a crime fiction novel.
Who is the perp?
USA cultural and political life as we have it and must deal with it.

The time setting of 45 years ago is not more innocent, merely less equipped. The technology of social media and continuing media business consolidation/centralization with algorithmic personalized diffraction and separation, empowers marketing, powermen and corporations. The boys in the band are not all that bright and don’t have the power of certain tools of control. No one in the novel is super villain sinister and about to build a multl-level marketing system of branded sex slaves, but at core is all sadly the same. None of this takes anything away from this interesting and entertaining novel and story.

Is this a hero's journey type of tale? It’s better than that. Maybe a more realistic anti-hero novel. The groupies provide support for the band but every one of them has their own angle, their own wish for transcendence and immortality by their sucking up to glory. If they do THIS, they can maneuver themselves to THAT. The novel provides a clear view of a culture gone wild with need, greed, and lust for some kind of meaningful life within the atmospheric chaos of the marketplace. .  

Are we all groupies one way or another?

Page 348

“It was a study in groupiedom. In pain. In joy. In good. In evil.

In life.”