Bookstore Creep: Alien Daughters from Word Virus
Scooting up to Word Virus Books with pounds of blueberries loaded in the trunk. It is a hundred degree day and I am vaguely cognisant of the decay of those fruits as I hop out of the car. My parking spot has one tree-branch above it, casting minimal shade. This whole area of Foster-Powell, outer and very southern Southeast Portland, is mostly concrete.
There is no sign, but there is a little cart full of discount books out front, so I find the place easily enough. I pop inside and take a moment to glance around. It is a miniature bookshop, can't be over 100 square feet. The bare bones nature of the space is instantly soothing. Behind the counter there are two people in an important-seeming discussion, so I float around for a moment or two until it feels right to approach.
I pose my thesis question, searching for book number three in my exploration of modern books that speak to the underground of the last twenty years, in the general regions of North America. Carly and Chadwick instantly dart over to the section of Semiotext(e), a publishing house that I have never heard of. Not surprising, as I have not heard of most things. This is why I need to be a detective. The way that others just know things without extraneous mission and absurdity still eludes me. It would be nice to just have a pulse on some sort of scene. But then again, it is more fun to be an anthropologist of my own cultures. Semiotext(e), Semiotext(e)... there seems to be a collective sigh. They want to give me this book that just came out. They keep repeating the name. But C explains that they just sold their copy. C tries to recommend other texts a few times, but half-heartedly and with a shake of the head and a sentence that always ends in “but really I want you to read Jackie Wang”.
It comes time for slapdash solutions. The verdict is out, the book has been chosen; yet it is not in the store. There is no precedent for such situations. I pick up a compilation of important texts from the publisher. I propose to buy this, and get the new Jackie Wang book from the library. C and C are unconvinced by this plan. The book is apparently quite popular and likely all copies are checked out. A quick call to the library confirms this. Six copies, all in circulation.
I would usually be more patient, and wait for one to be returned. Trouble is, I am leaving tomorrow on a whirlwind no-cell-service camping and mutation-oriented trip that would really lend itself to having such a book. C goes to her bag and comes back with a fat pink book. “This is it, I actually have one of the copies. Why don’t you borrow it, and just return it to the library when you are done.” I take the book, feeling the trust. But how will I write in it… “sticky notes.” she says with a shrug. The deal is done. I buy the compilation, stack the pink book on top, and walk out with 800 pages of reading material. It’s from 2023, and she lived in a kind of famous punk house in Baltimore…. Alien Daughters Step into the Sun, by Jackie Wang.
The book travels with me, on a solo trip to the coast where I nest in among rocky outcroppings so as to maximize sun and minimize wind. It comes with me for morning tea in the cafe full of tarot card kits in Yachats. I spend hours reading under my red-light headlamp to the sound of summer bugs by the stream.
I pick up the book when I wake up in my hammock the first couple of days of the rave, too. Until I mutate a little too dramatically to read much. I read when I am back home, trying to regain some sanity. I read out front of the local coffee roaster where a few older men try to use it as an excuse to start flirty conversation. I explain to them that I really want to get through this essay, and then go the fuck home.
I pick up the book as I become increasingly sleep deprived and manic, entering August. I am easily influenced.
I finish the book, eighty pages in a day, as my deadline to place this column on the internet approaches. I take out all of my sticky notes, label them by page number, and stick them to the rug of my art room. I read each one in some sort of ritual, crawling around the carpet in strange forms so as not to crush them. I make some food because I am starving. Then I take out my notebook, the urge upon me to respond by hand:
*
In unsolicited conversation with Jackie Wang and her many insights.
*
Incantations are conducive to the beginning of an essay, especially when your femininity is locked up under concrete. All of our femininity is underground -- for the cunt is eventually death which is so illogically buried cold -- when everything about its history screams warmth.
¿Burn the dead, find a feminine way to write?
I left the extremely personal and magical way of writing behind at some point, but I remember it. Eighteen, out West, alone in a cabin on a vineyard. I had a faux-fur vest (which I still have now), but back then it had recently been obtained from a freepile at the dump on Lopez Island, Washington, and that was the shit. My first moments discovering the immense freedom of leaving all my conditioning and all my allergies on the other side of the country. I would walk for hours, hop fences into cow pastures, and hold my hands out palms outstretched fully focused as the herd ran towards me from across the field. I would meditate in a church. Me and the other folks at the work trade would dumpster dive, art opening crash, then use our cash for Coors, the tall cans.
Wearing that furry vest with autumn crisp sunsets over the ocean, we all watched together from the deck of a dilapidated and decomposing old crab shack. The funny thing is that when I remember those times I remember the fairy tales that I was writing -- they overlaid the experience. They were my parallel universe, but were they? Or were they just as real?
That wild frosty joy of adventure. Experienced by me, such a weird kid who (¿purposefully?) failed to grow up in certain ways but had grown up fast in others, like the fact that I had my eyes on boys and learned long ago that catching their attention made me feel powerful. Stupid. But I was powerful back then. 2013.
Powerful because I knew nothing of the world, but a lot of philosophy. Because I felt poker-to-the-flame hot angst. Because I had no smartphone and no car. Because I gave no fucks about my personal hygiene. Best of all, because it hadn't even occurred to me that most folks would be concerned by my behavior. I wasn’t here. I was there. It wasn’t the same world.
That was before I knew cannon, or before I realized that most of the books on my Dad’s bookshelf and my school library’s bookshelf were cannon. What a violent term, how do we interact with and introduce new to rapidly propelled metal?
That was when my collected works were fanfic and emo poetry and creation stories. Journal entries as the greatest and most beloved art form.
When the audience enters the room
My hands shake
From potential energy--
Isn’t it insane that we live in a world of
Infinite possibility
Yet we decide to stand straight
To wear pants
To internalize our earthquake
I suppose it’s out of love, that we normalize ourselves?
To be more understandable to one another.
Yet, to re-feminize the writing--
To let the doubt in
The magic in
The death in
Myself in
Is to refeminize my insides--
Would I want to do that within an essay? Would you really like to know the ways in which my femininity is buried, myself is buried? Would you like to hear about the insanely soft way in which a woman with red curly hair turned me on and turned sideways in my bed at dawn? Would you like to wait for me while I reconcile everything about who I am with everything those perceive of me, with my history, with what I could be?
And who even am I? My stories are true, but I admit that I am not real.
I, Rosalie Levy Holbrook Caggiano, am a mutant spawn of the ancestors of my scribe. For they did not have the capacity to dream the way that I do. To imagine the future. Now it is time, all of the women who bore so many children that they could not create me. Their memories wove me together and I do everything -- some might say too much -- because I inhabit urgently the world that they could not.
We could plant anything around our houses, and yet at some point it was decided that it is normal to plant grass. Perhaps the only straight flat homogeneous flora on the planet.
Jackie Wang shares her worlds of dream, of death, of friends, of love, of foolishness, of depression, of pharmacy, of book, of travel, of doubt, of her alien self.
It is a miracle that we can grow up,
Wander away from home,
And consult no guide but ourselves.
What madness brings such behavior in a young girl?
Let’s bottle it up, please, I’m considering dosing the world with it.
Bookstore Creep contains recommendations from the continuous investigation of Rosalie L.H. Caggiano into modern-day authors who are writing about the counterculture and the underground in the USO (The United States Of...). The USO is a zone that may encompass the whole of what is known as North America, or might not quite make it to the Southernmost and Northernmost hinterlands of what is known as Mexico or Canada. Rosalie searches for modern writers that upend the impression that “nobody does anything even remotely interesting in real life anymore”. She talks straight to the book-tenders of the City of Portland, exploring bookshop by bookshop instead of wallowing in the depths of the 129+ million books on Earth without guidance. She is beginning the construction of an extensive stainless-steel 3D diagram that documents the intricate webs of writer’s connections and histories, which become more and more clear with each column. This diagram already takes up most of her backyard.
Quotes from Alien Daughters Walk into the Sun
“When it’s just us, it’s our bizarre and nonsensical world. But when others are around there’s this gloom -- where to go, indecisiveness, conversations that go nowhere because you’re trying to say something that’s agreeable to everyone, to speak the lowest common denominator.” (page 36, ‘THE HARD FEMME YEARS’, on love and language)
“And shitting on the idea that adventure is a white-boy thing.” (page 63, THE HARD FEMME YEARS’, on travel as a queer and mixed-race woman)
“Tits can be the phallus in multiple ways. For one, they can ejaculate.” (page 112, THE PUNK-HOUSE YEARS, on queer sex)
“Who gives a shit about literary manners and their monopoly on speech? The task is to blow up the language.” (page 186, THE PUNK-HOUSE YEARS, on violence and cannon)
“YES -- transgression is not about extremity but about confronting what is hidden, discarded, silenced, or removed -- what people are too afraid, embarrassed, or uncomfortable to look at.” (page 192, THE PUNK-HOUSE YEARS, on experimental literature)
“How does one think through sexuality in ways that are candid and open without reproducing a US-brand of individualist sexual libertinism?” (page 206, THE PUNK-HOUSE YEARS, on superiority)
“A truly generous person does not feel embarrassed for anyone.” (page 236, THE DESERT YEARS, on letting people be their weird-ass selves)
