Bookstore Creep: Mona from Powell’s
This column may be perplexing without context. Check out the previous columns in the Bookstore Creep series:
I - Love After the End, from Belmont Books
II - Hikuri, from Mother Foucault
III - Alien Daughters Step into the Sun, from Word Virus Books
IV - Free Association
V - Chain-Gang All-Stars from Parallel Worlds Bookshop
VI - Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl from Wallace Books
One must wonder how many writers and researchers are floating around bookshelves taking inconspicuous notes in Powell’s on a rainy Sunday. At least this is something that I wonder as I take my weekly pilgrimage, like a meditation practice or rather the holy worship of a commercialized religion, over the bridge and into the city of books. I drift, awash in publishing house names, back cover summaries, the random yet fabled leaf of paper that the spine catches on as I let the pages tickle my thumb like playing cards. I know that Powell’s stays consistently afloat as one of the biggest tourist destinations around, and that there are many other bookstores to support. I don’t purchase much from there, but I do exist within its walls frequently, as if it were a public park. The artists know it too, and the street stayers, as someone is always posted outside those famous swinging doors vending art consumables or pity. Busy street right off the Burnside bridge, one day I brought my portable study over there (lamp, desk, quill, ink, obscure paper products) and set up cross legged ready to vend stories but then I caught the dirty side eye of some others more large than I, and decided to pack up.
My visits there are now pure information gathering, my own organic intelligence database, my disembodied finger on the pulse of our beloved tradition-turned-industry: Publishing. Books. Stained and dyed tree pulp (pop style bright pink and textural dots are trending) that mind melds the consumer with the creator. A beautiful, subtle art form that can be created, enjoyed, and shared with little disturbance to others in small spaces. It can also be researched with subtlety, and although I usually strive to make a bit of a stir when I bring my central research question to a new bookshop, at Powell’s I maintained my quiet stance and selected my title via perusal, not trusting that anything spontaneous or fascinating would occur by playing my game here. My game, to remind you, is asking book-tenders across Portland: “What modern-day writers do you know of that are writing about or are participants in the counterculture, the underground, the transgressive, in the general vicinity of North America?” Catch. The book-tender takes a moment, maybe some minutes, and then hands me a book. Catch. My turn to play.
How would I find such a book here, buried in a haystack? I decided to stick to the employee-recommended shelves at the header of each row, scanning for clues until - Bingo. Mona by Pola Oloixarac, translated from spanish by Adam Morris. Mona caught my attention with a pop art face patterned with tropical leaves and nearly obscured in a splotch of darkness that left her contours malformed. Mona caught my attention with the tiny publisher’s title written in light pink ‘Picador’. I confirmed that this selection would do by flipping to the back cover and reading “Mona, a Peruvian writer engaged in a downward spiral of substance abuse and erotic distraction in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior. Aware that she is something of an anthropological curiosity at her university - a woman writer of color, treasured for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings - she pokes fun at and exploits American academic culture and its fixation on identity.” I held the book to my chest and sighed. To be frank I had been dying to read a masochistic type poking fun at identity literature. I had started to expect as inevitable the response of ‘counterculture’ or ‘transgressive’ or ‘underground’ being associated with some identity or another rather than movement, happening, binge, voyage, or cult.
Set in 2017, with haunting disembodied toxic text messages peppering the pages in italics, Mona arrives on the scene cool, intellectual, and lazily high. Yet it becomes immediately clear that she has just woken up from a violent event of which she has no memory at all, but she has written off as the physical manifestation of her own inner pain and chosen to ignore, ready to board a flight to Sweden as a nominee for the prestigious and fictional Basske-Wortz Prize.
Mona, as I understood her through this 176 page novel told in the third person, is uncomfortably not feminist. She is frequently depicted with her head lolling, immobile, inert, turned on by the sensation of being hunted, and making disconcerting comments like pointing out that “Hashtag MeToo could be pronounced as ‘pound me too’ ” (p. 57). She wears fake eyelashes and tons of makeup, constantly fantasizes about dicks; and at the same time seems to have her identity entangled with the story of a girl named Sandrita who was recently abducted in Peru with suspected sexual assault. She is called out and simultaneously affirmed by a character named Lena who represents the feminist in this novel. In a lot of ways, what Oloixarac does with the narrative is reminiscent of Plato. The book is centered around speeches, most of them given by each of the nominees for the Basske-Wortz Prize, but some of them arising spontaneously in a way that suspends disbelief in the reality of this world that is otherwise realistic. It seems that every speech is another side of Oloixarac’s developing philosophy, although the exact subject is never specified. Then again, it is a bunch of writers all sharing space, so the reader might wonder if this is just how writers talk.
This is a book where a writer is writing about writing, let’s be clear here. I suppose for that reason it could be labeled as literary fiction. Writers writing about writing is not the genre for everyone, but I’d have to admit that as a fictional creation solely on Earth to do writing-related side quests, I can get down. Plus, of the books that I have come across in this investigation, Mona yielded one of the highest volumes of clues that made me feel like I am hot on the tracks of modern transgressive literature in North America. Part of that may have been because fictional Mona and allegedly real Oloixarac are transplants from Peru and Argentina, respectively. There appear to have been many more writing movements and happenings in Latin America than in the United States in the last 50 years, and it seems that their waves are still crashing up against these Northern shores. Mona and her peers reference the Latin American Boom many times, a movement in the 60s and 70s that yielded Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Julio Cortazar among others. Add Mexico City’s Infrarealist movement that stretched from 1979 to 1998 (see Bookstore Creep: Hikuri from Mother Foucault’s for more on that) and we are getting close to the present.
I am called to break the fourth wall even more than I already have been doing at this point and tell you directly that I am a bit frustrated as to why it is so hard to find a literary movement that is occurring in modern-day North America. If you’ve got one, drop me a line. I don’t mean a disembodied literary movement, I mean a group of people who actually talk to each other and are getting fired up off of each other’s spirit and work. I’ll let Mona explain more:
“ ‘I’ve been thinking recently that the history of ideas has also got to be the history of people liking each other. I mean, it’s obvious, right? Art is marked by these moments when certain artists take a liking to each other. They get along, they become friends. Something like love circulates between them. This way of getting along and making friends and forming groups is then what we call, after a few decades have gone by, an avant-guarde or a movement or the Boom or whatever.’ “ (p. 153/154)
Perhaps an expedition to the bookstores of San Francisco is in order, as Oloixarac was there as recently as 2019 and clearly onto something. The symbology is all there in this book, and her mental trips, the exact kinds of hidden clues that I am searching so patiently for. The tale ends with the coming of Ragnarok- the end of the world where Jormungandr the ouroboros serpent consumes the whole charade of the Basske-Wortz Prize proceedings, and we realize that Ragnarok has been laying in wait throughout the whole book as Ragnar, the Icelandic poet, whose incantations raise the lake and crumble the mountains. In the mythology of Ragnarok it is foretold that, after the end, the world will be resurrected fertile and devoid of wickedness. We do not directly witness this utopia by reading Mona, but perhaps we do witness it by reading any book. In the words of Oloixarac, “Why pretend that we believe in the existence of a shared world if all that exists is literature?” (p. 142)
Quotes from Mona
“A side effect of the drug was that it seemed to slow her movements -- something she thought made her look more elegant” (page 4, on valium and appearance)
“She’d been born in Peru, but claiming indigenous ancestry in any other context would’ve been outrageous - much like calling herself a ‘person of color’ anytime prior to her arrival in the United States. There was a niche sort of glamour to it, like being a rare specimen of an endangered species - as though her mysterious DNA were a tiara encrusted with rare pearls, and the universities each a massive ark navigating the Great Flood of the United States, heroically fulfilling their mission to save two of each beast. Strictly speaking, Mona preferred to think of herself as more of a mermaid, that cross between the fantastic and the inexplicable whose true habitat was beneath the waterline, among the drowned. She couldn’t help feeling like an outside observer, a mermaid tourist. Anyway, the whole charade was just a bizarre exercise in academic bureaucracy. And besides that, the selection of a racial subtype for “Hispanic” was obligatory.” (page 7, on intellectual fetish for identity)
“As if the festival were a suitable occasion for the best pretend party of her life, she was completely fucked up by the time she deplaned in Stockholm with her smart little carry-on.” (page 17, on getting high for no reason)
“The Amazon fascinated her because there, anything that seemed real, sacred, and existent, dissolved… and Mona knew with a visceral certainty that hiding within that slippery monstrosity was a world beyond time: the cave, the real and actual Platonic Cave that rendered every other theory of knowledge mere illusion.” (page 24, on the Amazon)
“Life in translation, on the other hand, was like swimming in an Olympic pool: people could cheerfully ignore each other.” (page 37, on preferring to be around foreigners)
“ ‘I think it’s vital to surround oneself with grand personalities. Everything now is so… boring. Don’t you think? It’s like nobody cares about being a personality anymore. As if being a writer were no different from being a professor or a lawyer.’ “ (page 52, Chrystos speaking on the modern day dilemma of art)
“ ‘Don’t play the fool with me. I don’t have time to talk about what’s normal. The human body wasn’t engineered to be like this, and you know it. You can’t deny it. It’s simple: We are, in our era, conscious that humanity is an animal in the process of extinction. So the search for perfection is in no way mundane or superficial.’ “ (page 83, Lena speaking on vanity)
“ ‘First of all, we have to accept that our readers are no longer human. That we’re all immersed in an immense narrative, the largest representational endeavor in the history of the world: Google. It organizes and indexes everything you’ve ever done, and catalogs your desires - even the things you still don’t know you’ll desire. It keeps statistics on your loves and your hates, the various possibilities for your future. The characters, which is to say, the users, are increasing in number every day. And every day, more of them write themselves into the story, each user doing his or her best to sound just like themselves! The genre for these characters is autofiction, playing at being real. We’re the characters who populate an omniscient novel that indexes and organizes itself for the benefit of nonhuman readers. These readers are also searching for something real, something much more real, more troubling, a search that leads to surveillance and control.’ “ (page 103, Marco on Google users as autofiction contributors)
“Marco wasn’t one of the genuine heretics, the lucid and wary ones, hiding out among the general population with pencils clenched between their teeth like knives. In the mornings you could hear the deaf howl of that dispersed regiment as they trooped in to their day jobs, half-written novels disguised among the calendars and documents on their tablets and laptops….” (page 110, on tortured writers)
“Why pretend that we believe in the existence of a shared world if all that exists is literature?” (page 142, on the sort of distinct sensations that an immersed writer or reader can have)
“ ‘On the contrary, we write to try and get rid of the hate-colored glasses that make the world so stark and supposedly legible. Even when something becomes apparent and we’re able to wrap our minds around it - maybe we don’t want to tell everyone about it, don’t want to rely on the codes in force, or use old words for new things. Maybe instead we just want to follow the snake back to its lair.’ ” (page 155, a piece of Mona’s final speech on the essence of writing)
Rosalie L.H. Caggiano
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.
