A friend has tried multiple times to read Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztek (see below). Friend studied literature in college, attended the same MFA program I did, has taught creative writing at the university level for many years, has co-hosted a long-running podcast on which he’s discussed books and writing, and has published a few books of his own with reputable publishers. Yet Atomik Aztek baffles him. Eight years ago he posted the following on Goodreads: “After 5 different attempts to read this book — spurred by very enthusiastic recommendations from a couple of friends whose judgment I respect — I have to admit defeat. This is a book I cannot read.”
Another writer friend once compared reading a novel to a musician playing a musical composition. Some compositions require more attention and effort than others. Some readers are more accustomed to the canon of unconventional narrative approaches than others. Presented with disorientation, long stretches of playful dialogue, the time-space continuum turned inside-out and elasticized, images interspersed throughout, clearly concocted quotations attributed to famous historical figures who clearly never would’ve said such a thing, alternate histories, impossibilities (eg, Aztecs battling Nazis), on and on, they do not experience the giddiness of literary liberation, a frisson from experiencing narrative freed from attention to plot (mutually conflicting desires), character (gotta change a little at the end), perspective (the steadier the better), and language (artful and attentive but not retentive).
I’m not suggesting that the fella mentioned in the first paragraph is a crappy reader — I just want to make sense of why a book might baffle him and others? Most likely when confronted with stuff that doesn’t quite cohere or make sense, with the language pedal pressed through the proverbial metal, the thematic engines humming, the automotive metaphor transforming into a simile like an iridescent insectile beast gliding on wings of mercury and magma, they zone out or reach for their phones to browse and contribute to the most hectic chaotic incomprehensible unknowable-in-entirety immediately internationally accessible group improvisation ever committed to text, yet some unconventional novels, albeit controlled and tame compared to reading Twitter as a novel, cannot be read for some reason?
Maybe some people come to bound print books for comfort, for poignancy, for a gentle sense of levitation three-quarters through a tastefully observed story involving aging divorcees in Canada? Maybe some people want to discover for themselves the significant relevant subtext spelled out for everyone on the back cover? Maybe some people think of reading, particularly reading novels, as an entertainment not requiring all that much active participation (it’s a pleasant sensation to read “page turners” that seem to read themselves in a way — I recommend Blake Crouch’s novels Dark Matter or Recursion)? Maybe some readers haven’t been exposed to precedent texts that prepare the reader for the so-called zaniness that also likely informed the author’s creation? Maybe some people are simply kinda resistant to having their minds blown? And/or haven’t quite had their minds blown otherwise in life, haven’t experienced truly ecstatic or psychedelic states, or nervous breakdowns, or even sublime experiences of art or music (that first time through “Trout Mask Replica” or “Torch of the Mystics”) or even movies that in part or altogether ease one’s acclimation to unconventional storytelling?
Or maybe not always understanding what’s going on is simply boring because it’s difficult to continue to pay attention to a novel one must actively read if what’s read doesn’t seem to always make sense and connect to the parts read so far? Maybe it comes down to being willing and able to exercise those patience muscles and pay attention and make connections for an extended period when absorbing performative text relaying all sorts of disparate shit? Maybe the more you do that, the more exposure to and experience with such stuff, the easier it becomes to read unconventional novels, and the more excited you become by the two novels by Sesshu Foster currently in print?
I don’t know much more about Sesshu Foster beyond biographies available online. His Instagram is low-key/chill. But I do know he’s a poet. And I know that most readers know that when reading poetry they need to exercise their associative intelligence, construct a semblance of sense from the extraordinarily precise or disordered or suggestive or obtuse text they’re reading, which often requires and benefits from re-re-re-reading. Below, I’ve posted some quick impressions of my first attempts to read Sesshu Foster’s two novels. I hope to re-read them both — and add to this soon.
ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines
(With art by Arturo Ernesto Romos-Santillano; City Lights, 2021)
Consider the dirigible, the airship, the zeppelin. High hopes for luxurious travel in graceful ghostly style high above the churning ocean. Airborne behemoths, leviathans of the deep superimposed on the sky as a form of transportation, these sky-traversing vessels ran on super-flammable gas or something like that, the Hindenburg had some issues coming in for a landing in Lakehurst, NJ, 1937, immortalized on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s first album, a black and white photo I saw in color one evening in my mid-teens, amazed the next morning to see it returned to its traditional state. Like Moby Dick crossed with Icarus, the gorgeous doomed airship seems like a top-notch symbol for ye olde American Dream of the melting pot raising all races up and up as co-equal citizens.
Sesshu Foster — an (east) LA poet and author of Atomik Aztek (see below) — returns with another all-over-the-place crazy soaring and ultimately exploded false history, deploying every possible postmodern/Laurence Sterne approach (dialogues, interviews, inclusions of photographs/false ephemera, etc), of a sort of gypsy cab/secret underground airship transportation line featuring obscurely located, beautifully illuminated stations outfitted with crappy plastic chairs, really not following precise schedules at all, linking destinations all over California, extending maybe to the southeastern US and Mexico and Central America and maybe even Croatia?
Through the first 165 pages I was thinking how funny it was that the author’s surname is Foster when the only author who approaches this sort of associative thematic play and delight in language was Foster Wallace. I compared it to Paul Betty’s The Sellout and at times Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, all set to essentially jump up and down about it, hyping to the lousy-with-dirigibles heavens its humor, unbounded creativity, sociopolitical import, all around example of towering literary artistry of the slanted/enchanted type.
Tiny highlighted self-referential “propaganda” text in Sesshu Foster’s ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, typed for your edification pic.twitter.com/tJzf1yHQST
— Lee Klein (@leekleinOL) July 25, 2021
But then came twenty pages of false random quotations attributed to famous names, a riveting fight scene, and then scenes that were really dreams involving characters with names (Mel, Sergio, etc) who didn’t seem characterized enough for me or certainly didn’t exist in my mind as any sort of human construct. It then exploded into a flaming cascade of appendices featuring ephemera, imaginative and creative use of old photographs and forged old documents and letters etc, unhinged or unfettered or un-giving-a-fuck display of detritus, a cyclone of trash from the ashes of the doomed transportation line high above east LA and thereabouts that may or may not have ever existed, a dream that’s real that’s unreal that in its unreal reality is nevertheless the dream we’ve lived, or something like that — maybe something conceptually extended to relate to the indigenous experience post-conquest in the southwestern American diaspora, or how the American Dream explodes to reveal a perpetual underclass oppressed by corporations and the state, or an expression of indigenous anti-rationality, a surrealist stance against bourgeois rationality expressed as Western capitalist colonialist conquistador oppressor expectations for conventional narrative resolution, or maybe also like Infinite Jest, Foster’s novel or collection of prose and images also resolves off-stage or in this case the dirigible of expansive meaning floats beyond the margins of the book in hand.
As an idea, conceptually, the book sort of needs to go down in flames — and the diffuse creative cascade of photos and texts and whatever in the book’s last third seemed to me mostly more extraneous than significant, poignant, beautiful, or politically insightful, although I still generally enjoyed reading and look forward to one day re-reading and reconstructing the fable.
Worth it alone for the chapter about the Poet of the Universe.
Overall, highly highly recommended to anyone interested in the possibilities of the novel and unconcerned with plot and character or at least willing and able to read a novel like a poem.
Atomik Aztek
Audacious, bodacious, hyperenergetic, imaginative, imagistically generous, interacting alt-realities, porous borders between eras.
Reminded me of Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle), ultraviolent voice-driven Vollmanny pyrotechnics, Ishmael Reed (Flight to Canada, Mumbo Jumbo), with mucho “Junot Diaz” spanglish, vato.
Slaughterhouses and sacrifices.
Really dense at times — sometimes hard to read before bed therefore.
A few hundred hard returns, especially in long stretches of paragraphless dialogue, would’ve made this more accessible without too much compromise?
Dozens of LOLs and snickers/sounds thanks to aforementioned audacity.
Great lists.
Riveting battles between Aztecs and Nazis.
Unannoyingly political, with suggestions of Mexican immigrant life in LA and American Empire.
Really just a fantastic historical inversion, high concept that keeps the bar really high for maybe 170 of its 203 pages.
Felt like the end sort of fizzled, keeping me from rating it the full five stars, but I may have missed something and should probably go back and investigate.
Highly recommended to most literate human beings, especially those up for something a little challenging but wholly rewarding and inspiring.
Winner of The Believer’s 2005 Book of the Year. I remember reading about it back then and immediately forgetting about it. Don’t make the same mistake I made, ‘migo.
Despite the unexpectedly semianticlimatic ending (I really expected the Aztex would drop an A-bomb on the Nazis or something super-sensationalist like that), it’s still the most enjoyable novel I’ve read in a while.
A total mindfugg.
*
To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).