Five Attractive, Mysterious Books

A few weeks ago, a package of five relatively small paperback
editions arrived all at once, rubber-banded together.
They were
different sizes and colors. The only real unifying theme was that they
were attractive and mysterious; rather than mass-produced products,
they felt like objects, items with cultural currency, the way that old
punk records used to. These five books make up the fall list of
Portland small publisher Microcosm, and, for the first time in weeks, I
was excited to take a stack of books home and tear into them.

Microcosm isn’t new; it’s been distributing zines, buttons,
stickers, and patches for 12 years—and books for a good chunk of
that time. It publishes mostly nonfiction, as prose and poetry and
comic books. The only one of the fall list that gravitates toward
fiction is Welcome to the Dahl House, a collection of comics by
cartoonist Ken Dahl. Even then, his fiction seems to be mostly rooted
in reality. At first, Dahl House reads like a collection of your
standard punky comic strips, with a few tired anticommercialism rants
and some prozine propaganda. They’re good for an old fashioned Mad
Magazine–style laugh or two—Sarge from Beetle
Bailey makes an appearance as a homophobic army recruiter—but
Dahl’s faux–Henry Rollins earnestness more often crushes the
humor to death. Things pick up when Dahl introduces the fictional
Gordon Smalls, a failed, fuck-the-system young protester who’s now
middle-aged, with no companions other than his own self-satisfied roar.
The Smalls strips almost all take the form of a how-to on alternative
topics (shoplifting, getting arrested, peeing in the shower), but the
palpable sadness of this man who has raged against the world until it
blithely passed him by is pathetic—and therefore hilarious. Much
of the book massages that same near physical discomfort, in particular
a very squirmy-funny autobiographical story of Dahl’s childhood
dalliances with a friend, including a game called “The Baby Seal”
wherein one boy would “hunt” the other’s penis and make it “bleed”
urine by poking it with his finger.

Two other autobiographical comics collections in Microcosm’s fall
list are similarly awkward, but much less satisfying. Brainfag
Forever, or BFF, collects eight years of cartoonist Nate
Beaty’s minicomics. There are an intriguing variety of styles, from
pages of photorealistic landscapes to scratchy cartoons reminiscent of
Gary Panter, but the stories that Beaty tries to tell, about travel and
awkward personal relationships, are profoundly uninteresting and
lacking in things like conflict and depth. The interstitial bits, in
which Beaty explains the stories behind the comics, are more
interesting than the collected comics themselves.

Then there’s Invincible Summer Volume II by Nicole J.
Georges, a collection of comics, poetry, and sketches from Georges’s
diary. (May 10: “I woke up sad, but surrounded by love.” April 26:
“Tempeh scramble with avocado. Yes! My fast is over.”) Georges is a
member of Sister Spit, the poetry collective cofounded by Michelle Tea,
which may interest Tea devotees, but the dullness of this diary, which
is not livened up at all by a pathetic breakup and several personal
squabbles that presumably don’t make any sense unless you know Georges
personally, make this book a classic example of a clichéd
small-press offering: self-involved, self-important, and of no real
value beyond the author’s own self-esteem.

But the rest of Microcosm’s fall offerings are rare and wonderful
books: There’s the third edition of On Subbing, the diary of a
man named Dave Roche who works as a substitute special-education
teacher in Portland. The daily encounters with different
students—when one boy hears that Roche lived in California he
asks, “How are the hookers in L.A.?”—are fascinating. Roche
doesn’t mock the special-ed students, some of whom are so profoundly
retarded that Roche has to literally wipe their asses for them, and he
doesn’t turn them into dispensers of Forrest Gump–style
wisdom, either. It feels like a genuine glimpse into a world that most
of us never consider, and Roche’s skill at preserving the dignity of
the students is highly commendable; I’ve never read a book about
mentally challenged children that felt this emotionally honest.

The final book is the least booklike of the five: Bill Daniel’s
Mostly True, with its turn-of-the-century Sears-catalog appearance,
is a collection of essays disguised as the April 1908 issue of a
magazine devoted to hobo markings. Pages are lined with antique
advertisements (“Raise Giant Frogs” and “Anyone suffering from Fistula,
Piles or Non-Malignant Rectal trouble is urged to write for our FREE
Book”) and sections of the book are devoted to photographs of
hobo-chalked graffiti, in particular the work of Bozo Texino, the
Michelangelo of hobo graffiti artists. Mostly True is utterly
unlike anything on most bookstore shelves—a collection of news
clippings both real and fake that, when put together, give the sense of
a culture larger and much more vibrant than any narrative essay ever
could. As with all of Microcosm’s diverse stable of former zine authors
and fringe poets, the reader should be grateful, and slightly
bewildered, to suddenly have discovered this weird artifact from a
mystifying world.