Writing in the Margins

One of the reasons Mars Volta's release is so jarring is its pained, psychological exploration of addiction and doom. "Comatorium's" lyrics -- now expanded at length into book form and available only from the independent Gold Standard Labs label or, if you're lucky, your local indie music store -- recall William Burroughs' disturbing "Naked Lunch" or Dalton Trumbo's "Johnny Got His Gun" in their imaginative extrapolations and uncompromising portrayal of the solitary mind in a state of irrevocable deterioration. Based on the true story of Julio Venegas, a doomed childhood friend of Volta vocalist Cedric Bixler and guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez (who also moonlights as one of Gold Standard Labs' head honchos), "De-loused" tells the story of Cerpin Taxt, who after trying to commit suicide by taking morphine ends up in both a coma and a spiritual battle for his own condemned soul.

Like Burroughs and especially Beckett, Bixler unleashes his language in psycho-scatalogical torrents, fusing poetry's high-impact wordcraft with conventional narrative's more accessible structure. Unlike the CD, the book, in a dense and deceptive 24 pages, offers up much more information about the various angels and demons Taxt encounters on his way to salvation, all the while engaging some audacious poetic exercises; picture Dante's "Inferno" with Robert Plant in the lead role and you're partially there. Separated from its sonic counterparts and stretched in format, Bixler's poetry sticks in your throat the way Chester Himes' "If He Hollers Let Him Go" does.

And, unlike "Naked Lunch," you can actually read the thing in one day without reaching for the methadone.

"Red River Rising: The Anatomy of a Flood and the Survival of an American City"
By Ashley Shelby
266 pages
Borealis Books
Order from Powells.com

"We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in the mass of advancing lava. Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping." -- Don DeLillo, "White Noise"

While "De-loused at the Comatorium" charts the spiritual catastrophe of one fictional character based on a real-life individual, Ashley Shelby's harrowing tale chronicles the collective ruination wrought by the 1997 Red River flood that displaced more than 50,000 North Dakota residents and cost billions in disaster relief. While the story merited a healthy amount of national coverage at the time, it has dropped out of the national consciousness -- that is, if you don't happen to live in or around any of the towns it devastated. If you lived in Grand Forks on or after the Red River broke through its dikes and submerged the town, you're probably still looking for some well-earned closure.

That may be, as Shelby explained to me recently, because after the initial solidarity and media coverage wear off, the aftermaths of catastrophes like the Red River flood usually deteriorate into bitter chaos. "It's difficult to streamline aftermaths and recoveries," Shelby said, "because each community is unique. And a flood is a very different kind of disaster from a tornado; a flood tends to steal from its victims for a much longer period of time."

The aftermath, she continued, "contains an initial solidarity, in which the community unites against the disaster. Then, as federal agencies trickle in, the community closes in upon itself, suspicious of outsiders. As time passes, though, and the federal government begins doling out money and aid, the community begins to fragment into individual islands of pain and resentment, because suddenly there are gradations of loss. As we've seen in the last few years, there is hardly anything more politicized and highly charged than victimhood."

Shelby's strength lies in charting the uncomfortable collisions between a disturbing natural reality and an unsettling bureaucratic fantasy, a domain populated by well-meaning but harried scientists, apathetic government agencies, calculating insurance companies, under-the-gun local politicians and residents who suddenly find themselves at the mercy of Mother Nature. More often than not, Americans feel they're in control of the natural world and take their planet for granted, but history is littered with the casualties of that wrongheaded philosophy. Shelby's book forces us to look into the mirror and come to terms with our pride and our ignorance, our faith and our policies.

"Whether it's a tornado, a flood, or even an act of terrorism, people are emotionally injured and yet are asked, immediately, to find closure and rebuild," says Shelby. "The stages of personal grief apply to the grief suffered by victims of all disasters -- and like someone grieving for the loss of a loved one, you can't force people to get over it sooner than they are able, especially when they cling to beliefs that are informed by faulty information. Survival isn't something that occurs overnight -- it takes years. But the media leave disasters as soon as the opportunities for dramatic pictures disappear. The bulk of the surviving takes place after the water recedes, and I think the story of how Grand Forks survived its disaster can be illuminating for any community that suffers a catastrophic event."

This story has been corrected since it was first published.