A Posthumous Book from Geek Love Author Katherine Dunn
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Katherine Dunn, Portland’s punk queen of gritty and weird literature, is known to most as the author of Geek Love, her 1989 novel about carnies who take drugs and poison themselves so that their kids will be born with profitable deformities—conjoined twins, a boy with flippers, another with telekinetic powers—for their circus sideshow. It’s only since her death in 2016, at age 70, that the public has taken interest in the rest of Dunn’s fiction, much of which has been published posthumously. The latest release is Near Flesh, the first-ever collection of Dunn’s short stories. On Tuesday, October 7, Literary Arts is celebrating the new book with an event (6:30–7:30pm, free) hosted by Omar El Akkad and Jeff VanderMeer.
Dunn’s posthumous run began in 2020 when The New Yorker published her short story about an upsetting yet banal student-professor affair, “The Resident Poet.” Then another piece of short fiction, this one about a woman who mistakenly purchases 50 roosters instead of hens and takes it upon herself to slaughter them, popped up in The Paris Review. Shortly thereafter, in 2022, the Farrar, Straus and Giroux imprint MCD published Toad, a novel Dunn had written in the ’70s. It was clear with close reading that the person who wrote Geek Love wrote these stories. They showcased the same complex embrace of outcasts and the ways women who demand agency become outcasts. But these characters were no circus freaks.
It turned out that a book editor named Naomi Huffman had gotten ahold of Dunn’s archive in 2019 and was behind this new publishing wave, a wave that swapped Geek Love’s almost–magical realism for a gruesome realism much closer to life. It also turned out that this wasn’t so much a new wave, or the discovery of a hidden body of work, but the resurrection of a rejected career. Toad was supposed to be Dunn’s third novel, following two she’d published in the early ’70s—remarkably, before her 26th birthday. Her publisher reportedly couldn’t get on board with her unlikable characters; a young woman who shares much biographical info with Dunn named Sally is the protagonist of both Toad and “The Resident Poet.” Today, it seems the world is ready for what Katherine Dunn knew 50 years ago. Near Flesh holds 19 short stories, including the two mentioned above. In the title entry, a woman contemplates having sex with robots. She speculates about the ups and downs of such a thing. Telling of Dunn’s seeming ability to see the future, she worried more about what sharing something so intimately human would give to robots and less about how it would affect the human.
More Things to Do This Week
DANCE Complexions Contemporary Ballet
7:30PM THU & FRI, 2 & 7:30PM SAT, OCT 2–4 | NEWMARK THEATRE, $40+
Complexions, a New York–based international dance company, is bent on expanding what both ballet and ballet dancers look like. More than inclusivity, the company, now 30 years running, is interested in exploiting what’s possible in ballet by embracing what different bodies are capable of. The result is fast, propulsive, athletic, and muscular. In town thanks to White Bird, Complexions is performing a piece by cofounder Dwight Rhoden For Crying Out Loud, which is set to tracks from the latest U2 album, Songs of Surrender, a sort of greatest-hits collection of rerecorded versions put out in 2023.
COMEDY Demetri Martin
7 & 9:30PM SUN, OCT 5 | REVOLUTION HALL, $58+
Martin is anything but a traditionalist, yet there is an old-school sensibility to his comedy. He leans into one-liners, props, and a multitude of shticks. Sometimes he is a stand-up, and sometimes his performance is billed as a one-man show—a play or other work of performance art. His current bit, “The Quick Draw Tour,” calls up his recent entry into the fine-art world. Martin debuted his first show of paintings this spring (he has described them as visual jokes), and on this tour he’s drawing live—a supremely corny gimmick, and yet one Martin is certainly capable of pulling off.
VISUAL ART Yoshida Chizuko
THRU JAN 4 | Portland Art Museum, $22+ (FREE 17 & UNDER; FREE FOR ALL FIRST THURSDAYS)
Though its new Rothko Pavilion opens in November, PAM’s programming earlier in the fall is reason enough to visit ahead of the big event. Yoshida Chizuko, who died in 2017, was a tremendously influential Japanese modernist. As the rare Japanese woman artist to find critical success midcentury, she was also a powerful advocate for other woman artists. She worked at the avant-garde of traditional Japanese aesthetics and techniques and adopted early Western modes of abstraction, including the wiggly optical patterns of so-called op art, before turning her interests to representational pictures of nature in her later years. This retrospective of nearly 100 works includes early paintings from the 1940s and ’50s as well as monotypes and woodblock prints spanning Chizuko’s long career.
Elsewhere...
- Allecia Vermillion traces Salt & Straw’s international, multiyear journey to recreate the Choco Taco; it involves Taco Bell. (The New York Times)
- Rachel Kushner talking about Eugene. (The New Yorker)
