K. I. Hope

Oddly enough, I decided to start reading the book at the exact moment that I was getting the oil changed in my car. That doesn't really sound all that crazy, but when you realize that this book makes you stop and think about the comings and goings of individuals, I don't think it could be more appropriate. From the first sentence, I was instantly hooked. I wanted to know what made this person tick. I wanted to know why this person saw the world in the manner that they did. Pleasantly surprised, I was able to find the answer to both of my questions as each page found itself getting closer and closer to the cover, as my fingertips flew fast as my eyes yearned to see what was behind the corresponding sheet of paper.… (mere)

This is Not a Flophouse reminds me of one of my own paintings entitled “The Time for Subtlety Is Over" which is a painting of George W stabbing the Earth while money rains into his hand, and the usual symbols on the bills are replaced with corporate logos and images of oil companies, pharmaceuticals, auto manufacturers and weapons makers. Instead of the United States of America on the bills, they read “The United Corps of America,” which is obviously the abbreviation for Corporations (as in, our government serves corporations not people) but also a play on the word “corpse” to imply that our country-slash-Democracy is dead thanks to corporate power.

I made this painting toward the beginning of the Iraq War when I was involved in numerous protest marches here in Chicago, the most dramatic of which found about 15,000 of us marching down Lake Shore Drive, completely stopping traffic for hours. After we circled around to Oak Street and LSD, that’s where the police stopped us. They had been unprepared for the number of protestors who would show up, but eventually called in enough reinforcements to pen us in and eventually encircled enough protesters to begin making arrests and, yes, clubbing anyone they felt like. (Later, we called them pig pens.) A few of my friends were clubbed who had done nothing violent. I managed to sneak out of the enclosures right before they got too tight and walked up the beach along Lake Michigan until I could cross over Lake Shore Drive at Fullerton.

At that time, it was very obvious to all of us protesters that all the reasons for the war were a big lie even though most the mainstream media was rather oblivious to that fact and because the mainstream media wasn’t pointing out that the emperor had no clothes, the masses couldn’t see it. Clearly, now, everyone realizes that “Weapons of Mass Destruction” was a fiction. Poor Colin Powell was paraded in front of the U.N. to repeat the lives with as much conviction as he could muster. He knew he was lying, and I’ll always hate him for it. Imagine if he had stood up and actually spoke the truth. All these, things, I know they are bullshit. I can’t in good conscious speak these lies. He could’ve truly changed history. But no, he was a loyal dog.

So at the time, I was sick of hinting around at the truth through metaphors and stories. I made a painting that just expressed exactly what I saw as happening. Oh, and the red background represents global warming and the denial of it (ps. anyone read how 2010 was the warmest year EVER. Ever? Ever.*) as well as the hellish nature of these scumbag politicians.

This is Not a Flop House similarly speaks direct truth about how K.I. Hope sees the world working. To me, it was an allegory, more than a tale of realism. Each character’s situation represents the engine of the system and how that systems affects people of different economic, social and class levels. K.I. doesn’t pull punches, she doesn’t hide the system in subtleties. Just like William S. Burroughs said about the title of his most famous novel, she sticks it naked, on the end of a fork, so you can see what you're eating. Is it easy to read? No. It’s painful because it forces you to confront the dark workings of our economics, our Capitalist, competitive, heartless system. But it’s important. It’s important not to be brainwashed by the media, by the government, and by the corporations. By Capitalism, whose only goal is to generate more capital by asking you to buy things you can live without and charging you for things that you can't live without. That’s what this book is about. The time for subtlety is over. Let’s face it, the human race may very well be doomed so we better get our asses in gear and make a change soon. The world is a flop house, sad to say.

*Ever since records have been kept. Thanks Robert.… (mere)

This book is a cry of anguish and rage. Sometimes it felt more like a prose poem howling against the machine than a narrative. On the surface, Hector is only about one very specific form of cruelty and that cruelty is revealed in a surprise twist at the end of the book. And that twist, in fact, helped me understand the more abstract elements. However, despite the author’s effort to make this very specific in that regard (and spelled out clearly in the afterword), it spoke to me more broadly. Sympatico with all the tortured masses crushed beneath the Gucci slippers of the rich, the corporations, and the government in cahoots with both. An indictment of the system that extrudes people like ground beef. It is unsparing in the horror it reveals, both a literal truth and a metaphor for the starvation, the rape camps, the despair produced by man (and I specifically mean “man” because patriarchy is indicted as a driving force of the war on those less powerful), and it’s a big fuck you to those who look the other way. Where were you when East Timor was invaded and 100,000 people were killed? Where were you when 800,000 were killed in Rwanda? Did you lift a finger, this book implies, to stop the genocide in Darfur, Sudan? Well, did you? Hector takes no prisoner, unlike our government, which imprisons black males at a rate six times that of whites. I read all these things behind the literal cruelty given life in this book. One cruelty builds on another builds on another.

It’s a hard read, no doubt about that. Unsparing in its brutal violence. But the lyrical quality of much of the writing helped sustain me through the most disturbing parts. The tone stayed with me, too, leaving a creepy sensation long after I put the book away. And perhaps the best thing about Hector is that it has a lot of heart. You can sense it in every line. That it was difficult to write … not because the effort shows, but because it’s unsparingly honest. I hope it will find more readers who learn something from it.… (mere)

Full disclosure: Yeah, I know the author, and yeah, she is very cool. That said, I still think I can write an objective review of this book.

Remember that time I read a book with a conceptual spoiler? (Soylent Green ain't people)
When you get to the very end of Hector, and if you read the Afterword, information will be revealed which entirely changes the context of the book. Certain characters are not quite who you thought they were. Certain scenes will need to be re-evaluated in their disambiguated light. No, K.I. Hope didn't play a trick on you. The emotions you felt up to (and hopefully including) the last chapter were entirely appropriate, and that is very much the point of the book. I can't say more without spoiling things, but trust me, would you want to know that "Soylent Green is people" from a review?

A word about dystopias
If you read George Orwell's 1984, I hope you were left with a sick feeling about the world he described. Orwell got it right. The rats, the pitiless brutality of Room 101. There should be nothing whatsoever appealing about these things. Switching gears to nonfiction, consider Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's [book:The Gulag Archipelago|1162417]. One hundred men inhabit a cramped cell together in a Soviet work camp. At the center of the room is a single bucket which serves as the communal toilet, and which inevitably fills to the point of overflow every night. Add to that smell the occasional vomit, and the frequent corpse which may not be immediately removed, and you get an idea of what Solzhenitsyn lived with, day in and day out, for almost twenty years. Dystopias are ugly. They're messy. Contempt is most easily expressed through neglect. These aspects of dystopia tend to get overlooked. Even Huxley's [book:Brave New World|5129] is a little too clean for some to swallow as dystopian.

Hollywood can always be depended on to get this stuff wrong. If you have time, watch the 1956 movie version of [book:1984|5470]

The movie's set has the well-kept appearance of nearly everything Hollywood produced in those days. INGSOC is rendered in immaculate polished surfaces. Hero and villain alike are decked out in suits much more striking for their clean, well-tailored appearance than for the drab, hopeless society they supposedly bespeak. Julia is portrayed by a slightly-too-hot-to-be-credible Jan Sterling. (Seriously, Julia is supposed to give the impression of a woman who would have been beautiful, if not for time and place she was born. There's a problem with any production of 1984 where half the audience wants to nail her.) Winston Smith doesn't look like a stinking, dehumanized slave when O'Brien pulls out his tooth; he looks like he's a goddamned model for an Oceania J.C.Penny! All this slick presentation undermines the perception of inhumanity, and precludes outrage.

K.I. Hope most definitely does not fall into that trap. Hector's dystopia is unhygienic. It stinks. Where there isn't blood and piss and snot, there's vomit and shit. Yeah- you aren't supposed to be comfortable reading it; dysptopias are ugly. K.I. Hope got this part right. Solzhenitsyn would approve.

Conceptual spoiler revisited
What I like best about Hector is that the book's value is not dependent on some O. Henry-esque "gotcha!" moment at the end. The story isn't about surprise at all, it's about a police state we all know, yet rarely think about. Sure, there are obvious parallels to Auschwitz and Tuol Sleng, but honestly, marquis barbarism like Auschwitz doesn't need somebody to tell you it's wrong. Hector is more along the lines of Upton Sinclair's [book:The Jungle|41681]. Ms. Hope draws our attention to conditions we know very well about, and then proceeds to show us how we aren't nearly as outraged as we ought to be. She's a voice of conscience, and she tells a good story to boot. For that, I have no problem lumping her in with luminaries like Orwell and Solzhenitsyn.… (mere)