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Dr. Handlove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Stroke Calvin Westra’s Dong

Spoiler alert for the works of Calvin Westra

Calvin Westra is playing in the graveyards of great artists he isn’t even inspired by. With the serialization of his first novella, NEET, he introduces the world to characters in similar dire straits as those in Great Expectations while maintaining the same form. Calvin doesn’t need Dickens or Faulkner. He’s the reason I stole Shoplifting From American Apparel, Taipei, Leave Society, and Bed by Tao Lin. Calvin knows to make something new you have to be new, but you can’t be afraid to recontextualize and repurpose old ideas. 

Calvin’s work is in your face with this fearlessness and global understanding of art forms. He’s cribbed magical realism and told a fantastic tale about olfactory issues and drug use. In “Tarkovsky’s Air Bud” he imagines a new life for the slow cinema pioneer. Calvin can also ruin your day, week, or month, reducing you to tears, in 100 words or less. “Blades of Glass” on Back Patio Press is one of the shortest stories I’ve ever read that I return to often. In Donald Goines it’s understood that people living in the Edo period didn’t know what they don’t know. Westra is aware of the things he doesn’t know, and is unafraid to become a master of the things he does. He makes it look easy and effortless. You don’t see the forty drafts or the hours on end up analyzing the smallest of phrases. Calvin gives you everything hot and ready, digestible, and then he sneaks up on you in your GI tracts and roots himself to a home in your body forever. 

The first moment it settled in with Calvin showing his reader just how much he knows without forcing his reader to think like that is his discussion of the character Emmanuel in Donald Goines. Emmanuel is a kid who has a good and normal life. He is an occasional drug user, but largely unconcerned. He wants to make movies and he describes movies with climactic finishes. Kagu, a rare bird, is bored by these action epics. Donald Goines leaves you sobbing in the end with an exchange over a cup of water. These are small moments that burrow into your soul. Calvin can give you the shootout and ruin your day, but he doesn’t need to go that big. He doesn’t seem to want to. He realizes that’s how you deflate everything else. 

Calvin’s first three major works form a trilogy. It’s up to the reader to decide if that’s what they see. I know it’s what I see. NEET begins with an unemployed man having an encounter experience with a trash monster. In 2018, the trash monster is a golem of guilt and pain and shame. In 2022 the trash monster is introduced in chapter 50 of Donald Goines. He is a puppet made by the Society for the Preservation of Rare Birds and his trademark behavior is insulting people. He says people are not enough. He mocks their voices. The trash monster targets the Great Indian Bustard. Is Great Indian Bustard the protagonist of NEET? Are Oen, Florian, Honduran Emerald, and Ben the same person? I struggle to know if each character is an individual facet of Calvin’s personality or if they are people he knows or both. These characters depict highly specific patterns of people reacting to loss, pain, grief, and alienation. Happy characters that sit alone doing drugs slowly become sad people for the exact same reason. Something bad happens to them and the why looks all different. 

Great Indian Bustard is targeted by the trash monster in chapter 50 and begins puppeteering in chapter 51. Kagu gets the Pig connect first. He frets about it at Tacos. Honduran Emerald is couch surfing, experiencing homelessness, by the time the gang goes to Tacos. Kagu and Honduran Emerald visit the Pig first in chapter 68. They’re concerned for their friend’s dying sinuses. They want better drugs because they won’t stop drugs. By chapter 74 almost the entire Society for the Preservation of Rare Birds is visiting to get drugs. It takes one friend, one neg, one good moment, and everyone is in. It doesn’t feel like it could be something risky at the start. It’s friends. Together. 

Honduran Emerald works to ignore the puppets in the same way he works to ignore the Radios manager and his Chemistry teacher. In NEET the first encounter with the monster is a debate as to if this is in Ben’s head or not. There will always be someone reminding you you’re not enough, usually the part of you you don’t want to be you. Even if that’s not true the security guards remind you that someone will be there to tell you. Someone will always find a reason to remind you as to why you’re not enough. It’s easy to want to silence that with drugs. 

Calvin is concerned with evil. In Family Annihilator Lee and Oen are both meditating on their relationship to evil. Oen is writing Family Annihilator which is about a lot of things. Lee loses access to her medicine and is concerned with the possibility that she’s an evil person, evil to her core. Lee is concerned about delivering an effective speech to her AA group. Evil and bad because her family said so. Evil and bad because she is. So evil and bad that recovery is the only option. This was my introduction to the works of Calvin Westra. In the trilogy this piece likely comes last. This piece comes last because it is about the redemption, moving forward from what we can’t change, acknowledging those things and using them as building blocks to make something better. Goines is the first part. We watch the creation of the antagonist of NEET. NEET is the middle, an extended precontemplation stage that explores just how much movement happens in inertia. The desperation to change your life with art and then see that your life is not understood is palpable. 

What is this all about? Evil. Maybe the loneliness or felt isolation that leads us to evil. Maybe the ways we isolate after encountering the evil. Calvin implies that evil is around us and we can partake in it, but that doesn’t guarantee that we’re evil people. Some people do evil things and change their lives. It is as simple as that. Some people do evil things because they’re coerced. Some people do evil things because they’re lured. Some people are evil even when they’re not because they’ve decided that’s how they are known. 

In my first read of Family Annihilator I was put off and distressed. Why are their lines that to me seemed without point referencing people strapped to hospital beds claiming to be raped by staff? There’s concern that the massage therapist in the intro has done something bad. The narrative is circular, ending where it starts, asking you to wonder what the entire chronology is. Calvin Westra’s work nonjudgmentally explores how someone winds up in situations that the statistically average or above average person would not imagine themselves in. 

Statistically average is central in Donald Goines. When Honduran Emerald is kicked out of his home it is an aside in a paragraph in the Tacos chapter. It’s not central to that chapter’s point, which is about having a better drug connect and blabbing about it at the wrong time. When Dunie gets kicked out her parents tell her all the ways they tried to love her. They force her to be aware of the things they did, not just out of love, but to guarantee their child was not a drug user. As a drug user she’s kicked out of the home. She’s ostracized from her family. She is not given the opportunity to recognize a mistake and begin again. The love is rescinded, making you wonder if it existed at all. 

Dunie gets addicted to drugs because she’s in love. Dunie does drugs once, just to see. She does them because her boyfriend is a user. He asks her to come buy drugs with him so she can get more. He says it will be weird, completely understating the reality of the situation. Honduran Emerald is introduced as a guy willing to put people into bad situations for his own benefit, but he’s still our hero. He’s at least one of them. She is traumatized from the sexual assault of a drug dealer, but enjoys the drugs enough to risk all the hurt again. She wonders about using alone, just a little, to regulate how much she needs and guarantee a good time. She wants to use alone to make it cheaper, to get some free drugs regardless of the psychological toll, and to have the experience she wants. She wonders about how to have a good relationship to the drugs. She wonders about her wonder. She didn’t want to be a drug user, but the first time was fun and maybe the next time will be closer to the last time. She’s in love with a young man who doesn’t realize he’s scary. This man doesn’t scare Dunie in the way he scares a homeless man on the street or other drug users. It’s implied he scares people in school. When her addiction takes over and they stop speaking she is afraid of him. She is afraid he’ll show up. The relationship is described as “rocky” once and an outside observer says it’s obvious you two had problems. These lines hit like bricks, they’re never returned to, and it’s up to you to remember how to weigh their importance in the face of scoring drugs. 

I started doing drugs again because I met a woman that didn’t like drinking and did like pot. I stopped dating people or stopped dates when they’d try to get me to do coke. I’m more of a scaredy cat than I let on, but most see that. My pot habit was nice, because I am in love. I love to drugs with my partner. That’s true. It still is. I’ve also watched something fun become something I need. Not so fun to think about. Where I live it’s okay to be addicted to pot. I don’t drive high. I take a lot of naps. Unless I’m going to aspirate on my vomit or have an asthma attack while passed out I won’t die. People think this is pretty okay. Not really a user’s user. I’ve had sex for drugs, but I was also having sex to have sex. A meal too. I felt like I was gonna puke, from the drugs probably, a lot of the time doing that. Not a user’s user. My family doesn’t speak to me really, but they’ve got their problems too. Not a user’s user. Calvin destroys these walls. I’m not someone losing everything. Not like I’ve seen in my family. I don’t have much though. I have degrees I refuse to use in their fields. I write for myself, which I see as my actual life preservation, and I am a drain on a lot of people. More than I’d like to be. 

Calvin’s work speaks to me. I am a NEET, hoping to end that part of my existence. I have an intense addiction to pot, which many claim isn’t a real addiction, that has had debilitating effects on my life. I don’t do anything and it’s getting to the point where I can’t afford to exist that way. I struggle with my relationship to alcohol. At points in my life I’ve been called a gamma species alcoholic due to my family predisposition and daily college drinking habit. My mother drinks every day and isn’t an alcoholic because she functioned well enough to retire. My dad is an alcoholic who has lied about his sobriety at many turns. He likely never hit the four or five years he claims. If he did he was white knuckling and dry. As his illnesses got worse and it was understood he’d never get his license back he started drinking in secret. 

Calvin understands those pivot points. It isn’t what is happening until it’s over. It isn’t what’s happening until it’s been years and then years have flown by in a moment. These lives are high stakes at every moment, like the inability to shit on opiods, and blunted to the point of near unfeeling, like each business being a destination for only one thing. When you’re on drugs you get Tacos. For me it’s Gyros. You go to Gods or you don’t, because you don’t wake up early. Life is as simple as those small choices. It’s hard to make those choices. It’s hard to commit to any choices, and some make the commitment for you. 

If you read the first sentence of each chapter as its own story in Donald Goines you get a smooth portrait of people visiting a dealer, first as individuals and then everyone. You get the dealer obsessed with sex and violence, a victim of violence. You don’t get the why’s of the users. You get the why of the dealer. You see Duniei get lured in, stop thinking about school and work, and start thinking about collecting cans. You see relationships fray and fall apart. Calvin’s work builds laterally and vertically. You can read NEET, Family Annihilator, and Donald Goines as a large epic. You can read them as individual stories of vice and painful histories. You wonder if the sex cult is different from the Society for the Preservation of Rare Birds. It must be. It’s the beautiful men in the cult. They have money. I think they’re on the sports teams. You don’t know much of anything about the users in Goines. You know The Pig is fat so most people must be thinner than him. The detail is in the body damage. Loss of smell, cuts up the arms, sinuses failing and constant colds. The drugs disconnect you from your mind and your body. They make one run on autopilot and the other move slow. The sex cult targets people with disabilities, visual or otherwise. I reread the book and think about the baby arm girl at my school. I think about how she was nice to me and everyone. I think about how beautiful she was. I think about how I thought about if people manipulated her then, because of her arm. 

Calvin Westra is one of my favorite writers and he knows this. He trusts his readers to find things on their own. He doesn’t need to explain to you. He may even acknowledge that you’ve found something he hasn’t. He isn’t concerned if you bounce off his writing or don’t get it. He knows that it’s there for those who are willing to engage and time will tell all truths. I hope Donald Goines continues to grow in popularity. I hope it encourages people to read all of his work. I think Calvin Westra is one of the best writers working today, and I know he knows it, and I wish I could be as cool as him watching the world begin to catch up. 

This is your loyal observer at Pigeon Probe. Remember to look up for the shit!

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Person/a Review

Elizabeth Ellen's Person/a begins with a preamble or overture of about 30 pages that is the text of the novel which also serves as blurbs, foreshadowing, hype, discourse around the work, an anxious justification of the future that numbs the content (something the narrator does with a hotel room too) and what one would think is the introduction of characters. Most of these characters do not exist outside of being someone the narrator can react against. 

This book demands you meet it on its level, which is a fiction piece that is explicitly inspired by real life events, some that may be easy to find footage or other information about. If you choose to follow the rabbit hole the instructions are provided. If the book is a work of fiction it’s poorly written, literally repetitive without impact, monotonous in tone, self aware and meta in a pathetic way, and it burns the edges off all passion. This could be trimmed down into something I call great. In its current form it is not great. I don’t get a sense that Elizabeth is trying to tell a story about a book that impacts her friends or her lovers or her child or children. These people barely exist in this space and outside of the rich relationship to the child, they only say don’t publish the work. These characters drink and discuss, but rarely is it about anyone but the subject’s work and when it is other work it is forgettable and not thematically important. The thematically important pieces that are not written by Elizabeth feel like the little dutch boy plugging his fingers in the flooding dam. This is insecure writing. It doesn’t feel vulnerable fully because of how self aware the book is. We are supposed to understand this as a heavily edited and still largely unfinished manuscript where someone repeats their memory about an obsession with a past lover. If Person/a 2: Person Harder came out in a few years I wouldn’t be surprised. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elizabeth made you reread all of Person/a again in Persona/2 while trying to write anything new. 

When the narrator blows up small behaviors to cover for larger ones as a pattern you wonder how much the author is aware of. If you don’t fall in the pitfall of looking for veracity you ask how much self awareness the author has. Maybe you need one for the other. The book is impossible to talk about if you meet it on its terms just like the narrator can’t be spoken to.  

What is there is escalating cruelty. This is a book explicitly committed to not learning a lesson. I am not trying to introduce the Hays Code for literature. People can write what they want. This endless longing to no point serves no purpose. I didn’t like In The Mood For Love so this specific type of feeling is something I know I’m turned off by. Recently I spoke with a former fling that I have thought about for five(?) years because I felt guilt. She said she didn’t remember what happened. When I clarified what happened she said lol don’t worry. We can be our own worst enemy. This narrator revels in being their own worst enemy. 

The narrator mocks suicide and addiction, something this ex flame has struggled with, all while self-aggrandizing her botched relationship as equal to suicide and addiction. She lusts for that fatality. I’ve struggled with both. I do wish suicide on my worst enemy and I feel bad about that. I know the weight. I don’t believe this narrator is lovesick. I don’t think this narrator knows how to love anyone. She is shallow in her own understanding of herself. Or this is all heavily edited to look like someone can’t even know themselves. Elizabeth the writer wants you to know that Elizabeth the character is nothing like Elizabeth the writer. Elizabeth the writer is a puppet in front of a real person we’ll never know. This does not read as the text of a master manipulator who knows how to paint a portrait of a completely separate person that people will mistake for real. 

Elizabeth the character paints herself a siren on the rocks. She has an irresistible charm that all men would fall in love with and she discards any man dumb enough to show it. She treats those who will stay loyal like garbage knowing they will stay loyal. She maintains a circle of people she seems to think of as lesser and unaware of manipulations. She is afraid of this ex flame because she thinks he could be her equal and more. An ex husband ran away on the honeymoon and she knew he’d come back. She knows someone will be doting on her. 

Her sexiness that is shown off across her published work as a selling point does not appear in the text. I did not know who Elizabeth Ellen was until I saw the Her Lesser Work cover art. I thought that if I was a different person I’d send her an e-mail. Now I’ve come to understand all communication and even discussion of her is fodder for her next great brushstroke. Some people find this to be one of the most vulnerable portraits of a person they’ve ever read. I don’t. I think the book is calculating. Her beauty doesn’t come across as radiant. She barely comes across as an embodied person in the text. She drinks and does not eat. When she eats it’s not much. There’s one acknowledgment of that in the book that feels pointed. I laughed out loud at a line about her crying into her own collarbone. 

The form of the book is insecure as well. It’s an extended rumination. Half finished redrafts of a novella to make a whole. There’s endless epigraphs and quotes from other artists. These bursts force me to reckon with the truth that I am reading the results of many better worker’s runoff. The self indulgence doesn’t have the strut of 70’s cock rock. There’s no hip hop glitz. There’s an explicit acknowledgement that Eminem is the best rapper because he raps about what’s real. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of rap music and something I’d expect from a woman that is largely known as an Ann Arbor person. I don’t want to read insecure and manipulative for 600 pages. It’s boring. You lay your pattern out too early. You completely understand why this person has time to sit alone and write these 600 pages because it sounds like they have no real friends. 

In the book she acknowledges class, but never alludes to being more than what a white woman born in the 60’s understands to be middle class. This character is not middle class. We know the author is not. We have all struggled in life. Coming into enough money to do whatever you want with your life is something that doesn’t invalidate past suffering, but can be acknowledged in a full complex manner. I’ve taken four hour bus rides to see exes. Those rides hurt my body. I slept like shit the night before and the night after bus rides. I felt like I  was in a temporary place and could never get my bearings. 20 dollars is a lot to me. My bus rides would cost 40 bucks minimum one way. I worked at a campus dining hall when I took those bus rides. I flipped burgers for nothing. I read marxist literature and the narrator is right to acknowledge her complete unwillingness to grow as a thinker or a person. She has enough confidence to mocks her partner for wanting to shut off his brain too. 

The elements that are formally experimental fall flat for me. Is he a writer or musician? Isn’t each of those both? Fuck off. Is my kid a boy or a girl? You’re not playing with it as much as you think. This book reads like a second waver’s attempted triumphant victory lap over the tyrannical man. Women being as bad as men can be isn’t revolutionary. It’s just people being bad. There’s not a real gender examination here outside of the literary scene image of a person. That’s barely mentioned and almost always just about fucking. Maybe the person desiring a heavy body like an Asperger’s blanket really is retarded. 

The mantra in my head is this book is rich in its blindness. The narrator writes about reading people whose work is as much off the page as it is on the page. I don’t think Elizabeth does that here. Sometimes it hits, but usually it’s hollow. I think her rote and mundane suburban anxieties usually lead people down rote and mundane questioning lines. 

I think the best part of this book is the relationship to the child. There are a few fleeting mentions of a feminist mom that stays with someone bad. I wish that was explored more. I know she has made work about that. I might read it. Both elements  remind me of my own relationship to my mother as a newly divorced beautiful woman in her 40s and 50s. My friends wanted to fuck my mom. My mom was occasionally too friendly with my friends. She never went to movies with us, but she’d watch them at home with us. Mock our stupid comments about the lack of realism in Zombieland. Who cares about realism in a Zombie movie? The relationship to Saul is unbelievable. Shark jumping. It starts off looking like a portrait of a woman’s madness, but ultimately when you compare it to the very hot feelings about Ian it’s floaty. This book pulls punches and self justifies and cowers. I think the bite is soft except the explicit intent to hurt a possibly real artist. The self criticism is even more shallow than your average pop mental health bestseller. 

Still, the attempt to know the child and the child’s attempt to help the mom find fulfilling love struck real chords in my heart. The child’s willingness to discard the father because of the mother’s self protective cold front struck chords in my heart too. This is where I feel the beating heart of the text. I know that’s not what the book is about. I worry for the child that reads this. Wanting to be the biographer of an ex flame and using a kid for story fodder hurts.

I want to care about Elizabeth the character and feel for her hurts and side with her. That’s why she includes that Bukowski stuff about being the hero of her shit. I don’t think anyone is the hero here. It’s an unreliable narrator losing grasp. 

The book insults you if you decide that this is something real. There is story truth and truth truth. I finished high school, barely.

For a long time I wanted people to write about me. I wanted to written about as a lover and I wanted to be obsessed over this way. After reading this I don’t. 

This is not what I expected from Elizabeth Ellen. I didn’t like it. If this is her. That’s sad. She was a mythic figure until I read this. If it isn’t, this is sad. It’s mostly bad writing. If you’re 40 and think this is what love is like I worry for you. We all struggle with strange feelings and wandering thoughts and ruminations on exes. We all want to fuck people on the street or creative peers. We want to fuck the people we can’t fuck. That’s age old. We can also move forward and find completely fulfilling love. This book is against that. This book calls for a new midwest loneliness. This book doesn’t even paint an image of the midwest. It’s hollow without intention. Cruel to create propulsion. I think this is an embarrassing exploration of what auto fiction can be and maybe that’s the point. 

This your loyal observer at Pigeon Probe. Remember to look up for the shit!