five books that make me think of this time of year

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3.

THE WILD PARTY

Joseph Moncure March and Art Spiegelman

Pantheon ed., 1994

(sorry this is late; i had a deadline and my fingers were being stupid)

Joseph Moncure March's most-recognizable contribution to American arts and letters– the phrase, "Pardon me while I slip into something more comfortable" (or some version thereof; that's lightly paraphrased)– suggests nothing of the man who would produce the work that Williams S. Burroughs would say "(W)as the book that made me want to be a writer." And yet that's just what Joseph Moncure March did, with 1928's THE WILD PARTY– an epic poem of the Jazz Age!– that was reprinted and illustrated by art spiegelman (small a, small s) in 1994. And while "an epic poem of the jazz age" would lose me, William S. Burroughs saying "It's the book that made me want to be a writer," alongside the presence and attention of spiegelman, would be enough to win me over.

It's a story of a party, of course, during prohibition, full of easy women, hustlers, bathtub gin, sex, violence, dragons to chase and a casual racism and holiday dollop of antisemetism that places the work firmly in its time without dating it– the shocking rush that comes from the… the, what, the sin, the titillation of all these wasted vaudeville wastrels transcends all that. It's about any bunch of sex and booze-fueled losers chasing after debauchery in an apartment with back rent due. It's timeless.

There's nothing winter about this book– in fact Queenie, our wastrel-in-chief, smokes out and luxuriates naked to try and beat otherwise oppressive heat– but it was given to me at Christmas, right before I ran off into a world of high drama and low rent for myself. Hell, it's barely even comics, with a kind of wood-cut illustration adorning each spread there's hardly any sequential visual narrative at all, but it's the first book I'd seen from spiegelman after the tour de force that was MAUS, whose importance and power really can't be overstated. And every Christmas I dig it out and read it a few times.

Like every other inevitable goddamn thing about the holidays: the doors always spring open; the cops always rush in.