Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground

by Charles Bowden, Amy Goodman (Introduction), Denis Moynihan (Introduction)

Cultivated from the fierce ideas seeded in Blood Orchid , Blues for Cannibals is an elegiac reflection on death, pain, and a wavering confidence in humanity’s own abilities for self-preservation. After years of reporting on border violence, sex crimes, and the devastation of the land, Bowden struggles to make sense of the many ways in which we destroy ourselves and whether there is any way to survive. Here he confronts a murderer facing execution, sex offenders of the most heinous crimes, a suicidal artist, a prisoner obsessed with painting portraits of presidents, and other people and places that constitute our worst impulses and our worst truths. Painful, heartbreaking, and forewarning, Bowden at once tears us apart and yearns for us to find ourselves back together again.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays, Nature, History, Westerns

352 pages, Paperback

First published November 6, 2002

About the author

Charles Bowden was an American non-fiction author, journalist and essayist based in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

His journalism appeared regularly in Harper’s GQ, and other national publications. He was the author of several books of nonfiction, including Down by the River.

In more than a dozen groundbreaking books and many articles, Charles Bowden blazed a trail of fire from the deserts of the Southwest to the centers of power where abstract ideas of human nature hold sway — and to the roiling places that give such ideas the lie. He claimed as his turf "our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox (all of them) books about America" (Jim Harrison, on Blood Orchid ).

Reviews

[John]

Author is a former newspaper crime reporter but became disgusted with reporting raped and murdered children. He continues writing about America's cultural underbelly. There's a chapter on the teamster's union, LBJ, life in an unincorporated Mexican border town, suicide of an artist, a prison execution. His literary style leaves you feeling as though you're residing inside a bleak Edward Hopper painting.

[Rusty]

There are a couple essays in here as fine as anything you'll read. They're surrounded by some one-note material, unfortunately. However, the man can write his fool head off.

I'm slowly looking for and getting everything else he's written, though, if that tells you anything.

[Simeon Berry]

"Torch Song" (published as a separate essay in The Best American Essays 1999) alone makes this book worth it, as it is arguably one of the best essays I've ever read (with Bernard Cooper's "Truth Serum" and Joan Didion's "The White Album"). It describes his time as a reporter on the sex crimes beat, and it is extraordinarily brutal and visceral, but also lucid and terribly effective, incisively analyzing how sex is constructed in American culture.

Sadly--though not surprisingly--most of the rest of the pieces in this book are not so rigorously constructed. Bowden is concerned with marginal communities and forces, and has a grand thesis about how America is hemorrhaging, economically, culturally, and spiritually (which is salient if not totally coherent), but I found myself less convinced. He also has occasionally lyric excesses (there are lot of rivers, flowers, screams, and other icons which were used mythically) which were sometimes effective and sometimes overwrought. A fine sensibility though, overall, and possessed of a keen emotional intelligence.

[Bern J]

Of the Charles Bowden books that I've read, I liked this one the least. I get that we live in a materialist culture that eats it's young but Bowden isn't the only person to have ever lost close friends & relatives to cancer, violence & suicide. Bowden freely admits that he
lives on the edge. Violence is part of the territory.
Get over it, Bowden, move on; no one gets out of here alive.
I never realized that Yaquis are such bad asses; good to know as I live in Arizona.
And I always enjoy hearing conventional wisdom flipped on it's ear; Bowden writes that other than sending the first troops (called advisors, back then) into Viet Nam & commissioning the Bay of Pigs debacle, JFK,our much deified president of the last half of the 20th century, accomplished very little. Meanwhile, LBJ, the presidential goat of the 1960's was responsible for passage of the Civil Rights Act, the War on Poverty & a paragraph of other landmark social
programs. And yes, he did get us more deeply involved in Viet Nam.

[Al]

Bowden works through lessons to live, phenomenological approach to uncommon humanity he compares to the Mesquite tree whose roots can go a couple football fields down. Works through his love of cooking, food, the booze, the women, the wine, the heat, and the hate of the world.
"Weather will be a factor. Watch for blue mists. Expect drought. Know the flood is coming. Read menus carefully. Open your mouth" he prescribes in a prophetic voice grounded in what he rues and what he savors.

[Ham Z]

“I have always been of the ground and yet estranged from the ground by my ways and my hungers.”

Incredible exploration of the human condition, the ways we are both deeply connected and drawn to the natural beauty and pain of the earth yet removed from it by selfish desire and violence.

“Without mesquite I am nothing. Nothing but one more man wailing at his fate in a bar at closing time.”

[jj]

I loved everything I've read of his. I admired whatever it was in his character that allowed him to witness, live & report about horrifying events without it seeming to affect him - until I read this book. It took it's toll on him and made me sad that he dealt with these experiences and horrors in self abusing ways. A real wake up call on one of my heroes.

[Maris]

Dunno why this was on my TBR but lordt the writing style is not for me

[Laura Hanke]

You almost need a drink and a cigarette to process this one. Very pesado.

[Kallie]

I resisted Bowden's intense voice and point of view. He won. I wish more Americans would read him. We are consuming the earth's resources at an alarming, greedy rate that leaves little for others less fortunate. Our capitalist agendas justify this. As Bowden says, the ultimate form of capitalism is crime, theft (whether white-collar or full-out gangsterism). He seems to live with that knowledge and does not let the reader off the hook either. Re-reading him, I have been tempted to read aloud in a melodramatic, mocking voice; then I go back to the same passage and enter his sensibility and find that voice the appropriate voice for despair and yearning. I don't think I could stand some of the dramatic people he hangs out with either, but who knows. And, he is definitely sexist in a Bohemian version of that but still . . . I do not care for his failure to question the all-important male gaze, his in particular. My favorite part: his history of the Yaqui -- the marginal survival of an indigenous group with entirely different, non-consuming view of the world and their environment.

[Zack]

There are long passages I liked, but the overall feel is too melodramatic. The narrator compares himself to the notoriously thirsty desert tree mesquite all throughout, like that self-ascribed kinship automatically qualifies him to divine America's unconscious socio-cultural cannibalism somehow. One cool thing: he talks about the Austin crazy-house I used to live near and write about in "Undamned!" Also a long chapter about the madness of LBJ and one or two about the Yaqui Indians, but overall seems more about the style-of-telling than the quality of tale. I bought it because the book jacket compared Bowden to Mark Twain and Woody Guthrie, "a true American crank." Well, I don't know. It's not a bad book, but see what you think.

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-83...

[Little]

I read one chapter. One horrific, depressing, disgusting chapter about the worst people in America doing the world's worst things to other people. It made me sad. More than that, it made me physically ill. Yes, this terrible stuff happens. Yes, it happens more than we'd all care to admit. That doesn't mean, however, that I want to sit and assess it, like poking a finger into an open wound to feel its contours. There's plenty of horror situated close to home already. I don't benefit from contemplating horror in the next city over. Nope. Done.

[Tracy]

Charles Bowden is an excellent observer and writer. The very end of the book was a bit difficult to understand what he was talking about (not the "Coda" story, the end of the previous essay).

His writing style may be difficult for some to get into, but once you are engaged, it can be quite beautiful.

[Corie Sanford]

I didn't make it through the whole book and maybe that's why I didn't enjoy it very much...well, I enjoyed the first half and then I couldn't force myself to finish it. Interesting, yet self indulgent.

[Ricky]

Experimental writing that didn't work for me. I tried, though. I did read it to the end, although I walked away with nothing.

[Charles Overman]

Bowden’s slept on, man. Somebody I admired put me onto this. I read it one summer after coming home and never was so inspired.