Joshua Wheeler presents Acid West
“When you hear I’m from New Mexico, you may have stories of Albuquerque and Santa Fe and Taos, the famous towns up north,” Joshua Wheeler writes in his debut essay collection published this spring by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. “There is no easy way to explain that here in the underbelly, south of the 34th parallel, which cuts the state in half, things are different. We use the abbreviation SNM for our home, and maybe that is a good explanation, how there is something awkward but accurate in the way it comes off the tongue like S&M.”
Wheeler, an assistant professor of nonfiction writing at Louisiana State University, populates the freewheeling
with a cabinet of curios assembled from seven generations of his family’s imprint on the southern New Mexico landscape. His sprawling essays are written with a gonzo consciousness that recalls the narrative digressions of David Foster Wallace — on such topics as the Trinity Test that bleached Wheeler’s great-grandfather’s cows, the toxic wounds of downwind radiation, the buried ironies of unearthing a cache of Atari cartridges in the desert, and the disjointed rhythms of a small-town Applebee’s. In April, praised Wheeler’s disjunctive yet eminently readable style: “Conjunctions do some heavy lifting. Even section breaks and tenses become the objects of dexterous play. The collection seems to be a raucous mutiny against the notion that language should be subject to inflexible regulations.”
At 4 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 14, Wheeler presents at the Jean Cocteau Cinema (418 Montezuma Ave., 505-466-5528), along with a new New Mexico project, a multimedia presentation entitled
Fielding was an actor, screenwriter, and silent movie director who commandeered the entire Plaza Hotel in Las Vegas for two years beginning in 1913, making several films that culminated in a five-reel futuristic thriller set in 1950 that is now lost to time — the story of which is ripe for retelling to Jean Cocteau audiences. The author event is $10, and $23 includes a copy of Acid West; tickets are available at jeancocteaucinema.com. — Molly Boyle