Weekly Roundup: Oct. 3 2022 (PJ Harvey's Orlam, Kim Kelly's Fight Like Hell) (Patreon)

Orlam (PJ Harvey)

Finally got a copy of this the other week. Not many will, I'm afraid. A 90s alternative rock musician's book-length narrative poem in an archaic English dialect won't grab a wide audience.

PJ Harvey is a seminal artist for me, on the same level as J. R. R. Tolkien, Kate Bush, and Elizabeth Sandifer. Her brand of creeping never-quite-gothic pseudo-folk music of darkness has touched me since before I saw her perform at Wolf Trap in 2017, and even more since then. Six-and-a-half-years after her last studio LP, I was ready for another PJ Harvey project.

In her later albums, Let England Shake and The Hope-Six Demolition Project, see Harvey exploring a kind of morose yet tender baroque English folk rock, where horn-like electric guitars growl over reedy ballads of the Somme and Anacostia. Folk songs like "The Last Living Rose" and "The Community of Hope" have more in common with Joan Baez than Shirley Manson.

Needless to say, Orlam, Harvey's 300-page poem about her West Country home of Dorset, is actually a natural progression. As Harvey has become more fixated on language, her stark lyricism has lent itself to poetry quite easily. 

In Orlam, language is an engine and an end in itself. Its West Country dialect is printed on two pages: the left, in a lighter font, translating the text to Modern English, while the right page shows the archaic text in a dark font. The result is a book that's as fun to read out loud as it is to peruse.

It's ugly, to be sure: killers and corpses and child molesters roam Orlam's town of Underwhelem. Sometimes you read the word "she-males" in a 2022 book by a presumable cisgender woman. The little tome is rough, painful, and delightful in equal measures. Not a populist pick, but easy to respect.

Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor (Kim Kelly)

Anarchist metal-head Kim Kelly is the best labor journalist to bear her unfortunately misspelled surname. Combing a savvy, narrative-minded pen with a left-wing conscience and historical wisdom, Kelly feels like the folk heroes she writes about: larger than life, armed with the truth, and full of rippin' yarns.

So Fight Like Hell, Kelly's rip-roaring history of the labor movement in America, is the perfect culmination of her outstanding labor reporting. Jumping in and out of crucial moments in history, Fight Like Hell shows the usually horrific yet frequently heroic underbelly of American labor, the proletarian victims of factory fires, and the folk heroes who helped lead masses to victory. 

Folks reading the book may already know about Eugene V. Debs and Joe Hill, but they're less likely to know about women, people of color, and queer folks who led the labor movement. Lucy Parsons, Frances Perkins, and my new hero Ida Mae Stull get their dues here. This is a corrective work of history about a topic of American life that barely has any prominent written history at all. Hard to get more essential than this.

Probably my book of the year. If y'all read any book I've reviewed in 2022, make it Kim Kelly's Fight Like Hell. Everybody should read it. Anybody can benefit from this book and learn something crucial from it. This is a barnstorming consciousness raiser of a book, and I literally cannot recommend it enough.