Books I Read September 14th, 2018

Happy new year to my Hebrew friends, happy everything else to everyone else. The weather in the evenings in LA is indescribably perfect. My life kicks along at a reasonably pleasant pace, despite it all. The last two weeks, I read the following.

The Bitterest Age by Raymond Kennedy – A precocious adolescent Berliner struggles to hold her family and life together during the last days of WWII, with the Nazi regime collapsing and the Soviets soon to arrive. There’s a lot of good stuff here, the heroine is well-drawn (if somewhat superhuman), but I think I might have felt it to be a bit too simple to meaningfully capture the inconceivable horrors of wartime, both in terms of the language and the underlining moral focus. It’s not a bad book by any means, but I couldn’t help but feel that the basically bourgeois moral structure Kennedy seeks to showcase was a little too neat, a little too clean. Which was sort of the point of the thing, but still.

A Borrowed Man by Gene Wolfe – I think Gene Wolfe is probably the best living fantasist, but this didn’t do it for me.

The Gardens of Consolation by Parisa Reza – Chronicling the lives of two generations of Iranians in the first half of the 20th century, Reza packs a tremendous amount into this slender novel. Perhaps too much? Her depiction of romantic love, and particularly of romantic love from the female end of things, is beautifully rendered, really a delight to read. A lot of the rest of it – dealing with the political developments in the years leading up to the CIA backed removal of Mossadegh, and the character of modern Iran – I thought was somewhat weaker. Not weak, but not as strong as romantic bits. Still, good stuff all in all, I’ll see what else I can find by the author.

Back by Henry Green – A soldier returns from WWII, becomes obsessed with the half-sister of his dead wife, sort of loses his mind, sort of gets it back. I complained that the other two novels I read by Green – Loving and Doting – were masterfully written but too narrow. Here I couldn’t help but feel the opposite. There is some fabulous language – the first few chapters, which are more impressionistic, even experimental, are very strong – but the narrative is rather shaggy, and didn’t exactly pull together for me.

Based on a True Story by Norm MacDonald – There are a lot of good throw away lines in this anti-celebrity memoir, but the main joy is seeing MacDonald’s parodying of literary styles – a few chapters of Bukowski, a pitch-perfect if horrifying pseudo-Faulkner – which are fabulously spot on. A librarian in the Silver Lake library wearing a Tom Waits t-shirt shushed me for laughing too loudly while I was reading it, so I guess you should probably take that as a solid recommendation.  

Dreams in Folklore by Sigmund Freud – Freud has this tendency to over-complicate even stone simple things, preferring elaborate explanations for what are fairly obviously mental processes; case in point, this slim tome, which searches desperately through the scatological stories of Central Europe, finding in them all sorts of deep seeded impulses while somehow missing the fact that people think poop is funny and like to write stories about it. I mean, I don’t take any of Freud’s stuff that seriously, but this one was real goofy.   

Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard – Jamie is a precocious adolescent living in Shanghai, who becomes separated from his parents when the Japanese invade and is forced to live out the war on his own, first in a sort of Peter Pan-esque interlude among the wreckage of the Anglo-Chinese households, then as a prisoner of war. Here as elsewhere, Ballard is a master of conjoining clashing experiences, narrating the joy which Jamie takes in his acts of survival, daily horrors made easier by a child’s incapacity to entirely understand the world around him, and the shifting uncertainties of a brief experience. But unlike his savage social commentaries/science fictions, which have the occasional tendency to tilt self-indulgently, the biographical nature of the content – the book is based, one sense accurately, on Ballard’s own experiences in the war – keeps the narrative tight, if horrifying. Very, very strong recommendation.

The Alexiad by Anna Comnena – It’s always fun to read history written by a historical figure, so to speak, and this overview of the life of the Emperor Aleixus, who did a pretty good job of rebuilding the shattered prestige of the Eastern Roman Empire, by his daughter Anna, was…reasonably engaging? Somewhat interesting? It was sort of vaguely for a project I’m working on, otherwise I’m not sure I’d have bothered.

My Marriage by Jakob Wasserman – The loosely fictionalized life history of a woman with narcissistic personality disorder, written by a her manipulative, selfish husband, who also happens to be a pretty famous early 20th century Austrian novelist. Really, really good – the portrait of Ganna within will resonate with, I can’t help but imagine, anyone who reads it – she is your cousin, your best friend’s ex-girlfriend, maybe an individual you yourself were foolish enough to allow into your life. Her endless struggle against the world’s refusal to bend to her every whim is chronicled with blazing clarity, albeit by an author whose own self-obsession itself borders on the pathological. Other readers – was your impression that Wasserman is writing himself in as a particularly noxious character, or that he simply didn’t understand the degree to which he was betraying himself within the narrative? I think it was the latter. Absolutely fabulous, in any case, strong rec.

Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego by Sigmund Freud – Usually there’s a point in Freud’s essays where he’ll fiat some flatly incorrect premise, and then rush past in hopes you won’t notice. Here it comes in identifying a ‘leader’ as an essential pre-condition of the ‘group/herd’, which brings us back to his father-as-first-sacrifice thesis which he articulates in Moses and Monotheism, but sidesteps the most fascinating aspect of group psychology; namely, that it often operates without any such patriarch, but as a faceless, blameless mass, giving vent to the sublimated desires of each individual. Whatever, there are still some fun brain teasers in here.

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich – A polyphonic reconstruction of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Long interviews with distinct ‘types’ – an embittered soldier, a hollow advertising exec, winners (but mostly losers) in the New Russia – with each section being distinct genres in and of themselves; mystery, horror, tragic romance. The scope and depth of this project, the profundity which Alexievich mines from the lives of her subjects, disparate voices but uniting themes – the universality of pain, the awfulness of death (and sometimes life), the redeeming and damning power of love – are immeasurable. One ought to be careful of making too pronounced a judgment on a book one has just finished, but ignoring that rule entirely I’m going to go ahead and say this is one of the finest things I’ve ever read, a magisterial work of human insight, an enormous accomplishment, fucking breathtaking, give it a go.

Love's Lovely Counterfeit by James M. Cain – A clever, amoral chiseler aims to overthrow the crime boss of a small midwestern city – so, Red Harvest, but with Cain’s nasty, sexy sheen. Like most of the rest of the stuff I’ve read by Cain, this goes on 30 pages longer than it really needed to, but you can’t quite bring yourself to complain.

Books and Tunes August 31, 2018

August Ends. I gradually grow acclimated to not eating exclusively red meat. Do you know dates are pretty good? Also, labneh. One afternoon I surfed badly. One evening I got a drink on top of a rotating tower. Things which would be tacky and awful in other places are lots of fun in LA.

Tunes for August

·         Houndmouth – bad name, good band

·         I’m not saying Townes Van Zandt is the best song writer who ever lived, but if you said it, I wouldn’t run over and slap you in the face

·         Do the Fruit Bats sound like the Bats deliberately? They’d have to, right? Yeah.

I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon – Constructed from interviews and scrap of Zevon’s journal, this is as down and dirty as you’re going to get – every petty rivalry, debauched episode, every misbehavior of a brilliant artist with some very serious character issues. Despite which, Crystal Zevon manages an enormously impressive even-handedness, particularly given that Warren seems to have beat the hell out of her a couple of times. A ravenously engaging read, the best rock and roll biography I ever read, hands down.

The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino – A wonderous little morsel about a teenager who climbs into the trees and refuses to come done, living a long life of romantic adventure and noble self-denial. Extremely charming. I’m starting to think I maybe really like Calvino, but just wasn’t grabbed by Invisible Cities.

A New Hope For the Dead by Charles Willeford – A cop and his people in 80’s Miami. There was some good slice of life stuff here, and I didn’t find the narrative (such that it was) entirely unengaging, but two weeks after I read it I can’t remember anything that really happened, which usually isn’t a great sign.

Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis – A comic overview of the rise, fall, and sort of rise of a mid-20th century cult – the peculiar and dishonest characters it attracts. All the usual pleasures of a Portis story are here – the deft sense of irony, the brilliantly funny dialogue – but operating along a narrative structure which, while loose, is outside of the ‘first person southern idiot voice’ he does in a lot of his other books. Lots and lots of fun, not quite True Grit but still well worth your time.

Writin' Is Fightin': Thirty-Seven Years of Boxing on Paper by Ishmael Reed – I love Reed’s early novels but this is…pretty weak beer. A collection of editorial and essays about controversies long forgotten, and inter-academic feuds which could never have been of much interest to anyone.   

The Varangians of Byzantium by Benedict Benedikz -- If you want to read a narrow academic history of an obscure military unit within a long decayed empire, you could do worse than this.   

Sun and Steel by Yukio Mishima – Literature, not to say life, offers no shortage of brilliant people dithering around in the most incoherent or radically destructive directions, but even still, you would be hard to find a more perfect encapsulation of genius put to the most startling stupid ends than Mishima’s grand self-statement. Individual lines are beautifully written, certain thoughts are articulated with heart-aching grandeur, taken in sum its worship of unthinking physical force, that is to say violence, in a nation then recovering from apocalyptic destruction (and responsible for a great deal of the same), must be judged either indescribably stupid or nightmarishly vile. One need not be aware of Mishima’s comi-tragic attempt to put this philosophy into practice to hold it in contempt. In short, this is every bit as rational as one would expect from a man who chose to be photographed for the book jacket in a speedo, wearing a katana.

Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber – A delightful children’s story about a magic prince and whatnot. Lots of fun nonsense language, and some very clever lines. I’ll pick one up for my nephew.

The Butterfly by James M. Cain  – Appalachian incest, clan rivalries, moonshining, all the erotic and horrific thrills one would expect in a Cain novel. A good way to burn an hour.  

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich – When I was about twenty-two or so I went on a military history kick, superseding my hyper masculine literature kick, which itself was the successor to my years of reading nothing but epic fantasy. Progress is gradual. In any event, there was a time when that was really my bag – Tacitus to John Keegan, Basil Liddel Hart, Shelby Foote, Napoleon and Frederick, Rommel, we can go on. I was never altogether interested in the strategy, not the sort of war nerd who geeks out on weapon’s specs and memorizes orders of battle. I was interested in lived experience; loose buttons, snatches of song from opponent’s trenches.

In time that passion was eclipsed by others, but still I want to make clear that when I say this is one of the best book’s ever written about war, I’m comparing it to, at the very least, three or four hundred books. Alexievich’s painstaking collection of interviews with Soviet female soldiers, both frontline and support, who saw service during ‘the Great Patriotic War’, is heart-rending, beautiful, and profound. Her contention – that woman interpreted and remembered war in fundamentally different ways than men – holds true, offering insights not only into WWII but into the very nature of combat which I can’t remember being yielded in other texts. Apart from an intimate sympathy with her subjects, Alexievich’s brief meditations about war and memory are themselves heartfelt and valuable. Really, really, really good. It turns out even a bunch of old Danes get one right once in a while.

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirlees – A gothic romance that simultaneously manages to give birth to the ‘living next to fairyland’ sub-genre, that is to say, John Crowley sure as shit read this before he wrote Little, Big. Absolutely delightful – clever and gorgeously written, with just the right dash of melancholy. How lovely fantasy was, before it became hardened into genre! Thanks to Kurt Busiek for the rec.

Books I Read August 14th, 2018

The days pass. I write a lot. I listen to Warren Zevon. I explore weird parts of the city. I’m trying not to eat meat, which is a miserable experience. I hate being a vegetarian. I really don’t want to be one. I think I did some other things the last two weeks but honestly I can’t really remember right now, it’s been a long day and I still got a lot of it left. Anyhow, this is what I read the last two weeks.

The Minotaur by Benjamin Tammuz – A Mossad agent falls obsessively in love with a much younger woman, writing her letters and surrounding her with surveillance without the two ever meeting. Part psychosexual drama, a metastasized reckoning of the effects of obsession, part unconventional but recognizable spy story. Midway through I was getting ready to declare the thing a masterpiece, but the second half kind of cheapened the thing for me. I prefer my mysteries unsolved and my passions unfulfilled, thanks so much. Still, weird and sexy and worth a read.

All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski – An upper-class family in Eastern Germany during the final days of World War II, trying to survive the coming collapse of their society, a long overdue reckoning, the terrors of which are certain to fall indiscriminately among the population. Interspersed with a surreal absurdism is an acute appreciation of the meaninglessness (?) of individual morality against the nightmarish circumstances. Surely it is only coincidence that I’ve been lately drawn to the works of post-war German writers, their attempts to puzzle out how a society can go mad so quickly, and what responsibilities can be demanded of those unfortunate souls caught within its net. Recommended, in any event.

Winesburg, Ohio – The citizens of the eponymous town, the apex of Americana, tell their stories of unfulfilled hopes and endless restlessness to the ear of a sympathetic everyman (boy) preparing for his journey into the wider world.  The justly famous John Lingan (have you read his book? ? No? Why not? I told you to read it! Sometimes I get the feeling I’m just screaming nonsense into the ether, that maybe you don’t even care about my literary ramblings) claims this as among his favorites, so I figured I’d give it a shot. It’s good. Its very good. It’s poignant and beautifully written, and for those of us born in the bloated gray sprawl of the eastern seaboard places like Ohio or Missouri have their own peculiar foreign joys. Occasionally I did find myself thinking that the stories hewed a bit too close to one another, that surely there must be someone in this town who just, you know, likes their job at the pharmacy or thinks their husband is a swell enough guy. But this is a pretty minor quibble, and ultimately I’d offer up a very strong recommendation.

Omensetter's Luck by William H Gass – The story of the battle for the hearts and souls of a small town between Beckett Omensetter, all innocent righteousness and innate joie de vivre, and his nemesis, the Reverend Jethro Farber, bitter and impassioned hater of life.  The first two books by Gass I read – On Blue, and In the Heart of the Heart of the City – were enough to establish the man as a monumentally talented writer of prose, but at the same time left me somewhat cold. It was technically amazing but didn’t ring with me in any way, it seemed more like a writing exercise than true art. I started this then with some trepidation, anticipating 350 pages of linguistic riddles and lots of children’s rhymes. I got these in spades, but what I also got was a profound and sympathetic moral viewpoint of the sort I didn’t find in Gass’s other works. This is a very, very good book, beautiful and sad, literary genius married to authentic insight. Strongest possible recommendation, provided you don’t mind the inherent difficulty of the prose.

Blood on the Dining Room Floor by Gertrude Stein – Gertrude Stein wrote a mystery novel!?! Sort of! I mean, it’s not exactly Chandler, and there are most hints of a plot than there is an actual storyline, but there’s certainly a strong whiff of nefariousness in this, as well as a ton of absolutely fabulous writing, as would be expected. I mean, it is a little much, the endless reliance on pronoun and repetition, but when it works, as it often does, one is left gasping enthusiastically at Stein’s brilliantly precise language. Lots of fun. (PS the Butler did it.)

In a Lonely Place by Dorothy Hughes – A lonely ex-pilot may or may not be a killer of woman in Dorothy Hughes’ rivetingly nasty novel. Hughes has very solid noir chops, and is a generally competent plotter, but the really stellar stuff here is her insight into the savagery of the male psyche – a brooding cruelty mixed with an obsessive capacity for love, surrounded by the most petty, childlike selfishness. Jim Thompson himself couldn’t have done any better, strong recommendation.

The Midnight Folk by John Masefield – Lavie Tidhar wouldn’t stop ranting on about this, which after I got from the library turned out to be a cutesie y/a book from the 1920’s about a typical plucky everyboy protagonist-orphan pursuing a lost treasure in the face of his evil governess who is also a witch. I liked its indifference to making any sense, which is an aspect of y/a literature that’s largely been lost these days, and it went by pretty quick. Obviously I’m not the target audience. Then again, neither is Lavie?

The Book of Emma Reyes by Emma Reyes – These recollections of an inconceivably miserable upbringing of the eponymous author, first in the slums of Bogota, then in the miserable stolidness of a Catholic convent, are so horrifying and peculiar that the book seems a work of fantasy, in the vein of Gabriel Garcia Marquez who championed the work. They are not, however, or apparently not, only an authentic history of sordid misery and the heroism needed to escape from it. Very strange, very sad, very good. The bit about the doll, in particular…strong stuff, man. Just strong stuff.

Black Swans by Eve Babitz – I pretty much thought I was done with Eve Babitz after last month’s debacle, but then whoever runs the twitter feed for NYRB Classics – who I’m sure has a name and a life and like, pants, and whatnot, but whom I personally prefer to think of as an incorporeal literary force, a divine oracle, if you will – told me I should try Black Swans, and so I did.

But I didn’t love it. Babitz first two books are marvelous fun – she stakes out a unique space as a sort of sage of shallowness, able to write about her youthful escapades in a fresh and witty way. Three books later, one can’t help but wonder if maybe this pose of superficiality is not a pose. The fundamental unseriousness which was part of the fun of her earlier work is not nearly as much fun, and in particular the essay twinning the LA riots to a week of sex with a new lover is so howling tone-deaf it made this reader actively uncomfortable. Oh, well. At least we still have Eve’s Hollywood.

The Best of Connie Willis by Connie WIllis – Willis is the reverse of a lot of the other writers I’ve been reading lately, who tend to rely on esoteric prose to paper over narrative holes. Her internal mechanisms work really well—sometimes too well, bluntly, with the jokes too clearly telegraphed, and the plot getting wrapped up too neatly. She’s also a little too friendly for my tastes, but then I’m a miserable person. I did really like Death on the Nile, though, and the one about there being no more dogs.

Borrow the Night by Helen Nielsen – Very strong if somewhat unoriginal noir by the apparently (though, based on the strength of this, unjustly) forgotten Helen Nielsen. Good stuff.

Media I Consumed July 31, 2018

Another month in the can. Lasts two weeks I wasn’t reading like I supposed to, please don’t yell at me Dad, I’ll work harder, I promise. It’s hot here in LA. It’s probably hot where you are likewise. Maybe you noticed the world is on fire? Try and put out whatever you can.

Music For July

·         Cigarettes After Sex sound exactly like their name would indicate.

·         Warren Zevon has some of the most vivid, apocalyptic lines in all of pop music – even his outtakes are fabulous

Books I Read

The Late Mattia Pascal by Luigi Pirandello – When an amiable reprobate is incorrectly identified as a suicide, he sees an opportunity to escape his awful wife and the horrid tiny Italian town in which he lives, only to discover himself isolated and empty without his network of obligatory relationships. I did not like this book as much as I anticipated, or to the degree that Pirandello’s reputation merits. I found it a pleasant idle, occasionally humorous but bluntly I couldn’t quite see what the fuss is about. I’ll pick up another by Pirandello down the line and see if I can out which of us is at fault here.

The Chill by Ross McDonald – Lew Archer’s hardened moral super-man investigates a byzantine network of family relations and tragic back stories. All of them basically have this plot, but I thought this one was simpler, harder, and better written. Like this little gem-

…”It’s really amazing, you know? You really can make a decision inside yourself. You can decide to be one thing or the other.”

The only trouble was that you had to make the decision every hour on the hour. But he would have to find that our for himself.

What the shit have you written today, you two-bit penny-scribbling hack?

Norwood by Charles Portis – A well-meaning hick travels to New York City in pursuit of a 70$ debts, with various misadventures arising en route. Very funny, like everything else Portis writes, though my absolute and unswerving commitment to honesty in all things compels me to admit I do wish Portis demonstrated a bit more ambition in this and last month’s Dogs of the South, both of which are kind of lacking in plot or even much by way of point.

Petty: The Biography by Warren Zanes – Look, man, they can’t all be fucking experimental narratives and lost classics of world noir, OK? Sometimes you just want to read some dirt about one of your favorite childhood rock and roll stars. Juicy gossip being my only real barometer for celebrity memoir, I would say this was fine, but not as good as Keith Richard’s autobiography (Why did all these fires keep cropping up around Keith? Poor bastard!). It did make me really want to nab a copy of Wildflowers on vinyl, though.

The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon M. Williams – An effeminate American professor and his shrewish, beautiful wife, find themselves besieged by inbred English peasants. It can be a thin line between examining our instincts for violence indiscriminately glorifying in them, and this taught little thriller, the basis for the Peckinpah classic Straw Dogs (and, apparently, a no doubt horrible remake), doesn’t quite meet the line. The first three quarters are a razor-sharp dissection of the fears and anxieties which are the core of masculine self-identity, as well as being relentlessly plotted and bitterly funny. But the end wraps the thing up in so neat a package that one almost feels uncomfortable – of course, everyone dreams about saving their wives from rampaging savages – that there are, these days, so few savages (or perhaps so many) is one of the essential problems of modernity, how to excise masculine energy in a healthy rather than self-destructive fashion. Then again, that might be asking a lot of an awfully slender text. Still, the it starts a lot stronger than it ends.

The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan – A polyphonic retelling of the failed Irish rebellion of 1798, which saw a small army of French revolutionaries and Irish militia put down with brutal severity by the English Crown. This is historical fiction in the Raj Quartet mold – no noble charges, no romantic retellings, only desperate men doing the best they can under terrible circumstances. Flanagan has some fine prose, and each of the many viewpoints – from Lord Cornwallis to a roaming poet/schoolteacher – feel honest and fully fleshed. It goes on for quite a while, but then, it is historical fiction, that’s kinda to be expected.  

Heed the Thunder Jim Thompson – Chronicling the downfall of the Fargo family, the Snopes of Kansas, basically, inbred, amoral, fiercely loyal to clan. A lot of what would make Thompson what Thompson was (one of the greatest American noir writers of the 20th century, which is to say, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century)  is on display in this, his first book and to the best of my knowledge the only attempt he made at ‘literary’ rather than ‘genre’ fiction. His prose is brutally mean but very funny, and his lived experience shines through the pages. Also here is the stark moral outlook which a lot of reviewers seem to have missed—on the front cover the New York Review of Books proclaims ‘Thompson’s books are palpably evil..’ which is both 1) not really a compliment and 2) completely untrue, indeed so obviously and clearly untrue that one wonders if whoever reviewed this bothered to read the damn thing. Thompson is not a nihilist, not at all – Thompson is moralist, albeit one concerned with the doings of very bad, very sad people, people who inevitably get their tragic and miserable end. Heed the Thunder functions clearly and unambiguously as a critique of American capitalism, indeed of the American way of life, which Thompson (with uncomfortable accuracy) identifies as, basically, an obsessive desire to get yours before your neighbor gets his. It’s not a perfect first novel, but it is very good, well worth the time of any fan of Flannery O’Connor or rural gothic generally.  

Compulsory Games by Robert Aickman – Aickman is a fabulous, inventive, peculiar writer, and this collection of his short fiction is so good I’m going to write a paragraph talking about what I don’t like about it. Aickman’s pattern in most of these are, basically –> individual in a highly charged emotional situation + uncanny or surreal situation = mysterious denouement which deliberately fails to clarify things. Sometimes this works marvelously, with the peculiar subtleties of each story’s theme submerged in rhyming narrative madness. Other times I felt like the climax was too vague to live up to the full potential of the set-up, and some vary good set-ups are kind of ruined for want of a clearer, sharper focus. None of which should detract from the first part (and most relevant) part of this capsule review, which is to say that Aickman is excellent, and these are a good way to frighten yourself to sleep one stormy evening.

Books I Read July 15th, 2018

I returned to my native East coast for the first time since fleeing to California. I found the weather muggy, the Atlantic quite cold, Toronto pleasant but unremarkable, Baltimore its beautiful self, my family well or feigning so for my benefit, my friends surviving their traumas or celebrating their accomplishments, in short, that the world continues to rumble along despite my not always keeping an eye on it. I hope you are well, and kind to the people around you, and true to your word despite the difficulties that entails, and able to take some joy in whatever currently surrounds you. 

The Wine Dark Sea by Robert Aickman – My feeling is that genre is only a useful concept in terms of longer fiction, where an author can variate on recognizable narrative beats, and doesn’t really have any meaning in terms of short stories. All short stories are jokes, basically, mean little one liners, and I don’t really see a distinction between your classic Borges reveal that the narrator was a minotaur and last week’s New Yorker where the hook is that the daughter and father will remain forever estranged, or whatever (I didn’t actually read week’s New Yorker but they’re all kind of the same). A lot of impossible stuff happens in this nightmarish, erotic and fantastical collection but the underlying themes – of environmental and technological estrangement, madness and love that is like madness – are grand enough in scope and executed with sufficient artistry that it doesn’t really seem fair to me that Aickman seems to have been shunted off into some horror-filled ghetto. Anyway it’s excellent, give it a pull.

Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret – I have really fond memories of carrying Proust around strange corners of Europe some ten years back but actually didn’t know that much about his life, and so this lengthy series of reminiscences by the author’s maid were a lot of fun. Reading of his deathbed creativity I couldn’t help but be reminded of the great James Dewitt Yancey, more popularly known as J Dilla, who’s final torturous months were given over to the creation of Donuts, in its own way as seminal a work as À la recherche du temps perdu.

RIP.

Ivory Pearl by Jean-Patrick Manchette – Manchette’s final, unfinished novel, is an attempt to move beyond the classic hardboiled noir which he mocked/epitomized in his earlier work, in favor of a more overtly political thriller, John Le Carre rather than Jim Thompson. Honestly, it’s hard to say exactly how well he did, since this is really only about half a book, but then, 30 thousand words from Manchette is better than a door stopper from most other writers.

Transit by Anna Seghers – Anna Seghers was a German communist who escaped the Nazi regime on the same boat that took Victor Serge to Mexico, fictionalizing her nightmarish escape from Europe in this beautiful, searing, tragic novel. Her protagonist, Seidel is a strangely upbeat German everyman, who escapes from a concentration camp and makes his way to Marseilles, joining a vast crowd of refugees desperate to escape the tangled bureaucracy and the coming certainty of death. Amid this chaos. Seidel finds a curious balance, stemming from his peculiar indifference towards his fate, until a romantic obsession unspools him. Beautiful, brilliant, tragically of the moment, given our own horrific, inhumane immigration policy. Lovely to see echoes of your nation in Vichy France! Anyway, strong rec.

Civilization and Its Discontents by Sigmund Freud – I don’t know why exactly I was driven to work my way through Freud but I’m glad I started. I remain skeptical of his therapeutic value, and he has a bad habit of being unable to recognize his good ideas from his very bad ones (in the fashion of Germanic geniuses generally (yeah, I’m looking at you, Kant, the Categorical Imperative is nonsense)) but all the same this is a work of penetrating insight into the human condition. I am pretty much on board with his idea that our conceptions of morality developed from our upright gate, and the ensuing transition from scent to sight-based organisms, and his brief explanation of why happiness is an impossibility is at once profound and, to my peculiar way of thinking, quite uplifting. There’s a moral vision articulated here which I don’t think Freud gets credit for conventionally, an appreciation for the implausible decency of the species, even an admiration for its bravery in the face of the pitiless existence to which its subject. Weird that he’s not better known!

Crash by J.G. Ballard – Speaking of Eros and Thanatos! A bunch of pervs getting off on car crashes, more or less. Ballard is a brilliantly precise writer, and there is some fabulously peculiar stuff in his eroticization of technological violence, as well as some interesting stuff about  lust works to dehumanize us—but, like most horror, and most erotica, for that matter, it goes from being shocking to dull very quickly. I get it, man, you kind of want to fuck a car-- you sure this couldn’t have been a novella?

One Day of Life by Manlio Argueta – 12 hours in the lives of a brutalized peasant family during the civil war in El Salvador. It’s always a dangerous thing for an educated person to write from an uneducated person’s perspective, it’s a very fine line to hit, and I’m not 100% certain I felt Argueta did it here. There’s a bit of a whip lash in the heroine’s internal monologue from earthy, personal concerns to too-precise summations of the political circumstances afflicting her and her family. I appreciated this more frankly for the moral weight than its actual aesthetic. Which isn’t to say it’s bad, really, it’s just not spectacular. This is why it makes no sense to write reviews about books, because at the end mostly you’re just like, yeah, this was fine, there are better books and worse books.

Scoundrel Time by Lillian Hellman – All my books were done and I stole this from the beach house I been staying at for a bus ride to a plane (I already had a book for the plane, but heaven forbid I spend an hour not looking at printed text.) Anyway it’s fine, I’m not sure why I read it really or why anyone else would either. Hellman is interesting and upright in her refusal to cowtow to McCarthy etc but this isn’t particularly riveting or, really, that detailed.

The New Testament (King James Version) – Look, I don’t want to start a religious war here, and I’m not a believer so it’s not like I really have a dog in the fight, but there’s just nothing in this to match the sheer aesthetic genius of Genesis, let alone the brutal profundity of Job or Ecclesiastes. On the other hand, Matthew 6:17 is kinda my jam.

Shoot the Piano Player by Dave Goodis – A tragedy struck piano player, allowing his personality and genius to rot beneath a friendly, superficial exterior, finds himself pulled into a violent underworld by cruel fate and his terribly family. The basis for Truffaut’s film, though I found the novel much stronger, far and away the best I’ve read of Goodis. This is classic American noir, sparingly written and savage, a grim gut punch of a novel from a man well-familiar with the human capacity for self-destruction. Lots of fun.

Fear and Trembling by Soren Kierkegaard – Once upon a time I was a bad philosophy student, as I have been a bad waiter, TESL teacher, content developer, shelf stocker, etc. Most of the reason for my incompetence stemmed from an inability to sit still for any brief length of time and an absolute loathing of group work, but part of it also was because I didn’t really care about anything but ‘practical philosophy’ as it was at one point called, that is to say, ethics and whatnot. Pretty much I just wanted to understand how to act, or at least why I act in the fashion I was. Anyway, long tangent, who cares about that or what I think about Kierkegaard, but what I think is this didn’t really resonate with me. A discussion of the necessary absurdity of faith as a moral act with Abraham’s proposed sacrifice of Isaac as its particular, it was a bit too much soaring Teutonic tautologies to my taste, and honestly as a non-believer I couldn’t quite grasp the relevance of most of it. Am I supposed to kill a kid? Not kill a kid? SOMEONE LET ME KNOW.

The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei – Lost beneath a lot of the sanctimonious leftist polemics about reading writers outside of the old canon is that it’s actually really fun on its own merits to get a glimpse of a foreign life, or really just to be wading through a different set of cultural signifiers and thoughts. This short, strange, comic novel of an aging stereo salesman, a loser in the new China, is not on its own merits particularly spectacular. There’s a lot of that thing you often see in books translated from Chinese where metaphors and fragments of speech which are (one assumes?) nuanced in the original come off as cliché in English, and the earthy everyman protagonist is pleasant enough to spend a few hundred pages with but not much more than that. Honestly if it was set in Chicago or New York or whatever I probably would have enjoyed it a lot less, but the little details of a foreign city and culture were interesting enough to propel the story from basically mediocre to modestly enjoyable.

Wine Dark Sea by Leonard Sciascia – Sciascia is famous for his crime novels which double as sharp critiques of mafia influence on his native Sicily, and the strongest of the stories in this collection refer to that subject. The rest focus around the lives of small town peasant Sicilians, and are rather a mixed bag. Nothing objectionable here but I generally didn’t find it as strong as his novels and it was, to my mind, not as good as the other book I read this month with the same name.

Media I Consumed June 30th, 2018

I took a walk around the Silver Lake reservoir at sunset, beside a silent, padding coyote; for a quarter mile, maybe, separated by a wire face. Passing joggers proved indifferent, as was their right.

Songs I Liked In June

·         Chastity Belt are killing it

·         I always kind of hated the song Dreams until I heard Electric Peanut Butter Company’s funk-psyche rendition of it

·         Back when I was living in DC and spending all my money at the DJ Hut (RIP (I was never a DJ)) I was all about the DV/MD/VA Lo-Budget productions hip hop scene, of whom I gather Oddissee kind of blew up the biggest. Anyway, revisiting Ken Starr/Kev Brown/etc. this month made me feel really old. What’s going on in DC anymore? Does Florida Avenue Grill still exist? Did the Kogood Gallery ever fix its water floors? Someone catch me up.

·         Compare Miguel and J. Cole’s Come Through and Chill to the Bilal/Mos Def/Common track Reminisce, then come back and thank me

·         Look, I was surprised as you are to discover I really liked another Andre Bird album but shit, son, here we are

Books!

How to Become a Virgin by Quentin Crisp – An unnecessary though largely pleasant addendum to Crisp’s previous autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, dealing with the famed Bohemian homosexual’s life after he attained celebrity status. It’s not much of a book, really, and I suppose I could only recommend it to Crisp completists, which I guess as it turns out, I am, because I thought there was a lot of funny stuff in here. 

Schlump by Hans Herbert Grimm – An earthy if unspectacular story of an everyman German youth enlisting in World War I. One upside of decimating the intellectual flower of Europe to the horrors of modern warfare is that you got a lot of really good, really complex, really different fictionalized perspectives from those happy souls who survived it, by the standard of which Shlump is kind of middling. It has this sort of Teutonic sensitivity that reminded me a bit of Goethe or Hesse, but it can’t really be compared to a lot of other books on the topic, for instance, this month’s stand out Blood Dark, read down for more.

The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa – To dislike a book it is not enough only to note that it has been well reviewed, and, despite all odds, there are some very fine writers who have won the Nobel prize. This fictionalized history of the final days of Rafael Trujillo, Panamanian dictator 1930-1989, is totally OK. It is an absolutely tolerable book. It’s a little longer than it should be, and the nested secret is no sort of secret at all, and I didn’t really find the prose scintillating, but there’s nothing intolerable about it. It probably would not crack my top ten list of books about tyranny; Latin America section, but there are a lot of fabulous stuff in that section so that’s not altogether shameful? I could probably do a few hundred words here about the peculiar phenomenon of the mediocre ‘literary’ novel, occasional hallmarks of which are modest structural complexity, relatively simple prose, and an emphasis on visceral horror which is for whatever reason codes as ‘important’ to many readers, but I’ll spare you. Wait, shit, I didn’t spare you at all. Sorry.

The Time Wanderers by the Strugatsky Brothers  – I guess it turns out this is the (last?) in a ten book cycle dealing with a sort of future Soviet utopia’s attempts to colonize the galaxy, with last weeks Hard to Be a God in the same arch. This is not bad by any means, faux-collected documents about humanity’s attempts to reach further stages of evolution, more or less, but I don’t really like sci-fi, I mean I don’t have much of a tooth for it, and I think by this point I was just sort of at my quota, so to speak. I genuinely did not like any of these nearly as much as Roadside Picnic, which, in fairness is the acknowledged masterpiece.

Moses and Monotheism by Sigmund Freud – Judaism is an offshoot of the heretical Egyptian monotheistic cult of Aten, all religion (and human society basically) comes from a man’s desire to kill his father, Freud is absolutely batshit entertaining, it is fucking certifiable anyone ever took any of this as being science in the slightest sense, let alone thought to use its tenants therapeutically. Fun, though!

The Quick Red Fox by John D. MacDonald – I really liked my last Macdonald, but this take on the classic two-fisted private detective fell pretty flat to me, as do most of these kinds of stories post-Ross McDonald.

Uncertain Glory by Joan Sales –– The pitch is Dostoevsky meets For Whom the Bell Tolls, but to describe this as being a love triangle during the Spanish Civil War would be to exaggerate the degree of narrative here. Like the great Russian, there are a lot of long, somewhat stilted conversations about morality and the duality of man and so forth, which are…again, tolerable (that’s sort of been this week’s theme) but that’s a high bar to set for yourself genius wise and gun to my head I didn’t quite feel Sales met it. The earthier stuff about getting bread in wartime Barcelona and so forth was more interesting, but there was sadly less of it.  

Equal Danger by Leonard Sciascia –An upright inspector investigates a murder in a fictionalized country, in the course of which he’s forced to confront the omnipresent corruption of his and, let’s be blunt, human society. Somewhere between Hammet and Kafka, this is Sciascia at his purest, an articulate expression of anguish at the state of post-war Italy, human weakness and insensitivity, wrapped in a reasonably compelling noir package. Pretty excellent, worth your time.

Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette – A middling bourgeoise businessman is targeted for assassination, and finds himself forced to discover the tiger which has always lurked beneath his surface. Again Manchette shows an enormous genius for reconstituting hackneyed genre premise (in broad strokes this could be a very bad Liam Neeson movie) into a savage commentary on the hideous banalities of the modern age. At turns hysterical and horrifying, this is my favorite Manchette (no small praise), and something of a masterpiece. Strong recommendation.

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles – The dreamy, somewhat incoherent story of an American couple who go traveling in North Africa in the latter stages of Colonialism (though this bit isn’t that important) and gradually (actually not that gradually it’s a pretty short book) lose their personhood and sanity, this is a rough one to write a capsule review for. It’s beautiful, and strange, and its written in such a way at to evoke a mood rather then theme, or at least not a theme that can be easily explained—unless to say it deals with the sort of universal desire to desert the obligations, both social and internal, which make up our self-identity, and be diluted into some vaster tableau. Erotic, horrifying, very interesting, take a look at it.

The Instant Enemy by Ross McDonald – The story of sad-eyed tough guy Lew Archer’s attempt to save the life of a troubled young hooligan, and the endless spurt of tragic back story which comes out as a result. You know Ross McDonald is one of the greats because even though this book does not make any motherfucking sense it’s still fabulous. With a chalkboard I could not follow along with the labyrinthine complexities of this investigation, but the writing is on point, and the moral version defined within – a sadder, more sympathetic one then offered by his predecessors – is more than worth the price of admission.

The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz – A sometimes sweet but generally nightmarish re-creation of the author’s youth in a small city in Poland. This reminded me a lot of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, in its mad little vignettes which spin off in unexpected directions, and a little of Felisberto Hernandez, in its eroticized obsession with non-human objects and creatures, and a little bit of Proust in its minute recreation of childhood experience. A beautiful little dream of a book, something strange to savor and get lost in.

Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud – Enormously stimulating, if complete nonsense. Apart from the monomaniacal obsession with seeing Oedipus behind literally every aspect of human civilization, as well as what I can’t help but feel is an exaggerated emphasis on the defining importance of incest-avoidance as a societal bedrock, there’s the utterlyLouid absurd idea that the processes of an individual mind, dimly understood, could be transferred meaningfully onto the intellectual processes of the entire species. Again, it’s complete nonsense but boy was it fun.

Blood Dark by Louis Guilloux – Extraordinary. A WWI novel without combat, a very early absurdist text, existentialism before existentialism, Blood Dark is another one of those novels that a couple of hundred words isn’t really going to do justice to. The story of a faded, miserable, deformed academic, whose existence is dominated by a pointless and vague but still in some sense admirable crusade against – what, exactly? His fellow man, the circumstances enforced upon them by a cruel circumstance or a still more terrible deity. The surrounding cast of hypocrites, sadistic false patriots, weak saints, elderly lovers and corrupt bourgeoisie offer a scathing comment on the state of the French nation in the last year of WWI, but our pseudo-hero’s crusade, indifferently and pointlessly pursued, is at the heart of this masterpiece. This is bitter black by not nihilistic, and in contrast to a lot of his successors, Guilloux works to mine some value out of the ludicrous awfulness of the human condition, rather than wallowing pointlessly in it. Very strong recommendation, assuming, you know, you have the energy and time to spare.    

The Carter of 'La Providence' by Georges Simenon – I picked this up thinking it was one of Simenon’s gritty, miserable noirs, only to discover with some modest disappointment that it regarded another investigation his implacable, largely silent ogre Maigret. Since I actually don’t really care in the slightest about the internal plot mechanisms of mysteries, I find procedurals kind of tedious, which makes me not a very good judge of whether or not this is a good book. The stuff about the grand canal system was kind of a hoot, though, he’s got an admirable sense of place.

Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa – Half a dozen stories, by turns humorous and rather horrifying. Akutagawa is a very sly writer, with a deceptively simple style, nested in a lot of traditional Japanese mythology but easily accessible to a Western audience. Yam Gruel – a mocking myth about a pointless, pathetic official whose existence is given meaning by a desire to gorge himself on the eponymous breakfast food – is a lovely little marvel in particular. Lots of fun. Quick sidenote – anyone want to tell me why Kurosawa mis-titled his famous film? This is not a rhetorical question, I’m confused.

Media I Consumed June 14, 2018

Yeah, I know I’m late, I been saving lives and putting together IKEA furniture. This is what I read the last two weeks.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge – Victor Serge was born the child of international communist revolutionaries, spent his youth and middle age trying to overthrow the ailing pre-war European states, fought in the Russian Civil War, was jailed and broken for refusal to bend towards the totalitarian currents of the revolution, wrote several tremendously good novels, in short, was one of the most extraordinary of the 20th century’s personages. His autobiography makes for predictably fascinating reading, particularly his insightful portraits of basically every major leftist figure, and his honest efforts to reflect on the failures of the revolution, bitter criticism by which his essential optimism stands out even brighter. If I was the sort of person who felt things about things I might have found this inspiring.

Sex & Rage: Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time by Eve Babitz – Reading Eve’s Hollywood a few months ago I found myself flabbergasted that such a vibrant, interesting, commercially viable force had more or less disappeared; this book, Babitz’s third and the first to fictionalize her experience as LA ingenue and rock and roll muse, goes a fair way towards explaining the mystery. It is utter shit—badly plotted, sloppily written, and more self-indulgent than second-rate fan fiction. I could go on for about ten more sentences to this effect but what would be the point? Better to move on awkwardly.

Facundo: or Civilization and Barbarism by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento – An essay about the struggle between urbane civilization and rural barbarism within post-independence Argentina, written by a man who would become president of the country, this came up as part of my ongoing study of ‘early’ South American literature as having had an almost defining effect out of the then nascent continental consciousness. The joke, basically, is that while Sarmiento was a bitter opponent of the Caudillos that had come to power in his native country (and forced him to flee to neighboring Chile), he kind of can’t help but be drawn to their raw masculine savagery, seeing in it mankind’s horrifying but captivating instinct for self-destruction. More abstractly interesting than enjoyable in and of itself, but then, that’s life generally.

Suddenly, A Knock at the Door by Etgar Keret – For my money, Keret might be one of the best short story writers of the age—always original, funny when he wants to be, critical of society’s foibles but sympathetic to us poor schmucks caught in the middle of the mess. This collection is a maybe a little darker than the rest (reasonable given it’s the most recent and, you know, the state of the world and everything) but it’s still a delight to buzz through, like downing a bag of potato chips except each one is valuable. Maybe it’s more like Kale chips. I’ve been in LA too long.

Hard to Be a God by the Strugatsky Brothers -- A far-future communist functionary goes undercover on an alien planet closely resembling medieval Europe/your classic fantasy setting, taking the role of a Robin Hood/Cyrano type, with the caveat being he and his cohort can’t kill anyone or take any active role in advancing their new country from feudal barbarism into enlightenment. The Brothers had a real talent for writing legitimately entertaining genre stories which still manage to grapple with more substantial political and historical concerns than most of their American counterparts, and if this isn’t as strong as the masterful Roadside Picnic, it ain’t bad reading neither.

The Prone Gunman by Jean-Patrick Machette – A contract killer tries to get out of the business so he can spend his life with his long lost love—this enormously hackneyed premise, in the hands of a skilled crime writer so dark he makes James Elroy look like Agatha Christie, is reframed as a nihilistic commentary on the banal pointlessness of human existence, bitter, bleak, and hysterical. Machette is the French Jim Thompson.

Melville by Jean Giono – A short novella about the artistic burden incurred by Herman Melville prior to writing Moby Dick. I thought it was kind of overwritten and tiring, but I have a really, really low threshold when it comes to writers writing about writing, so you might dig it more than I did.

What Maisie Knew by Henry Miller – A young girl gets shuttled around London by her horrible, divorcee parents and her horrible divorcee parents’ horrible lovers, because innocence is a precious thing and yadda yadda yadda. Frequent readers of this blog (what? Really? Get a job) will be aware of my personal feeling that basically, with the exception of some Russians and maybe the Bronte sisters, no one wrote a good novel before the 20th century. The first Miller I’ve read since I was in college did not do much to shake that belief. This is the kind of book where a character will say a line of dialogue, and then that line of dialogue will be buttressed by a page of text describing the character’s emotional state, and how this line references previous themes, and so on and so forth. I kinda these kinds of books. It is also relentlessly unsubtle, and all the risqué bits are not that risqué 130 years on. I wouldn’t say there’s nothing here, but I didn’t love it and I absolutely felt the essential idea was dealt with better by other writers.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion – Weird that it took me this long to get to Joan Didion. Maybe if I had gotten to it earlier I’d have enjoyed it a bit more, but then again, maybe not. The strongest bit is the first third, a scathing critique of the 60’s West Coast counter culture which is funny but also cheap and kind of bitter – Didion hates these people with the sort of nakedness which makes any honest insight kind of impossible, and if you want to see a closet conservative tear apart the hippie beast you’d better go with Electric Kool Aid Acid Test. The second, rambling two thirds lost my interest completely, portentous and tiringly bitter. God sakes, Joan, you didn’t eat a good sandwich in any of these places? The weather wasn’t ever pleasant? Life consists exclusively of omens of doom? There isn’t anything on this earth worthwhile beside John Wayne’s penis?

The Steel Crocodile by D.G. Compton – Social sci-fi about the struggle between the soulless tendencies of the modern technocratic state against individual idiot’s right to self-determination. Strong, basically well written, Compton has a legit talent for swiftly modeling complex social dynamics, not generally a common feature of sci-fi stories. Downside is a lot of it has to do with computers, which, if you’ve ever read anything about computers before the development of the personal computer, depicts a vision of the future so gloriously inaccurate that it’s kind of hard to take seriously. The fear of an omnipresent media desperate for any sort of emotional provocation which Compton deals with in Continous Katherin Mortenhoe seems much more on point.

Trials of a Respectable Family by Mariano Azuela – A fascinating if imperfect portrait of a aristocratic conservative family during the Mexican Revolution, written by a former revolutionary soldier. The first part, detailing the family’s evacuation in the face of revolutionary forces by the youngest son, a weak-willed milksop, is a little too mean, and the second part, about the patriarch learning the value of hard work, is a little too nice. Still, there’s a lot of good stuff here, Azuela combines an understandable political enthusiasm with impressive structural and narrative complexity.

Beetle in the Anthill by the Strugatsky Brothers —The Bros. continue their run of cleverly re-imagining classic genre tropes – in this case the spy story, although there’s some sci-fi and even post-apocalyptic stuff here -- into more complex discussions of the nature of humanity, and even the sort of veiled criticisms possible to Soviet writers. They all also tend to fall pretty to third act infodumps and unruly Deus Ex Machinas, this one in particular more so than the others I read.

Media I Consumed May 31, 2018

I got moves, boy, you don’t know about him. I don’t broadcast them on the gosh dang internet. You’ll hear about them when it’s time to hear about them. When they finished bletting, and whatnot. What follows is May’s playlist, and the books I read and the films I saw last week.

Music For May

·         Billy Woods always kinda kills it

·         For droning, maudlin folk music you can’t get much better than Sam Amidon. Wasn’t he Samamidon a while ago?

·         Who is this Lord Echo character and why is he straight killing shit? This album is ludicrously upbeat Summer pop.

·         Call it shtick if you want to, but CW Stoneking sings a damn good shango.

·         I listened to Angel Olsen’s Never Be Mine about 50 times after I heard it, but I listened to Courtney Barnett’s Sunday Roast 100.

Other Men’s Daughters by Richard G. Stern – I don’t know about the rest of you but I learned to read off my father’s bookshelf, a vast-seeming library which consisted more or less exclusively of raw, pulpy fantasy and a lot of heavy, hyper masculine 20th century authors – Hemingway, John Barth, that sort of thing. Some of these guys – Saul Bellow, for instance – I would totally unhesitatingly describe as geniuses. Some of these guys were not. In any event, most of the literature I was exposed to as a youth had magic swords or brilliant, angst-ridden narrators with unhealthy relations towards woman. At 18 I thought like, half of all books were about professors at Ivy league colleges dealing with problems brought on by an exaggerated testosterone and general jackassery. This was probably a lot of the reason I stopped reading fiction between like, 20 and 25, frankly, and in recent years I’ve been kind of gun shy about dipping my toe back into the waters.

But I’m more or less happy I set aside that prejudice for this one, an excellent entry in the Roth/Irving/Updike milieu, about an affair between a professor and a co-ed which ends his marriage. Stern has a pretty extraordinary gift for prose, as well as a real insight into character’s beyond the protagonist, who come across as fully realized and human in a way that the weaker novels in this genre tend to fail it. There is a peculiar lack of tragedy to the story which, one feels, goes hand in hand with Stern’s ability to empathize with his characters If the narrator is an authorial surrogate, than at least Stern has forgiven himself. Which, I mean, depending upon how much of a moralist you are might piss you off, but at least it felt a little new.

Dark Lies the Island by Kevin Barry – Another collection of stories about drunkards in Wests Coast bars, lost children and occasional nightmares. I really like Barry’s style, he has a great ear for dialogue and a fabulous feel for male custom and behavior. It’s dark but not monochromatic, and the handful that verge into horror have fabulous stings.

Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed – Part alternate world fantasy, part meta-critique of the aesthetic values of Western Civilization, Mumbo Jumbo is probably best understood as an evocation, a Working, to use the book’s own vernacular, mockingly(?) supposing itself to herald or call forth a leveling of the white power structure and the birth of a new, multicultural age. This is Crying of Lot 49 meets The Fire Next Time, fascinatingly clever, innovative in a dozen ways. There’s so much great stuff in here that the missteps, in particular an abrupt third act switch in the narrative style, are particularly frustrating, but even still anyone reading it will come away with the certainty that Reed is an absolute original. Between this and the (somewhat superior) Journey to the North I really cannot fathom why he seems to be little read.

Avengers of the New World by Laurent Dubois – A solidly written history of a fascinating period of human history about which I knew relatively little and now want to learn more. There’s nothing particularly striking about the style but it’s a competent overview of a series of extraordinary events. Definitely made me want to pick up something more substantial on the subject.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor– Right, well, you know what you’re going to get; a lot of Gothic freaks and an advertisement for Catholicism so blisteringly break it might as well be a condemnation. Prose wise, this woman is untouchable, just untouchable, but I will say that the singular focus robs the narrative of much potential for surprise. At any point in any of the stories you can pretty much figure out what’s going to happen by assuming the most miserable and grotesque outcome. I mean she’s still amazing and even when I knew what was coming I still found it pretty howlingly funny.

Salt in the Wound Leonard Sciascia – A historical overview of a semi-imaginary, prototypical Sicilian village – its long legacy of corruption, governmental incompetence, poverty and constant feuding.  Sciascia, who became beloved in his native Italy for a brand of crime novels excoriating the real-life brutalities of the mafia, offers a similar vison here. There’s some good lines and Sciascia has a bracing moral weight, but a lot of this did boil down to in-jokes about the Social Democrats that kinda went over my head.

Sharp Teeth by Toby Barlow – Gritty LA werewolves, Urban fantasy/modern horror by someone with legit prose chops. The peculiar stylistic conceit is maybe a little on the nose in terms of staking out ground as literature, but basically, I thought Barlow had the skill to pull it off, and anyway apart from that it’s pretty resolutely unpretentious. Top shelf genre stuff, well worth a read.

Third Man – Yeah, I mean, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s kinda the best movie ever. Couldn’t resist seeing it at a midnight showing even though I know most of the dialogue by heart. Seeing it on the big screen I was struck particularly by the sets which are amazing, all of these shadowy, vertical structures around which Holly always seems to be running. Chills! Chills! 

Media I Consumed May 22nd, 2018

I had a birthday party at a barcade and I beat the 6 person X-Men game, which I never got to do as a child because it is a frivolous, stupid activity and my father, being a reasonable man, would not give us enough quarters to accomplish the feat. Anyway I still enjoyed it.  

The Exiles and Other Stories by Horacio Quiroga – I really like this guy, I can see how he became (as I gather) a pivotal figure in South American literature. Like Kipling without all the uncomfortable imperialism, with an earthy, authentic understanding of the Argentinian/Brazilian frontier, and the desperate men who inhabit it, or who inhabited it some century back. There are some pulpy thriller type stuff here, almost Robert E Howard like (except that Robert E Howard never went anywhere or did anything) but there’s also some reasonable social critique, and a lot of nightmarish stories about the sort of men who go vagabonding and get lost in out of the way places and drink themselves to death or find some other means of suicide. There’s nothing explicitly impossible in most of these, but you can see how his hyper-realism (I don’t think I ever read a writer who had so many stories which end with the narrator dead) was an influence on later generations of magical realists.

Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys – The story of a young woman who leaves the West Indies to come to England to become an actress, only to end up a miserable, impoverished semi-prostitute. Rhys has great natural talent as a writer, and her experience (which broadly mimics that of the narrator, not that I’d comment specifically on her romantic engagements) is used to grim if fascinating effect. That said, I kinda did feel like we were basically going over the same territory here as I did in the other books I’ve read by her—the protagonists are despairing and listless, and a lot of the themes remained similar, if expressed to a slightly less impressive narrative standard. Then again, I might have liked this more if I started here. Still, speaking generally she’s a very impressive writer and this is good stuff. 

Blood on the Forge by William Attaway --  The story of the Moss Brothers, who come north from Kentucky to work in a hellish steel mill in the Alleghany, is a rare wonder which deserves to be rediscovered. Attaway came from a well-to-do family and his life seems to have very little resembled that of his protagonists but reading this book you’d swear he had toiled away in a foundry. There is an honest rawness here, not only in his intimate-seeming knowledge of the conditions of his character’s lives, but in the sort of even-handedness which few writers can offer about a foreign milieu. The prose is potent, biblical almost, with Attaway working (successfully) to imbue the story with enormous, mythical force. Very, very strong rec.

Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq – A dreamy, lyrical work about a soldier’s pastoral idyll along the Belgian border during the fall and winter of the Phony War, operating rather unsubtly as metaphor for the French nation. My tolerance for descriptions of bucolic settings tends to be pretty low, even if those descriptions are very good, so I probably liked this one a little less than it deserved. On the other hand, it’s pretty rare to read a book about war which takes a new slant on the thing, which this definitely does. Worth your time, even if it wasn’t one of my absolute favorites.

Our Spoons Came From Woolworths by Barbara Comyns – Between this and Jean Rhys, it was a big week for of underprivileged female Londonites suffering from patriarchal abuse. Which, fair play, is Comyns jam, though she shakes things up a bit here by withholding her usual flavor of gothic horror in favor of a dash of comedy in the narrator-is-innocent-to-the-point-of-being-absurd type. I liked it a little bit less than her nightmarish stuff, or maybe 3 of hers in two weeks was a bit too much for me.

The Life of Elves by Muriel Barbery – I intensely disliked this book. The plot is paint-by-numbers high fantasy, without even the usual narrative tricks offered by competent genre writers. The prose is frankly just awful, a goopy mess, lots of tumbling sentences but if you break off any fragment and look at it up close it’s nothing. The character’s do not exist beyond their names, and its veneration of bucolic Europe seemed stale when Tolkien did it.  

Sunset Boulevard – An aging film star in a decaying mansion, gone mad from memory of her lost fame, this is the kind of movie you feel like you’ve seen even if you haven’t (as I hadn’t), the archetypes and even the catch phrases sunk into the public consciousness. Still, sometimes those movies don’t end up being good, so it was nice to see that this one holds up pretty masterfully. Swanson is amazing, having herself been a silent film star obviously adds a lot of piquancy to the thing but she just nails it generally period. Only strike against it is an over-reliance on voiceover which is totally unnecessary given the simplicity and general excellence of the every other aspect of the movie. Often the flashback lines are really good but they’re pointless, the rest of the film venting the themes more artfully. Still, fabulous.

Porco Rosso – In an alternate world Adriatic, a confederation of seapilot pirates hire Charles Lindburg to face off against the eponymous bounty hunter, an irascible, anarchic humanoid pig. This movie was so goddamn fun I can’t even tell you. I’ve always been of the position that Ghibli’s enormous genius lies in the visuals and the general aesthetic, rather than the plots themselves which are kind of goofy, and the simplicity of the plot, along with the gorgeously imagined pre-WWII Europe, play to those strengths. It has that dreamlike, inexplicable quality which I tend to really love in fantasy. There is, for instance, no explanation of how our hero became a pig, nor are there any other non-human characters, nor did any of the human characters make a particular point of him being a pig. Long and short I loved it and I’m really glad I got to see it on the big screen.

Media I Consumed May 15th, 2018

I decided to walk along the LA river to Downtown or Mission Junction at least and I took a shortcut through this fence that wasn’t there anymore and underneath the 5 (I think it was the 5 (they say ‘the’ before the name of the highway out here)) there were these like, catacombs which had been predictably painted in bright garish horrifying murals which I sort of expected but what I didn’t expect was that there would be this there

And I’m pretty sure it’s a doomsday device but if you know for sure let me know in the comments.

Happy birthday to me. Last week I read and watched the following.

Limbo By Bernard Wolfe – A madcap post-apocalyptic cybernetic thriller, an early depiction of the perils of nuclear apocalypse, an exploration of the dualities of humankind, the only problem with this text is that is absolute awful dogshit. This is an (admittedly early) example of that brand of science fiction in which the world and the characters serve exclusively to advocate for or against various philosophical/political points, and while Wolfe has an appreciably broad range of knowledge the text is unreadably pedantic and incredibly repetitive, and at bottom I simply did not feel he had much to impart, let alone anything  requiring 500 pages.

Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three by David Plante – A rather waspish depiction of three (semi?) major literary figures. Reading between the lines one gets the sense that, basically Plante was a handsome parvenu who managed to implant himself in the affections of older, highly regarded female writers, then turned around and wrote fairly scathing portrayals of them. I mean that’s kind of shitty and if I was, say, Jean Rhys’s friend I might smack the shit out of him if I saw him in a cocktail party but as a reader my main complaint about Plante is that the experiences he recounts are mostly dull and not expressed with any particularly burning cleverness. God spare us all from sycophants and false lovers.

Doting by Henry Green – Adulterous misbehavior among upper middle-class Londoners in the 1950’s. The dialogue is sharp, and funny, and since it’s almost all dialogue that was how I felt generally about the book, even if the predictable see-saw of the relationships pushed the thing a little too far into straight farce for my taste. Green is really, really talented, and I’m going to keep reading him because I have the sense that neither this nor Loving, which I read last month or whenever, is his best book. Somewhere in the catalog there has to be something a bit more ambitious, I aim to find it.

Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow – The story of a Chicago Jew who became enamored with that old New Orleans style jazz and the African American culture which created it, and ended up playing a fascinating role (assuming you believe this autobiography, which my googling seemed to more or less confirm) in spreading and popularizing jazz music throughout America and the world, when he wasn’t dodging the Purple Gang in Detroit during prohibition, selling marijuana to Louis Armstrong, or being an opium addict. True or false, this book was a heaping shitload of fun, with pages of entertaining anecdotes about jazz greats and an absolutely fabulous overview of century-old slang. Good on NYRB for re-issuing it.

Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition of 1761-1767 by Thorkild Hansen – The story of a catastrophic mid-18th century Danish scientific expedition to what is now Yemen, and a thoroughly enjoyable piece of light history. Hansen does an excellent job of reconstructing the feel and culture of the age, both within northern Europe and further east, as well as the personalities of the characters themselves; a callow, pedantic, potentially murderous philologist, a brash but brilliant botanist, so on and so forth. Hansen is a really first-rate writer of narrative non-fiction; the story moves along briskly, the prose is sharp and funny, his perspective measured. Lots and lots of fun.

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. Eve Babitz – Any writer will tell you the most annoying thing about being a writer is telling people you’re a writer (also, editors.) Most people, being on the whole both 1) literate and 2) self-absorbed, secretly/not that secretly believe that their lives would make for fascinating reading, confident that their autobiography contains within it the seeds of a fascinating, indeed, of a necessary narrative. That they themselves generally do not read is a helpful aid to this delusion, allowing them to conceive of writing as an activity akin to prophecy, rather than a skill that needs to be developed. They are certain that their story is an important one, requiring only the inspiration to get going (ahhhh, the marvels attributed to this divine state!) and bam! The full power of their personal story will loose out their fingertips and onto virgin paper and in no time flat flood the world.

This is why I usually tell people I freelance, which is vague and cold enough to generally forestall further questions, particularly since no one is really that interested in the specifics of anyone else’s life.

Anyway, I was thinking about this while I was reading this latest Babitz, because it’s got that dilettante quality common to a lot of the people I’ve been meeting lately, actresses and producers and vague Hollywood hangarounds—except that with Babitz this half-idiot quality is a sham, both because she’s actually led a fabulously interesting life, playing muse to (so far as one gathers) all of the good musicians in Southern California in the late 60’s and early 70’s, but also because she’s a really cutting, funny writer. This loose collection of short stories about bad parties and good friends and cocaine, lots of cocaine, is a bitter breeze, the kind of thing you can laugh through over a couple of cocktails at one of LA’s many plastic tiki bars, tacky so long they’ve grown charming.

The Vet's Daughter Barbara Comyns – It’s just unbelievably peculiar that Comyns is not better known—her books are elegant little nightmares, bone-bleak explorations of the plight of working class women, simultaneously defying the patriarchy and genre convention. This story of Alice, whose life is strangled by the brutality of her caregivers and the fundamental injustice of the world surrounding her—like last week’s the Juniper Tree it’s better not to go into any particular detail about the narrative. Unflinchingly dark, but honestly so, candidly so. Really clever stuff, strongly recommended to fan of Shirley Jackson/anyone who likes good books.

Breathless – I’m not going to waste your time talking about how great Breathless is, except to say 1) I’m sorry I didn’t see it sooner 2) it turns out that the most effective short hand for my romantic type is Jean Seberg as Patricia, that is to say, enormously destructive red heads.

Media I Consumed May 7th, 2018

A week of May in the books. We’re going from warm to hot here, the natives often warn me of the summer to come. There are many places in LA where there are no sidewalks and caught up in my thoughts I seem to find myself walking through a lot of them lately, up gulleys, skirting small highways. I haven’t been able to make myself watch a movie in a while, which mostly I blame on the frustrating awfulness of the Filmstruck interface. I hope you are well. The other you. That one, yes.

Last week I read the following.

Little Reunions by Eileen Chang – A fictionalized account of Chang’s youth in Shanghai and Hong Kong, as the last child of a fading, internationally oriented caste of Mandarins, with special emphasis on the relationship with her brilliant,, narcistic mother, and her fickle first lover who plays Quisling with the Japanese invaders. I was excited to read this, having really like the other stuff of Chang’s I read, but this was kind of disappointing. A lot of effort goes into trying to express the elaborately complex social relationships common to this era (there’s a lot of ‘First Uncle’s second concubine and I used to…’), but the narrative remains peculiarly narrow, and I kept hoping for a wider perspective which never really presented itself. She’s obviously talented, there are some savage little bits here and there, but the book feels goopy, like someone do a really deep dive into their familial dirty laundry without the narrative sharpening required for fiction. Disappointing.

The Driver Who Wanted to be God and Other Stories by Etgar Keret – After last week’s somewhat disappointing snatch of Keret’s non-fiction it was fun to read him back in top form. I’m honestly shocked that Keret isn’t more popular than he is already—not only are his stories funny, poignant, and original, but they’re also simple and short. One of those rare books that can be enjoyed by people who like to read and people who don’t really like to read. 

The Mexican Revolution by Adolfo Gilly -- The thing about Communism is that it lost—which, counter to both Marxist theory itself and later self-serving capitalist critiques, doesn’t prove anything, because there’s no inevitable march of history, no absolute law to anything, sometimes dice just roll a certain way—but it does make reading communist histories feel like picking through the sacred texts of some decayed and largely forgotten religious order. Maybe it always kind of felt like that. Certainly, a great deal of the intellectual force of Communism (apart from just generally being right about a lot of things) was that it relied upon a vocabulary and a general framework which only true believers would bother to learn, the use of which served (and still serves) to off-foot an opponent. This, naturally, led to the development of a style of leftist writing which is academic at its worst – verbose, needlessly dry and dogmatic. Is there such a thing as a first rate communist historian? That’s a serious question, please answer in the comments.

Anyway that rant aside it’s been so long since I read anything about the Mexican Revolution that I was basically coming in blind, and it is a pretty fascinating bit of human history, and so I didn’t mind this, but even when I found myself in intellectual sympathy with Gilly I was also somewhat bored. Like, ‘yes, of course, the exploitation of the rural peasantry by the Conventionist Bourgeois forces was an inevitable consequence of the Morales’ commune’s failure to extend their anarcho-rural template to the urban masses,’ but also this is pedantic and duller than it should be.

Late Fame by Arthur Schnitzler – Saxberger is an aging civil servant whose stasis is interrupted by the discovery that a book of poems he wrote in his half-remembered youth has become the ur-text for a movement of struggling Viennese artists. A funny, poignant, clever meditation on the vanity of intellectuals and the essential pointless absurdity of fame. Swift, lovely, shockingly modern given it was written more than a century ago, I’m a sucker for anything which mocks the arrogance of my caste but even those of you engaged in more valuable occupations than writing fiction will likely find this worth your time.

The Juniper Tree by Barbara Comyns – A working class woman’s attempt to create an independent life with her young daughter are interrupted by the affectionate attentions of an upper class couple. I really hesitate to give much more description of the narrative than that, other than to say that Comyns is the genre-bending feminist hiding beneath your bed, whispering terrors from with the black depths of bourgeoise, patriarchy induced ennui. That prose got pretty purple there but my recommendation is entirely sincere. I wish I could discuss it more without spoiling it, but I kind of can’t.

The Underdogs: A Novel of the Mexican Revolution by Mariano Azeuela --  While serving as a doctor in the Northern Division Azeuala somehow found the time to dash off this formally complex but brutally raw novel about the Mexican revolution, from its early, idealistic period to its moral and military collapse. This is fabulous, beginning as a scathingly subtle satire of heroic military literature before taking an abrupt nihilistic turn, some fascinating amalgam of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and Heart of Darkness. And to recap, he wrote all of this literally while it was happening—even Victor Serge had to sit on his stuff a while. Really, really good. Really mean.

Media I Consumed April 30th, 2018

I know it’s been hard for you having to two weeks without an update, and I’m sorry, OK? I’m sorry. Calm the shit down. You’re not on my fucking Patreon. LA has weird shit on the walls. I drove up to Seattle along the PCH for the second time this year and it was still awesome. It turns out it’s easy to put up a tent. Thing’s are often easier than you think they will be. I have listened, read, and watched the following.

Music!

April Favorites

·         This month ended up mostly about being female singer songwriters with a pleasant drone and a lot of boom bap hip hop.

·         Sean Price’s last album is not his best album but it’s not bad—I always loved his weird mix of super violent imagery and paeans to Bernadette and his kids. RIP.

·         Monarch > Wye Oak

·         Having not listened to the Dead with any seriousness in going on 20 years I realized I didn’t realize what a good lyricist Robert Hunter was.

·         Open Mic Eagle is fucking incredible.

·         I listened to Different Now by Chastity Belt for about 18 hours in a 24 hour period two weeks back.

Books!

Piano Tales by Felisberto Hernandez – Really remarkably weird. Felisberto’s obsessions – with tactile sensations, with the secrets of strangers, with inanimate objects and morbidly obese woman – are entirely his own, and expressed in a gloriously peculiar fashion which seems unique now and must have been utterly unfathomable upon its release. They aren’t really my obsessions, however, and there is this kind of maddening similarity to his writing, I read halfway through one of the short stories in here before realizing I read it last week. Certainly original, potentially brilliant, but two collections in I haven’t read anything which really struck me on an emotional level, and I’m not sure I’ll have the energy to work much further through him.

Basic Black With Pearls by Helen Weinzweig – A middle aged woman follows her lover, an American spy across the world, their liaisons arranged according to a complex code which only the two of them can decipher. Stranded in Toronto, the city where she was raised, ‘Lola’ is forced to come to terms with her personal history and her tortured relationship with men. Sort of. I found the book pleasantly opaque, refusing to offer answers to any of the myriad of mysteries it introduces, even in so far as revealing whether the protagonist’s lover is real or a figment of her imagination. That said, the essential underlying theme – the ways in which women make themselves slaves to love, or how society forces them into this role – is presented in kind of a ham-fisted fashion, and for that matter it’s tough to entirely take seriously a scorching feminist critique which ends with the heroine (unironically, so far as I could gather) heading off to the apartment of a man she just met to spend the rest of her life happily in love.

The Dog of the South by Charles Portis – A thinner Ignatius J. Reilly travels from Alabama to Honduras in pursuit of the wife who cuckolded him and the car she stole. There’s no plot to speak of, mostly the text is a series of extended conversations between our protagonist and the madcap characters he runs in to. This kind of thing lives or dies on the strength of the author’s wit, obviously, and as anyone who read True Grit knows Protis has it in spades—this is pretty laugh out loud funny. It’s also pretty long, though, and a lot of the conversations starts feeling similar, and even within themselves they tend to go on a little longer then they need to. I think this kind of comic novel works a lot better at 200 pages than 300, but ultimately this is a pretty minor quibble and you could do a lot worse for a bus ride or whatever then picking this one up.

Loving by Henry Green – I gotta say I’m pretty fucking over upstairs/downstairs stories and books about English high society generally speaking. It wasn’t enough that we had an entire body of literature written during this actual period, somehow there are still folk searching for little gems of profundity to be quarried from the most exhausted literary mine in history. Actually the only reason I ended up reading this is because I didn’t really know what it was about -- some nights around one am I log on to the Los Angeles Public Library ap and root around for things that interest me, and then I go to bed and then a few days later I pick them up having no memory or what I ordered. Which, that opening to the contrary, worked well here because I actually quite liked this. Greene creates an enormously dense, real-seeming population in this story of a cast of servants bickering at each other in a manor house in WWII Ireland, and for the first hundred and fifty pages it was a real joy to decipher their complexities. But it kinda doesn’t go anywhere, or it least it didn’t really go anywhere for me, and I thought the ending was far too neat (deliberately neat, but that didn’t stop me from not liking it). Still, I mean, a ton of artistry here, I’ll read another from Greene.

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes – To give any sort of description of the narrative to this would be pointless, although I’ll remember it personally as a modernist poison pen to an ex-lover. This is the sort of book which is meant to be deciphered rather than read, but you can still generally glean a few bits from even a first reading. The writing is difficult, occasionally brilliant, occasionally maddening; I found myself banging my head against the table a bit at the page long descriptions of people’s clothing, and some of the monologues left me equally bored. But there were some excellent, excellent lines, insightful or just enormously peculiar. On the other, other hand it does have that classic (though not universal) failure common to this style of fiction where the thing seems to become entirely an intellectual exercise, and even when I did manage to figure the linguistic riddles I was still left kind of cold on the affair. On the other, other, other hand, it’s brief. In summation; I found the reviews on the back to be a little over the top (try and forgive Ms. Barnes the Burrough’s encomium) but basically felt reading this to be a valuable exercise.

The Topless Tower by Silvina Ocampo – A long short story about a young boy who finds himself transported to a tower by the devil, sort of. I’ve been obsessed with Ocampo since I read her NYRB collection last year, which is marvelous and should shoot to the top of your read pile, and this was clever in parts but not as good as most of the ones there. Still, it will tide me over until NYRB Classics gets around to releasing another anthology of her works.

The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret – A collection of short essays about the span between the birth of Keret’s son and the death of his father. I admire Keret enormously, the short fiction I’ve read by his is lovely and life-affirming and hysterical, I was very excited to read this, it’s OK. Honestly I felt like a lot of it he was sort of coasting, in the sense that the essays did not always come to the razor sharpest of points. It’s upbeat and super readable but inferior to his short fiction.

The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories Horacio Quiroga – Short fiction by an Uruguayan/Argentinian Kipling/Poe. Creepy! Weird! You can see the influence on Borges here, certainly, although it’s less polished if arguably rawer. There are a couple of short ones about men dying that are really excellent, and a long one called Anaconda which is a fabulous exercise in anthropomorphic violence, a sub-genre in which I daresay I know a little bit here and there. Also, what a great title.

A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk by John Lingan – The last honky tonk in the Shenedoah proves the entry point into a collection of essays about the rapid change of rural America, family, authenticity, a lot of other things. Fair warning, I would pay even less attention to my opinion on this one then you are used to normally, since John is a very, very old friend of mine, and I’d happily lie to a stranger to feather his nest, but happily here I don’t need to. John’s a thoughtful guy and writes with a sharp pen, interweaving history and personal experience in the best travelogue tradition. Strong rec.

There Are Little Kingdoms by Kevin Barry – I really like Kevin Barry. City of Bohane really tickled my sweet spot, a nightmarish urban fantasy with the tightest literary chops, and these rambling collection of short stories about an Ireland not seen on Aer Lingus commercials, is top notch. He has a fabulous ear for dialogue, his stuff is very funny without seeming false, you can sort of imagine his cast of low rent drunks and club drug ridden teens talking in the way they talk. The prose altogether is pretty fabulous, there are about a million throw away line I really wiped my brow over. Liked this a ton, check it out. But check out John’s book first.

Movies!

Tobacco Road (1941) – John Ford’s bitter if humorous satire of a clan of rednecks and their attempt to hold onto the family farm, this is weird and mean and funny. Nothing really happens, its just a series of semi-cruel sketches about incest and eating raw turnips and the like, but with Ford directing it the visuals are lovely and it made me laugh a lot.

Paris, Texas – Look, man, I tried, I seriously did, but for me this ended up being a pretty mind-numbing exercise, having to stare at XX sorrowful countenance for what seemed a rough eternity. I gather that most people who understand film better than I do seem to think I’m wrong, and I’m not willing to go toe-to-toe with the common wisdom this early in my career as an unpaid, unread film critic, but apart from some really lovely panoramic shots of Los Angeles this basically didn’t do anything for me.

Media I Consumed April 15th, 2018

Searching for apartments I’ve been taking great looping walks around the East Side of Los Angeles, and I’ve noticed some things. First, bacon wrapped hot dogs are a popular street dish among Hispanic Angelinos. Second, there are no good apartments in Los Angeles. Apart from that I read and watched the following.

Books!

The Chronicles of Prydain By Lloyd Alexander – I loved these when I was a kid and it turns out I kinda love them now too. I’m maybe going to write a review for someone, if not I’ll post something longer here.

A HIstory of the Hussite Revolution by Howard Kaminsky -- What was it, exactly, that compelled me to read a 600 page academic history of the development of Hussite thought? Part of it is that I’ve long had an interest in the Wars of Religion, and this was a piece of that vast and sanguinary tableau I hadn’t really investigated, and the Los Angeles Public Library system did not (curiously) offer a more general military/political history, and so I took what I could get. Mostly it was that having indulged myself for five books of Y/A fantasy I felt like I probably needed to eat some greens, intellectually speaking, and this was my self-punishment. Being aimed at other specialists in Czech history religious history I am obviously in no position to judge the truth or falsity of its broader claims about the development of Hussite dogma from, roughly speaking, the council of Constance to the destruction of the Taborites, but its written with reasonable clarity given the difficulty of the subject matter. Apart from that? I realized I’ve been thinking the word was Ultraquists for a really long time but really it’s Utraquists. The Taborites were pretty wacky, that’s a pretty fascinatingly modern seeming historical side story. I dunno, I don’t regret reading it, but I can’t imagine recommending it to anyone.

Lands of Memory by Felisberto Hernandez – Apart from children’s fantasy and religious conflict I’ve been working through the lights of early 20th century South American literature, among whom Felisberto Hernandez stands (I gather) in particular regard. In this selection of half a dozen of the man’s most beloved short stories, you can find a lot of threads of later authors – not only Borges’s obsession with memory and perspective, but also Bolano’s constant oblique expression of meance, and his preference for ending a story abruptly. The writing is the kind of pretty where you enjoy every sentence and then get to the end of a long paragraph and realize you have no idea what’s going on, which is to say that’s it’s both invigoratingly difficult and somewhat repetitive. I probably can’t say that I preferred Felisberto to the writers he inspired, though the stand out stories, Crocodile and the first one, about the stinky pianist, basically, are weird and mean and worth the cost of admission. 

Two Serious Ladies Jane Bowles – Two upper middle class woman engage in unexpected episodes of debauchery. The prose is absurdist slapstick, which generally speaking I like but which here I found murderously dull and almost entirely unfunny. The characters themselves are so loosely drawn I literally had difficulty remembering which was which, and the debauchery itself is neither erotic nor exciting in any way. There seems a notion that the protagonist’s decision to revel down in the muck has some sort of religious implication but the thrust of it was so vague and muddled that I frankly couldn’t expound upon the theme more than that. I disliked this book so much that I feel like I must have missed something—if anyone has read this and wants to correct my math, please feel free to do so in the comments.

Eve's Hollywood Eve Babitz – Love is about half a sham, even in the best cases, a conscious and deliberate effort to keep the wool tight over the top of your face, but what’s the alternative, really? I did not love New York when I first moved there – that was why I wrote City Dreaming, in fact, as a deliberate effort to intoxicate myself on the metropolis and my brief time in it. The same effort will be required to become an Angeleno, to view my stay here as being valuable, as valuable as something can be in the stew of meaninglessness which is the human experience.

Which is to say, I suppose, that existence proceeds essence. I invented that. That’s mine.

Anyway long and short being I especially enjoyed Ms. Babitz recollections of her childhood as the children of upper class intellectuals in a vibrant post-world Los Angeles, as well as her torrid anecdotes of being the hippest socialite in the 60’s anarchy which followed. But even if you don’t need to convince yourself you made a good decision in moving cross country to sell your soul to the Hollywood machine you would still (assuming you aren’t a fool) marvel at Babitz’s sly wit and lacerating, gleeful observations about so diverse a slate of topics as LSD and Taquitos. She’s sort of a West Coast Renata Adler, and if that doesn’t make you want to run out and read it then you need to stop reading my reviews.

Movies!

You Were Never Really There (2018) -- Joaquin Phoenix is a hulking trauma victim who lives with his mother and works as a (bare with me) hitman specializing exclusively in pedophiles who gets caught in a the midst of political conspiracy. So far as I’m concerned this is probably the most impressive example of the revenge sub-genre, and certainly the somewhat smaller hyper masculine vigilante saves innocent woman,’ sub-sub-genre. Lynne Ramsay is a wonder—every shot is stunning, she finds extraordinary beauty within the context of constant horrible savagery and she films action in an exciting and unconventional way. Phoenix is likewise marvelous, hulking and brutish and terribly miserable.

Indeed, it’s such a technical accomplishment that I was forced to consider the moral and aesthetic ramifications of the film far beyond what I would normally expect to do while watching an action movie. There is something peculiar, frankly, about marrying such wizardry to so absurd and unbelievable a story. As hard as they work to introduce elements of seriousness into the plot, mainly by having a lot of flashbacks to the hero’s horrid childhood, it is impossible to escape the feeling that this is basically the same plot of a Frank Miller comic, Taxi Driver without any of the ironic undertones.

Can a film be high art without making any sort of moral point? I think it can, probably—Sergio Leone is art, the Warriors is art, pure fantasy shouldn’t be condemned for that alone. That said, if the thing is pure fantasy, as I think it basically is, then much of the savagery towards children has to be judged exploitative and cheap.  

None of which is to take away from the enormous marvel of the film, which is one of the best things I’ve seen in years and highly worth your time and money. Also, at the half full Saturday afternoon showing I went to last week, Joaquin Phoenix came out before hand to say hello (I gather this is not that uncommon) and after he left an employee of the theater who was like 17 came out to give a brief announcement during which he thanked Wa-Queen for his time. It was pretty amazing.  

Thunder and Lightfoot (1974) – Clint Eastwood is a retired armed robber, a young Jeff Bridges is an enthusiastic car thief, after this Michael Cimino goes on to make The Deer Hunter, all in all it should have been better than it is. The first hour is a shaggy but good humored road movie, but the second hour is a rather dull heist followed by an incoherent climax. It looks good, there’s a certain amount of enjoyment to be taken from just watching the cast bullshit with each other, but basically this was pretty underwhelming.

M (1931) —Normally when I watch things from this era the best I can hope for is some broader appreciation of how certain stylistic innovations helped develop the artform, but never in my memory can I recall seeing a film anywhere close to this old which was so utterly captivating in its own right. The story of a child killer, and of the underworld syndicate which tries to hunt him down, there is so much that’s fabulous in this movie—every shot is amazing looking, the cuts are brilliant and complex, and Lang had an enormous talent for assembling a collection of weird looking character actors. Peter Lorre as the child killer is utterly horrifying, sallow and insensibly moronic except when on the prowl, when his whole being seems to light up with desire. Not only the first, but probably the best, serial killer movie ever made, an absolute and indelible masterpiece—I’m going to have to figure out what I kick out of my top 10 to make room for it (I don’t actually have a top ten, I’m an adult, but you get the idea.)

Media I Consumed April 7th, 2018

East LA is full of odd dashes of color, wildflowers next to freeways, murals peeking from alleyways, and of course the hills rising when you remember to look at them, ochre dust and verdant green. I’m not going to do the keep/drop distinction in these reviews anymore because they’re all from the library.

Books!

Myths of Greece and Rome by Thomas Bulfinch – I had a sort of wild hair to go back and read the Greek myths of my childhood. It turns out I mostly remembered all of the good ones, though, and I didn’t love the tendency Bulfinch has to bowdlerize all the juicy, weird, sexual or existential aspects of the myths—for instance, all the times Hercules gets drunk and kills someone and then feels bad about it and has to do lots of super human things to make up for it. I dunno, how do you review a book of Greek myths? Vulcan was always my favorite God? Besides Athena, obviously, obviously Athena is the best. Athena really is kind of the Mary Sue of Olympus – she gets to be the god of ‘good war’, not ‘bad war’, which is a little cheap anyway you look at it, plus cities, heroes, and technology. What the hell is left? Bad world-building, that’s what I call that. Bad worldbuilding.

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton – In the near future, society is on a slow verge of economic and environmental collapse, and medical science has advanced to the point where virtually no one dies except of old age. Discovering she has three weeks to live, Katherine Mortenhoe refuses to sell her story to a pain-starved public, and escaping the press and reality TV hounds flees to the anarchic borderlands beyond the city, followed by a reporter with cameras for eyes. It is…really good, prescient (this was written in the 70’s) about the increasing sacrifice of privacy and, more impressively, about death itself. Compton is a more than solid writer, especially for someone trucking in 70’s sci-fi, where a clever idea was more important than being able to write a sentence (I’m looking at you, Phillip K.) This works as adventure, as satire, and as a more profound comment on the complexity of personality and the need to live an authentic existence (whatever exactly that means) in the face of death and the media machine. Very good, I’ll definitely check out another Compton soon.

Brainquake by Samuel Fuller – An insane bag man gets involved with an unscrupulous gun moll. I had not, as of reading this, seen anything by legendary director Samuel Fuller, but whatever his cinematic merits he was not much of a novelist. The kind of hyper-stylized crime novel which more closely resembles a superhero or sci-fi story, a setting basically unrecognizable (not in a good way), and characters that are equally loosely drawn. It also relies upon characters coincidentally running into one another in a way that more shatters than stretches credulity. Not good.

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner – A middle-aged woman in the interwar era seeks to cast off the conservative shackles of her family and live alone in rural England. It’s funny and quick and there’s a really, really delightful twist mid book that I won’t spoil but makes a longer review kind of impossible. Suffice to say it’s a clever and thoughtful take on womanhood, worth your time though I felt the end kind of fizzled out.

The Pumpkin Eater by Penelope Mortimer – An inability to develop into a fully actualized human pushes a woman into an endless string of pregnancies and half-wanted children and, ultimately, insanity. This was…peculiar. As a character study, I thought it was a failure—our unnamed protagonist did not ever come together for me in any kind of real way (nor did any of the other minor characters), and the pathological nature of the woman’s behavior is not considered in a therapeutic or analytical way, despite much of the narrative being couched as a conversation between the protagonist and a shrink. As a more esoteric comment on the patriarchy and womanhood and so on, I thought it was muddled and kind of aimless. An interesting idea executed unevenly.

The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp – The autobiography of Quentin Crisp, a famed member of the homosexual London underworld for much of the 20th century, recollections of his misadventures and thoughts about life and society. I am in rough awe of this book. I was impressed with it in a way which makes me almost not want to praise the thing too highly, for fear that today’s exhilaration will give way to tomorrow’s regret. On the other hand, who gives a shit what I think, so what I think is that this is a straight masterpiece. Crisp is a fabulous, fabulous comic writer, lacerating and laconic. His observations are pithy and astute, and while his twin obsessions – himself and homosexuality (his observations on ‘deviant’ sexual mores are on par with Proust) – are particularly well-served, anywhere Crisp decides to shed his light he offers valuable insight. Some might, I suppose, be put off by his campy bitterness, but I found his cynicism neither insincere nor undeserved given the man’s suffering and frankly the general state of the world, and in any event it was always cut with levity. Strong recommendation.

Yesterday by Maria Dermout --  A (presumably) fictionalized account of the author’s early youth in Dutch Indonesia, this slender volume seems to have served as practice for the more radically fictionalized account she gives in the absolutely spectacular Ten Thousand Things. There’s some fine bits in it, she does a good job of expressing the peculiar way in which children misconceive the world, but its follow up is so much better that it was hard to get real excited about this one.

Movies!

Kansas City Confidential (1952) --  There’s nothing particularly original in this story of a bank heist and the trouble the bank heist causes, but its done well—the writing is tight, both in the sense of the dialogue itself and in the underpinnings of the plot. Also, fucking Lee Van Cleef is fabulous as a shifty gunmen, really all of the side characters look mean and weird and give the impression they could actually be gangsters, rather than just really really handsome people, which is mostly what you get from films these days.

The Steel Helmet (1951) – I’m not trying to pick on Samuel Fuller, seriously I’m not, but I likewise did not see a ton in this story of a squad of GI’s fighting to survive in Korea. For a film made in 1951 it has an impressive awareness of racial issues, but they’re not discussed with any great sincerity or complexity, and the whole thing that (that being war and racism and so forth) is wrapped up with discomfiting neatness. In common with most war movies from this era the action, so to speak, is also really dull, a lot of still shots of men scowling and shooting out windows.

In a Lonely Place (1950) – Humphrey Bogart is a temperamental if brilliant screenwriter who may or may not have killed a woman. There are a couple of problems with this movie but the main one is the man himself. I fucking love Bogart, but his range is extremely limited. It’s not just that, looking at him, you kinda know there isn’t a director alive at the time crazy enough to have him be an actual villain (dark passage doesn’t count, he wasn’t famous then), it’s also that he just can’t really convey the kind of coiled madness that this character is supposed to have. It also leans pretty heavy into the ‘male artist is so brilliant and troubled and you should feel bad for him even though he maybe just hit a guy for no reason’, all in all one of my least favorite clichés.

Media I Consumed March 31st, 2018

Yeah. I went to Joshua Tree? I was in a classroom for the first time in 10 years? I had various misadventures in the city that I’m not gonna fucking talk about cause I don’t even know you, mean, Jesus, quit being so nosey.

Music I Liked Lots in March

Thoughts

·         The second Chinoseries kind of didn’t blow my head off, but the third is, if not quite on par with the brilliance of Onra’s first effort, still pretty sick.

·         Annoying hipster bands still have some great singles

·         J-Live > than Talib Kweli

·         Whatever Snoop Dogg is calling himself these days he can still rock

·         My brother Michael is responsible for turning me on to the Headless Horses cover of True Love Will Find You in the End

If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino – A paean to the power and peculiarity of reading, framed with a peculiar meta-narrative by which a reader (the reader) is forced to read the opening of ten different novels without coming to any sort of conclusion. I confess I went into this one warily, since most of the people I know who talk about Calvino generally don’t strike me as that clever, and I thought Invisible Cities was kind of nothing, Borges without the brevity. But I actually quite enjoyed this – the various false novels are both compelling in and of themselves and clever homages to various styles of world literature, and the over-arching story worked for me, albeit somewhat less so. Calvino has an unfortunate stylistic tendency to mistake tautology for insight, and I didn’t find his philosophical ramblings about the nature of literature to be all that brilliant, frankly, but page to page it was a lot of fun. Library, but keep.

Street of No Return by Dave Goodis – A crooner turned alcoholic bum is framed for killing a police officer during a race riot. It’s weird that the most revered genre writers, at least when it comes to mystery, tend not to have any of the qualities that genre books are supposed to have. Chandler, for instance, couldn’t plot a narrative to save his life and Chester Himes’s stuff similarly has a weird tendency to run out in strange directions. Not that I’d put Goodis in that category, but he does have that interesting quality of a slumming ‘literary’ writer.  His experiences as being basically, a miserably impoverished alcoholic in Los Angeles, shines (glooms?) through the narrative, and the slice of life bits, about drinking shoe polish to get high or whatever, they really work, in a depressing sort off fashion. But the genre bits in this – the mystery, the action, etc., frankly didn’t interest me in the slightest, and the back story is incoherent, and there’s more of that then there is the good stuff. Library, but drop.

An African in Greenland by Tété-Michel Kpomassie – Enchanting! At 16, the author, living in a village in West Africa, reads a book about Greenland and spends the next six years trying to get there. There’s a tremendous joy to this book, a sense of wonder to everything Tete-Michael encounters. Obviously his perspective as a non-westerner going to a non-western society is fascinating for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is there’s no element of self-censorship. He also, more than any other travel writer I can remember reading, is utterly immune to the sort of self-aggrandizement which tends to mar the work of a lot of his confederates. He has the most charming way of tossing off immensely difficult undertaking – ‘that winter I learned to hunt seal and pilot a dog sled’ – as if they were not worthy of mention. Library, but I loved it and would keep it.

So Much Blue by Percival Everett – Three interlocking stories in the life of successful but emotionally absent middle-aged painter, whose failure to deal fully with the events of his past limit his capacity for growth and human interaction. That was a weird summary, but it’s sort of best if you go in blind. There’s something about Everett I really like, I can’t exactly put my finger on it. There’s a…subtlety, both in the language (which is spare and clever and largely unnoticeable) and in the thinking itself. It’s more than that, though, it’s sort of a moral presence, I suppose? Its always dangerous to read a protagonist into an author, but in both this and last week’s Watershed one gets the sense of a man trying to face the problems of human existence squarely, without affectation or exaggeration. Library, they’re all library these days, but keep.

On Being Blue William Gass – A wide ranging overview of the concept of ‘blue’, with particular emphasis on its linguistic and pornographic ramifications. This was fun, if enormously self-indulgent. Gass is like a big league power hitter, swinging for the fences with every sentence. When he hits, you get some really fabulous prose. When he misses, however, it’s a hell of a whiff, and you’re left kind of gasping in sympathetic shame. This was a weird metaphor for someone who fucking hates baseball. Anyway, t’s a hundred pages, I basically had fun with it, your mileage might well vary. Keep if it wasn’t a library book.

Bandarshah by Tayeb Salih – A series of short stories about Salih’s paradigmatic Sudanese village of Wad Hamid, with a (far from exclusive) focus on three generations of exceptional/semi-magical patriarchs, including the eponymous, as a metaphor for the challenges of Sudan/the Arabic world more generally to grapple with the conflicts of modernity. I liked this, I did not like it quite as much as the sublime Season of Migration to the North and the nearly equally fabulous Wedding of Zein. It’s structurally a bit more complex than either of those, which in practice I thought got in the way of Salih’s beautiful prose and profound moral grasp. Library, but I probably wouldn’t keep it not because it’s not good, it is good, but the other two are better and make a cleaner case for Salih’s genius.

The Seven Madmen by Roberto Arlt – A murderer’s row of untermenschen (SP) plot a series of violent crimes in a vague effort to create a fascist regime/new world morality. I gather this novel is sort of an Ur-text for a lot of South American magical realism, with Cortozar and Borges identifying Arlt as influences, and obviously I’m not going to dispute them but I couldn’t see much of that as a reader. It reminded me more of Dostoevsky or maybe Andrei Bely—a great deal of energy is put into exploring the character’s basest urges, there is a lot of ‘I realized then that I would marry the prostitute. But then I thought no, I should shoot her.’ Unlike Dostoevsky, however, who lamented the effects of modernity with similar bitterness, Arlt has no Christ to offer redemption, and the novel comes to verge on nihilism. Which is not in and of itself an unacceptable viewpoint (at least from a literary standpoint), but aesthetically there is a sort of ringing sameness to the thought. It is quite funny, however, and his knives are very, very sharp, and there are predictions about the moral state of humanity that seem quite prescient, particularly as regards the rise of fascism (this was written in 1927). Library, but I’d keep.

Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974) – The death of Ellen Barstyn’s husband forces her out of a lower-middle class lifestyle which she had come to despise, and puts her on the road with her adolescent son in what I gather is Scorsese’s second movie. The ending is too light, but apart from that I really dug this—the dialogue and the various interactions feel very human, very honest, and Barstyn (who won the academy award for this performance) is lively and magnificent.

Media I Consumed March 22nd, 2018

Basically I didn’t do much this week except have the flu, which was less interesting than it might sound. I also read and watched the following…

Books!

Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum – The lives of a handful of characters in Weimar Berlin’s finest hotel, this just did not do anything for me at all. The prose is…fine, I mean nothing one way or the other, but the characters are real stock—an aging ballerina, a gentleman thief, a nebbishy clerk with a fatal illness who decides to blow all his remaining money on learning to live before he dies – I couldn’t detect an actual human being anywhere in the bunch. Hokey, man, real hokey, Library but I’d drop.

If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes – A black worker in a naval plant in WWII-era Los Angeles is brutalized and driven insane by American racial politics. The prose is strong, though not as strong as it would get in his later books, and he still has the sharp eye for injustice and hypocrisy, as he demonstrates throughout the Harlem detective series, but the plot, such as it is, is kind of….loose? Predictable? Ultimately I think his ‘genre’ stuff is stronger, not so much because of the genre angles specifically but more because of the sense of place which is so abundantly vivid in his Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones stuff, but somewhat less thick on the ground here. Library, probably I’d drop it not cause it’s bad but because on my theoretical book shelf I already have like, 8 Chester Himes books and I could probably do w/out a 9th.

Hill by Jean Giono – Weird. Frightening. The countryside of rural Italy, in retaliation for the infinite sins done to nature by humankind, decides to destroy a small community of farmers. Giono has a talent for reframing the prosaic or lyrical aspects of nature in uncanny and horrifying prose, and the portrait of the farmers is savage and true-seeming. Did I find this an uncomfortable allegory for the horrors of climate change (though to be clear it was written a century ago)? Yes, I did. Keep.

The Blonde on the Street Corner by David Goodis – Goodis was a crime writer, I think, at least that’s what I was thinking when I got this from the library, but this isn’t a crime novel, rather a slice of life thing about an unemployed young man towards the end of the great depression, and the hopelessness which overcomes him, embodied here in the eponymous blonde woman. There’s not a ton here, and what plot there is is a little…on the nose, I guess? But a lot of the small interactions between the protagonist and his friends and family ring true, Goodis has the good noir writer’s gift of relaying accurate sounding dialogue between uneducated individuals, as well as an affection for his characters which gives the narrative a proper feeling of tragedy. Library, but I guess gun to my head I’d probably keep it.

Watershed by Percival Everett – About a black hydrologist who becomes embroiled in a revolutionary Indian movement. This makes the book sound more genre-y than it is really, most of the time is spent with the protagonist reconsidering his familial and romantic history, and, implicitly, how they affect his decision to buck the authorities for people whom he has no direct loyalty. I liked it…OK? The depiction of the protagonist’s destructive relationship with a crazy woman is extremely well drawn, and Everett is a thoughtful and insightful cultural critic, but the various narrative strands came together a little too…not neatly, exactly…bluntly, I guess to mix a couple of metaphors. Library, but I don’t know I’d have a burning need to hold on to this.

Between Two Worlds by Simone Schwarz-Bart – A magical-realist high fantasy, some peculiar amalgamation of the Odyssey, Thousand Years of Solitude and The Palm Wine Drunkard, in which our heroic Guadeloupean protagonist, possessed of a courageous heart, a magic rifle, and a golden penis (seriously) quests to defeat a beast which has swallowed the sun and also represents the legacy of slavery, journeying through colonial Africa and the land of the dead en route to his destiny. This description doesn’t really do justice to just how peculiar a book this is, slyly satirical but meant as an authentic epic, in which the tragedy of the African diaspora is redeemed through the suffering of our fairy-tale protagonist. Occasionally I got a little tired of the endless nonsensical descriptions, and I can’t say I liked this quite as much as the last Schwarz-Bart I read, the sublime Bridge of Beyond, but this is a very good, very odd book. Bart is attempting a style that I’m not really mad in love with, but it has to be said she nails it, and when she slips back into something a little less fantastical the excellence of her prose and the profundity of her thinking shines through. It seems very odd to me that Bart isn’t better known/regarded, given both her general ability and the enthusiasm the general public has for this sort of a story. Library, but I’d hold on to it otherwise.

Films!

The Player (1992) – An amoral Hollywood executive beats a writer to death and tries to get away with it. Also, romance! The running joke, of course, is that the protagonist’s actual crimes, murder and whatnot, are paralleled by his artistic crimes, making awful bilge for the studio system. Altman’s long tracking shots and multi-part dialogue are inspirational, and the endless 80’s star cameos are a lot of fun. I basically have never been able to like Tim Robbins in anything because he seems pompous and sleazy, but here he’s supposed to be pompous and sleazy and so it totally worked for me. Of course, the actual mystery doesn’t really make a lick of sense, but, whatever, we can’t have everything.

Wages of Fear (1953) – In a small South American border town, four European tramps agree to drive two trucks of nitroglycerin to a burning oil derrick a few hundred kilometers into the hinterlands, knowing that any small misfortune will kill them. Everything having to do with the actual driving bit of it is amazing, tense and terrifying; the hour build up before hand it seems to me is much, much too long, and it actually didn’t do all that good a job of introducing the characters. Not that it’s badly done exactly, it’s just that the premise itself is so brutal, so sharp, that anything that surrounds it seems to detract from it. Also, the very, very end was stupid. Still, fabulous all in all.

Tampopo (1985) – A band of culinary ronin teach a widowed mother how to run the perfect Ramen shop. If the framing story sounds insufficiently peculiar, rest assured the interluding vignettes promise the strangest food porn you will ever watch, making Jiro Dreams of Sushi look like 120 days of Sodom. Charming and funny, I might have enjoyed this more if I hadn’t decided to watch it on my 4th day of being laid up with the flu, which meant I was more nauseated than enthralled by a lot of it. Still, as someone who’s only memories of two months in Japan (basically) are of Ramen shops (Hokkaido style has butter and corn! There was a joint in the Kyoto train station where they had a basket of raw eggs on the table that you could crack on your soup, just hanging there like a normal condiment!) I was basically pretty down with a 90-minute homage to the King of noodle soups.

Shoot the Piano Player (1960) – A once famous pianist, now taken to playing ragtime at a dive bar, is pulled into a life of crime by his rapscallion brother in Trouffout’s homage to American crime. Who gives a shit what I think but this didn’t really come together for me. The noir bit didn’t really make any sense, and I thought the extended back story presented mid-film was kind of nothing. I liked a lot of individual scenes and lines and bits, but as an entire movie it seemed disjointed and I never really found myself giving a shit about any of the characters.

Thor: Ragnarok (2017) – Look, I was sick for fucking days now, OK? I just couldn’t watch anymore goddamn arthouse films, I needed something the film equivalent of the popsicles which were, for a while there, my only form of sustenance. This fit the bill. The negative part of my brain wants to point out that the plot makes no sense, and the villain/central conflict is so thin that I can’t remember any of it even a few days later, and that the humor comes, basically, just from each of the characters pointing out the absurdity/impossibility of the situation that they’re in. On the other hand, it’s genuinely funny, Taika Waititi seems extremely comfortable going from funny regional director to the pilot of a couple hundred million dollar ship, and Chris Helmsworth has decent comic chops, and you can see he’s enjoying the hell out of not having to make a third Thor movie which was exactly like the first two Thor movies. In practice I enjoyed this more than any other Marvel movie I’ve seen probably since Avengers – look what can be accomplished when you break out of that paint by numbers mold!

Red (1994) Strange. Lovely. A kind-hearted model in Geneva hits the dog of a bitter ex-judge who may or may not be God. Conversations about morality ensue. In keep with the rest of the Coleur trilogy this movie looks beautiful and comes together in a meandering, dream-like fashion, never providing clear narrative answers but offering a conceptual/thematic through line which was hopeful without being saccharine. I quite liked it.

Action Man (1967) – An aging French criminal (Jean Gabin) runs into an old friend with whom he served in Indo-China, and the two decide to knock off a bank. Basically a second rate Rififi, but since Rififi is fucking amazing this was still pretty solid. The actual heist is kind of nonsensical, and the fight scenes are similarly all kind of stupid, but Jean Gabin is fabulous, brutal and selfish and authentic feeling, and the ending comes together in a really weird, mean way.

Media I Consumed March 15, 2018

Right. Apart from being laid up with the flu at the moment thing’s are fine. I went to an avant garde puppet show? That was weird. I’m having trouble thinking clearly, my brain’s been cooking for a couple of days.

Books!

Ka: Dar Oakley in the Ruins of Ymir by John Crowley – A view of humanity’s journey from the stone age to just beyond tomorrow, as told (sort of) by Dar Oakely, a magic, immortal crow. I like John Crowley a lot, even though I haven’t liked all his books. He’s brilliant and has a fine prose pen and most importantly (particularly in the thimble-sized genre in which he writes) he’s ambitious, his writing defying easy convention or simple analysis. Ka is a lot easier to get through than say, Aegypt, but still this is the sort of book which is going to turn off most genre readers by virtue of his scope and difficulty, while, probably, getting the usual short shrift from the literary types who can’t admit to liking speculative fiction unless it’s been written in a different language. Which is too bad because, while imperfect, Ka is a really strong book. The first 2/3 in particular are strange and original, at turns horrifying and beautiful, and Dar Oakley’s peculiar series of journeys through the worlds of men living and men dead are weird and creepy and exciting. It bogged down a fair bit once we reached modernity, both because the various subplots aren’t as strong and just generally I think because the idea had kind of run out of steam a hundred pages before we actually ended the book, but still this is a thoughtful, valuable take on the miseries of human existence and the endless unknowability of death. Also, lots of flying. Library, but I’d probably keep it until I have to move somewhere again anyway.

Quartet by Jean Rhys – a young, underdeveloped, down on her luck Englishwoman living in Paris is manipulated into an affair with Ford Maddox Ford and his wife. Well-written, swift, and very, very mean, this reminded me a bit of last year’s After Claude in its…well, not quite misogyny, but the ferocious nastiness with which its female characters are all portrayed. It’s a slender novel, largely plotless, though I did really like the way Rhy’s sets the heroine’s obsession for the Ford character sort of off page, showing the terrible effects of it but not really the passion itself. All around well worth a read, I’d keep it but it’s a library book.

All Shot Up by Chester Himes – Maybe my favorite one of these? Admittedly they’re all very good, and very similar, but the mystery here was particularly sharp, there was a little bit more of Coffin and Gravedigger than there are in some of the others (which is a good thing), and the realm in which their investigation runs—the Harlem homosexual subculture, and the black local political elite – prove particularly fruitful terrain for Himes’s critical eye and ever-sharp elbows. I’ve been getting these from the library but at some point I'll be out somewhere and I’ll see them all on a shelf and I’ll buy then and then I’ll keep them.

Bilgewater By Jane Gardam –The story of a brainy, peculiar tom-boy raised by a bookish, silent father and a beloved nurse/caretaker, and the various troubles she gets into during adolescence. This is a really, really excellent Y/A book, from a time before that was a clearly delineated idea, well-written but conceptually rather limited. I’d give it to a cousin or a niece or something and they’d love it and carry it around and dog-ear the hell out of it but I didn’t think it was as complex or exceptional as the last Gardam I read. Not at all a bad book but I’m not sure I’d hold on to it. Not that it matters cause it’s a library book, THEY’RE ALL LIBRARY BOOKS NOW, so the keep/drop rubric should probably be amended.

The Heat's On by Chester Himes – When Grave Digger Jones gets dropped with a gunman’s bullet, Coffin Ed brings savage retribution to Harlem. The most conventionally plotted of these, and probably not surprisingly, my least favorite. Not to say that it’s bad, it’s not bad at all, it’s good, it’s just not as good as the others. Still, a ton of weird fabulous throw away stuff about Albino ex-boxers and viciously immoral geriatric heroin dealers. Library, but, you know, I’d keep it because I want an entire collection of Himes’s stuff at some point.

Wide Sargasso Sea By Jean Rhys – About how the brutal racial politics of the post-slavery Carribean drove a minor character from Jane Eyre insane. Full disclosure: I’ve never actually read Jane Eyre (awkward pause), though I’m not sure if that puts me in a better or worse position to review this book. Anyway, it’s dope, its got a very peculiar structure with the narrative shifting between the protagonist and her husband about midway through the book, as well as this overwhelming sense of gothic horror. It’s quite a nightmarish novel, actually, but then you sort of expect that going in. Library, but very good I’d keep it.

Blind Man With a Pistol by Chester Himes – As a summer Harlem explodes with violence, the powers that be send Gravedigger and Coffin Ed to figure out who’s causing it, only to discover that the culprit is (wait for it) racism! One gets the sense that Himes was basically sick of writing this series by this point; this is less a mystery novel than it is an exploration of a New York about to explode. There’s lots of murders, but none of them get solved; there’s lots of evil, but none really gets punished. I was always pretty much reading Himes for his depiction of scene and his insight into the brutal nature of racial politics in America, and those are all still on evidence here, but if you were hoping for you’re regular genre pay off you’ll be disappointed. I liked it though, keep. If it weren’t borrowed.

Films!

Last Good Friday (1980) – Bob Hoskins is a mean asshole who runs the London underworld, Helen Mirren  is a somewhat underused Mob wife, Pierce Brosnan is very young, the script is complex and mean and takes a while to come together, you’re rooting basically for Bob Hoskins but there’s no real notion that he’s a good person or anything, that is to say it does a really good job of not sugar-coating the realities of professional crime,  the final bit is fucking brutal, I dug it.

White (1994) – So, basically any American non-Arthouse movie is genre, that is to say, operating according to an internal narrative structure which provides certain expected emotional pay offs to the viewer—even relatively unsophisticated consumers have some underlying appreciation of this fact, which is why they tend to get angry if you buck it in even fairly casual terms. Part of the fun of watching things that don’t come out of the Hollywood system is that they can ignore these formulas or, as is the case here, torture them in interesting ways. Karol is a Polish hairdresser who’s insanely beautiful Parisian wife (I am as in love with Julie Delpy as I was when I saw her at 12 in American Werewolf in Paris (horrible movie)) divorces him. He is forced to return in tatters to Poland and…well, I don’t want to get into it for fear of spoiling the ending, which is super weird, and fun, and made me laugh in shock. Apart from that bit, though, I basically didn’t love any part of this, it was kind of slow and not that funny. So, watch it for the part I can’t tell you about, I guess, and then we’ll have a more substantial conversation on the merits at some point.

Vengeance (2009) – Very famous Frenchman Johnny Hallyday hires three contract killers to take revenge on the men who murdered his grandchildren.  It goes on too long, it’s a little bit sappy, and there are these occasional bits you have in foreign movies where people start acting in completely incoherent ways. But it’s stylish as fuck, and very famous Frenchman Johnny Hallyday is, well, you can understand why he’s famous, and there are some great throw away noir lines here and there. As far as Johnny To movies go, I preferred last week’s The Mission, but this was pretty strong in and of itself and I’ll keep an eye out for more of his movies if I can.

Yield to the Night (1956) – A character study of a woman on death row; maybe a third of the run time is about what led her to her circumstances (an ill-fated love affair, needless to say), but mostly it’s just a slow depiction of the protagonist going gradually more insane from the misery of her circumstance, and the attempts of the wardens/her family/etc to check the slide. This was good, well done, slow, kinda dull, might ultimately just not have had enough material to justify the runtime, conceivably could have been better if it had been a little weirder.

Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) – A mumblecore mafia movie. The guy who plays Jackie Treehorn is a strip club owner who gets in debt to the guy with a mustache who’s in all of Wes Anderson’s movies. It’s sort of an odd conceit that ‘accurate’ dialogue – by which I mean rambling, semi-coherent, with a lot of repetition – often goes hand in hand with an ‘inaccurate’ plot – that is to say, people doing things for inexplicable reasons, or general lapses in narrative logic. I’m kind of a sucker for this sort of thing, but I’ll admit your mileage might vary. Good title, though.

Media I Consumed March 9th, 2018

Yeah, the first week of March in Los Angeles saw some rain, which was strange and distracting, but apart from that things roll along comfortably. I saw Dave Rawlins and Gillian Welch kill it at this weird theater downtown which looked like a gothic cathedral inside, that was pretty fun. I ate some pretty killed ox-tail at an Indonesian joint in Pasadena. I read and saw the following.

Books!

Light by M. John Harrison – A serial killer/scientist in the present day, an amoral fighter ship captain, a ragtag ex-pilot, all bound together kind of loosely with a mystery that doesn't exactly come together but was pleasant to get through all the same. Harrison has some reasonable prose chops (though he leans too much to the William Gibson school of let-me-name-check-40-proper-nouns-a-sentence-to-give-you-some-color school of writing), and I totally enjoyed reading this, but it was cooler than it was profound. Which makes it sound like I didn't like it but I did, I totally liked it, it was creepy and a fun, quick read, and if this wasn't a Library book I'd keep it.

Dead Babies by Martin Amis – How can a satire be at once horrifyingly unpleasant and utterly toothless? Ask Martin Amis, I guess. About a bunch of really nasty, loosely drawn Anglo-American debauchees on a weekend long orgy/bender. Its disgusting, and disturbing, but it's not really much more than that. I guess this is supposed to be a critique of post 60's moral anarchy, but it doesn't bear the faintest resemblance to how society actually developed, just an endless stew of grotesqueries trotted on page in the presumable hope that shock will be mistaken for insight, which, judging by the reviews on the back of this book, I guess worked? I don't know why though, if you want to delve into the horrific moral collapse of modern Britain, just read Highrise. Awful, just awful. Drop, obviously.

The Crazy Kill by Chester Himes – Shit, Chester Himes Man. Shit. This..guy...damn. Like the rest of them, murder and the brutal aftermath which Gravedigger Jones and Coffin Ed bring in the aftermath, an investigation which propels pretty fabulous character studies of a selection of Harlem's citizens, a put-about gambler, a opium-addicted reverend. Writing is very strong, the construction of the plot is extremely tight, Jones and Ed are used with intriguing sparseness, the setting is vibrant, I mean, Himes, man, what are you going to say? This guy is top shelf noir. Library, but keep, obviously.

The Book of Dust by Phillip Pullman – When I heard Pullman was going to write a prequel/sequel/whatever to the Golden Compass books, I was disappointed, because those are fabulous and don't need to be touched, and prequels are stupid as shit for the obvious reason that they tell a story which is not the main story and so who cares. Part of the reason this book isn't any good is just because of that – the crux of the narrative has to do with our new protagonists trying to save Lyra, heroine of the His Dark Materials trilogy, from various threats she faces as a newborn – which, spoiler alert, they manage. But frankly the problems in this go beyond just the more general trouble with prequels, it just kinda sucks on its own merits. Malcolm is the blandest Y/A protagonist you'll find outside of pretty much every other Y/A book, the world itself is not nearly so fascinating the second time around (and stays fixed on Oxford and southern England, a less enthralling than the magical North which Pullman previously created), Pullman's philosophical/religious beliefs remain as dogmatic as ever, in short, this is not a very good book, and even if (especially if) you really loved the original trilogy I'd avoid it. Library, but drop.

Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively – Like Proust, except 200 pages, and the Madeline is a tank driver, and there's some incest. It's good, it's the sort of well-written you could give to a clever person who doesn't read a lot of books and that person would still like it. That's meant as a compliment. Given how many books there are dealing with this sort of subject, that is to say memory and the impossibility of synthesizing an 'authentic' narrative from the endless fragments of existence, I maybe thought it suffered a bit by comparison? Or, maybe another way to frame it is that I thought this was a very well-executed iteration of a very specific though not particularly rare literary sub-genre, but I didn't think it was revolutionary or even enormously ambitious. That said I would totally keep it (if it wasn't from the library), it's a very good book, it's funny and the writing is very strong.                                                                      

The Big Gold Dream by Chester Himes – As good as all the other books in the Harlem Cycle (as apparently they’re called) with a focus on the depravities of organized religion, and a bunch of hustlers trying to get over on a devotee.

Movies!

Red Rock West (1993) – A western noir in which a suprisingly restrained Nick Cage gets hired to murder Laura Flynn Boyle. Later, a less restrained Dennis Hopper arrived. I liked this movie, I'd have like it if it was a lot meaner. Cage's hero is a little too heroic, but I did like the back of nowhere Wyoming setting.

Misfits (1961) – Maudlin and mediocre. There's a good short story hidden here, in the story of three men (Montgomery Cliff, Eli Wallach, Clark Gable) falling in with a woman (the incredibly ill-cast Marilyn Monroe), her ill-considered soppy optimism contrasting with the grim reality of their cowboy lives, but it's too long and it takes an easy ending rather than pushing through into grim misery. Grim misery for me, man, you know what I like!

Mona Lisa (1986) – There are some peculiar, shall we say, political undertones to this story of a two-bit London criminal who comes out of jail and ends up working as a driver for a high class prostitute, but Hoskin's peformance (as the aforementioned thug) is compelling, as is Michael Caine's virtual cameo as his mob boss/effective pimp, and the ending is violent and shocking and does a pretty fabulous job of subverting the expectations the rest of the film had you swallow. Dope.

Game Night (2018) –  Better than it has any right to be. A lot of movies have struck upon doing a suburban noir, I think Jason Batemen himself was in a couple of them (something to do with bosses? Bad bosses? A Google search would sort this out) but mostly I feel like the ones I've seen do a shitty job of it. There's nothing revolutionary here and the ending is kinda nonsensical but the ratio of hits to misses joke wise is just much, much higher than most of these efforts—the throw away lines are better, in short. The cast is strong but mostly what you're talking about here is just a more than normally competent writing effort.

Night Moves (1975) – Weird. A neo-noir in which Gene Hackman playing a sensitive NFL-player turned detective (though the NFL bit doesn't really play into it) works a missing daughter case and tries to figure out who he is and what's up with his wife and the moral purpose of life and whatnot. It's structure is peculiar, it's largely and deliberately without tension, though a third act pivot ratchets it up a bit to no particular effect—but the meandering is mostly enjoyable. Young Gene Hackmen is a lot of fun to watch, and while there's rarely anything particularly compelling going on on-screen that's sort of balanced by the fact that lacking a conventional plot you don’t know what’s going to happen next so much.

The Mission (1999) – Ho, ho, ho! Ho! Loved this. About five Hong Kong gunmen brought in to serve as bodyguard for a high-ranking triad—obviously, I’m a sucker for these sorts of things, but I’ve also seen a ton of them and this one is really excellently put together. The little vignettes introducing each of the characters are fabulously on point, their growing camaraderie works well, the gun fights are dope, the plot itself is cleverer than it needs to be, and in a couple of critical places it zigs where you figure it’s going to zag. It doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel, but it’s got some nice, sterling silver rims all the same. Definitely going to check out another Johnny To film soon.

It Always Rain on Sundays – Really, really good, except for the kind of crap last two minutes. A slice of life noir about the East End of London in the post-war era. The life of a shrewish, unpleasant second wife of a day laborer is upended when an old lover escapes from prison and arrives, desperate, at her doorstep. Her attempts to keep him hidden drive the narrative and are fine in and of themselves, but much better are the various side-characters and misadventures which crop up around the main plot; a trio of thieves trying to sell of a gross ton of stolen roller skates, the clever police officer who pursues them, a fabulously sketched Jewish gambler/criminal. Excellent, well worth your trouble. 

Media I Consumed February 28th, 2018

February was a pretty great month. I won't belabor the point. And lucky you, now you get to add music to the list of things you can cherry pick off of me. Assuming you have spotify, I guess.

Best of February 2018 – Daniel Polansky

Thoughts

• This month ending mostly being about alt-folk, I don't know why.

• It's pretty insane to think how good Gillian Welch is as a songwriter that David Rawlins is not the best songwriter in that duo.

• Even a second-rate Townes Van Zandt album is a pretty fabulous album.

• I've been following Oddisee since the DC days and he still rules.

• How did it take me this long to hear 'Gypsy Woman?'

The English Master of Arms from the Twelfth to the Twentieth Century by JD Aywlard – So I was in this antique book store in Downtown LA that was closing at the end of the month, and something about this book caught my eye, and then something about the idea that I wouldn't be able to find it if I didn't buy it just then forced my purchase. I've made worse spur of the moment decisions, any way you look at it. A history of the British practice of melee weapons over the course of the last half century or so, this was one of those amusingly niche sorts of history books which, having so slender a focus, are useful for getting one to think about the peculiarities of life in a previous era. I basically couldn't follow/didn't care about the evolving practice of arms per se, but there are a lot of fun side stories about the colorful lives of the different English masters, and Aywlard himself has a pretty sharp pen, there's some good throw away lines mocking the pretensions and absurdities of his subject. Yeah, I mean fuck it I'll keep it.

Bomarzo by Manuel Mujica Lainez– the autobiography of a hunchbacked, fratricidal, devil-worshiping Renaissance Italian noble, ultimately less fun than it sounds. There's a lot of lovely pageantry, and some effective existential/aesthetic horror (there's a lot of Borges and Silvina O'Campo here, appropriate given they were all from Buenos Aires) but it gets repetitive, both in terms of the narrative itself and as a character study for the Duke himself. It also does the thing that a lot of historical narratives do where like, Don Quixote or Paracelsus run across the page in some minor capacity, and I kind of hate that. It's not a bad book, but it would have been a much better one at 300 pages, as opposed to 700 or whatever. Library book but I don't think I'd bother to hold on to this in any case.

God Save the Mark – About a sucker who inherits half a million dollars, and the various folk who attempt to con it from him. This is not quite up to the standards of Aztec Idols,but it's funny and clever, Westlake has some great throw-away lines as well as a real insider's grasp of New York, which comes out nice on the page. Library, but probably I'd drop it just cause I've got better examples of him doing this kind of thing.

Seven Men by Max Beerbohm – Five character studies/short stories, mostly of writers/artists/creative types, often with a supernatural bent. They're...OK. Beerbohm had a light comic touch (and a lovely name) but some of these don't land that well and the one's that do land don't land all that hard. I did quite enjoy the first short story, in which a hack writer with pretensions of genius visits the future only to discover his descendants have no more appreciation for his talent than did his contemporaries. Keep, for the moment, but it's just because it's an NYRB book and my shelves are bareish.

Casablanca – I mean, I like Casablanca, but full disclosure I don't love it like you're supposed to. The early genre bits are a ton of fun, and the walk through Rick's is classic, all the quick-takes and weird characters, and Bogart's hard-boiled dialogue is, well, obviously, and if I need to tell you my feelings about Peter Lorre then you don't know me at all, man, you don't know me at all. But the central romance is just shticky, shticky as all hell, which is fine but people seem to talk about it as if it's filled with meaning and profundity and I just don't see it. Even this guy who couldn't stop talking the other night before the midnight showing (midnight showing's are fun) was like, oh as I got older and have had more love affairs this movie resonates more for me, and I was like really, you had a girlfriend leave you so she could more effectively sustain opposition towards the Axis powers? Cause mostly they just seem to want me to be nicer to their friends.

Edge of Heaven – There were a lot of things I liked about Edge of Heaven, a pair of intersecting stories revolving around a group of Turkish emigres to Bremen, a small city in the north of Germany in which I lived, once upon a time. It's very pretty looking, the cast is excellent, the dialogue is well-written, and the structure of the narrative itself is quite clever, there are legitimately surprising bits in this. On top of that, however, there was the great pleasure I took in getting to see those few bits of a city I have not had occasion to revisit since I fled, and the happy nostalgic feelings it provoked in me. All of this together more than made up for the, to my mind, somewhat mawkish third act, and I'll definitely take a look at another Akin in the near future.

Black Panther – I'm glad I live in a world in which black children can watch mediocre genre crud with characters that look like them, but that's all this is, the standard Disney/Marvel production with black folk instead of Norse Gods or whatever.

Blood Simple – I regard the Cohen Bros. with something resembling adoration, and this Freshman effort, about a couple of murders and a love affair and whatnot, has some excellent bits and demonstrates the style that they would develop so brilliantly later on—the action is thoughtful and horrific, the little bits of dialogue are on point--but the narrative doesn't make any sense, like, at all, and there's not much of the grand moral framework which is the most extraordinary thing about their later movies. Still, a fun watch. Also, the title is from a Dashiell Hammet line in Red Harvest, about the joy of murder making the hero go eponymous.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit – Another midnight showing, this movie is a ton of fun. Being me, I'd have wished they'd leaned a little more into the subversive, dark nature of the underlying ideas, and at a certain point the endless slapstick got duller than I remembered. That said, as far as a movie that can be enjoyed by a five year old and a full adult, it's hard to think of much to compare. There are so many clever little throw away bits here, Donald Hoskins is an inspired choice, I mean there's a reason you love this movie and so do I.

Blue – Pretty! Depressing! The color trilogy has been on my list since high school and I'm happy to be getting to it now. Blue is incredible looking and Juliette Binoche gives a ferocious performance as a woman grieving over the death of her husband and child, trying to bring herself back from the brink of madness. I'll admit I found it kind of slow going through it, but as the film continues and each scene proves a piece to the larger thematic puzzle of how Binoche deals with her newfound 'freedom', and gradually reattaches to human society, was striking and exceptional. Looking forward to seeing the next one.

Scarecrow – Gene Hackman is a thug, Al Pacino a friendly drifter, the two set out on a journey from California to Pittsburgh, getting into various misadventures along the way. Sort of a cross between Of Mice and Men (with a car wash replacing the Alfalfa farm) and Midnight Cowboy. Fun! And Pacino could really, really act, back before he started chewing scenery full time. Interesting to see him play against type here, quieter and more friendly, nothing of the rote heavy he started playing at some point in the 80's.

Media I Consumed February 16th, 2018

I dunno. I dunno. A lot happened this week. Some good. Some not. I dunno. I hate the internet and don't ever want to be famous. I doubt there's much danger of that. Since I wrote the last post I read the following books, and watched the following movies. I'm going to start writing things about them now, because it helps me remember them later on.

The Bridge of Beyond By Simone Schwartz-Bart – Fabulous, just fabulous. Several generations of woman growing up in Guadeloupe, this is magical realism (I know, I know, sorry, sorry) at it's very best, that is to say an ecstatic (though not at all improbable) hyper-vivid storyline, filled with various folk beliefs and hints of fantastical activities, the purpose of which being to intensify the readers own reactions to the essentially very reasonable, human emotions of the cast. An enormously life-affirming novel, exceptional in its empathy. Oh, lovely, lovely! A very, very rare find. I have read a lot of fabulous books lately and gun to my head (please don't put a gun to my heard) this was the best. Absolutely beautiful. Obviously, keep.

The Dead-Mountaineer's Inn by the Brother's Strugatsky – A police investigator arrives at a (possibly haunted) winter cabin, various mysteries occur, to say much else would spoil things. You can probably assume by it being written by the two greatest Russian sci-fi writers (one of the best period) that there is more here than the usual locked door mystery, and that part of it I really liked, but at it happens I fucking hate locked door mysteries, and so the part of it that is an example or perhaps a parody of the that style of book really bored the shit out of me, and so I probably didn't love this as might as much as I might have. On the third hand (?) there is a sense of moral seriousness, evident likewise in last week's Roadside Picnic, which put it firmly in the keep column.

Invitation to a Beheading by Vladamir Nabokov – (Quick sidenote – this is not the first time that Vintage International has flat shit the bed on back copy (I'm looking at you, William Faulkner's The Mansion) directly spoiling the ending. Admittedly the ending is nonsensical but that's not the point, someone over there needs to fix this shit)High literature has its cliches as assuredly as does genre fiction, and among their number there is surely no hoarier conceit than 'man is put to death for the crime of being an individual,' every bit as banal as the beautiful broad walks into a private detective's office/scullery boy draws a sword from a stone. Here you will find the usual slate of grotesque side characters and tragi-comic interludes, done very well, so far as they go, I mean Nabokov can write, obviously, there are some laugh out loud funny bits, but basically it seemed like a lot of absurdity for absurdities sake, and it just felt tiringly similar to a lot of other things I've read. This is the first book I got from the LA Library (I joined a library! Woo-hoo for me!) and so the keep/drop dynamic doesn't really work as well, but if I'd bought this I'd have gotten rid of it.

God on the Rocks by Jane Gardam – Ooo. Oooh! Excellent. A summer in north England between the Wars, a precocious young girl and the horrible adults who surround her; a puritanical father, a weak mother, a lascivious nanny, a bunch of other less than lovely, though sympathetic and understandable, characters. This is very well written, but rarer (at least among a lot of the books I find myself reading) it is masterfully plotted, offering the sort of narrative anticipation that high literature often feels like it doesn't need to bother with (sidenote: it is generally wrong). Excellent all around, I'll definitely keep an eye out for more by Ms. Gundam. Another library book, but I'd keep this in principal.

The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain – Basically, this is a very good, grim noir/novel of existential despair in the Jim Thompson/Camus mold. I particularly liked the weird sadomasachistic sex, and the twisted sense of love which arises between the leads. On the other hand it's over complicated, and the legal drama and the various side-stories which come after the initial murder only serve to muddle the ferocious erotic nastiness of the plot. Still, fabulous, I'd keep it if I didn't need to give it back to the library.

Invincible Vol. 23 Full House – For my money, Invincible is the best superhero comic ever written, and one of the best comics period. A hundred plus issues in and Kirkman still manages to keep the story fresh, with surprising plot developments and solid character development. I guess it's coming to an end soon, apparently, and that's kind of a bummer but also I'm looking forward to seeing these evil Vultrimites get their what for. Fucking Vultrimites. Keep.

God's Country by Percival Everett – Absolutely fucking fabulous. Some peculiar crossbreed between Nathanael West and Charles Portis, an absurdist revisionist Western serving double (triple?) duty as a grand comment on racial injustice. Our antihero protagonist, Curt Marder, a cowardly, immoral fool, has his wife kidnapped by white men masquerading as Indians, and hires on the services of Bubba, a black tracker, heroic and taciturn, to find her. A series of tragi-comic misadventures ensues, exposing the hypocrisies of the mythology of the American West mythology and making me laugh with such frequency and intensity that I began to make the people at the bar around me uncomfortable. Brilliant, obviously a keeper

Harold and Maude – It's funny to see the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl spring full-grown from Hal Ashby like Athena from the head of Zeus, down to Harold learning a quirky instrument, and the Cat Stevens soundtrack. The original is much better than its descendants; the fake suicide attempts are, at first at least, legitimately funny, and every scene with Harold's mom made me laugh out loud (the bit where she's filling out his dating profile is a howler). Also, obviously, the age difference is legitimately transgressive, and Harold's gradual realization that he is sexually attracted to Maude is done in a really unsettlingly excellent way. The end is still kind of shticky, but then again romantic comedies by their nature kind of have to be. I quite liked it, all in all.

Being There – About a gentle retard who manages to stumble his way into the highest echelons of power by repeating things people say back to them and muttering the banal idiocies he learned from watching television. It's a brilliant conceit, and Peter Sellers is fabulous, although to my mind we could have shaved about 20 minutes off. But really that's a minor complaint, and this is a pretty great movie, particularly Shirley McClaine's hysterically funny sex scene and the brilliant final shot. Hal Ashby had a peculiar genius for creating films which future generations would steal from entirely while somehow completely missing his obvious ironic intent. Zach Braff saw Harold and Maude and figured, hey, what if Maude was young and beautiful and the ending was happy, and I guess Rob Zemeckis saw Being There and thought, hey, what if the inane platitudes of this halfwit did contain some seeds of wisdom, and he made Forest Gump. Weird. Weird. Anyway, this is great, watch it if you haven't.

Last Detail – Fabulous. About a pair of Navy-lifers who are charged with delivering an 18 year old boy to spend 8 years in prison for a minor crime, and the misadventures they gin up in en route. It's really, really well written, funny and mean, the dialogue and the interaction always feeling honest. Jack Nicholson plays one of the two guards, and he nails it- 'screamy' actors tend to age really badly, their intensity inevitably descends into schtick as they get older (I'm looking at you, Al Pacino) but this role really shows Nicholson at his best—there's a raw authenticity to him, a mad passion that bubbles off the screen, whether he's screaming at a mouthy bartender or lamenting the loss of their charge's innocence. Really, really liked this movie.

Shampoo – Mainly what I liked about this is there are no easy villains. Characters who would be throw away villains in worse movies – a commercial director who swoops in on Goldie Hawn, a sleazy industrialist played brilliantly by Jack Warden (there's a character actor, shit) – they're sympathetic, even likable. For that matter Beatty's womanizing prick is drawn with understanding awfulness. Oh, and 18 year old Carrie Fisher has got gigantic eyes and solid comic chops.

Lost Highway – I basically want to avoid giving any actual interpretation of the film, or even much of a description, because I fear they'll just spoil the thing, and if you haven't seen it you ought to, but this seemed very much to me to be a sort of practice run for Lynch's superior Mulholland Drive, having much the same basic set up – a pair of stories reflecting one another, with the illusory half functioning as an attempt by the protagonist to overcome the evils brought about by their obsessive, violent, destructive love. So far as Lynch goes, this is pretty coherent, closer to say, Blue Velvet than Inland Empire, but all the same if you like your films with, you know, clear plots and whatnot you might want to stay away. Obviously I'm kind of a obsessed with Lynch, indeed I have no idea why I haven't seen this movie already, and am glad I rectified that failing. Also, more fun to watch Lynch now that I've moved out to LA, but obviously that's not going to be much for you one way nor tother.