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.

Books I Read February 8th, 2018

LA is warm and weird. I went to a Taiwanese Night Market last week and ate stinky tofu for the first time since I used to live in Taiwan, as well as a couple of other things that I actually liked and wasn't just eating for nostalgia. The flowers bloom in the winter, out here. In New York there weren't really any dive bars anymore but there are some proper dive bars here.Yo estudio espanol por uno o dos horas a dia, y progresso despacio. Escribe estos libros;

The Damned by John D MacDonald – Excellent and peculiar. About a handful of people who get stuck at a ferry crossing near the Mexican/American border, and the misfortunes which befall them. I picked up one of MacDonald's at some point earlier, something which was a bit more straight detective-y and I liked it but didn't love it. This was much better. The writing is really on point, each of the different characters feels well-realized (mostly; in keeping with the noir tradition the assholes and villains are better drawn than the more decent characters.) MacDonald's writing is astute in its depiction of sexual mores as well as casual racism. The structure is likewise really peculiar, with each short chapter taking place from the POV of one of the different characters, ranging from casual gangsters to emasculated husbands. A lot of other mid-century noir writers – Chandler, Hammet, the other McDonald, etc. – had the prose chops to go toe to toe with more or less anyone (almost) but were hampered by having to stick to the usual genre conventions, which are fun but limiting. It's interesting to see what can be done out of those boundaries, kind of like what Highsmith was doing with Price of Salt. Hey, is this out of print? Because if so, it would slot neatly into the NYRB classic's catalog. Keep.

Central Station by Lavie Tidhar – Mushy. Mushy all over. Yeah, I know you gave it to me for free, Lavie, but I still didn't like it. Go back to writing about Nazis. Drop.

Pnin by Vladamir Nabokov – Yeah, I mean, there's a reason that Nabakov is widely regarded as one of the best writers of the 20th century. This is a small book, both in page count and scope, about the life of an indigent, unimpresive Russian professor, but the prose is masterful, funny and original, and more importantly than that there's a sweetness to him, he doesn't give in to the easy temptation, common to good writers and geniuses generally, to hate the people around him. Keep.

The Sagas of Icelanders by Assorted Icelandic Folk – Prose stories detailing the various misadventures of man and woman who were born or exiled to or who died in Iceland from, roughly speaking 900-1200 AD. What's the point of reading ancient works of world literature? 1) it gives you some insight into a past culture, and into the broader sweep of history. 2) it's difficult, and strange, and not like reading anything written in the last few centuries, and there's a value to that in and of itself. 3) there are always a handful of peculiar concepts which are fun to steal and run with – here I really liked the Scorn Pole, which is when if you challenged another dude to a fight and he agreed and then punked out you'd go to his land and put a rotting horse head on a stick in front of his house. 4) it's always fascinating to see these pre-modern societies grapple with emotional issues which are outside of appropriate social norms. But, mainly 5) because it's one of the unique joys of literature to stumble across intersections between the past and present, when the life of a raider/merchant from a thousand odd years ago reflects some similarity with that of a shiftless LA lay-about.

There's enough of them here to make it worth your trouble, though the general quality varies a lot. Egil's Saga, about a whiny poet/lunatic warrior in particular is really good, as is the Saga of the People of Laxardal, which details the bloody, endless, self-defeating vengeance of a woman scorned. Probably I'd be better served if I had read them one at a time, rather then altogether, because the blood feuds and voyages to Greenland kind of run together, but by and large I would admit to having felt like this was a pretty good use of my time. Keep

Books I Read February 2nd, 2018

Right. I moved to Los Feliz, which is the sort of neighborhood which like, if you were making fun of my cliché, you'd go, 'I bet you live in Los Feliz, don't you,' and I'd have to hang my head. But, it does have a million cool bars and restaurants and coffee shops and there's a big park nearby and some good bookstores and what more does a person really want. I walk around the neighborhood and point at things and say their names in Spanish. El piso! La Ventana! Un habitacion. Etc. Also, I read these books.

Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert Heinlein –I'm trying to get someone to pay me to write about this so I'll just use this as a placeholder, but in case I forget to fill that place I didn't love it. There's a freshness to Heinlein which is characteristic of that era of sci-fi writers, where the territory is so uncharted that things don't feel cliché, but I thought ultimately its moral vision is likewise kind of infantile, and some of the writing is just not great, any way you look at it. Drop.

Flight to Canada By Ishmael Reed – Oh man, I loved this. L-O-V-E-D. I like, walked into lamp poles reading this. I tripped on the beach reading this. A brilliant, bizarre comic satire of race relations during the civil war and a hundred years after, taking place in a nonsensical wonderland where Gettysburg is overlapping with rock-and-roll music and our protagonist, Raven Quickskill's eponymous escape from slavery might take place on a jumbo jet. Like Nathanael West (peculiar that I just read him last week, as Reed's debt to West is clear throughout) the plot really is just thin cover for an endless barrage of side characters, misadventures and narrative asides. The best satirists are hedgehogs, all points, and Reed is one of these, with every facet of American society being pitilessly, savagely, hysterically skewered. There are no easy answers here, no clear political program, just a fabulous writer exposing the underlying hypocrisy endemic to the human character. Also, you could basically read any sentence in this book and just laugh your ass off-- all this great wordplay and dead pan humor. Obviously I'm keeping this.

Eternity Street: Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles by John Mack Faragher– I had forgotten that part of the fun of moving to a place is you get to submerge yourself in the history of the place you've moved, and this was a good way to start, a brisk six hundred pages about the slow development of the rule of law in Los Angeles. There's a bit about its early incorporation into the Spanish monastic system and then a swift overview of secularization and then a bit about the American 'liberation' Southern California during the Mexican-American war which is entertaining (in the fashion of all American conflicts prior to the Civil War, there's a lot of half-assedry as modestly incompetent military men struggle against the inconceivably vast distances involved, teams of shoeless marines being dispatched by a charge of vacqueros with horses, everyone getting drunk and running away after there's a fight, that sort of thing) but probably goes on a bit too long, after which it settles into the heart of the story, a discussion of how lynch law rose and fall in Los Angeles, and the creation and strengthening of societal norms against violence. That was a long fucking sentence. That kind of thing is right up my alley, and there were a lot of fun descriptions of horrible crimes sufficiently dated as to offer one frisson rather than nightmare. As it happens I actually bought this one for my phone, cause it was a lot in paper and also I'm trying to keep fewer books but if we're going to keep to my binary, if I owned it, I'd keep it.

Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky– Damn. Damn! Wow! Damn! Between Flight to Canada and this, I had a pretty fabulous week for books. How come the Russians are better than everyone else when it comes to novels? I don't know why this is the case but it's true, they're been ahead of the West at every stage since the creation of the novel, pretty much. When did this come out? '71? For some reason I thought it was a little earlier. Still, dope, really, really dope. So, there's this town, and these alien's come and visit it, and a lot of weird shit happens, and everyone runs away, and the UN tosses this cordon around the town's the alien's visited called the Zone. And people sneak into these zones and they steal shit because this shit's worth a lot of money to the outside world, because this shit that the alien's left behind or whatever, they're like toys to the aliens (maybe) but to us they violate the laws of physics and shit. These dudes are called Stalkers. This is a pretty ill set up for a book just starting out buy the Bros. Just nail it, man, it's written with this really excellent patter which 1) sounds like you think future people would talk 2) is totally easy to understand and 3) somehow gives a broader sense of the world without bogging you down in a lot of explanation, except for one bit 4/5ths in, and even that's pretty fun. The Bros. Do the best job of making the 'alien' feel really horrifying of anyone I think I read besides Lovecraft but unlike Lovecraft, who was obviously a bigoted, desperate man, the Bros. Offer an bleak but not despairing moral vision which only very good works of fiction offer. I also got this online but I'm going to keep my eye out for a version to BUY-- THAT'S HOW MUCH I LIKED THIS BOOK. Not only am I not going to drop it, I'm going to buy it!

Japanese by Spring By Ishmael Reed – Weird. I can't remember having such a case of a literary whiplash since reading Annie Proulx. The story of a black professor of literature who sells his soul first as an anti-affirmative action advocate, then as a pro-Japanese quisling after the Japanese take over the university, I was so shocked by its bitterness and general incompetence that I spent a lot of the book thinking I must have been missing something, before coming to the decision that no, I didn't, it just sucked. There is a joke somewhere to be made about the inherent racism endemic to most all cultures and people, our secret belief that whatever we are must be better than whatever everyone else is by virtue of our being it, but it doesn't come together here. Reed's depiction of Academia as being a bastion of Nazidom is from my experience, peculiar and inaccurate. (admittedly this was written in 91 or so, but still I cannot imagine things have changed so much between then and my undergraduate experience in the mid 2000's. True, there has been a recent and disturbing 'mainstreaming' of right wing pseudo-fascist ideology, but that's sort of the point—Academia is not the main stream, it is its own peculiar niche, and not one in which you will see many individuals wearing swastikas). Likewise almost hysterically dated is the early 90's fear of a resurgent Japan, which is, in retrospect, about as silly a boogieman as you're apt to find.

There are a lot of skills required of a satirist, most of which Reed seems to have lost in the quarter-century or so between writing Flight to Canada and writing this. His powder is dry, his assaults either toothless or taking place on straw men. Worse yet, Reed gives in to the single most unacceptable fault in a satirists, which is to allow his own personal feelings to dictate the vent of his spleen. Whoever it was that popularized the 'punching upward' school of satire is a fucking idiot who understands nothing about humor in the slightest (as if it were an Excel formula – 'make sure you exclude any underserved populations from your comic sum!'). A good satirist carries a machine gun, not a rifle, and he takes aim at everything he sees, and, most importantly, he makes sure to keep one in the clip for himself. Flight to Canada does a great job with this, skewering the pretensions and hypocrisies of everyone it lays its eyes on. Japanese by Summer does the exact reverse. Reed frequently slips into an omniscient third person that comments in what, by all appearances, is mean to be an objective fashion, pointing out the failures of the various characters and telling the reader what they're supposed to believe. By the time we get to Reed's introduction of the character 'Ishmael Reed', who takes over the last quarter of the book and engages in fairly naked sock-puppetry, one cannot help but feel that Reed the author has shat the bed altogether. As a single if sterling example; there are at least half a dozen asides mocking a character named Dgun da Niza, a Neo-Conservative of Indian descent meant, obviously, to be Dinesh D'Souza. Fair enough, D'Souza is as rancid a festering pile of of shit as was ever stuffed into a suit and shoved on television, but he's 1) not really worthy of being called out directly and 2) making fun of another person's name is the lowest form of humor that can be stumbled upon.

In short, despite having some fabulous throw away lines, there was so much of Reed's own persoal issues shoved into the narrative that one comes away with the awkward feeling of having caught someone masturbating. I suppose its possible that this was all some incredibly subtle joke that I just didn't get it, but if so, I didn't get it. Drop.

Books I read January 28, 2018

Right. So, I live in Los Angeles now. Above a tattoo parlor in Venice, which is a little too on the nose, all thing's considered, but I guess I'll take it. Anyway I'll be moving out soon enough. LA is cool, it's warm during the day but cool at night and its weirder and wackier than New York, and everything is jumbled all up together in an appealing way. Anyhow it's been too long since I didn't have any idea what I was doing next; that's kind of my preferred MO. Oh, also, I'm trying to learn Spanish—Duolingo says I'm 25% fluent but I say Duolingo and I have pretty different ideas of what fluency entails. In any event, these are the books I read this month.

The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler – What's there to say about Chandler that hasn't been said? One of the best pure prose stylists in the English language, and his genius is on evidence here, but he also has no idea how to structure a plot, and that likewise is evident. Even if you can forgive the two narrative strands being forced together under a set of circumstances which would make Dumas blush at the coincidence, you're still left with a book which would be seriously improved by dropping about 75 pages, particularly towards the back half, which is padded out unmercifully. I mean it's still spectacular, and justly beloved, but gun to my head I think I would take Farewell, My Lovely, which has a more coherent pacing. Still, man, the sting at the end, and the meta-joke where Marlowe is working for a miserably depressed alcoholic who writes cut-rate genre fiction which he feels beneath him—I mean, Chandler is Chandler man. He's the one and only. I already have this in some back back East, so I'm not actually going to keep it but obviously it's worth keeping.

Dashiell Hammet: A Life by Diane Johnson – As far as biographies go, this was fine? Hammett had a fascinating and extraordinary life, from impoverished Baltimorean Youth (Go Ravens!) to Pinkerton Agent to Tuberculosis patient to beloved novelist and bon-vivant to political dissident, and Johnson offers a nuanced and basically well-written view of the man. I found myself sort of annoyed at the brevity with which Hammet's time time as private investigator was given, which of course is more interesting than him being, say, an elderly alcoholic armyman in the Aleutians during WWII, but that might be because there isn't a lot of information on Hammet's life at that point, I'm honestly not sure. I'll keep it for the moment because I might have an idea for a Hammet related project, but as a rule only the most exceptional biographies tend to make my cut and I don't this will survive another move.

Tristiana by Benito Perez Galdos– Eh. The story of an aging Don Juan and his eponymous adopted daughter/lover, this is basically well-written and there are some clever narrative decisions at the end but for whatever reason I found myself kind of bored. A lot of the narrative consists of love letters between Tristiana and her lover, and these are supposed to be saccharine and overwrought (in the fashion of young lovers) which, fair enough, but I still had to read them and I didn't love reading them and so I will probably drop, though in fairness to Galdos, long dead, he accomplishes what he sets out to do here.

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West – Hysterical. Oh man, did I like this. A (mocking? Sincere?) story of a journalist taking on the role of advice giver for a daily rag during the Great Depression, whose forced familiarity with the full range of human despair and idiocy brings about religious epiphany, this is a hysterical, gorgeous, strange little novella. Like a funnier Dostoevsky (not that Fyodor wasn't funny—to the mines, to the mines!). Loved. Keep.

Naked Earth by Eileen Chang – Ooooh! A masterful, sprawling epic somehow condensed into about 300 pages, Chang's depiction of an idealist Commissar (that's not quite the right term but here we go) trying to survive Land Reform, the 3 anti campaign and then the Korean war manages to be vast in scope and also beautiful line to line.Stylistically, Chang's particular genius lies in her depiction of erotic romance (I think gun to my head I might have enjoyed Love in a Fallen City, which deals with this subject primarily, slightly more), but there are some really fabulously clever plot choices here which allow for a depiction of the horrors of Mao's China while still allowing for some rough glimmer of optimism. Keep. Chang is a rare talent.

A Cool Million by Nathanael West – Basically an anti-Horatio Alger, about an upright, heroic young man who sets out in search of the American dream and finds himself jailed, abused, dismembered, killed, and then used as the posthumous champion of a proto-fascist group. West is...really, really funny, and really, really mean, and between this and Miss Lonelyhearts (which was slightly better) I'm kind of shocked it took me this long to get to him. Keep.

A View of the Harbour by Elizabeth Taylor – About a small, English beach town fading in post-War modernity. In so far as there's a plot, it revolves around an affair and the ways in which said affair affects the town's various persona; an aging sailor, an elderly gossip, a miserable widow, a couple of other people, but really this is one of these books in which very, very little seems to happen. I quite like Taylor, her novel Angel is a lot of fun and her collection of short stories that NYRB released has one of my all time favorite horror stories (something about a fly? Or maybe the number 3 is in it? You'll know it if you read it) and her talent for prose is on evidence here but all the same I was mostly bored while reading it. Drop.

Memoirs of the Warrior Kumagi By Donald Richie – Interesting. Odd. A false biography ostensibly written by a minor character in the Genpei Wars, immortalized in the epic Tale of Heiki, one of the foundational texts of Japanese literature which is sometimes (falsely, nonsensically) described as being an Eastern Illiad. In recounting his life, Kumagi seeks to come to grips with the false narrative which surrounded his slaying of a minor noble of a rival clan, as well as, more generally, to assess the way in which legend comes to replace fact not only in the minds of the public but in our own as well. It's breezy and odd, with a talky, informal style very deliberately at odds with the traditions of Japanese chivalry and the literature of the time, and I got a kick out of it. Keep.

Day of the Locusts by Nathanael Hawthorne – My least favorite of the 4 of his that I read this month. Part of this is that it's the one which comes closest to having an actual narrative, about a painter newly come to Los Angeles who tries to woo an unscrupulous actress/prostitute, but the story meanders and doesn't go anywhere and doesn't offer anything really by way of a pay off, which, again fine, but I'd rather it just be dispensed with altogether so Hawthorne could make more silly jokes. Also, as for said silly jokes, I didn't find the ones in this as funny as the ones in the other three. But, again, all this negativity is by comparison to his other stuff, and taken alone this is weird and funny and quite mean and I would keep it.

Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte – I met a Fraulein on a beach in Lithuania, once upon a time. She had very blonde hair and very blue eyes and a smile like water on an electrical fire, and for that too-rare grin I left my home and moved to a city on the North sea where the sun did not shine and there was nothing very good to eat. Talmudically speaking, a Goy, I was nonetheless the closest she and most everyone else I met there had ever come to seeing a Jew, an and it was a rare social gathering which would not find me cornered by some or other well-meaning Deutschlander, anxious to assure me that, had they been in the place of their grandparents, they would have shown the utmost regard for my person and property, irrespective of the risk to their own

Among Germans, I found this unearned moral certainty to be a harmless, indeed faintly admirable attempt to deal with the peculiarity of being burdened by inconceivable crimes which were committed a rough half century before your birth. But for all other peoples it taught me to despise any kind of unearned moral certainty as a particularly disgraceful form of Boenhoffer's 'cheap 'grace', and when occasionally I hear it being bandied about I have to bite my tongue to keep it civil. 'Would you have chosen death above dishonor?' I want to ask. 'Are you so certain? Would you have shielded the Goldstein's from next door, knowing that the penalty for doing so was your murder and the murder of everyone else in your household? Would you have slapped anti-Hitler propaganda on the walls of Munich, as did the sainted Scholls? Are you so confident in your righteousness

I am getting somewhere with this, I promise.

Malaparte was a war reporter attached to the Italian army and thus able to travel widely throughout the Axis controlled areas during World War II. Already something of a literary star in his home country, Malaparte became part of an international socialite set which saw him welcomed throughout wartown Europe. His account—published long after the war, allowing for unknowable sorts of post-facto revisions—has him lamenting the terrible brutalities of the Nazis from deep within the belly of the beast, observing with distaste the evils of the Nazis and their supporters, though never to such a degree that he arouses their ire. He sits at table with the German overseer of occupied Poland, he slights Himmler in a hotel in neutral Finland, he does his best to hide the desperate Jews of Moldova. Welcomed because of his boundless wit (which Malaparte details with comprehensive thoroughness), Malaparte laments the inability of a single individual to do anything amid the horror of modern warfare, horror which, it must be said, he chronicles with insight and stylish prose.

I did not like this book. I did not like this man. I did not like sharing space with him, I did not like carrying him in my bag. The long intro to the contrary, I could not make my peace with a fellow who would call a Nazi friend, or even allow one to mistake him as such. Perhaps there was nothing that Malaparte could have done, within the context of his circumstance, to effect the evil going on around him. Perhaps in his shoes I would have done even worse; I can't say. But I do not think I would have eaten dinner with a man responsible for the murder of countless Poles, however clever or subtle my insults over the desert course. I do not think I would have shared that man's salt. I do not think I would have slapped that man on the back. Maybe this is false righteousness, but in any case I would as soon not have Malaprte sharing room with my other books. Drop, obviously.

The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West– Hysterical, vicious. An elaborate series of very cruel jokes about the pointless futility of writing and of art more generally. There's nothing really by way of story, just a lot of peculiar asides and a pretty fabulous Dostoevsky impression. West is one of the better comic writers I think I ever read, laugh out loud funny. Keep.

Book Reviews Last Six Months of 2017

2017 will be the worst year for reading, in terms of hourly effort/number of books, that I can ever remember having. This is a galling, bitter pill to take, one of many I’ve been trying to stomach these recent weeks. But still, castor oil at least strengthens the digestion, and failure offers endless opportunity for self-reflection.

Why didn’t I read more? Laziness? Maybe laziness. I seemed often to lack the necessary presence of mind to sit comfortably and read a book this last year, various other anxieties proving too strong. Generally speaking I can make myself write but not read, the former requiring a sort of all-consuming mental effort which tends to void away most other , while reading is a more reflective activity, and easily spoiled by outside concerns.

Also, I just couldn’t be bothered to getting around to putting these all up on goodreads. My computer is kind of a piece of shit, and I’m pretty lazy. Wait, I mentioned that already.

Anyway, below are my scattershot, fairly haphazard recollections of the books I read these last—six months or whatever, I dunno.

EDITORS NOTE: I WAS SO LAZY I DIDN'T EVEN GOT THIS DONE DURING THE YEAR IN QUESTION. On the other hand, who cares..

After Claude by Iris Owens–Half a year later and this one still stings when I look at it. The absolutely relentlessly nasty recollections of a shallow, meaningless Manhattanite and the endless injuries she does herself and others, presented with extraordinary bitterness. I’ve been thinking of this one a lot lately, for one reason or another. Suffice to say it’s sharply written and devastating, but also I suspect too mean for most readers. I don’t think its misogynistic, exactly, but if a man had written something which so savagely plumbs the depths of a woman’s psyche they would have a hard time at cocktail parties, let’s just put it that way. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s enormously clever, however. Keep, and I’ll see what else I can dig up by Ms. Owens likewise.

Black Spider by Jeremiah Black Spider –A horror story grounded in an authentic belief in Christianity (been a while since we’ve seen one of those), the plot is simple but it works all the same – small town in Switzerland makes a deal with the devil, the devil makes them pay for it. Horror (genre fiction generally) tends not to age that well but this one still mostly worked for me, there are some disturbing little bits and the pre-Freudian erotic/satanic frisson is a lot of fun. Keep.

The Midnight Promise by Zane Lovitt – the classic detective novel is the modern update of the passion play, in which the sins and evils of humanity are writ on the body and soul of a sainted martyr, their shining example serving to shame our petty, quotidian immorality, the endless tiny concessions which are demanded of us. Lovitt’s excellent debut effort is very much in this realm, his sympathetic-bordering-on-masochistic hero a spiritiual a successor to Ross McDonald’s Lew Archer (the third of the holy trinity as regards detective fiction, though for some reason never having gotten quite the same shine as Hammett or Chandler). An episodic series of misadventures in the life of an Australian PI, building finally to a reasonably thrilling crescendo, the language is brisk and competent and the structure skillful. I don’t actually know anything about Lovitt but his storylines at least feel authentic in the way that good crime writing does, his villains are nasty and stupid and unexpected things happen unexpectedly. Strong stuff. Keep.

The Rim of Morning: Two Tales of Cosmic Horror by William Sloane –Pre-war horror seems to have needed to be, essentially, less horrifying than its modern version. That is to say that you’re much more likely (as in these) to have a story framed around something more uncanny than violent or terrifying. These two short novels are skillfully constructed, the writing is definitely a notch above most of Sloane’s contemporaries (damning with faint praise) but probably most readers will find the underlying revelations, not to put too fine a point on it, not that scary? It’s an interesting counterpoint to Lovecraft, for instance, whose prose is pretty squalid but whose nightmares were so horrifying that they somehow managed to compensate for his lack of professional comptence. These are better in all regards, except for not having enough sting. Then again, the sting is the point of a horror story, isn’t it? Still, it holds up better than 90% of horror fiction of its time. Keep.

Dark Places by Gillian Flynn – Gillian Flynn is a very mean, very talented writer. This tale of a broken woman investigating the horrific murder or her white trash family by her brother (?) is not quite so strong as Gone Girl (magnificent) but it’s still pretty fabulously tight. Flynn has that enormously rare gift of being able to write in a voice which is at once appropriate to the character and also clever line by line, and her world of miserable millennial Midwestern losers feels lived in and authentic. Keep.

Slade House by David Mitchell – Masquerading for three-fifths of its brief length as an entertaining if unoriginal haunted house story, the back-chunk veers suddenly into deeper corners of Mitchell’s shared universe, tying into the same world of feuding magical groups which he detailed in the Bone Clocks (and introduced retroactively to 1000 Autumns of Jacob De Zoet). From an aesthetic perspective, this seems an error, muddying up the essential purpose of the story with a lot of info-dumping, and moving the thrust of the narrative away from a series of doomed, human protagonists and onto a supernatural savior (drawn from previous books) who swoops in to save the day. I didn’t care for it, but more then that I feel kinda compelled to object to a story which can only function effectively if the reader has read some prior text without making this point explicitly clear on the cover and in related materials. Slade House is presented as if it were a stand-alone work, but it simply isn’t– it is a prequel or a sequel or an addendum to The Bone Clocks. At best, this should have anchored a collection of short stories, and I find its release in this fashion kind of distasteful. Drop.

Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro – A relentlessly unsubtle novel masquerading as the exact reverse, The Remains of the Day is the story of the last of the great English Butlers reminiscing on a life ill-spent. Ishiguro has the voice right, at once in keeping with the character and pleasantly readable, but mostly the book is a critique of a certain strand of English culture which ceased to exist some half century before Ishiguro wrote the book, and there’s something cheap about taking a dump on your grandparents (not literally in this case but still). It’s all a little sanctimonious – did you know the Nazi’s were bad? You did? There were thoughtful people making similar critiques fifty odd years before this. All the same it’s a skillfully crafted book, he’s obviously really talented. Keep.

Kiss of the Spider Woman Manuel Puig – A dialogue between two men in an Argentinian prison, one sent for leftist activities, the other for being a homosexual, whose growing love is sublimated through the elaborate description of fake movies which they collectively recollect. I sort of thought the thing worked better during the first 2/3’s when the love affair is unrequited rather than during the last, tragic bit, but still it’s a very odd, clever, vibrant little novel. I’ll keep an eye out for Puig going forward. I borrowed it from someone and already gave it back, but in principle I would keep this.

Mating by Norman Rush – I didn’t love it. Rush is very smart, and this is an ambitious novel, but it didn’t fundamentally come together for me. The narrator, who might be unnamed or whose name I just might not remember, is a reasonably brilliant female academic working in Botswana who decides to fall in love with a more brilliant male academic working in Botswana on a secret experimental city in the hinterlands where woman hold all political power, with the notion being the twin narratives intertwining to make a profound statement about male/female relations. This is the sort of novel in which the protagonist is a very smart person and the narrative consists mostly of her engaging in elaborate intellectual conversations, either with her partner or just acting as her own interlocutor. It reminded me a bit of some of the denser Saul Bellow, but then again I haven’t actually read a book by Saul Bellow in probably ten years so that’s not real useful. Anyway, I found the protagonist essentially believable as a character, which is a difficult accomplishment given the style of the book, but I was also bored a lot, and I think probably just tend to prefer a tighter aesthetic. In practice, it seemed like an awful lot of intellectual effort for relatively little pay off, and I don’t really think I’d recommend it. Drop.

The Simple Art of Murder by Raymond Chandler – Actually it might have been this book I read or it might have been another collection of Chandler shorts, it doesn’t really matter. When I went out to LA for a couple of weeks for different reasons and I obviously decided I needed to read a Chandler, and I picked this one up at the Last Bookstore in downtown LA (which is fine but quite frankly, yo, LA friends, if this is your answer to the Strand you don’t have an answer to the Strand.), and it’s fine. I had forgotten that Chandler reworked all of his short stories into his novels (incidentally, this is the reason for the famous (maybe not that famous) ‘who killed the chaffeur’ question in the Big Sleep, which is basically that he kept a previous story whole cloth without realizing that his changed made this plot point irrelevant) which was kind of fun anyway because I got to relive my favorite of his novels without having to re read them altogether. Chandler is, you know, Chandler, he writes like nobody’s business but the plots don’t make any sense. Drop, but only cause I have all the novels that he reworked these into.

Next Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko – I have a real soft spot for these, going back probably a decade or something. In and of itself its really pretty rote urban fantasy, about a heroic, tortured young man working as a sort of supernatural police in Moscow, but somehow it just kind of hangs together for me. There’s some silly bits in here – I have despised the transcription of song lyrics since the Hobbit – but underlying it is some fairly substantive ethical contemplation, as well as a number of surprising narrative choices which I generally enjoyed. Also, magic fights! Keep.

The Woman Who Borrowed Memories: Selected Stories by Tove Jansson -- I have great esteem for Janson (despite never having actually read the Moomen. Moomin?) as (ugh) a writer’s writer, in the sense of having ferociously on point language, a complexity and peculiarity of viewpoint, etc. My expectations might have been a little unrealistic given how much I loved loved loved Fair Play, but not all of these quite hit for me. There are a couple of masterful cuts – The Squirrel, for instance, I really liked – but there were a fair few that didn’t have quite the tightness of theme that a really good short story requires. But, again, my expectations were very high, I still enjoyed these and read them real fast. Keep.

Paris Vagabonds by Jean Paul Clebert– A transient’s tour of Paris in the years shortly after WWII. If the idea of this appeals to you (it appealed to me) double down on it. Clebert was a real, no shit, homeless dude, and his recollections of slophouses, cheap bars and whores is cleverly, even beautifully written, and are accompanied by a series of haunting and beautiful photos. I really liked it, it made me miss Paris and feel nostalgic period of time long ago where I was, I mean, not a transient obviously but, you know, familiar with a lot of strange characters. Not as strange as the ones documented here but still, I get to be nostalgic about whatever the fuck I want to be, go fuck yourself. Asshole. Fuck you. Keep.

The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout – You get to carry a book around with you, you see, and you get to read it in between doing other things, and sometimes these other things (whatever they are) are very happy or very sad or just very, in some way, and then always afterward (not always but for a while) you get to take it off the shelf and dust it a bit and sigh wistfully and then put it back on the shelf.

All of which is to say am glad that I am able to take in human letters some small source of rejuvenation, occupying space in my bag beside my computer and some receipts. This was a very lovely novel, magical realism (ugh, sorry, sorry, you know what I mean, a book with impossible activities not organized along usual genre lines) set in Dutch Indonesia, every little bit of this beautiful and sad and strange. It’s episodic and moody and there’s little real thrust of narrative in it, only the passing of the generations, death and life, violent and tragic love, loss, yearning. That kind of shit. I’m pretty sure that I really, really loved this book, but I’ll have to give it six months or so to see. Keep, in either event.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories by William H. Gass – Yeah. So, I would regard this book as being, line by line, one of the more difficult things I ever read. Gass writes like I imagine people who don’t really like literature imagine everyone writes, a stream of consciousness ramble which obfuscates basic facts, tends towards little by way of narrative, and doubles back on itself endlessly. I don’t regard any of those as being bad things, to be clear, it’s a style like any other style, sometimes I like it, sometimes I don’t, depending on its execution--though of course, in practice it’s so difficult a ‘genre’ that only enormously talented writers can manage it with even a pretense of competence. Gass manages it. He has an enormously rare gift for striking and unexpected sentences; you will not find, in its 200 pages, I think a single familiar metaphor. When this works it works fabulously, and already some of his lines – ‘lonely as overshoes, or someone else’s cough’—have wormed their way into my memory. I will admit that not all of the stories punched for me, and there were a lot of annoying bits where you have spend an amount of mental effort to deduce some quotidian detail. But the last two stories; one about bugs, basically, I can’t put it better than that, and the eponymous finale, were really, really masterful. Keep.

Young Once By Patrick Modiano – I confess I don’t pay a lot of attention to the Nobel prize for literature because I have this curious medical condition where I’m gonna die one day, and thus my time on earth is limited, but my vague sense is that they seem to warble between awarding it to incandescently difficult stuff the purpose of which is to make you think the Nobel Prize people are very smart and sort of mediocre crap the purpose of which is to make you think the Nobel Prize people are hip and approachable (oh shit I just remembered Dylan got it last year! How could I have blocked that out!?!). Anyway, I’m going to go ahead based on this one that Modiano is the latter. This is basically a brief, not brilliant pseudo-noir about a pair of people falling in love in and getting into occasional minor trouble in Paris in the 60’s or 70’s I guess. The prose is fine but unremarkable, which indeed would be an apt description of the book generally. It’s very much in that drifty, Paul Auster/Murikami sort of vein (though in fairness, better than either of those two), long on ennui and short on much else. Drop, I mean I didn’t hate it but I can’t see any reason for keeping it and I’m moving to LA and I’m afraid even some of my beloved NYRB Classics won’t make the cut.

Peace By Gene Wolfe – Yeah, I read it fucking again, so sue me.

Darkness Visible: A Memor of Madness – A lucid account of a severe depression, particularly terrifying in so far as the affliction came unexpectedly late in life to Styron. It’s about 90 pages, its well written, I'm not sure it's going to knock your head off particularly, though. Drop. I’m throwing out all my books kinda so drop, but don’t feel bad about it Styron it’s cool, you ok. No man, it’s fine calm down. Don’t look at the window like that, it makes me uncomfortable.

The Sun King by Nancy MIttford– yeah, this was a brisk, pleasant history of the life of Louis the XIV. I’ve been getting rid of most of the books on my shelves and I probably have about 5-6 which cover this topic, so it was hard to get quite that excited about it but it was breezy and fun and also a lot lighter than most of the other books I have regarding the Sun King and so Keep.

The Door by Magda Szabo – A Hungarian intelligentsia’s recollections of her tumultuous friendship with her elderly maid, a peasant woman of enormous vitality and a rigid, idiosyncratic moral system. It was good and I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it but confess it did not strike me down like a literary bolt of lightning. Maybe that’s a high bar to put for every work of fiction you come across. It seemed a little…pat, I guess? A bit too simple, a bit too straightforward, a bit too, I dunno, easy. Keep anyway, it's solid.

Victorine by Maude Hutchins – Uhhhh…Shit. When did I read this one? I think it was…winter? Or maybe I was traveling somewhere? No, it couldn’t had been winter I don’t think. Could it? This is not useful. It’s an episodic series of recollections from a mid century farm house, with the girl sublimating a lot of sexual energy into a relationship with a retard who thinks he's a horse, and a cheating father, and I think the brother masturbates. The vagueness of my recollection is a pretty strong argument for trying to write these reviews down in a timely fashion, but probably also speak to the fact that this one didn't hit me real hard. Drop.

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro – Since I first came to New York, I was looking out for a copy of Caro's beloved biography of city builder/ruiner Robert Moses, which, half a century after its first printing, remains so popura that it literally took me five years of searching to find a copy of this massive, million word tome that didn’t cost 30$. It came too late. By the time I finally found one, and by the time I got around to reading the one I had found, I was getting ready to say goodbye to New York, putting my cheap furniture onto the stoop and saying whistful farewells to old watering holes. The 1200 very large pages of this tomes thus became a trial, an unhappy and despairing reminder of a place I loved and hated and am in any event leaving, of the endless catalog of errors that I made during my time here, of the occasional moments of happiness, more bitter still than my mistakes.

So, with the substantial caveat that my reading The Power Broker was an enormously elaborate exorcise in masochism, both figurative and literal (I consider myself something of a pack horse but having this brick in my backpack for last two weeks was half-crippling), what did I think of it? I thought it was too fucking long. Yup, that’s what I thought. It’s just too goddamn long. Moses was a fascinating figure and his impact on New York was enormous, but for a casual reader a lot of this stuff could be condensed. The beginning of the book, chronicling Moses’s transition from honest reformer to the power mad monster, is interesting, but once he makes that switch (around 1935, or so) the narrative starts to feel pretty repetitive. There’s something very personal to this biography – Cairo has a real sense of the injustices committed by Moses during his concrete transformation of New York, and a desire to tell the long untold stories of his victims. But it’s the same story, mostly, Moses using the powers he carefully accumulated and the indifference of the city and state elite to destroy nice things in New York and replace them with upper class amenities and hideous highways. Which is terrible and everything but basically it’s the same story whether its East Tremont or the Throggs Neck bridge or whatever, political chicanery leading to the eradication of natural beauty and the destruction of all things good. Will I keep it? No, I’m not gonna fucking keep it, it’s heavy as sin and I’m through with New York anyway, man, I’m done, I’m gone, you gone have her, I don’t miss her, I won’t think about her at night, I won’t count her hideous flaws as secret virtues, I won’t let her grit down in my soul. Editors Note: Nah, fuck it, I'm keeping this one.

The Book of Ebenezer Le Page by G.B. Edwards – Yeah, this was really lovely, I'm surprised I hadn't heard of it earlier. The recollections of the Guernsey's Guernsey-man to ever Guernsey his way out of a Guernsey hole, or something like that. An old man looking back on the twentieth century and his various misfortunes, accomplishments and small tragedies, really beautifully written, NAME has that peculiar ability to write in the voice of a semi-literate country farmer but still strike upon passages of great humor and kindness. Keep.

Books I Read July 27 2017

You should feel absolutely free to assume that my not having updated this in the last 6 months or whatever, and for that matter the scarce paucity of books which I’ve read in that time, are the consequence of my being mind-numbingly busy with a truly bewildering array of successes professional, artistic, and romantic. I’ve come to a lot of pretty heavy personal decisions in the last few weeks, major life changes, the main one for our purposes being I’m getting rid of as many of my books as I can possibly convince myself to get rid of, as well as a firm no-shit commitment to not keeping books I don’t really like or feel a need to own in the future. I’m 33, but like a really foolish 33, so it’s a big step for me, back the fuck off. The end result of all of this is that my previously light hearted rating system will now turn pitiless as the thumb of a degenerate Roman emperor, all books to be either enshrined on my hallowed shelves as works of profound genius or consigned to the stoop as mediocrities unworthy of attention. Alas, it’s been a while since I read a lot of these, dating back to the implausibly distant period of February last (ahh, were we ever so young?), and I don’t remember them so well as maybe I ought to for making the final aesthetic decision these novels will ever receive. Ah, well, life’s not fair.

Thus Were Their Faces: Selected Short Stories by SIlvina Ocampo – This one I do remember, however. Ho ho, there are some that you do remember, that scar their notch against your brain, and she was one of them – sexy, funny, utterly unconcerned with genre or literary distinctions, and savagely, cuttingly, mean. Having read these, I was shocked I have never hear of Ms. Ocampo -is this simply a facet of my unknowably vast, indeed, by all-appearances ever growing swell of ignorance, or does she simply not receive her just due? Based on these short stories, the latter at least seems all but impossible. Strong recommendation. Will I Keep it: Obviously.

The Russian Girl by Kingsley Amis – Jesus, I carried this one around forever. It’s fine, it’s not bad, it’s like 20 other Kingsley Amis books, an aging academic and a cast of oversexed women and a hint of espionage. Will I Keep It: Doesn’t seem like it, no.

The Death of Napoleon by Simon Leys– Yeah… uhhhh….Napoleon’s last attempt to free France from the tyranny of perfidious Albion falls apart and Napoleon is forced to live out the final brief shred of his life as a humble Parisian fruit seller. It’s slight and sweet and short. Will I Keep It: It’s an NYRB classic, they just look so goddamn pretty on my shelf I can’t help it.

Southern Reach Trilogy – Yeah, these were cool. I mean I got nothing bad to say about them. New weird I think kind of doesn’t quite do it for me, I tend to want my genre stuff a little rawer. I’m a really fucking weird guy, I either want like, the most oddly abstract, nonsensically complex stuff, or I want to have my face straight up shoved into a gun wound. Or something. I dunno. Mainly all this made me think about is the degree to which, like, Lovecraft still looms so utterly preeminent in horror, no one seems really to have been able to come up with a creepier idea than his ‘what if there was no god but only a devil and also the devil has tentacles and also the devil doesn’t care about you’. I guess maybe what sort of I didn’t altogether love about this, and obviously this is ceding like, technical skill, a reasonable degree of originality of thought, is that I maybe couldn’t quite figure out what exactly is it’s point? It feints a lot at having a broader critique but doesn’t exactly arrive at much beyond, like, secretive government technocrats are shitty, and empathy is good? Which, maybe that is enough of a point, I dunno. I dunno about a lot of things lately. Will I Keep Them: I think I just convinced myself, yes.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson – Being, like anyone not a complete fucking retard, terrified at the prospect (certainty) of climate change, I really wanted to like this, which essentially is an optimistic view of a post-sea level rise American as encapsulated by a handful of occupants of a water-logged Manhattan apartment building. Robinson is a good science writer, and a thoughtful guy, and I admire his willingness to try and conceive of the actual effects of climate change rather than just feel super sad like I do (Wah!), I think that’s a valuable goal for the science fiction of this generation, but this is a little bit of a mess. The characterization is sloppy and the story lists kind of plotlessly and the ending is so oddly perfunctory you feel like even the author is kind of bored with the thing. Also, I fundamentally think the world is a much worse place than Robinson does, humanity a sin-ridden, vile species, self-awareness a mistake and perhaps one best fixed by a vigorous bathing, as to remove lice from a dog.

                Haha I’m just kidding we’re OK. Anybody watching Ozark? It’s not bad.

                Will I Keep It: No.

Will You Please Be Quiet, Please by Raymond Carver – I’m sorry but this just bored the living fucking shit out of me, I respect the craft but I kept wanting to bang my head against the wall, these discrete suburban madnesses SOMEONE FUCKING SHOOT SOMEONE JESUS GODDAMN CHRIST. It’s been like 6 weeks since I read this but I can’t remember any specific story in it. Good title, though. Will I Keep It: No, it turns out I really just don’t like Raymond Carver.

Close Range by Annie Proulx – Not to get like I just ate a bag full of madeleines, but to square the memory of a thing with the broader narrative that thing played in your life is an impossible difficulty -- inevitably the knowledge of the cliff to come imprints itself on your recollection of the road leading to it. I’ve been drinking. The point is, I really quite liked this book, but my second Proulx (Accordion Crimes, as it happens) I found at once so comically awful and peculiarly reminiscent of this that I now struggle to gin up much affection for it. There is something…kind of shlocky about Proulx, an exaggerated commitment towards nastiness less within the storylines themselves, maybe (though there is plenty of this) than in the writing itself, the metaphors and asides all tending in these very specific directions. Is it possible that it was just maybe the moment, the day, some trick of the light, that I never loved her, that it was not real at all?

No, fuck that, I’m an optimist, a romantic, I tell you. There are some good ones in here, some real winners – I quite liked 59 miles to the pump, I think it was called, and the one about the belt buckle.  Will I Keep It: You’re God Damn Right.

Gun With Occasional Music By Johnathan Lethem: Yeah, I mean, it’s fine. I enjoyed reading it, and I’ve been so pathetically fucking lazy lately when it comes to my reading that this kind of mean something, I have all the moral strength of a…haha, well of a weak person, the slightest mental effort and I just veer off into something else, whoosh. Anyway. It’s funny and it goes by quick but it didn’t dig into me in any particular way and I sometimes found him guilty of that thing ‘literary genre’ authors do of kind of half assing plot details cause you know no one really gives a shit. Will I Keep It: Nah, man, this profound journey of self-discovery I’m on, only kind of casually not disliking a book is not a good enough reason to keep it. Three cheers for me!

Wish Her Safe at Home by Stephen Benatar -- Did you? When I said three cheers for me, did you do them, or did you just say you were going to do them! Liar! Liar! Oh, God, how can I ever trust you again. This book is about…a woman who gets an inheritance and uses it to buy a house in a town outside of London and the ability to recreate herself outside of her usual milieu along with a sudden influx of money allows her to go progressively more insane. Actually, this was good, and weird, I liked it. Will I Keep It: Yeah, I am actually, but also it’s small and obviously I fetishize NYRB Classics.

Fancies and Goodnights by John Collier – Yeah. Uhhh…I can’t really remember if I had so much trouble finishing this because I’m a lazy, miserable person or because they weren’t the most riveting collection of stories. It certainly should have fit the bill, forgotten mid-century American magical realism (or whatever), and there were some strong ones now that I pull them out of my memory…I was reading these when I was in Utah, I was faculty at this beautiful resort in the mountains there, I had like a cabin, in the morning I would drink coffee and write some of a book I will never publish and listen to the silence (it is not silent in New York, this is part of the reason I am going to leave, not that I hear LA is so quiet neither) and sometimes I would hold this up and peek at the mountains over top of it. And then I guess I carried it with me when I drove to Denver unexpectedly, God there’s some beauty out West, and I hadn’t known I was going to do it and that’s the main thing really, not to know, to remind yourself that you don’t know, you can never know, there are things waiting around the corner for you. Will I Keep It: Yeah, I guess so.

Things I Like About America by Poe Ballantine – For a long time I held as my life’s ambition to be lost, to look at unfamiliar scenery and strange people, a very tiny thing carried onward by the wind, counting each mile and footstep. It’s not at all a rare preoccupation, and Poe Ballantine, and the fellow who gave me this Poe Ballantine book, are likewise devotees of this smiling, silent god. These are a collection of shorts about being on busses and working shitty jobs so that you have the money to get on other busses. They are well enough written but mostly I can’t say I found myself stopping in awe at the prose. Ballantine’s hook is that he is/was a real no shit legitimate vagabond, not a put on, and I respect that even if I can’t do it anymore.  Anyway, I liked this fine. Will I Keep It: Yeah, but only because it a friend’s favorite book.

The Vintage Mencken H.L. Mencken – Yeah, I mean, he’s funny and he’s got some fabulous one liners but on balance he’s a classic troll, cantankerous for its own sake and to prove his individuality, obsessed with personal vendettas which were likely pointless at the time and are now utterly opaque (how much do you know about the American political scene of say, 1926? Because it turns out I don’t actually know anything either). It’s sort of illegitimate to compare a newspaperman to a ‘straight’ writer, their primary obligation is to be constantly saying shit of some kind, but his record as revealed here is pretty weak and that’s coming from someone essentially sympathetic to pre-WWII ideas of American isolationism. Will I Keep It: No.

The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony by Roberto Calasso – My older fucking brother frankly has been talking this book up forever, but like forever forever, like a decade forever, and I really went in like oh shit, what you doing son, which is generally a bad way to go into a book, or to visit a place, or to meet a woman. Where was I? I didn’t like this like I had intended myself to. It’s basically just the author spitballing endlessly about Greek myth, and some times I was like ‘cool, clever’, and other times I was like ‘what, no, that’s…what?’ that doesn’t make any sense at all. To my mind it was a poetic but not particularly illuminating and indeed in some cases seemed outright false in its depiction of classical Greek myth. I was also bored a fair bit. Will I Keep It: No.

Count Zero By William Gibson – He’s not really trying on the plot, and probably you could shave off say…20-30% of the fake proper nouns and you’d maintain the same effect, but it’s weird and original and Gibson warrants his spot. That said, it’s pretty damn similar to Neuromancer which likewise does not include plot as a great strength but is cleaner and more coherent. Will I Keep It: Uhhhh…yeah, I will, for the moment, but I think I probably the day will come when I feel like I need to own one William Gibson book and when it does this one will go.

The Queue by Vladamir Sorokin – Hahhahahahhahahahahahhahahhahahahahhahahahahhahah. Will I Keep It: Yes.

The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Cesares – Uhhhhh. Nah. It would have been not my favorite short story and it didn’t improve as a novella. If you are going to enjoy one book by a friend of Borges that I mention in this post read Ocampo, I already fucking told you. Will I Keep It: One of the rare few NYRB Classics that I dump.

The Mangan Inheritance by Brian Moore– Shit! Damn! I love a book that really truly subverts genre stuff, where you’ve got no goddamn idea what’s happening next. Legitimately, disturbing, weird, erotic, dope, totally read this. Will I Keep It: I done just told you I was, didn’t I?

Black Wings Has My Angel  – A second rate Jim Thompson. Will I Keep It: Yup! Even a second-rate Jim Thompson is worth a read.

Anyway, friends and associates and anyone else who somehow wondered in here, that’s what I read barring a few I can’t remember and a few I’d rather forget. Good luck with what you got going, even if you don’t quite deserve it.

Books I Read February 1 2017

A month into 2017 – Jesus, that went by in a flash, right? On the one hand, I am objectively among the most fortunate people, not only in the world today, but in the very history of the species, having the benefit of bug free linens, regular meals, and high proof alcohol. On the other hand you get to looking at the gray sky and the gray buildings and the gray people who populate them, and you gray also, no less gray, not even to yourself, and you start to think, hey, maybe we deserve what’s coming to us.

Days like that, I book a one way ticket somewhere. I’m out of the country for the foreseeable, and I cut the throat of my social media account like a suckling pig before a feast, so I guess I’ll see you when I see you. Keep your head down and your eyes sharp in the interim.

Chaos and Night by Henry de Motherlant -- About a Spanish anarchist living in Paris, having fled his country after the Civil War. This is a bone bleak depiction of a wasted life, in essence, of an enormously bitter man who antagonizes everyone close to him out of a deep-seeded personality disorder masquerading as an exaggerated sense of moral purity. Motherlant (no way in hell that was his real name) seems to be one of those infant terrible sorts who everyone grew to hate, a rightist in the Ezra Pound mold whom my introduction suggests was also a pederast (though I confess a quick internet search offered no evidence of this – any French folk who can enlighten me on this point, please do), and there is something rather straw-mannish here about writing so vicious a character study of a political enemy. That said, it is effective (if rather one dimensional), and the miserable final scene, w/ (SPOILER ALERT) our protagonist dying pointlessly, alone and unmorned is neatly done, though I confess I can’t actually imagine recommending it to anyone.
 

Born to Kvetch by Michael Wex -- I very much admire the sort of person who is able to start a book, realize they don’t like it, and not finish it. I’m not that sort of person. Even back when I was the sort of person who didn’t finish every book that they started I never seemed to give up for good reasons like I didn’t like the book, but rather for bad reasons, like the book was too hard, or I had impulse purchased another one. A friend gave this one to me intending an unexpected kindness, but in fact it just exhausted time that might have been better spent on other things. Thanks a bunch, Andy. Thanks loads.

Anyway, there’s nothing really wrong with this other than that I am the world’s worst language student and so most of the text, dealing with peculiar aspects of the Yiddish language, was largely lost on me. I found bits of it interesting in the abstract -- the pessimistic soul of Yiddish, its naked tribal allegiance, its curse construction – but this was tempered by the author’s Borscht Belt humor, with a lot of random pop cultural references in lieu of actual jokes, like being cornered by your least favorite uncle at a Bar Mitzvah. Still, I have found myself greeting strangers with ‘Vos Macht a Yid’ lately, so that’s something at least.

Chocky by John Wyndham -- About a child’s imaginary play mate who is not that. This is very much that early sort of sci-fi novel where you really don’t need much besides a modestly interesting premise, but it’s got an interesting English low-keyness which contrasts well with the broader American version, and the writing, while not on par to some of the other things on this list, didn’t make me physically ill. Better than anything I’ve read by Dick, I’ll tell you that much.

Last Words from Montmarte by Qiu Miaojin -- As a rule, ‘the Emperor has no clothes’ should be your review of last resort – not to say that the emperor is never wearing no clothes, sometimes the emperor is legitimately naked as a jay bird, but a lot of the time it’s as the magic tailors promised, and you’re just a country rube who can’t figure out the cut of his suit. What I’m saying is, before you decide a book is shit you should make good and god damn sure that the problem doesn’t exist, as I’m told the tech folk say, between keyboard and chair. And thus I gave a lot of thought to this one, which appears to be held in high regard and yet I confess to feeling was really, really not very good.

I began initially sympathetic to the premise – consisting of 20 ‘letters’ written by a Taiwanese woman in Paris to her ex-lover, the back promised not only a torrent of insight into the nature of love but hidden structural complexities (the letters can be read in any order! Characters appear and disappear and take on new names and genders!). I confess I found neither. Here is the thing – this is not a well-written book. By this I don’t only mean that the language is not in and of itself aesthetically pleasing, although with a few exceptions (some of the physical descriptions of romance are reasonably powerful) it is mostly not; what I mean is that the quality of thought, revealed word by word and line by line, is not particularly high. This really does read like a love letter from a wounded person to the person who they feel has wounded them – which is to say that it is a lot of soupy-sounding tautologies and unrefined emotion. As to the relatively minor structural flourishes – at one point the narrative seems to switch to a series of letters written by the protagonists lover to a sort of heroic self-image of the protagonist, which is not a bad touch, the spurned lover imagining themselves the recipient of her ex’s undying affection -- I get the sense that most of the people who enjoy this book do not enjoy it despite rather than because of them. That is to say that I think most fans essentially disagree with me about the quality of the prose/thought, seeing the commentary as being valuable on a surface level. Which, fine, fair enough, but if you open this book and read any random sentence or paragraph I suspect you’ll come away feeling, like I did, that these really aren’t worth your trouble.

It’s hard not to feel that a great deal of the popularity of this book stems from issues unrelated to the text itself. Qui Miaojin was, I gather, one of the first people to write openly about lesbianism in Mandarin, and her having committed suicide shortly after this book was released, an act which dovetails neatly with her protagonist’s mindset, certainly adds the book an added piquancy. But in and of itself, I’m gonna say hard pass.

Also, as a quick side note, while the letters can be read in any order to a greater degree than a novel with a conventional story, there was a clear narrative tempo to the text as presented, and thus one of the underlying hooks of the novel is kind of bullshit.

Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge -- Victor Serge had it worse than you and wrote about it better, a professional revolutionary who’s unflinching moral honesty put him just below Trotsky on Stalin’s hit list. Inspired by the 8 months Serge spent in prison, and the two years he spent exiled to a distant eastern town, Midnight in the Century is about that moment when the early, heroic supporters of the Russian revolution began to realize they were defeated, that their extraordinary efforts would be wasted and worse than wasted in service of a totalitarian state. It is a grim book but not one without hope, and in that it was a worthwhile thing for me to read this month. My personal feeling is that Serge’s later, more stylistically complex work (particularly the truly, truly marvelous Unforgiving Years) are superior to this, but it is a question of degrees of excellence. Serge’s relevance as a writer seems to only grow with the passing of the years, and I can recommend him to anyone looking at a bad situation, knowing it will get worse, and trying to figure out their place inside of it. Which is to say, all of us.

The Land Breakers by John Ehle -- Yeah, excellent. About the growth of ‘civilization’ in an untamed land, an adventure novel that succeeds on its own merits – there is some great bear hunting here – and also as a larger meditation about early America and humankind itself. Well-written, exciting and with considerable moral depth, a whole-hearted recommendation.

Walkabout by James Vance Marshall – A weird, disturbing, compelling novella, about two white American lost in the Australian outback who are saved from starvation by an Aboriginal youth on his eponymous journey. Small but lovely, compelling and evocative, recommend.

The Moviegoer by Walker Percy -- Wow. Just jaw dropping. One of the best things I’ve read in a very long time, a masterpiece of 20th century literature. It reminded me a bit of Saul Bellow but more confined, more neatly drawn, less desperate in demonstrating its own genius. It’s the kind of book that I would talk about for a long time in the back of a bar, or while walking along a windy street with someone, gesticulating wildly, but that I find I’m not sure I have much to say about vis-à-vis a capsule review. A perfect novel, recommended in the highest terms.

Young Man With a Horn by Dorothy Baker -- Hoo! Excellent! Wait, this is the same Baker who wrote the likewise excellent but otherwise in tone, structure, character and story entirely dissimilar Cassandra at the Wedding? Weird! Weird world! You haven’t even written one stellar novel, and she wrote two! WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE?

Right, well, basically every jazz cliché was, so I gather, created in this book, so much so that later generations (this came out in 38) of Jazz aficionados were prone to look back on it with some contempt. Which is too bad, because it’s the rare sort of book which inspired a lot of imitators but still holds its original power. Baker understands jazz as an art form, writes about it intelligently, but more than that she understands what it is to be driven by the act of creation beyond the capacity of the human organism, to focus the entirety of your existence on the single, pointless activity of art, art for its own sake, art for its creators sake, art irrelevant to the audience. I’ll admit I’m just pretentious enough to feel like it had some relevance to my own life and trade.

Also, that’s a hell of a last line. Damn, but this woman could write.

Books I Read January 23 2017

The warmest January in recorded history was a mixed bag for yours truly, between general existential despair and my predictably poor slate of decisions. On the other hand, hell if I didn’t read some fire the last three weeks, as detailed below…

Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man by R. Ananthamurthy – Praneshacharyah is a righteous man, by the standard of his caste and creed, a pious Brahmin who’s religious and moral attainments have gained him wide fame. He is the leader of a colony of other Brahmin, mostly rather unlikable people as people tend to be. Far the worst of them is Naranappa, a blasphemer and troublemaker, whose death throws the community into chaos. Though he turned on his caste, violating constantly the tenants of his faith, still Naranappa was a Brahmin, and before his corpse can be immolated it needs to undergo a series of rituals, which only his fellow Brahmin can perform, the execution of which is at once a moral necessity and itself blasphemous in so far as Naranappa had fouled himself with alcohol and unclean living. His struggles to thread this needle drive Praneshacharyah towards madness, forcing him to reconsider essential aspects of his existence, all as the plague begins to ravage the land around him. There are no easy answers here, and while the hypocrisies of the Brahmin colony are cruelly skewered, still Praneshacharyah is a fundamentally sympathetic character, struggling to find clarity in a world which refuses it, seeking after righteousness without success. One can easily see why this is considered a classic of non-Western literature, dealing with particularly Indian concerns in a way that will have universal resonance to any serious reader. Excellent, well worth your time.

The Unknown Masterpiece by Honore de Balzac -- Fascinating, yeah. Two short stories about art, the eponymous of which seems to preface the development of non-representative visual art by about 70 years. Yeah, Balzac, I guess I can see why people keep talking about this guy, apart from the pun.

The Gallery by John Horne Burns -- Interesting. Burns worked in intelligence during WWII, and his job appears largely to have been trying unsuccessfully to keep his fellow soldiers from selling their equipment and rations to the starving Italian population which surrounded them. In this curiously structured novel – consisting mostly of sketches of characters that might have been found in Naples during the US occupation, smugglers, down on their luck GIs, syphilis victims, arrogant officers, club owners, etc. – Burns presents a vision of the war which seems utterly unfamiliar, miserable and resolutely unheroic, the mindless destruction of an ancient civilization by the brute force of modernity, and the human wreckage left behind. A closeted homosexual, Burns also offers a distinct view into the gay subculture which (flourished? Existed?) around the army at that time. His experience provides some really fascinating insights, and he’s a skilled writer, but he was also like 25 when he wrote this, and it reads like it. He tries to do to much, and actually one gets the sense that this would have been more effective if it had eschewed the peculiar format for a straighter narrative. It’s not at all bad, but it’s also pretty miserable and quite difficult, and so I can only offer a sort of mixed-recommendation.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman -- To my mind Gaiman is a talented epigone, reworking the writing of better authors into a package more acceptable to your average reader. This isn’t to say I don’t like him – I do like him, albeit kind of grudgingly. His prose is generally not terrible, and he has an undeniable talent for the sort of throw away fantastical bits which I love (here, for instance, the bucket itself, and the broken toys, that sort of thing). That said, to me there can be no serious comparison between say, Little, Big and American Gods, or for that matter The Jungle Book and The Graveyard Book. Gaiman’s imagination runs within a comfortably modest preserve, never really piercing genre conceits, nor confusing the reader with complex language. Where Gaiman’s genius lies – and it can only be called genius – is in the art of self-promotion. For most of his vast sea of readers, Gaiman has come to be irreparably confused with be Morpheus, Dream Lord etc. of the Sandman (still his best work, IMHO). There is a certain grandeur to this – Gaiman had a dream and made the world believe it. That is no mean feat, and as an honest man I tip my hat to him.

Anyway, on to the book. It’s a work of mediocrity. There’s not much getting around that. Gaiman is in the privileged position of being able to get the market to accept formats which less popular writers would never be able to shove across, in this case passing off a long-ish novella as a full novel, a fairly rare structure for a story and one that is useful in keeping the reader a bit unmoored. The plot is sketch-like in its simplicity -- boy enters wardrobe (or neighbors farm, in our case), endangers himself through foolishness, must be saved – and it moves along at a brisk pace. And although the whole thing is a bit deus ex machina, with each new event, creature, spell and counterspell being revealed more or less at the moment, still I basically felt it was effective enough as an adventure story. But the framing device – about Gaiman going back to his childhood home, and nostalgia, and art, and etc, mostly fell quite flat for me. I kept stopping at lines and thinking, ‘that’s remarkably unclever’, or even, ‘no, that just isn’t true at all.’ There’s just so much Goddamn excess sentimentality, I couldn’t get past it.

On the other hand it’s only like 150 pages, and it wasn’t like an entirely unpleasant go, so if you can snatch it up for not the cover price (which is just unreasonable given the length of the book) you could do worse for a pleasant afternoon idyll.

Gabriele D'Annunzio by John Woodhouse -- I’d been doing nothing but fiction for a few weeks, and I wanted to shake it up with something fact based and concrete, and I’ve got this friend talking up D’Annunzio, and I saw this randomly and picked it up. But I never actually read any of D’Annunzio’s writing, which in retrospect is an odd way to be introduced to the life of someone who, despite a vibrant but essentially trivial political existence, was primarily a writer. Anyway, yeah, D’Annunzio was a really, really terrible person, and I came away from this book really wanting to smack him in that fat, bald head of his with a shovel. There seems to be a stronger case than I appreciated for seeing him as the link between actual Nietzschean thought and the fascist gibberish which Mussollini gifted, with such disastrous intent, to Hitler himself. As to the book itself, it’s not great. I gather that these days D’Annunzio is mostly famous for his peculiar sexual appetites, and that there is something of an academic cottage industry in Italy consisting of chronicling his exploits, and that Woodhouse himself is reacting against this by writing a deliberately dry text. The language itself is workmanlike but uninspired, and while I can appreciate a biographer wanting to avoid too much overt moralizing (especially on such a controversial figure), but the result is a text which seems to consist of recitations of concrete facts about D’Annunzio’s life, without much of an effort to tie him to the larger intellectual currents of his age. I’m honestly not exactly sure who this would appeal to, in so far as your average reader will be bored and any D’Annunzio scholars will likely already be familiar with the events herein.

In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami – Ooooh! Ooooh! This was a nasty one, damn. Kenji is an aimless 20 year old who eeks out a living taking foreign tourists on tours of Tokyo’s sex clubs and brothels. Frank is his newest customer, a terrifying, sympathetic American who…well, you can probably put it together by the cover art and the first couple of sentences. This is a brutal existential noir, Kenji as the everyman forced to stare at the bleak heart of modern Japanese society. It is…not for the faint of heart, and even horror fans are likely to find some of this prose too much for them. Recommendation wise, I’ll put it this way – if this is the kind of thing you want to read, I would go ahead and read it. That is to say, it delivers on what it promises.

The Town and The Mansion By William Faulkner – Let me preface this by saying, on the extremely off chance that someone from Vintage International reads this, whoever wrote the back copy of this should be yelled at, fired, and then run out of town on a fucking rail. HOW FUCKING STUPID ARE YOU TO SPOIL THE END OF THIS ENTIRE TRILOGY ON THE BACK COVER OF THE BOOK. Seriously, I want to find this person and beat them upside the head with something (assuming they’re a man of appropriate beating age.)

End of rant. Right. So, I’m going to just review both of these together, since I read them one after the other and my thoughts apply to both. Faulkner’s prose is, for my soon-to-be-rapidly-depreciating-US-dollar, about as good as you’re going to find. It’s like jumping into cold water, painful at first, and then innervating – the compulsive sentences rolling downward, the bits that are deliberately left unsaid, the clever obfuscations, the profane jokes. And his plotting is fiendishly clever, something which you one very rarely finds oneself saying about ‘literary’ writers. In his big reveals, in his nested secrets and sudden murders, there is a whiff of the genre ghetto to Faulkner (no surprise he wrote the screenplay for Big Sleep, even if he kind of fucked the pooch on the ending). And both of these qualities are on display in these two, the second and third books in the Snopes Trilogy, which details the life of one Flem Snopes, an amoral backwoods savage with a genius for a sharp trading and a desire to attain respectability.

I devoured these, laughed loudly at them in bars, kept yelling at acquaintances about it. And yet…well, obviously, when one is reading one of the great writers of the age, as indeed I believe Faulkner to be, one is not just asking ‘is this a good book’, because of course it’s a good book, even the shit Faulkner tossed out just for money (The Reivers, I’m looking at you) are really good. What one is asking is, ‘is this one of the works which cements the authors place in the canon’, and the answer to this trilogy is, no, not quite, not to my mind. The main characters in the book – Lawyer Stevens, Eula and Linda, and of course Flem himself – never quite come together. Various smaller bits, about the rest of the Snopes clan and pitiful folk they abuse, are far stronger, but the motivations for the major characters felt, ultimately, either vague or kind of unconvincing.

Which is to say, I suppose, that if you haven’t read Faulkner, read Faulkner but maybe don’t start here, and if you’ve already read Absalom, Absalom, etc. then you could do a lot worse than counting on with the Snopes trilogy.

My Face for the World to See by Alfred Hayes -- Yeah, just fabulous. About a middle aged Hollywood hack who makes a bad decision with a young woman. Short, and the plot is simple, but it feels authentic and honest in its despair. Also pretty fabulously written. Reading it, I found myself thinking of Mulholland Drive, the themes of which – innocent woman in trouble, or is she – are on display here. So, yeah, if anyone knows David Lynch, maybe ask him if he’s read this? And if he hasn’t, you know, tell him he should, cause I think he’d like it. You can also read it if you aren’t David Lynch. You don’t have to be David Lynch to read it, obviously.

Ten Things I Thought About Books I Read in 2016

During the 366 days or 2016 I saw some places I had never seen before, I forget myself for moments and sometimes even hours in the company of friends and family, I wrote words that sounded sweet to my ears at least, I was (perhaps once or twice, ever so slightly) brave, I drank more than I probably should have, I obsessed over trivial personal considerations and ignored the well-being of my fellows, I lamented my failings and my inability to overcome them. Also (according to Goodreads) I read 139 books, which is not 150 books, the round if arbitrary ambition which I had set myself. And some of those were omnibus editions so like, you could probably count Parade’s End 3 more times or whatever, and I read a few things I disliked too much to review, so maybe you could add 6 or 7 on top of that 139 but still, but still, but still, any way you look at it I did not read 150 books. Bad Daniel. That’s a bad, bad Daniel.

Anyhow, when I sat down to try and do a top 10 list it ended up being like a top 18, and then I got kind of bored with the idea of a top 10 list, and then I just wrote out the following.   
 

1. Flat Out Nastiest Book I Read in 2016: Would have been Nightmare Alley in a walk, a prohibition era noir about the rise and fall of a circus con man which serves simultaneously to condemn religion, psychology, and love. Except that in 2016 I also read High Rise by J.G. Ballard, which makes Nightmare Alley look like a tween romance novel, complete with shiny vampires and dry humping. Can there be any real dispute at this point that Ballard was the most prescient writer of the second half of the twentieth century, both in his savage criticism of modernity and in his astonishingly far-sighted concern for environmental collapse?
    
2. Two ‘A’ authors we all should stop reading: Paul Auster, because he’s just, I mean he’s just the worst, are we all even reading the same books? Do I have a congenital brain defect which somehow distorts my vision when I pick up one of novels, making genius look like limpid, pointless prose, Borges denuded of its wit and puffed out interminably? And Isabella Allende , who, again, I mean, really people, come on, this is the very apex of mediocrity. The plateau of mediocrity? Whatever, don’t waste your time. Bonus Overrated ‘A’ Author: Jane Austen.
    
3. And two ‘A’ authors we all should start reading: Renata Adler, one of the best comics writers of the age, a writer’s writer, and J.R. Ackerley , strange and clever and funny and sad.
    
4. Best work of genre fiction, fulfilling expectations category: Peter Straub’s Ghost Story is everything you could want in a horror novel – strange, frightening, well written and better paced, with the most singularly effective opening you’ll ever stumble across. Read it in a day, be kept awake for a week.
    
5. Best work of genre fiction, superseding expectations category: John Crowley’s Little, Big tells a tail of lost love, fairies, changelings, sorcery, and the collapse of America that also speaks to essential experiences of human existence. Comparable in its scope (though arguably superior) to Hundred Years of Solitude, this is a book to be savored and returned to. Bonus: Peace by Gene Wolfe, which doesn’t win because I read it last year, but still always kind of wins, if you can dig it.
    
6. Book Society Somehow Got it Right On: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn is that rarest of things, a popular novel deserving its millions of sales. Weird and scary and mean and well written and etc, if you somehow avoided reading this you should rectify the situation.
    
7. Best Book about Nazis I read in 2016: Diary of a Man in Despair, Friedrich Reck’s tragic, timely, ennobling journal which he kept while living through the rise and collapse of Nazi Germany. If you read one thing on this list, read that. Bonus Book about Nazis I read in 2016: While A Man Lies Dreaming Lavie Tidhar cannot be compared to Reck in terms of clarity of prose, profundity of thought, or the moral stature of the writers themselves, it does have way more scenes of Hitler being pissed on.
    
8. My Least Favorite NYRB Classics Book that I Read in 2016: Just so you don’t get the idea that they’re paying me off, or whatever, I didn’t particularly care for Memed, My Hawk, which ends up being a not altogether fascinating adventure novel.  
    
9. Best Book I picked up on a stoop in 2016:  A Tie (gasp!) between Donald Westlake’s hysterically frantic comic-crime novel Dancing Aztecs and Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John   Helyar, about late 80’s Wall Street shenanigans.
    
10. Best Book to Explain the 2016 Election: Ride a Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy, about a menopausal woman riding a sudden wave of testosterone to the head of the bank which she works, perhaps higher. Fabulously mean, fabulously clever. Bonus Book to Explain the 2016 Election: Diary of a Man in Despair a second time.

Books I Read December 31st 2016

Yeah, 2016. That happened. 2017 will, I very much suspect, happen also. I hope it happens for you in a way more joyful than despairing. I’ll try and do a year end wrap up next week, I know you’re all just panting to read my top 10.

Amsterdam Stories by Nescio – what an odd, lovely little book. Nescio, who, according to the forward, is required reading in the Netherland (on the off chance there are any actual Dutch folk reading this, please do inform me if this is true) was that very rarest of breeds, a part time writer of value. He spent most of his working life as a manager of the Dutch East India corporation, and wrote, basically, only the five short stories which are contained in this book. They are really, really beautiful, especially the second in the collection, The Young Titans, about a gang of immature Amsterdamites (did I get that right? Theoretical Dutch person, advise) and the feverish intensity with which they experience their youth in a Netherlands long lost. It is the sort of book certain to leave you gazing out the window and remembering sunlit afternoons through which you once walked, ruminating on past loves, on friends never seen but not yet forgotten, that bittersweet burn of nostalgia, tossed straight with no chaser. I very much enjoyed it. Between this and the release of the Dutch edition of the Straight Razor Cure (aforementioned Dutch phantasm, purchase swiftly) it had me thinking about the bookshops near the Spui, and fog in the Jordaan, and of the strange flatlands which abut the north sea. Very much worth reading.

The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy – A sharply written comic novel detailing the romantic misadventures of a recently graduated American living in Paris at the start of the 50’s. Dundy is laugh out loud funny, and most of this book reads as a hard-eyed romantic comedy taking place among a fascinating post war community of Eurotrash and wannabe artists. But there is a very odd tonal shift in the last quarter, in which the farce veers into a sort of noir, and that straight on into melodrama. The failure to stick the landing not only keeps the book from reaching minor classic status but also kind of wastes the excellence of the prose. That said it’s short and readable and quite funny, and I would happily recommend.

A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr -- about a WWI veteran who spends a summer in the north of England, rehabilitating the mural of a medieval church. Amid the bucolic scenery and the pleasant rhythm of his work, revealing the brilliant creation of an ancient, unknown artist, our hero begins to recover, in part, from his recent trauma. A sweet, small novel, at once melancholic and life-affirming, uplifting without being in the least bit saccharine. Lovely.

The Iron Heel by Jack London – A fascinating failure. Written in 1905 or so, this is sci-fi before there really was such a thing, and in certain structural senses remains fresh more than a century after it was written. It purports to be the biography of a communist revolutionary sometime in the 1930’s, after the United States and the rest of the world were under the rule of the eponymous organization, a set of oligarchs who have overthrown the world’s democracies. Peculiar enough, but the interesting bit is that the meta-conceit is that the manuscript has been ‘rediscovered’ at some point six or seven centuries later, and the text is footnoted by a historian of that age. With our privileged position we know that our protagonist, who wrote the book before what was to be their climactic victory over the oligarchs, fails, and that the world spends several centuries in the grip of despotism before the final permanent victory of labor over capital. It’s an interesting enough idea for me to spend several sentences describing it, but the book itself is kind of crap. The first hundred pages consist of these incredibly didactic dialogues which will bore to tears anyone who reads them, irrespective of your political position. The second half, which details the struggle against the iron heel, is better only in comparison. Squinting, there are indeed similarities between the oligarchic regime which London describes and the European fascism which arose roughly in the same period he predicts, but there are also a lot of disparities (like most Marxists of the period he underrates the ethnic/national questions then defined (and indeed still does define) international politics). But really I cannot much imagine anyone enjoying this except as a peculiar literary artifact.

Reveille in Washington - 1860-65 by Margaret Leech– – yeah, fun. The intimate history of the city of Washington during the American Civil War, this is a compelling if not quite breezy cultural history, with lots of juicy bits about the events of the day, interesting characters, peculiar misadventures, etc. I’ve read a lot about this period but it’s always fun to revisit different corners of it – how absurd is it that you used to just be able to walk into the White House and ask the President for a job? What the fuck was everyone doing on that account? Hell. Also, I had forgotten all about General Thomas a.k.a. the ‘Rock of Chickamauga’, which is the best nickname for a general in the civil war. Actually really what this made me want to do was go back and re-read Shelby Foote, which is on my list of ‘books I would re-read if I was to be told I would be dying of cancer in six months.’ But, till that happy day, this will have to do.

Books I Read December 15th 2016

Do you know how much God damn trouble I had to go through this week because of an errant arm gesture and an unfortunately placed cup of coffee? Merry Christmas!

Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese By Patrick Leigh Fermor – Basically just a long series of digressions centering around Greece, and particularly the wild, little visited Mani region. While framed around the trip, relatively little of the text is devoted to his actual misadventures. Mostly what you’re in for is a brilliant, widely traveled, hyper-literate man dumping all his theories about the history, culture and mythology of Greece onto a page. When Fermor is on, his prose is scintillating in its over abundance. When is off, it can be quite a slog. To my money he was on more often in this than in any of the Time of Gifts trilogy, where his tendency to spend two pages describing the features of Gothic churches occasionally threatened to drive me insane.

A Man Lies Dreaming By Lavie Tidhar – Look, I didn’t want to read anything else by Lavie Tidhar, OK? I felt like I’d sort of done my duty as a very casual friend of by reading A Violent Century a month or two back, but he just kept on and on and fucking on. Read my book about Hitler, he said. I already read it, Lavie. No, he said, a different book about Hitler. And then he called me a bunch of unrepeatable names and then he sent me a review copy of A Man Lies Dreaming.

A Man Lies Dreaming is the story of a writer of Yiddish pulp fiction, who, while dying in Auschwitz, envisions a vengeful alternative reality in which the Fuhrer is forced to make ends meet as an exile in London. A low rent private detective, Wulf, as Hitler is called, is forced into tracking down a Jewish woman who, it is suspected, has been kidnapped by the rest of his Nazi cabinet, who have set themselves up as basically a criminal underworld in this alternate world version of England. Part of the joke is that Hitler, as written by Tidhar, maintains the essential features of the classic noir hero—he is incorruptible (if utterly evil), as resistant to the temptations of money and society as was the Marlowe himself. Part of the joke is that our eponymous dreamer is using this fantasy to torture this version of Hitler according to the vulgar traditions of his sub-genre – Hitler is beaten, drugged, tortured, raped several times, urinated upon, and forcibly circumcised, broken down by the cruelties of society until he comes to resemble the broken creatures he created in such numbers.

My first instinct upon reading this book was to wonder, quite simply, how in the name of God Lavie got it published. It as resolutely uncommercial a novel as I have ever read. Far too peculiar for the vast majority of genre readers it is also pulpy and deliberately vulgar in a fashion which seems calculated to likewise annoy more literary types. I also can't possibly imagine the Goy getting anything out of it – it is so distinctly a product of a certain very distinctly Jewish sense of humor, at once lyrical, ironic, and puerile. Readers who persevere through its peculiarities will discover a book which, astonishingly in this day and age, manages to grapple with the moral ramifications of the Holocaust in an original way. It also has a really, really good Eichman joke.

It is an imperfect novel – the footnotes which accompanied my addition are unnecessary, adding a meta layer to an already complex book. They seem to exist only to offer a sort of intellectual cover for the book, to disassociate the author from the material. There are also, anyway you slice it, too many scenes of Hitler erotica. But in a book so idiosyncratic, such excesses must be forgiven. I don’t really know who reads these reviews, and thus I can’t, in good conscience, actually recommend this book to you. The vast majority of people will probably not enjoy it in the slightest. But it doesn't take away from it being a work of authentic merit.

Congratulations, Lavie – you’ve written the last word in alternative reality Nazi fiction. Could we maybe move on to something else now?

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne -- Yeah, this was a cheery one. Our eponymous heroine is one of life’s unfortunates, ugly, callow, not particularly intelligent, a woman of limited capacity whose ambitions are foiled by cruel circumstance. Well-written, keenly insightful, really, really sad. Judith is the sort of person one has met all too often, who we usually don’t see and whom we look away from when she makes herself known. A very strong novel that I confess I was in a hurry to get away from.

Scandalmonger By William Safire – Anther stoop book, and in retrospect I’d have been better of leaving it there. A novelization about the muckrakers who came to prominence in the first few years of America’s history, and their effects on and interaction with the great men of the age. It’s a fascinating episode badly treated. Safire’s fictionalization of the events, to my mind, offers the worst of both possible worlds. Most of the text consists of fake dialogue cribbed from the letters of the major characters, and so it sounds overly formal and jarring. But here and there Safire feels comfortable departing abruptly from history, inserting (to my count) two ahistoric love affairs and a murder. Essentially, any time anything interesting happened in the book I would flip to the end to inevitably discover that it was something Safire had whole-cloth invented. There are interesting things that have been done blurring the boundaries between fiction and fact (Simon Schama attempted something similar with Dead Certainties etc. but Safire doesn’t do them. Better off grabbing one of the many readable histories of the era if you're interested.

We Think the World of You J.R. Ackerly – Oooh. Ooo! Really excellent. Frank is an upper class Englishman in love with Joe, a married, working class laborer sent away for housebreaking in London in the 1960s. Through a peculiar series of events Frank becomes obsessed with Joe’s dog, which he tries to look after while Joe is in prison. The novel tilts initially in a sloppy, melodramatic direction (my hackles get up in any book in which a dog is a major character), but this is a feint, and the book soon pivots in distinctly darker directions. It's not that there is a mystery to it exactly, but watching the way in which the small cast of characters develop is too much of a joy to spoil it by giving away much more. It’s beautifully if simply written, and Acklery’s understanding of the human psyche, of our strange jealousies, of the foul underside of love, is really masterful. Strong recommendation.

December Tenth, 2016

M slammed the door of the bar behind him, uttered seventy-three syllables in a hiccuping staccato and limned shapes into the air. Then he turned and hurried to the counter. His face was wan, and his eyes were wide with recent horrors.

Boy sat a lethargic counterpoint to M's desperation. She had just finished eating a croque madam, and was then focused on making a dent in the establishment's theoretically bottomless supply of bloody Marys.

“Thank God,” M said, “it hasn't gotten to you yet. My ward should hold them, but I don't know for how long. We need to move fast.” He reached behind the counter and grab a bottle from the well.

“What's your problem?” Boy asked.

“How long have you been in here?”

'Here' was a fairly typical gastro pub in a North Brooklyn, eight drafts and cute things on the walls.

“Couple hours,” Boy said. “Why?”

“Christ, it must spreading faster than I'd thought.” M poured himself a stiff few fingers of what turned out to be tequila. “Can't think like that now – no time for despair. Call Stockdale, and tell him to get down here with whatever outdated melee weapon's he's been saving. Then call Abilene, and tell her it's time to take care of her queenly duties and chase the devil the hell out of North Brooklyn. I'll see if I can do something to slow it down in the meantime. There's this elder god owes me a favor from way back – might be the only chance we have left. Burn out anything in a few mile radius, better then letting it spread further. Excuse me, sir?” M asked the bartender loudly, “do you have any alcohol which is more than a hundred and fifty proof? And, also, I'm going to need you to start clearing out some of these chairs.”

“What are you talking about?” Boy asked, growing slightly concerned despite being weighed down pretty heavy with clamato juice and bechamel. There were a lot of things to be said against M – she could have run you an easy twenty without pause, and crowd-sourced the litany long after – but to his dubious credit, he was generally too flighty and self-involved to get that concerned over anything. “What the hell is going on?”

“They're everywhere,” M said, taking his drink, pouring himself another. “Shambling mindless through the streets, bleary-eyed, mumbling inanities, fornicating baldly in alleyways, vomiting light beer with abandon.” M drank his third shots in ninety seconds. “The things I saw walking up Bedford – reindeer horns soaking in pools of urine, crimson sweatpants stretched tight to breaking, bile drying on fake beards. This is the end of days, Boy, the whole thing unspooling and us left as witness.”

Boy slumped back down into her seat. “Oh. That's just Santacon.”

“What?”

“Santacon. They do it every year. It'll be gone tomorrow, don't worry about it.”

M looked somehow worse than he had when he supposed themselves to be on the cusp of the apocalypse. “You're telling me those people are doing this on purpose?”