Books I Read August 13th 2023

Spent a lot of this week on a beach, and some of it watching a meteor shower. I set myself the peculiar task of re-reading these reviews from back when I started doing them some 7 (!) years ago, which partially explains the re-reads.


The World a Moment Later by Amir Gutfreund – A recapitulation of the history of modern Israel as told through the lives of a number of dissidents, lunatics and burn-outs. This is something of a sub-genre within literary fiction—most obviously 100 Years of Solitude but also Alaa Al Aswany's Yacoubian Building and Olga Tokarczuk's Primevil and Other Times and probably about 10 more I can't remember off the top of my head. These days I tend to be less enthusiastic about this sort of sprawling, multi-character novel, maybe because I've read a lot of them, but in part because the characters in these tend to feel more like wacky collections of improbable attributes rather than fully fledged humans.

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke – I was not surprised to discover this was as good as I remembered it being. What's interesting is that Clarke, whose previous work sits so squarely within a specific literary tradition, here creates something entirely new and strange. The language is spare and beautiful, the narrator's voice imbuing the world with enormous vitality and kindness. I appreciate enormously a book which leaves me with a feeling of hope. A real favorite of mine.

Duplex by Kathryn Davis – A surrealistic exploration of girlhood, womanhood, motherhood, the suburbs, climate change, disappointment, nostalgia, other things. The language is striking and weird – it reminded me a bit of William Gass, every sentence requires careful parsing as a collection of words one has never previously seen on the page. It's pointless to discuss it in terms of plot and barely more in terms of theme (at least in the context of this brief review) but I enjoyed the mood and thoughts this evoked.

Little Lumpen Novelita by Roberto Bolano – Still great.

Innards by Magogodi oaMphela Makhene – A suite of short stories depicting life in a Soweto ghetto from apartheid to the near-future. Really good. Written in a mix of English, Afrikaans and (I think) isiZulu, the stories are raw and break in unexpected directions. Makhene's characters – betrayed women, drunken elders, quisling professors, a post-apocalyptic Boer – are distinct and interesting. I dug this, I'll keep an eye out for her next work.

Books I Read August 7th 2023

Howdy. Spent the last week sitting on beaches and reading books and thinking about other times I sat on beaches, reading books.

Guston in Time by Ross Feld – A short essay detailing the author's friendship with the eponymous neo-expressionist painter. Art criticism is pretty far outside my balliwick which is probably why I tend to enjoy reading it.

The Liar by Martin A. Hansen – A schoolmaster on a small Danish island intrudes in the lives of the inhabitants. Spare, slim, sad, pleasant.

Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby – The South's best get away driver takes on one last job, struggles with the curse of generational violence. Good stuff. It moves quick, the language is sharp and action punchy but still carries some kind of real human weight. I picked another one up by him right after so that's praise.

Old Calabria by Norman Douglas – A ruminative travelogue of a largely forgotten piece of post-unification Southern Italy. Douglas seems mostly famous these days as a pederast (which is quite an accomplishment, given the competition from other 20th century English writers) but this is fun all the same, interesting if not always coherent takes on the Italian history and culture.

Heat of Fusion and Other Stories by John M. Ford – There's a lot of poetry in here that brought the average down.

My Darkest Prayer by S.A. Cosby – An ex-cop investigates the murder of a shady preacher in a small southern town.

Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand – A sometime photographer and current casualty of the NYC punk rock scene becomes embroiled in a mystery on a secluded Maine island. The voice is strong and the plot moves quickly.

Books I Read July 24th 2023

Hope you're not melting.

Last Call by Angus Wilson – An intelligent but frustrated grandmother must reinvent herself when she moves to a live with her intellectual son and his family. There aren't enough books about old people, because books aren't really marketed to old people and young people generally don't like being reminded that they are growing old, which is too bad because there's a lot of territory to be mined here. Wilson's depiction of unexceptional but admirable people requires a lot of talent, and I found myself enjoying this.

Forgotten Journey by Silvina Ocampo – Eerie children murder / are murdered in many of the 28 very short stories by Argentina's rediscovered matron of the surreal. Silliness aside I love Ocampo, and these works of enigmatic microfiction (few run above 1,000 words) had me puzzling over every sentence, trying to find the throw away sentence explaining each narrative riddle, sometimes coming to the conclusion they were deliberately inexplicable, and rarely caring either way, so masterful is the language and tone. Apparently she wrote a ton of stuff, I hope more is translated quickly.

Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes – Gen X's last great wastrel falls into penury, catching hold of a wide spectrum of French society on the way down. Combining a not-quite-completely-black satire of French society with the nostalgic anarchy of The Savage Detectives. Really, really fun, there are apparently two more of these and I'm excited to jump in.

Books I Read July 16th 2023

Turns out not waking up at 3 AM has really improved my reading habits.

The Book of Merlyn by T.H. White – A tedious and unnecessary epilogue to the classic work of YA fantasy. You should never, never read a late sequel to a beloved work of literature, especially YA, but I had never heard of this and saw a nice edition in a fun book store in Joshua Tree (shout out Space Cowboy Books) and took a foolish chance.

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward – Mysteries abound behind the boarded up windows in this disturbing nightmare of a novel.

A Private Affair by Beppe Fenoglio – A partisan tries to save a potential romantic rival in this sensitive and sincere-seeming portrayal of the last days of the Ducce regime. In the minor details and the broader themes, the author's experience speaks out. Good stuff.

The Right to be Lazy by Paul Lafargue – A paean to sloth by an early communist. The eponymous essay didn't do much for me but the accompanying 50 pages slamming Victor Hugo was worth the price of admission.

The Printer of Malgudi by R.K. Narayan – A directionless writer becomes the beneficiary of a lively, chicanerous printer. Beneath an entertaining light comedy (of the kind Indian literature tends to excel) lie thoughtful observations about the limitations and pointlessness of the artistic/creative life. I liked it.

The Hive by Camilo Jose Cela – In a cast of hundreds thronging post-Civil War Madrid, you would think the writer would manage to find a single redeemable soul. Alas. This reminded me a lot of Curzio Malapart, in the sense of being well-written but pitiless in the way that makes you think the author was probably an asshole. Also, they were both fascists.

Books I Read July 10th 2023

Sun has arrived and LA is resplendent. In a few weeks everyone will start to complain of the unending light but for the moment we're enjoying the lobster tans and long evenings. As always, such beauty is peculiar contrast to the slow moving political crisis that is American society, more on that over at the LA Times.

Growing Up Weightless by John M. Ford – The prodigious children of the rulers of the moon rebel against the confines of their future society. Ford is a really interesting, peculiar writer. His language is strong, the plotting is complex and he has a human focus which tends to contrast with the genre as it has come to exist, but at the same time he like wrote a bunch of star wars tie in novels? Anyway, this was good and smart and affecting and I liked it.

Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn – Retellings (and, one suspects, outright reimaginings) of classic Japanese folklore by an early European settler in Meiji-era Japan. After a while you do get a bit like 'no don't fall in love with the pale maiden you met beside the tomb!' but mostly these are lovely and evocative.


Against the Wind by Martin A. Hansen – A collection of short stories from an early 20th century master of Danish fiction. Small town farmers go mad with greed and stand up to the Nazis and occasionally find God in a cruel but redeemable world. Good stuff.


The Promise by Silvina Ocampo – Drowning in the Atlantic, a woman recollects her life in a series of character description and brief vignettes. Lyrical, evocative, surreal. I'm a big fan of Silvina Ocampo but that's nothing much new.


Rovers by Richard Lange – Two undead brothers scuzzing immortal through the American West run afoul of love, bikers. Blunt, fast-paced, and well-written, Lange and I share an affection for deglamourizing vampires .

Books I Read June 30th, 2023

Last week marked the end of my year in a bakery. I learned to do this...

But didn't read very much, so it's been fun getting back on the wagon.

A Man of Shadows by Jeff Noon – A down on his heels private detective pursues an heiress through a a city of perpetual light. The setting was striking and weird.

The Scholars of the Night by John M. Ford – A history professor finds himself embroiled in cold war shenanigans. It's a little life if Three Days of the Condor wasn't the dumbest fucking in the world.

Cowboy Graves: Three Novellas by Roberto Bolano – As someone with a Cesarea Tinajero poem tattooed on his chest, any return to Bolano's world of heart-struck pimps, would-be-revolutionaries and lost pimps is welcome, but on balance this is probably only for completists.

The Day Lasts More Than a Hundred Years by Chingiz Aitmatov – A camel ride to the cemetery offers a Kyrgystani everyman the opportunity to contemplate communism, tradition, family, mankind, in this classic of Central Asian literature. There's also a weird sci-fi component. It's heartfelt, I liked it.

I Spit on Your Graves by Boris Vian – In this remarkably odd work of allyship by the man primarily responsible for bringing jazz to Paris, a light-skinned black man seeks savage revenge on the white race. Violent, erotic, horrifying, weird.

Life Among the Savages by Shirley Jackson – An intimate autobiographical account the years of domestic bliss the author spent with her young family in rural Vermont. Yes, that Shirley Jackson. Apart from the ongoing incongruity of not having a Shirley Jackson book end in horrible tragedy I found it kind of dull.

A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East by László Krasznahorkai – The grandson of Prince Genji wanders through a decaying monastery, contemplates the fallen nature of existence in sentences that go on for a very, very, very long time. In an of itself that doesn't bother me (nor does the complete lack of plot) but at bottom there just really didn't seem much to this.

Books I Read June 12th, 2023

This is a bit more like it. Thanks to the folk at Borderland books in Haight-Ashbury for having my book, John M. Ford's books.

Living Pictures by Polina Barskova – Faintly interconnected vignettes (both fictional and non) interweaving the author's past with the siege of Leningrad and the fates of various artists. Intermittently effective.

Tentacle by Rita Indiana – In post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo a down-and-outer rewrites history/saves the world. Shades of sci-fi Bolano (which is maybe just to say Bolano), slight but very much its own distinct thing. I'd say I dug it.

The Last Hot Time by John M. Ford – I read this book when I was maybe ten or twelve, during a period of time where I was probably reading a couple of hundred fantasy/sci-fi books a year, the vast vast majority of which either have been or should be forgotten. This one stuck in my mind, however, not so much for the general premise – elves/magic have re-entered the world, brought about a minor apocalypse, and now like to cosplay gangland Chicago – but for its lyrical wistfulness, peculiar pacing and a BDSM subplot. When I pieced together that this half-remembered work was by John M. Ford, writer of the really excellent The Dragon Waiting, I was pretty sure that a re-read would prove it to be that rare example of a work in which my past and current self would find agreement. Huzzah! This is urban fantasy done right, pulpy and fast-paced but also moody and vibrant, a world you want to live in even though you might have your heart broken or get eaten by a dragon.

Hangsaman by Shirley Jackson – A high strung co-ed attends a woman's college, is stifled by the patriarchy, descends into madness. A compelling and low key depiction of insanity. I can't exactly say that I enjoyed it but it was excellent, Jackson has an imitable capacity to for unassuming menace. This is a bit more like it. Thanks to the folk at Borderland books in Haight-Ashbury for having my book, John M. Ford's books.


Honorable Men


Gayane Torosyan Stevens was found dead early in the morning on June 6th, 2022 beneath the Colorado Street Freeway exit, in a transient encampment along the LA River. The autopsy report indicates that she died of a gunshot wound to the head.

These are the only indisputable facts in this matter; everything which follows is personal report, rumor, or hearsay. Apart from Gaya herself, the names have been changed.

The last time I saw Gayane Stevens she was building out the room in which she would be killed, laying lengths of scavenged plywood into the girders below the Colorado Street bridge, the freeway for a roof and a twenty-foot drop to the concrete riverbank. A short, slender Armenian woman in her early 40s, Gaya stood out among the other unhoused along the river. You didn’t need to know that she had an MBA, or that only a few years earlier she had worked as a financial services adviser; she was physically and mentally more robust than her neighbors. Passing her on the street, you’d have thought she taught yoga or sold candles on Etsy.

I was visiting on behalf of a homeless organization with which I volunteered, handing out bottles of water and hygiene kits. I’d been doing this most weekends for the last several years, tramping through encampments along the LA River, forging relationships and trying to connect the inhabitants with housing and other forms of support.

As usual, Gaya was friendly but disengaged. After some debate, her and her boyfriend, Nil, agreed to a van ride to a shower station we had set up further down the river. It was a banal interaction—I only remember it because the van took a while to arrive, and I grew petulant waiting in the heat.

Gaya was killed a month later. News of her death quickly made its way through the veteran members of my outreach group. The feeling was one of muted shock; Gaya was known to have trouble with her neighbors, and life along the river is savage. Still, the realization that Gaya’s murderer might well be one of our participants, someone to whom we had offered clean socks, or shared a picnic lunch, was horrifying—though not quite unthinkable.

“Never has an honorable man slept under a bridge,” Nil tells me over the phone a few weeks after Gaya’s death. I’ve known Nil for almost as long as I’ve been doing outreach. In his mid 40s, he is a constant fixture along the river and a long-time participant in our various programs. Despite living unhoused for years, he remains intelligent and physically fit. A bipolar methamphetamine user, he is also clever, witty, and a talented artist. He used to play piano at our pre-Covid potlucks. Nil has been the target of violence—last year he was assaulted by another unhoused—but on the streets the line between victim and victimizer is very thin, and river rumor credits him with owning a gun.

Nil says he knew Gaya for about a year before she was murdered, but that they only took up with each other a few months ago. He says that Gaya was “a beautiful person,” smart and capable. Like everyone else, he is mystified as to why a woman with Gaya’s background was on the streets, although he hypothesizes that she was “running from something.”

After a few minutes, Nil reveals another facet to his relationship with Gaya. She was intelligent and energetic, but she was also a troublemaker and a thief. This last is a particular taboo among the unhoused, where it impossible to guarantee the safety of one’s possessions, and theft is a source of constant, almost paranoid concern. Nil says that Gaya “thought my stuff was hers,” adding that she was constantly “gangstering my stuff.” He says she could also be antagonistic and even combative, starting fights without any clear reason.

In fact, the night before she was killed, Nil says Gaya manufactured an argument and forced him out from the encampment, even going so far as to throw a bottle of urine at him. “Granted,” he adds, “it was my urine, but still.” Nil says he left the bridge but pitched a tent nearby. Early the next morning he heard a “blood-curdling scream,” but did not investigate. Heading back to the encampment later to “start on his morning chores” he found “rivulets of blood running down like discarded milk… so fresh that it hadn’t drawn flies.”

Before checking on Gaya or notifying the police, Nil says he told everyone else in the encampment of his discovery—most of whom decided to leave—then took videos of the crime scene. He explains that he felt the videos would somehow be evidence of his innocence. Once finished filming, he called the police, who collected the body, interviewed him, then left.

Nil says he has a hunch who killed Gaya but refuses to share. He alludes to larger conspiracies, and hints at a connection Gaya had with the Armenian mob. There is a lot about Nil’s story I don’t understand, and some things he doesn’t want to share over the phone. We arrange to meet in person later in the week.

Nil declined to say who was beneath the bridge the morning of Gaya’s murder, but he didn’t need to. There is a common misconception that most homeless are transients, but in fact the majority are sedentary, remaining in the same encampment for months and even years, building out their hutches and accumulating possessions. The Colorado Street Bridge encampment has a fairly stable tenancy, and I know most of the people who sleep there.

One of these is Carl, who lived in the loft beside Gaya. Once upon a time Carl ran a limousine service, but he’s been unhoused for the last ten years. A decade on the streets has not been kind to Carl; he suffers a host of physical ailments and gives a strong impression of ill-health. A few weeks before Gaya was murdered, someone beat him so badly that he had to be taken to the hospital, though no one wants to say who, or why.

Despite being a potential suspect and admitting, unsolicited, to a list of outstanding felony charges, Carl is happy to speak with me about Gaya. He frames his story by explaining that he is on what he calls his “God Thing,” by which he means both that he tries to live according to Christian ideals and also that God speaks to him personally. It was God who told him to make a loft under the bridge with plywood, he explains, and Gaya who stole the idea from him. Although he initially describes her as “sweet, intelligent, and outgoing,” it isn’t long before he is portraying Gaya as a volatile woman with a loose sense of personal property. He says that she had moved into his spot a few months before her death, ostensibly to “help him with his work.” But as the days wore on, Carl describes Gaya as having become more antagonistic, starting “heavy duty arguments” in what he perceived as an attempt to provoke him to violence—although he adds that he “never laid a hand on her.”

Eventually the situation became untenable, and Gaya moved out a month before her death, building her own loft next to his and taking up with Nil. Going from roommates to neighbors did not improve their relationship. In fact, Carl explains that just before her death, Gaya had stolen a piece of his plywood with which to expand her space. She was “trying to punk me,” he explains angrily, knowing that “being on my God Thing I wasn’t going to beat her ass.” Rather than resort to violence, Carl says he left the encampment and wasn’t around the morning of Gaya’s death. He says that there were a lot of people angry with her, but that no one he knows would have killed her.

Shortly after her death, Nil set up a gofundme page to repatriate Gays's ashes to her native Armenia. Entitled ‘Wings for Gaianna [sic],’ it depicts his relationship with the deceased in sanguine, even flowery terms. “She helped me to realize that I was worthy of love, and set me on a course of personal self improvement and empowerment for I hope to one day regain my place in society...” He suggests that Gaya was “slashed to death” by “some sick and deprived psycho killer that I believe is currently stalking the homeless recently they (the cops) don't want anyone to know about what's actually happening in Glendale to the homeless or unhoused in this area because they do not desire to generate any sympathy…for the people that reside on the streets.” Nil asks for ten thousand dollars which will “include the flight, transporting the remains, as well as the funeral in her Homeland and reimbursement for the time and patience it will take in order to find the family in order to make this a memorable goodbye for the entire family in Armenia and so that I will feel as though Gaia is not alone for the rest of eternity but at home with family and friends.”

Thus far the take sits at four-hundred dollars. I’m planning to ask Nil about the Gofundme page, and about this psycho killer that he mentions, but the day before our appointment he begs off, claiming a sudden illness. Later that night, he sends me a series of confusing texts about ‘warnings’ that he’s been sent, then blocks my number.

Volunteering with the unhoused one struggles to maintain a sense of perspective. The system is so broken, the need so vast, one can easily justify behaviors which would be unthinkable in a professional organization. When one is (or imagines one is) addressing a crisis—helping a mother with her infant child, trying to separate an unhoused woman from an abusive partner, or get a long-time acquaintance into rehab—it is easy to brush aside semi-official protocol. Every experienced outreach volunteer has gone out alone to visit an encampment or given their phone number to a participant.

At first, looking into Gaya’s death seemed only an extension of these regular irregular activities. Increasingly it was becoming clear my behavior was outside the scope of my organization, and potentially dangerous. The day after Nil cut off contact, an unhoused friend who heard I’m looking into Gaya’s murder texts me an admonition. “…[Be] careful bcz she burned A LOT of bridges and severely pissed off a lot of people…the list of suspects has to be 10 miles long…Maybe longer.”

Willy would have to be included on that list. A rail thin, silver-haired Armenian man, he was Gaya’s partner before she took up with Carl. Willy lives about half a mile downriver from where Gaya was killed, beneath the white spire of the Atwater Village Horse Bridge, in a tent surrounded by a small junkyard of scavenged bike parts. I find him searching through a pile of busted tire tubes and ask him about Gaya.

“I don’t want to talk about that fucking bitch,” he tells me, then proceeds to do so. He says that she’d been on the streets long before he met her, and he doesn’t know anything about how she got there. He says she’s been “making her way up the river from Frogtown,” and that her M.O. was to find a man she could use as a protector, move in, steal from them, then find another man to protect her against the first before repeating the cycle. He says this is what happened to him. He says he let her move into his tent a few months back, but that she quickly proved to be trouble. He says she was a thief and describes her habit of stealing his possessions in front of him, then daring him to respond. When he finally decided to throw her out, Willy says Gaya refused to leave and even tried to provoke him into hitting her so she could call the cops.

Willy’s loathing of Gaya is venomous, unpleasant to be around. “Usually when someone dies you feel something here,” he says, tapping his hollow chest, “but for that bitch? Nothing.” Several times during our conversation he says that he wanted to kill her or would have killed her.

But he says that about several other people too – about Nil and Carl, about John and Lunatic who live underneath Colorado, about most of his neighbors. Willy’s is a world of constant conflict, some hypothesized, some real, and it is difficult to distinguish between the two. He says that Nil is a psychopath, that he assaulted some people in a neighboring encampment and once threatened him with a knife. In truth, Willy’s dislike for his neighbors is nearly universal. At one point he recommends that someone come by with a bulldozer and push out all the people living on the river, adding that this hypothetical driver should be “given a medal.”

Willy concludes our conversation with a suggestion that I abandon any further investigation into Gaya's death. “Forget about her,” he says, “she isn’t worth your trouble.”

The encampment below the Colorado Street Bridge looks the same as ever. There is nothing to alert anyone that a murder has been recently committed. The usual collection of debris is scattered about, and the inhabitants have returned to their tents and makeshift cells. The only change is Gaya's loft, which has been removed—presumably by law enforcement—leaving the girders at the northeast corner empty once more.

I find John in a chamber he has built into the back of the bridge, along with the woman he supposedly traffics. Shirtless, he comes to his door long enough to answer a few questions. He didn’t really know Gaya. He wasn’t there the night she was called. He can’t tell me anything.

His neighbor, Guillermo, is slightly more forthcoming. He admits to having been in his spot the night Gaya was murdered but says he didn’t hear anything. Like Carl, he claims not even to have known Gaya was shot. He says Nil woke him the morning of the murder, to show him the blood. He mentions that Nil took videos before calling the police. He doesn’t know why anyone would hurt Gaya. He doesn’t know if she has any enemies.

Gaya’s loft has been removed, but Carl’s remains beside it. From the outside they look identical, although whomever killed her clearly did not struggle to distinguish between the two. I climb up for reference. It is just about too low to stand in upright and cramped with Carl’s possessions. Enclosed on three sides by the bridge, it is pitch black even in the daytime. A flashlight would be required to navigate further, something that did not occur to me. Again, Gaya’s murderer apparently knew better.

When I come back down, I see Guillermo watching warily from the window of his hutch.

By this point it had become impossible not to acknowledge the improbable reality that I was trying to solve Gaya’s murder. In part, again, this seemed a natural progression of my previous duties. The unhoused in LA exist in a semi-anarchic state in which the official civil apparatus rarely interferes. Assisting them means adopting roles for which one is neither trained nor credentialed. Having already played ersatz nurse and case manager, acting as detective did not seem entirely absurd.

In retrospect, this seems a weak justification. The fact remains that at this point the idea of giving up the investigation seemed unfathomable. Through back channels, I learned that Nil would be attending a weekly lunch put on by my organization, and I resolved to try to complete the conversation he had been avoiding.

I find him at a back table telling two other unhoused people about Gaya’s murder. Seeing me over his shoulder he grows anxious, but quickly recovers. “This is Daniel,” he says, introducing me, “he’s a journalist, we’re doing a piece on Gaya.” I suggest we take a walk, and somewhat reluctantly he follows me out to the street. Walking over, he whispers that he’s found new evidence about Gaya’s murder but is concerned he’s jeopardizing his safety by reporting it.

I tell him that first I want to see his videos. He takes his phone out. The screen is fractured in a dozen places. Scrolling through his files he grows skittish. He says he isn’t sure if he still has the videos. I tell him to take his time and check. After a minute of searching, he proves successful, queuing up video and showing me his phone. It is brief and shows the police stringing up tape and investigating Gaya’s loft.

“You said you took videos before the cops came,” I remind him.

Previously enthusiastic to show his footage to anyone who asks, Nil turns reticent. “Are you sure you want to see this?” he asks, as if concerned for my innocence.

I tell him I am.

The next video shows Nil approaching the entrance to Gaya’s loft, commenting on the volume of blood, and calling her name in such a way as to make it clear he does not expect an answer. Guillermo can be seen briefly, and I am reminded that before taking this video, Nil woke the rest of the encampment. There is a surreal, even theatrical air to the proceedings, and it is unclear to me why Nil would have taken so long to check if Gaya was still alive or exhibit surprise at blood he had already seen.

The next video is a still shot of Gaya’s blood leaking down the embankment. It lasts for more than three minutes. Watching it feels interminable. I cannot imagine what filming it must have been like.

Nil has lit a menthol and paces back and forth. When the clip finally ends, I call him back over. “You said you had a video of Gaya.”

“You mean of her body?” he asks, as if the idea is shocking. But then he gives me smile like a child caught playing truant. “Maybe I do,” he says.

The final video is brief, a close up of Gaya as she lies slumped on the lip of her loft space. A headlamp remains strapped to her forehead. It is impossible to make out the bullet wound, but her face is so completely devoid of movement, so uncannily still, that there can be no question I am looking at a corpse.

Gaya and I were not close. I began investigating her death out of curiosity and continued according to that form of vanity which demands one finish a course once committed. Seeing her murdered body, however, I am left with only the simple fact of our shared humanity, now stolen. She was one of us, and now she is not. That should mean something. I think that should mean something.

Nil takes his phone back. The air between us has soured. I fear my face betrays some hint of what I’m thinking.

He asks what I saw in the video. I say I saw a close up of Gaya’s dead face. He says she looked peaceful—but she didn’t look peaceful to me, she looked dead. I tell him that. I ask him what about these videos he feels demonstrates his innocence.

Instead of answering, he offers me his new theory of the crime. Just last night, he explains, a woman named ‘Mama Russia’ gave him the inside scoop—Gaya was killed by someone high up in the Armenian mafia, because she ratted him out to the cops, or perhaps because she stole something from them. Nil’s story is confusing. I ask him who this ‘Mama Russia’ is, and how she knows all of this, but Nil doesn’t answer.

Nil begs off. I don’t try to stop him. I have a feeling that if we stand here together much longer something bad is going to happen. Before he can leave, I force one final question on him—why did he block my number? He insists he didn’t until I show him the notification on my phone. Then his eyes go wide, as if the enormity of the conspiracy is only now dawning on him. “The mob must have blocked your number,” he says, wearing the same smile as when he admitted to having filmed Gaya’s corpse. “Be careful.”

During the weeks I investigated Gaya’s murder, she remained a cypher. She didn’t like to talk about her past—even with other unhoused—and left little digital footprint. What emerges from conversations with her acquaintances is an image of a deeply disturbed woman. In an atmosphere in which violence is common, and violence against women horrifyingly ubiquitous, her pattern of naked theft and deliberate insult seem genuinely suicidal. Drug use alone does not account for it—I know many people on the river who struggle with a dependency on crystal meth, but none who have cultivated such universal antipathy.

I had begun to worry that Gaya’s story would be told entirely by ex-lovers and stated enemies when, days after speaking with Nil, I managed to reach someone from Gaya’s past, a colleague and close friend from before she moved to California. His memories are of a capable, well-adjusted person, without any hint of the darkness which would come to consume her. Gaya was “academically gifted” and extremely professionally competent. A “by the book” person with an impressive ability in financial mathematics. He describes Gaya teaching herself how to install a new front headlight for her car and coming by his cubicle to playfully steal chocolates. She drank socially but he never knew her to take drugs. He says Gaya called him two or three years ago, and their conversation was entirely pleasant. He says she “sounded happy.” He says she was “the Gaya he knew.”

How to square all this with the woman that Nil and the others talk about is a task beyond my capacities. In the end, Gaya’s death proved far less mysterious than her life.

I resigned from my organization the day after my last conversation with Nil. Our work is only possible due to the relationships we have built among the unhoused, and in investigating Gaya’s murder I had jeopardized that trust. Willy had already complained about my questions, and there seemed a dim but awful possibility that my behavior might endanger another volunteer.

It is probably also fair to say I had lost my stomach for outreach. Nil, Carl and the other homeless mentioned in this story represent an extreme subsection of the chronically unsheltered, but the reality is that life on the streets is brutal and dehumanizing to an almost unimaginable degree. There are very few people capable of withstanding these corrosive conditions. While they may not have killed Gaya, the universal indifference with which her murder was met by her neighbors made it difficult to imagine continuing to do engagement as before.

It must be admitted, however, that this apathy extends far beyond the unhoused. After repeated attempts, I managed to contact the LAPD homicide detective in charge of investigating Gaya’s murder and told him what I had learned. He listened politely and insisted the investigation was ongoing but declined to answer any questions about the case. Gaya’s murder received no notice in the LA Times until weeks after her death, when it was printed as an item in the homicide report. After some back and forth, the outlet which had accepted my original pitch declined to publish this article, telling me that they questioned the news value of a homeless woman's murder and were “not surprised the police didn't work hard on this case.”

Further efforts to find publication proved likewise futile. In time I gave up trying.

That was twelve months ago. The world has continued to spin. Some of the people mentioned in this story are in shelters or supportive housing. Others are dead or have left the area. The investigation into Gaya's murder is long closed.

But I still dream of her some nights, of her inanimate face and the terrible blankness of her closed eyes, and I believe that the fact we allow for conditions to exist in which a woman can be murdered without notice, investigation, or repercussion, ought to be a source of deep and abiding shame to every citizen of Los Angeles.

“Never has an honorable man slept under a bridge,” Nil warned me. I have come to question if they can be found elsewhere.

Books I Read June 4th 2023

I attribute the stark collapse in my reading, as well as the concomitant lack of reviews, to working three nights a week in a bakery, an intoxicatingly exhausting activity which leaves little time for anything besides a bit of writing. Hoping the second half of the year will see a return to form. In any event, these are the scant few books I managed to read over the course of this year.

Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay – The story of a group of girls who disappear during a day trip in the Australian outback is one of those unclassifiably brilliant novels which functions as supernatural thriller and evocative literature. One can see its influence in innumerable later works but this remains as fresh and weird as the day it was written. Read it, but don't read the forward. Best to go in knowing as little as possible.

Bridge of Beyond by Simone Schwarz-Bart – 'However tall trouble is, man must make himself taller still, even if it means making stilts.' The story of three generations of woman growing up in Guadalupe remains one of my favorite works of literature, a haunting, tragic, inspiring paean to the necessity of hope.

The Turnout by Megan Abbot – Tragedies strike an incestuous ballet studio.

Lady Joker Vol. 1 by Kaoru Takamura – An attempt to blackmail a large beer consortium exposes the corruption endemic to modern Japan.

Monsieur Monde Vanishes by Simenon – A bourgeois businessman abandons his Parisian existence to live as a lower class scoundrel in Marseilles. One of Simenon's innumerable but excellent explorations of the stifling limitations of modernity/existence.

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes – An ex-junkie and her sloth familiar track a pop star through a supernatural (although essentially authentic) Johannesburg. A sharply written noir-fantasy mashup, right up my alley.

The European Guilds by Sheilagh Ogilvie – Not exactly sure what compelled me to read a 1500 page academic history of the European guild system, but Ms. Ogilvie makes a compelling case that they were a cartel system which stifled development and had no particularly positive benefit for the continent writ large. So, yeah, glad we don't have those anymore. Would have really hindered my walking into a job at a bakery.

Don't Know Tough by Eli Cranor – A well-meaning football coach's attempts to help his troubled star player escape life of impoverished abuse in this excellent, bitter black noir. Strong debut.

The Trees by Percival Everett – Everett tries his hand at blaxploitation with mixed results.

Dr. No by Percival Everett – Another of Everett's genre re-workings.

The Never Ending Story by Michael Ende – Harry Potter by way of Herman Hesse, a re-working of the then nascent 'chosen one' trope which has swallowed the Y/A and fantasy genres. Weirder and more interesting than I anticipated, I can see why the author was so pissed about the films.

Deadwood by Peter Dexter – A fictionalized retelling of the murder of Wild Bill Hickock and the high days of the Black Mountains. At once engaging and deeply melancholic n the best traditions of the genre.

Mood Indigo by Boris Vian – Tragic romance as surrealist farce by the man responsible for bringing jazz to Paris. Memorably weird.

Divorcing by Susan Taubes – The eponymous separation leads the author's thinly veiled surrogate to mine her memories in an effort to re-define her identity.

Catastrophe and Other Stories by Dino Buzzati – Uncanny fables chronicling the rise of Mussolini and the fracturing of mid-century Italian society. Buzzati has a talent for making haunting stories out of very simple premises.

The Wounded Age and Eastern Tales by Ferit Edgu – Interlinked microfictions inspired by the author's experience as a teacher in war torn Kurdistan. Excellent.


Books I Read

Happy New Year. I had some wins in 2022 and I took some lumps. I suspect you could say the same. I don’t predict 2023 being any easier on any of us. Hold on to whoever you have to and prop up whoever you can.

The Rat on Fire by George Higgins – Harried detectives pursue a miserable fixer who’s hired a detestable arsonist to rid his decrepit tenement of unsavory tenants. Nasty, smart, George Higgins at his more George Higgins-ish.

An Area of Darkness by VS Naipaul – Naipaul visited India, a homeland which he had never seen, passed down through the decayed myths of his immigrant family, when he was 30, having already earned a reputation as one of the most astute critics of the post-colonial world. He didn’t like it. He thought it was unhygienic and overcrowded, he detested the subcontinental tendencies towards prevarication and insincerity. He felt, in short, that the interplay between native Indian society and Western imperialism had let to an intellectually and morally sterile landscape. Naipaul didn’t like India, but in fairness he didn’t like Trinidad (or anywhere else in the West Indies), he didn’t like Iran or Indonesia, he was lukewarm, if memory serves, on the American south. Naipaul spent 70-odd years staring at the world and, to judge by his writing, came away with the impression that he had seen little of beauty or value. I like to think (or I would like to think that I like to think) that he is wrong. I suspect Naipaul is destined to be forgotten by future generations; he stands in too dramatic counterpoint to the received wisdom of our well-meaning, guilt-obsessed age. But on the opening day of 2023, I find I can’t condemn a man for looking out over our burning planet with some honest measure of disgust.

Ti Amo by Hanne Orstavik – A chronicle of the death by cancer of the writer’s husband. Sad, lovely.

Brenner and God by Wolf Haas – A well-meaning quasi-moron provokes, solves a kidnapping. Good, fun, weird.

The Necessary Death of Lewis Winter by Malcolm Mackay – A small-time hit man kills a small-time drug dealer on behalf of some small-time villains. Quick, low key, smart.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius – Hey man, quit bitching cause your fucking arm got cut off, OK? It’s no different than a clay pot breaking. Look at the big picture, if the gods had wanted you to have an arm they’d have let you keep your arm. You think you’re the only one who ever got his arm cut off?

Ride a Cockhorse by Raymond Kennedy – Still really funny.

Books I Read December 5th, 2022

Took about 3 years but I finally got smacked with the plague this week. I didn’t have the energy to read anything difficult, but I did manage to plow through some light stuff.

Trust by George V. Higgins – A shiftless ex-con gets over-clever trying to pay back a favor to the mob. It gets kind of into the weeds on the specifics of selling used cars but the final act is top notch.

The Jesus Cow by Michael Perry – A cow with the a birthmark of the face of Jesus is born in a small mid-western tow. Light satire ensues.  

Kennedy for the Defense by George V. Higgins – The misadventures of a street-wise middle-class middle-aged lawyer, loosely based presumably on the writer. I liked it less than the other stuff I’ve read by Higgins.  

The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind – The arrival of a pigeon in his apartment building throws an idiot into existential despair. It was OK.   

Monkey Sonatas by Orson Scott Card – A collection of wide-ranging shorts. Uneven and sentimental, but there were some effecting and odd ones likewise.  

The Digger's Game by George V. Higgins – A thuggish bar owner tries to pay back a gambling debt. Brutish, short and fun.

Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card – I wrote a glowing book report on Ender’s Game in the second grade, and more than thirty years on I can say it stands up. Though the essential conceit – ‘super-special child gets chosen to go to a super special school to save the species’ – remains the most dominant plot in y/a, never again was it done with such poise, thoughtfulness, and above all, brevity. Card’s prose is simple but entirely lucid, the sort of simplicity which speaks of technical talent. His world-building is deft and his characterization effective. Ender’s Game is one of those rare books which both succeeds on and subverts its story. Page to page it is great, pulpy fun to watch our sympathetic protagonist defeat a series of increasingly more terrible enemies – bullies, teachers, space aliens – while the undercutting themes of co-operation and acceptance are delivered without mawkishness or sanctimony.

Books I Read November 28th, 2022

Happy belated. Thanksgiving. I read these books last week.

Rainy Season by Jose Eduardo Agualusa – A semi-fictionalized account of the author’s experiences during Angola’s long and bloody post-war history intertwined with an also possibly fictionalized biography of Lidia do Carmo Ferreira, an Angolan poet and intellectual who disappeared in 1992, just before a resurgence in combat.  A compelling and peculiar attempt to make sense of a tragic epoch.

Autumn Rounds by Jacques Pouline – A recluse and some friendly hippies drive a bookmobile around rural Quebec.

Cogan's Trade by Eddie Higgins – The robbery of a mob-protected card game and the fallout thereof. Higgins’s was a crime reporter and defense attorney and it shows in his uncannily excellent ear for dialogue, which makes up the vast majority of the book. Higgins has a gift for conversation which is at once thematically perfect and feels completely authentic to the characters. Excellent.

The Middle Passage by V.S. Naipaul – A blistering investigation into the psychosis of the post-Colonial West Indies. I thought the stuff about Naipaul’s own island of Trinidad was stronger than much of the rest, but apart from that I’m still working through my larger thoughts on Naipaul. I know you’re all waiting with baited breath, just hold out another week please.  

Books I Read November 21st, 2022

So about six months ago I talked my way into a job in the bread department at a commercial bakery.

This is my excuse for falling off on writing these reviews and reading generally.


Magic Terror Peter Straub – 8 stories straddling the line between explicit genre thrills and the sort of quasi-nihilistic depictions of human despair which one might find in say, Ian McEwan. To be absolutely blunt I tend to prefer the genre end of these things more, a bit of the impossible makes all the darkness feel if not more palatable, at least a bit less tedious. Plus I admire the structural chops necessary to make a horror story work, it’s always easier to just let the thing careen into the general horridness of the human condition rather than come up with a genuine sting. Like I said there’s a bit of both here—his depiction of two monstrous, monosyllabled English thugs is genre enough that Gaiman wholesale lifted it for the heavies from Neverwhere, while the one about the horrific childhood origins of a serial killer reads like something from the darker end of Joyce Carol Oates. A talented guy anyway you look at it. RIP.

Party Going by Henry Green – A group of awful English elite get stuck in Paddington Station waiting for a train. It’s not Green’s fault that I kind of never want to read another book about the aristocratic England, or that I grabbed this without know what the plot was. That shit’s on me.

The Samurai of Vishogrod: The Notebooks of Jacob Marateck by Jaco Marateck – Cheeringly rambling reminiscences of life in turn of the century Poland for an unconventionally boisterous Jew. Odd and fun.

Angel of Oblivion by Maja Haderlap – Memories of a childhood and life spent in the shadow of the author’s family’s wartime efforts as Slovenian partisans. Intimate recollections of a bucolic rural existence shot through with grief and trauma and intertwined with uncompromising if sympathetic character studies. Good stuff.

Literary Occasions by V.S. Naipaul – A series of essays primarily interesting as offering a formal autobiography of the author’s Trinidadian background. I’m doing a Naipaul re-read, so far it’s been fruitful.

A Useless Man: Selected Stories by Sait Fai Abasiyanik – A collection of short stories from the decades long career of (apparently?) Turkey’s most beloved short story writer. I really only have the back cover to speak to that but if it’s true, it’s not undeserved. These are really stellar, vibrant, curiously written portrayals of a lively, multi-ethnic, pre-WWI Istanbul, and of the long shadow left by the tragic loss of that existence. It reminded me a little bit of Robert Walser in its depictions of the strange of an urban setting, but there’s a seriousness and a darkness at play here which is very much it’s own thing. Lovely. Good on Archipelago books for bringing this, and a lot of other stuff I’ve been reading lately, to a larger audience.  

Books I Read September 4th, 2022

I should have read more, given how much time I spent on the beach the last few weeks. Alas.

Chronicles from the Land of the Happiest People on Earth by Wole Soyinka – Part satire, part noir, Nigeria’s favored son’s blistering rejoinder to the hopes of post-colonial African society, portrayed herein as having degenerated into an orgy of hyper-capitalist excess covered with a patina of national custom. Soyinka’s concerns are distinctly but not exclusively Nigerian, and while cannibalism and kola nuts may be foreign to a western audience, his essential thesis—that it has become impossible or perhaps only futile to live morally in modern society—will resonate with rational readers of any nation. (One recalls that in addition to being tormented by successive generations of Nigerian regimes, Soyinka destroyed his green card in 2016 after Trump’s election.)

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner – A precocious genius storms the 70’s NY art scene, meets some radical Roman revolutionaries. Of a type.

The Dunciad – Alexander Pope shitting on his rivals in rhymed verse. It was funny if unsurprising to be reminded of the universal pettiness of writers as a class, but in retrospect I’m not sure why I read this.

Books I Read July 25th, 2022

Still been too busy to read regularly. Hoping to change that in the weeks to come.

Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima – One of Tsushima’s spare, lyrical evocations of single motherhood, not that dissimilar from h ser other pare, lyrical evocations of single motherhood.

History of Italy by Francesco Guicciardini – A history of the Italian invasions by a man who helped cause some of them.  

Books I Read July 4th, 2022

I know I been behind on shit but I been doing a lot of shit you don’t know about. Also, I wrote this article about the inspiration for Philip Marlowe.

Boston Adventure by Jean Stafford – The daughter of impoverished insane provincial parents discovers the stultifying madness of Boston high-society. Stafford is very smart and very mean and can’t stop being either for the span of a paragraph and it kind of steps on the narrative.    

Snow Angels  by Stewart O’Nan – Growing up in the 90s you kind of got the sense that the pinnacle of high literature were books by whiny middle-aged white dudes about their parents getting divorced in suburbia. I think this was a lot of the reason I was such a resolute fan of genre stuff at that point in my life, I just got so fucking sick of reading lists of artifacts in childhood bedrooms, and uncomfortable sexual revelations from unhappy men. Anyhow, Snow Angel admittedly resembles the above but more working class and less self-indulgent, a tautly sketched, sincerely felt depiction of love’s power to wound. Good stuff. 

Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes – The hippest mod in 60s London fights racist fascism. Energetic and fun.

Bedlam: An Intimate Journey Into America's Mental Health Crisis by Kenneth Paul Rosenberg – I kinda already knew how fucked our mental health system is but there’s some interesting stuff here, particularly about how the capitalist influence on the psychiatric pharmaceutical industry has meant that very little research goes into finding drugs to treat severe mental health issues.  

Ashe of Rings by Mary Butts – In WWI Britain, a precocious young woman grapples with a loveless mother, self-destructive lover, and a patronymic supernatural demesne. In theory I quite enjoyed Butts’ use of fantasy as a medium to explore personal and societal concerns. The writing is complex if uneven, and it was fun to imagine an alternate reality in which the genre grew up around more relatable tropes than Tolkien’s staid love of rural England and a bloodless Christ. But it was also one of those self-indulgent books where the protagonist is really obviously the author, and the romance in question a thinly veiled reworking of some previous relationship, the whole text obviously intended as a missive to an unfaithful partner. I guess I liked it less than I’d have liked.

 

 

Books I Read June 5th, 2022

It's been a busy few weeks, hence the lack of updates and small number of books read. I suspect the weeks to come might be even slower in terms of reading, I've got some other stuff going on, you will just have to get your brief, usually profane encapsulations of obscure foreign novels from someone else for a while.


The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk – A thousand page panorama of a sect of apostate Jews in Central Europe in the early days of the enlightenment. It's...OK? Tokarczuk is a decent writer but the huge case of characters never really felt memorable or lively to me, and thematically it felt a little like contemporary literature Bingo – who had magical realism, the dual-monarchy, multiple POV's written in different styles...Congratulations, you won the Nobel!' I guess what I'm saying is, if for some reason you care what a handful of Swedes think about human letters, this award made more sense than Bob Dylan but less sense than Svetlana Alexievich.

 

God Sends Sunday by Arna Bontemps – A fictionalized biography of the author’s uncle, a reconstruction era jockey, vagrant and ne’er-do-well. A vibrant recreation of black America at the turn of the century and a charmingly amoral character study. Good stuff.   

 

The Homeless by Christopher Jencks – An attempt to make sense of the data leading up to the first explosion of modern American homelessness in the late 80s. As always, the longer you stare at the data the more perplexing it becomes, but Jencks is honest and thoughtful and comes to some interesting conclusions.

 

Red Moon, Red Lake: Stories by Ascher/Strauss – An oblique collection of interlocking tableaus exposing the explosive nihilism at the core of all human interaction, and possibly also a series of serial killings. Dark and nasty and funny and weird.  

 

City of Spades by Colin MacInnnes – A directionless cracker becomes fascinated by London’s immigrant black population. Like if VS Naipaul was a 60s hipster, a cynical if not heartless commentary on the difficulties and misunderstandings of interethnic interaction.

 

The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzatti – A young soldier wasting his life at a garrison in the distant reaches of a fictionalized empire becomes a parable for our own half-hearted ramble through an indifferent existence, deluding ourselves as to the possibility of meaning, occasionally managing moments of courage despite the ceaseless movement of time and the fundamental isolation of the human condition. Beautiful, lyrical, a small but sharp masterpiece.  

 

Divine Punishment by Sergio Ramirez – A mix of close reporting and fictional recreations of the trial of a cad and serial poisoner in pre-war Nicaragua in the days before the first Somosa dictatorship. At once a riveting true-crime mystery, a political satire, and a slapstick comedy, Divine Punishment is a unique work by a genuine talent. Ramirez is one of the favorite discoveries I’ve made this year.