February 28, 2013
My Pet Serial Killer (Book Acquired, Some Time in January 2013)
Okay: So I’ve been meaning to get to this one for awhile, but my review stack has just been too big.
Anyway, Michael J. Siedlinger’s My Pet Serial Killer is pretty weird stuff so far, but also compelling and very readable.
At Word Riot, Edward J. Rathke gave the book a favorable review, writing:
My Pet Serial Killer is a psychological thriller as pickup game as college days romance as media study as violent porn as metahorror as the most bizarre and cruelest master/slave relationship I can remember reading since John Fowles’ The Collector. Claire Wilkinson, a forensics graduate student, plays the pickup game but she searches for a very specific kind of lover: a serial killer. She finds her Gentleman Killer, tears him apart, and rebuilds him, hoping to mold the greatest serial killer ever, causing a media frenzy, and furthering her own academic career. Twisted without being overly violent, haunting without the ghosts, Claire is a narrator and protagonist that we race along with, burning through pages at a dizzying rate only to see what she does next.
The book also got a good write-up at HTML Giant, which declared “Seidlinger is the sickest of the fucks. Few can compare.”
January 27, 2013
“Cannibals? who is not a cannibal?” (Moby-Dick)
It is not, perhaps, entirely because the whale is so excessively unctuous that landsmen seem to regard the eating of him with abhorrence; that appears to result, in some way, from the consideration before mentioned: i.e. that a man should eat a newly murdered thing of the sea, and eat it too by its own light. But no doubt the first man that ever murdered an ox was regarded as a murderer; perhaps he was hung; and if he had been put on his trial by oxen, he certainly would have been; and he certainly deserved it if any murderer does. Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. Does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? Cannibals? who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgment, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate-de-foie-gras.
But Stubb, he eats the whale by its own light, does he? and that is adding insult
From “The Whale as a Dish,” Chapter 65 of Melville’s Moby-Dick.
November 9, 2012
Read “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” a Short Story by Carson McCullers
“A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud” by Carson McCullers
It was raining that morning, and still very dark. When the boy reached the streetcar café he had almost finished his route and he went in for a cup of coffee. The place was an all-night café owned by a bitter and stingy man called Leo. After the raw, empty street, the café seemed friendly and bright: along the counter there were a couple of soldiers, three spinners from the cotton mill, and in a corner a man who sat hunched over with his nose and half his face down in a beer mug. The boy wore a helmet such as aviators wear. When he went into the café he unbuckled the chin strap and raised the right flap up over his pink little ear; often as he drank his coffee someone would speak to him in a friendly way. But this morning Leo did not look into his face and none of the men were talking. He paid and was leaving the café when a voice called out to him:
“Son! Hey Son!”
He turned back and the man in the corner was crooking his finger and nodding to him. He had brought his face out of the beer mug and he seemed suddenly very happy. The man was long and pale, with a big nose and faded orange hair.
“Hey Son!”
The boy went toward him. He was an undersized boy of about twelve, with one shoulder drawn higher than the other because of the weight of the paper sack. His face was shallow, freckled, and his eyes were round child eyes.
“Yeah Mister?”
The man laid one hand on the paper boy’s shoulders, then grasped the boy’s chin and turned his face slowly from one side to the other. The boy shrank back uneasily.
“Say! What’s the big idea?”
The boy’s voice was shrill; inside the café it was suddenly very quiet.
The man said slowly. “I love you.”
All along the counter the men laughed. The boy, who had scowled and sidled away, did not know what to do. He looked over the counter at Leo, and Leo watched him with a weary, brittle jeer. The boy tried to laugh also. But the man was serious and sad.
“I did not mean to tease you, Son,” he said. “Sit down and have a beer with me. There is something I have to explain.”
Cautiously, out of the corner of his eye, the paper boy questioned the men along the counter to see what he should do. But they had gone back to their beer or their breakfast and did not notice him. Leo put a cup of coffee on the counter and a little jug of cream.
“He is a minor,” Leo said.
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October 18, 2012
I Riff on Dostoevsky’s Novel Crime and Punishment
Self-portrait in Hell, Edvard Munch
1. Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—
Did I read it before? In high school? Not in college, not in grad school, I’m certain of that.
That I could have read Notes from Underground in full three times, but not Crime and Punishment—how?
I vaguely recall wandering into Crime and Punishment as a young man. All those Russian names though. My attention was on other matters.
And so reading Crime and Punishment this month I repeatedly felt a strange anger or shame at all my younger selves for lacking the attention or the will or the discipline to stick it out . . . and these words, attention, discipline, will, they don’t seem like the right words, because the book compels, commands, rewards . . .
2. You are familiar with the plot of course:
Our hero, our anti-hero, young Raskolnikov murders a pawnbroker, an old woman; in the rush of the crime, he fails to close the door, and the pawnbroker’s innocent sister sees him. So he murders her too. The rest of the novel deals with the psychological fall out of this crime. Sure, there’s a sister and a mother, a failed marriage plot, a detective, a friend, and a love interest, a prototypical hooker with a heart of gold, etc.—but that’s it. That’s the plot.
3. What impels Raskolnikov to murder the pawnbroker?
Perhaps I shouldn’t answer here. Perhaps it’s better to suggest you just read the book if you haven’t yet—because is not this the driving question?
(Oh you’ve read the book? I’ll continue then).
4. Raskolnikov murders the pawnbroker not because he is an indigent student in need of funds. He murders her to test his theory—or rather, he murders her to test his place within the scheme of his theory.
The Murderer, Edvard Munch
5. Raksolnikov’s idea:
I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course. Otherwise it’s hard for them to get out of the common rut; and to remain in the common rut is what they can’t submit to, from their very nature again, and to my mind they ought not, indeed, to submit to it. . . . I only believe in my leading idea that men are in general divided by a law of nature into two categories, inferior (ordinary), that is, so to say, material that serves only to reproduce its kind, and men who have the gift or the talent to utter a new word. . . . The first category, generally speaking, are men conservative in temperament and law-abiding; they live under control and love to be controlled. To my thinking it is their duty to be controlled, because that’s their vocation, and there is nothing humiliating in it for them. The second category all transgress the law; they are destroyers or disposed to destruction according to their capacities. The crimes of these men are of course relative and varied; for the most part they seek in very varied ways the destruction of the present for the sake of the better. But if such a one is forced for the sake of his idea to step over a corpse or wade through blood, he can, I maintain, find within himself, in his conscience, a sanction for wading through blood . . .
Raskolnikov believes that “extraordinary men” have the right, the duty, even, to transgress law—even to the extremes of murder (even mass murder) in order to bring about a new word, a new idiom, a new philosophy, a new paradigm, a new zeitgeist, even a New Jerusalem.
Raskolnikov wants to know if he is one of these “extraordinary men.”
6. But Raskolnikov, like Macbeth or a figure out of Poe, is plagued by doubt, misgiving—and more than a touch of insanity and egomania.
His instability and his psychological and moral dilemma is summed up neatly in only the second chapter of the book:
“And what if I am wrong,” he cried suddenly after a moment’s thought. “What if man is not really a scoundrel, man in general, I mean, the whole race of mankind—then all the rest is prejudice, simply artificial terrors and there are no barriers and it’s all as it should be.”
7. The word or an iteration of the word psychology appears 25 times in the Constance Garnett translation I read.
Crime and Punishment was published in 1866, when Sigmund Freud was ten years old.
(I am not naively/stupidly suggesting that Freud invented psychology, by the way. I’m just riffing).
8. What Crime and Punishment does so well:
Harnesses the intellect of its protagonist Raskolnikov, shows us his fevered mind in revolution, shifts us through his moods and dilemmas and despairs and strange joys.
9. And it’s not just the interior of Rakolnikov’s skull we get such access to—Dostoevsky gives our lead a marvelous, taunting foil in the detective Porfiry, a loyal and empathetic counterpoint in friend Razumikhin, a despicable enemy in the poseur Luzhin, and a dark-future forecast in Svidrigaïlov.
Each of these characters represent viewpoints and attitudes about psychology and morality without ever falling into being mere allegorical sketches or mouthpieces for Dostoevsky’s ideas.
10. Dostoevsky—unlike certain contemporary novelists I’ll neglect to name—doesn’t tell us that his character is brilliant (or troubled, or confounded, or fucked up). And he goes beyond showing us—he actually lets us experience the character’s psychology.
11. A marvelous, frightening episode that illustrates point 10:
Despair, Edvard Munch
12. This isn’t to say that Dostoevsky’s handling of characterization is flawless.
His women appear less fully-realized than his men, as if he perhaps cannot inhabit their minds so fully or exercise their brains, their souls, their voices.
Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya, for example, is a bold, more perfect, more more moral, more stable version of her brother, a woman who seems able to withstand conflict, disappointment, and misfortune with ease—too much ease. Raskolnikov’s mother, in contrast, is something of an idealized blank—not just a mother, but the mother figure: nonjudgmental, loving—her character summed up in her hugging her son and forgiving him for what she cannot forgive.
It’s the depiction of Raskolnikov’s love interest Sonia that I find most troubling though. Dostoevsky renders her an unsubtle merging of the Virgin Mary with Mary Magdalene. Her alcoholic father forces her into prostitution to save the family, but she never appears bitter or angry or even upset. Dostoevsky rarely affords her a speaking role, and in her biggest scene she reads the entire parable of Lazarus. Sure, she makes the words her own, but she’s being ventriloquized. The strings show. She’s pure symbolism, really, and stands in stark contrast to the dark, flawed humanity of Raskolnikov.
13. Re: Point 12 above: If Dostoevsky shows a certain weakness in his depiction of women, he perhaps compensates in other areas. For example, Luzhin’s roomate Andrey Semyonovitch, a utopian socialist, serves as a mouthpiece for emerging feminist ideas. And if Dostoevsky mocks would-be reformers in his novel, it’s not always with vitriol, but sometimes with understanding, and even perhaps love. After all, this is Raskolnikov’s pretension—to be a reformer of others, to step over the line of law, to be a great man.
14. But Raskolnikov is a failed reformer, or at least is unable to live with his trespass, his sin. Crime and Punishment’s epilogue emphasizes the Jesusian theme of the possibility of resurrection, even as it subdues or complicates that possibility.
We get the final image of Raskolnikov “mechanically” taking up Sonia’s copy of the New Testament; he doesn’t open it to read, but instead reflects on the possibility of a new life with Sonia, a life that “would cost him great striving, great suffering.” Dostoevsky does not let his protagonist off the hook, even as he offers the reader a final comforting vision of “the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life.”
15. There’s a strong temptation to see the epilogue as tacked on, as a sentimental gesture to the reader’s sense of stable morality, as a bit of window dressing that covers the ugliness of the narrative.
And perhaps this is true.
I’d argue though that Dostoevsky gives us a cold, ugly ending in the figure of Svidrigaïlov, who more or less commands the final moments of the narrative, moments that lead inexorably to his suicide—the self-erasing gesture that Raskolnikov cannot commit to. I think that Svidrigaïlov’s suicide might stand as a placeholder for Raskolnikov’s—an exchange of sorts.
And Svidrigaïlov’s death is not without a small measure of redemption—the redemption of other-directedness, of giving, of selflessness. It is far more complicated and troubling than the Jesusian resurrection that Dostoevsky implies as a possibility for Raskolnikov, but it also strikes me as far more real.
September 29, 2011
Book Acquired, 9.29.2011
Dubious History by P.H. Denson. This sucker is thick; 550+ pages of conspiracy theory driven thriller. I read the first few pages this afternoon; the writing is much better than the swollen publisher’s description below—
Drawing on the secretive and intriguing mysteries of the Masonic brotherhood, the fast-paced, brilliantly layered storyline and its fascinating central characters have proved a big hit with readers who like to have their wits challenged and to be kept guessing right to the end. The story begins with what appears to be a hit-and-run ‘accident’ and moves rapidly to reveal a chilling web of serial murders and a deadly Masonic secret. George Fairfax, a Pulitzer nominee researching the history of a small American town, falls victim to a hit-and-run. When his nephew Zach steps in to complete writing the town’s history, he quickly becomes suspicious of his uncle’s ‘accidental’ death. Zach begins to unravel a spiderweb of clues that point to a dangerous Masonic secret which may also be responsible for the mysterious deaths of a number of other members of the Masonic lodge. Can Zach decode the clues to the two-hundred-year-old secret in time to find the serial killer before he claims his next victim? And what twists await at every turn as each clue uncovers more of the shocking truth behind the killer’s real end-game?
January 10, 2011
“We’ve Gotten Used to Death” — A Passage from Roberto Bolaño’s 2666
From Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, “The Part About Fate, pages 266-267:
“We’ve gotten used to death,” he heard the young man say.
“It’s always been that way,” said the white-haired man, “always.”
In the nineteenth century, toward the middle or the end of the nineteenth century, said the white-haired man, society tended to filter death through the fabric of words. Reading news stories from back then you might get the idea that there was hardly any crime, or that a single murder could throw a whole country into tumult. We didn’t want death in the home, or in our dreams and fantasies, and yet it was a fact that terrible crimes were committed, mutilations, all kinds of rape, even serial killings. Of course, most of the serial killers were never caught. Take the most famous case of the day. No one knew who Jack the Ripper was. Everything was passed through the filter of words, everything trimmed to fit our fear. What does a child do when he’s afraid? He closes his eyes. What does a child do when he’s about to be raped and murdered? He closes his eyes. And he screams, too, but first he closes his eyes. Words served that purpose. And the funny thing is, the archetypes of human madness and cruelty weren’t invented by the men of our day but by our forebears. The Greeks, you might say, invented evil, the Greeks saw the evil inside us all, but testimonies or proofs of this evil no longer move us. They strike us as futile, senseless. You could say the same about madness. It was the Greeks who showed us the range of possibilities and yet now they mean nothing to us. Everything changes, you say. Of course everything changes, but not the archetypes of crime, not any more than human nature changes. Maybe it’s because polite society was so small back then. I’m talking about the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, seventeenth century. No doubt about it, society was small. Most human beings existed on the outer fringes of society. In the seventeenth century, for example, at least twenty percent of the merchandise on every slave ship died. By that I mean the dark-skinned people who were being transported for sale, to Virginia, say. And that didn’t get anyone upset or make headlines in the Virginia papers or make anyone go out and call for the ship captain to be hanged. But if a plantation owner went crazy and killed his neighbor and then went galloping back home, dismounted, and promptly killed his wife, two deaths in total, Virginia society spent the next six months in fear, and the legend of the murderer on horseback might linger for generations. Or look at the French. During the Paris Commune of 1871, thousands of people were killed and no one batted an eye. Around the same time a knife sharpener killed his wife and his elderly mother and then he was shot and killed by the police. The story didn’t just make all the French newspapers, it was written up in papers across Europe, and even got a mention in the New York Examiner. How come? The ones killed in the Commune weren’t part of society, the dark-skinned people who died on the ship weren’t part of society, whereas the woman killed in a French provincial capital and the murderer on horseback in Virginia were. What happened to them could be written, you might say, it was legible. That said, words back then were mostly used in the art of avoidance, not of revelation. Maybe they revealed something all the same. I couldn’t tell you.
May 21, 2008
Tearing Down the Wall of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector
Even if Phil Spector hadn’t given us the recent spectacle of an outlandish murder trial, Mick Brown’s Spector biography Tearing Down the Wall of Sound would still make for a gripping read. Brown’s biography, simply put, is the definitive Spector book. At nearly 500 pages (including endnotes and an extensive bibliography), Tearing consistently treads the thin line between exhaustive and exhausting, but the source material–Spector’s insane life–is simply too compelling to ever earn a yawn. Just when it begins to feel that Brown has given us too much detail, we’re rewarded with yet another tale of Spector’s lunatic shenanigans. And whether he’s pulling a gun on the Ramones, drunkenly berating Michelle Phillips, praising Ike Turner and Yoko Ono, or fighting with the Beatles, Spectors’s crazy mischief is exactly the kind of stuff we love to read in a celebrity biography. However, lurid stories never trump the real reason to read this book: Spector as musical genius. There’s plenty here to please hardcore audiophiles, including long discussions of the evolution of Spector’s famous “wall of sound” and the producer’s tumultuous relationship with arranger/songwriter Jack Nitzsche. All the episodes of Spector’s life are here–his early teenybopper days with the Ronettes, his “making” of Tina Turner, his battles with the Beatles (both as a group and individuals), his “comeback” shot with the Ramones, and even his late disillusionment with, um, Celine Dion. These segments are bookended with a detailed consideration of Spector’s recent troubles, beginning with a secretive Spector secluded in his California mansion right before the alleged murder of B-movie actress Lana Clarkson, and a lengthy, journalistic afterword explaining the events of Spector’s much-publicized trial, right up to the September 2007 mistrial ruling. Heady stuff.
Photograph by Brad Elterman
Ultimately, Brown crafts Spector’s strange life into a bizarre bildungsroman; he paints Spector respectfully but never reverentially, revealing a Promethean hubris in his subject that veers into self-annihilation. At the same time, Brown’s Spector is an utterly American story, a classic reinvention tale. Even when Spector is at his most petulant, paranoid, and downright awful, Brown never lets us lose sight of the man’s sheer force of will and his enormous contribution to American music and culture. Brown’s book reminds us of the myriad ways Spector transformed our notions of pop music, but he leaves us wondering if Spector will indeed be able to rise like the phoenix from his latest debacle or if his upcoming retrial will be the end of the music.
Said