Pynchon in French and Ballard’s Creation, Krilanovich’s Acid, Shaky Knees, beat by weather etc.

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Any time I visit Atlanta, I have to stop by A Capella Books. I walked down there from Little Five Points, where my wife and son were still looking around. I have never seen L5P so busy, thick with hipsters young and old and even older who were killing hours, like we were, I suppose, before the first set of bands that night at the Shaky Knees festival in Piedmont Park later that evening. A Capella was pleasantly empty, for the most part.

I picked up a first American edition of J.G. Ballard’s 1987 novel The Day of Creation. Not Ballard’s finest, not his worst; the collector in me thought it should go home with me.

After some downtime at a rental we walked to Piedmont Park for the first night of Shaky Knees, an outdoor music festival featuring four stages in the sweltering swooning swanning sauna September heat. I am very much not a Music Festival Guy, but I wanted to see some of the bands in this year’s lineup, and my son wanted to see even more of the bands — so we made a family trip of it.

We arrived not quite an hour before the psyop (?) indie sensation Geese were to start their set. A band called Hot Mulligan were playing; I had tried to listen to a little bit of their music on the drive up to Atlanta (I did this for pretty much all the bands I hadn’t heard before), and it was decidedly Not For Me. I did like their live sound though, and especially the singer’s charisma. Oh who the fuck am I kidding — I guess he really just won me over when he implored the crowd to “Boo the VIP section!” (Shaky Knees, like every other thing in America right now, is a capitalist swine scam: shaded areas barricaded off for the richies to rest, covered stadium seating for the very rich richies to enjoy their punk-indie-etc., $35 margaritas, a little village of “brand partner experiences” where you could, if you were so stupidly inclined, take pictures in front of a Sierra Nevada “immersion room.” So fuckin punk!). Anyway, speaking of rich kids–

I tried to watch the band Geese with an open mind. My son likes their record and he generally has good taste. The crowd seemed to like what they were doing, which was really just a shoddy whiny blues-rock thing expressed in impoverished chords. One of the guitar players was wearing a Melt Banana t-shirt. I opened for Melt Banana at a record store in like 1999 or 2000, a piece of information that dramatically drove up my esteem in my son’s eyes. I thought Geese were genuinely bad at playing their instruments, their songs were boring, and, worst of all, their guitar tone was terrible.

Luckily Danny Elfman played next. For some reason, this legend was consigned to the smallest stage at the festival, tucked back in the hills of the park (I would see Geordie Greep there later, as well as some of the Bone Thugs-n-Harmony set). Elfman plays a lot of Oingo Boingo songs mixed in with some of the greatest hits of his scores. He plays with a full rock band, orchestra, and choir. It’s totally fucked up and amazing. If there had been a roof over the park it would’ve exploded when they played “This Is Halloween”; what’s left of the metaphorical roof would have disintegrated during The Simpsons theme. I am not, like, a Danny Elfman fan–but I guess I’m Gen X or whatever, and I suppose I really enjoy weird but very accomplished musicianship. Also, Danny Elfman is like 73 and totally jacked. (Google him.)

We caught the end of Fontaines D.C. (great show from a band I didn’t really care about) and then (speaking of rich kids), watched headliners The Strokes. I was impressed by their show — they seemed to understand the assignment and Played the Hits and Mostly That First Album.

Geordie Greep shreddin'.
Geordie Greep shreddin’.

Next day, Saturday, was generally a weaker lineup, but it featured the two acts I most wanted to see: Geordie Greep and Pavement. I’d caught Greep last week in Jacksonville, a show I didn’t know was going to happen back when I bought the Shaky tickets. Both shows were excellent. If you don’t know Greep’s stuff, it’s kinda like Zappa or King Crimson with the horny Philip-Roth-persona lyrics delivered in a crooning but theatrical style, a mix of David Lee Roth and Meat Loaf. His album The New Sound was my favorite of 2024 and pretty much everyone I’ve tried to play it for has hated it, other than my son. The day was blazing, so we scooted back to the rental, rested, and returned for Blood Orange. Their set started great but was then interrupted by lightning and thunder and then a torrential downpour and an evacuation of the park. No Pavement for your boy! I got beat by weather.

I consoled myself with recollecting the show I saw back in, what was it, ’95, ’96, with Royal Trux opening? They were fucking terrible at that show. We trudged home in inches of thick gross water. I watched the Florida-Auburn game on my laptop, another consolation. (Feed my thrill.)

We spent too much of Sunday at Piedmont Park. I think there were like 50,000 people there. It was Hot as Fuck. I was impressed by Santigold’s set, which was high energy despite the astounding, oppressive heat. My son was looking forward to Modest Mouse and was disappointed, much as I had been disappointed way back in, what was it, ’98, ’99 when I first saw them shit the bed in a boozy concert in Gainesville? (I should disclose that their front man later lived down the street from me for a season and was a notorious total dick to everyone in the scene and generally thought he was like, too cool for school I guess.) They sounded thin and unenthusiastic.

Wu-Tang Clan were unexpectedly fantastic — I mean, I love those early albums, but I honestly expected them to phone it in, but they played all the “hits” with enthusiasm and energy. LCD Soundsystem turned out to be the highlight of the festival. I’ve loved some of their tracks over the years, but soured on the band when they made an enormous fuckin’ deal about disbanding (I mean they made a film about it!) only to reunite — but they were great. I’m generally ambivalent about headliners Gorillaz, but they sounded great, played all the hits, and had an impressive roster of features show up in person, including Del the Funky Homosapien, who capped the festival with a rousing rendition of “Clint Eastwood.”

Unable to sleep, my ears ringing, I finished the novel I’d been reading on the trip,Grace Krilanovich’s Acid Green Velvet. This is a novel about hoboes, grifters, yeggs, anarchists, socialists, cults and movements and capital and anti-capital. It takes place in some alternate version of the end of the nineteenth century, in some alternate California. Acid Green Velvet is surreal and sinister and funny and sexy and gross; it’s part horror, part social satire, part historical thriller, part part part part part…Look, I loved this novel, Acid Green Velvet. Maybe fifty, sixty pages in it really sank into me, or I really sank into it. It reminds me strongly of Thomas Pynchon’s work, particularly Against the Day, with which it shares many themes and motifs, as well as Slothrop’s toilet adventures in Gravity’s Rainbow (it’s, uh, abject). It’s not just the themes, but also the oblique, layered, surrealistic/mystical style of Krilanovich’s prose that recalls Pynchon’s style. Her approach is, to be clear, in no way an imitation or approximation, but rather blood that flows from the same vein. (The phrase against the day pops up late in the novel, by the way.) Proper review to come.

And more Pynchon:

When I got back home, I had a package from Paris — Nicolas Richard’s new French translation of Pynchon’s latest novel Shadow Ticket:

Nicolas got in touch with me early last year, and we corresponded for a few months about the novel. Answering his questions and trying out some of his phrasing was some of the most fun I’ve had in years. It was like reading the novel again through different eyes, different ears. Nicolas was kind enough to include me in his acknowledgements, which is one of the biggest little thrills of my life:

Untitled — Lucas Samaras

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Untitled, 1970 by Lucas Samaras (1936–2024)

Barbara Trapido’s Brother of the More Famous Jack (Book acquired, 12 Sept. 2026)

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NYRB’s new edition of South African author Barbara Trapido’s debut 1982 novel Brother of the More Famous Jacks is forthcoming next month, with an introduction by Mick Herron. NYRB’s jacket copy:

The Goldman home, anarchic, proudly carnal, and teeming with little children, could not be less like the stultifyingly respectable one Katherine Browne has just left. She enters university in search of an education—and she will find one, not in the classroom but among the Goldmans: Jacob, the Falstaffian philosophy professor; Jane, his earth-goddess wife; and their older sons, Roger, “gorgeous,” and Jonathan, “equally gorgeous, but trouble.”

Brother of the More Famous Jack is a book about the eroticism of the intellect, about falling in love with a family, and about refashioning the bonds of youth. It bears comparison with Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, and it is a book that welcomes readers into its own capacious, wise embrace.

Mass-market Monday | Donald Barthelme’s Snow White

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Snow White, 1967, Donald Barthelme. Bantam Books (7th. printing, 1971). No cover designer credited. 181 pages.

The collector in me finally picked up this awful horny late sixties photographically-covered edition of Donald Barthelme’s classic postmodernist freak fairy tale Snow White. I think the cover is really stupid and vaguely sexist and doesn’t gel with Barthelme’s book at all, but it’s also an interesting artifact, a stupid horny sexist “sexy” cover of a piece with the sea of stupid horny sexist “sexy” mass-market covers that whirled from revolving cases in Woolworth’s and Pic-n-Save and etc. half a century ago. I love to think of some horny ne’er-do-well picking this one up, finding himself a little disappointed. Even better: A horny ne’er-do-well getting turned on to Barthelme’s postmodern trip.

The trial of Bill the dwarf:

“BILL will you begin. By telling the court in your own words how you first conceived and then supported this chimera, the illusion of your potential greatness. By means of which you have managed to assume the leadership and retain it, despite tons of evidence of total incompetence, the most recent instance being your hurlment of two six-packs of Miller High Life, in a brown-paper bag, through the windscreen of a blue Volkswagen operated by I. Fondue and H. Maeght. Two utter and absolute strangers, so far as we know.”

“Strangers to you perhaps. But not to me.”

“Well strangers is not the immediate question. Will you respond to the immediate question. How did you first conceive and then sustain —”

“The conception I have explained more or less. I wanted to make, of my life, a powerful statement etc. etc. How this wrinkle was first planted in my sensorium I know not. But I can tell you how it is sustained.”

“How.”

“I tell myself things.”

“What.”

“Bill you are the greatest. Bill you did that very nicely. Bill there is something about you. Bill you have style. Bill you are macho.”

“But despite this blizzard of self-gratulation —”

“A fear remained.”

“A fear of?”

“The black horse.”

“Who is this black horse.”

“I have not yet met it. It was described to me.”

“By?”

“Fondue and Maeght.”

“Those two who were at the controls of the Volkswagen when you hurled the brown-paper bag.”

“That is correct.”

“You cherished then for these two, Fondue and Maeght, a hate.”

“More of a miff, your worship.” “Of what standing, in the time dimension, is this miff?”

“Matter of let’s see sixteen years I would say.”

“The miff had its genesis in mentionment to you by them of the great black horse.”

“That is correct.”

“How old were you exactly. At that time.”

“Twelve years.”

“Something said to you about a horse sixteen years ago triggered, then, the hurlment.”

“That is correct.”

“Let us make sure we understand the circumstances of the hurlment. Can you disbosom yourself very briefly of the event as seen from your point of view.”

“It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.”

“What is your authority.”

“The cathouse clock.”

“Proceed.”

“I was on my way from the coin-operated laundry to the Door Store.”

“With what in view.”

“I had in mind the purchasement of a slab of massif oak, 48” by 60”, and a set of carved Byzantine legs, for the construction of a cocktail table, to support cocktails.” “Could you rubric, scout-mysteries.”

“No. It was in the nature of a threat, a punishment. I had infracted a rule.”

“What rule?”

“A rule of thumb having to do with pots. You were supposed to scour the pots with mud, to clean them. I used Ajax.”

“That was a scoutmystery, how to scour a pot with mud?”

“Indeed.”

“The infraction was then, resistance to scoutmysteries?”

“Stated in the most general terms, that would be it.”

“And what was the response of Fondue and Maeght.”

“They told me that there was a great black horse, and that it had in mind, eating me.”

“They did?”

“It would come by night, they said. I lay awake waiting.”

“Did it present itself? The horse?”

“No. But I awaited it. I await it still.”

“One more question: is it true that you allowed the fires under the vats to go out, on the night of January sixteenth, while pursuing this private vendetta?”

“It is true.”

“Vatricide. That crime of crimes. Well it doesn’t look good for you, Bill. It doesn’t look at all good for you.”

“Clean Slate” — Tom Clark

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CLEAN SLATE 3 free services of the weightless cool environment: a light blue wall for breathing, a bright red wall for energy, a broad green wall for warmth.

“Clean Slate”

by

Tom Clark

3 free services of the
weightless cool environment:
a light blue wall for breathing,
a bright red wall for energy,
a broad green wall for warmth.

Sunday Comix

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“Multiple Mouth McCardy,” a detail from Wally Wood’s cover for Plop! #13, June, 1975, DC Comics.

Biblioklept is twenty years old today

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Biblioklept is twenty years old today.

I was 27 when I started the blog which I guess means I’m 47 now. The blog is older than both of my children (it is almost exactly nine months older than my oldest child).

More data:

I published 167 posts between 9 Sept. 2006 and 9 Sept. 2007, Biblioklept’s inaugural year. This was right around the time blogging went fully mainstream and right before social media platforms started to sink their claws into the zeitgeist. Two friends of mine had started blogs and they both independently suggested I start one, so I did. The early years of this blog are littered with posts referencing their blogs and other blogs, blogs long since defunct. One of those friends is now dead. The other friend I am no longer friends with for reasons I actually can’t even fully remember. 

Not sure of what to post for Biblioklept’s vigintennial, I spent an afternoon this weekend browsing through that first year of posts. Biblioklept was initially, ostensibly, a blog about books I had procured, pocketed, pinched, and purloined. I described outright thefts along with tomes I never returned. I also wrote about books that people “borrowed” and never gave back to me (including many, many students). I eventually took up writing, or trying to write, real “reviews” of books. Biblioklept barely had an audience the first few months, but by the end of the year the readership had grown, in large part thanks to these longer reviews, and also, I think, because of a general brattiness to the site. I was 27, like I said; I felt much older than the millennial Brooklyn hipsters all my friends lived among far North from my Florida, and I was much younger than the established literary voices that had segued from the print into the digital world. My takes on books and film and music were often uncharitable, snotty, uninformed, or just plain mean-spirited. Perhaps more cringeworthy to me are novels and films I heaped undue praise upon. I could link to lots of specific examples, but I won’t.

Scrolling through posts from 9 Sept. 2006 to 9 Sept. 2007, I was struck by a few things — how loose and chaotic the blog was, how free it seemed, how clearly aimed at an audience of maybe 10, 15 people, and how very very very angry I was all the time. A searing hatred of the Bush regime comes through in those early posts; early Biblioklept is soaked in the post-9/11 zeitgeist. Too, those early posts emanate a strange, subtle, and unacknowledged anxiety about what I might now call early millennial (or Millennial if you prefer) hipster culture. Maybe I was afraid of losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets with their borrowed nostalgia (I actually remembered the eighties).

As far as I can tell, I didn’t receive any review copies or advance reader copies until around November of 2007. In just a few short years it became impossible to keep up with all the books that came in. By 2010 the audience for the blog had dramatically expanded (even as blog readership on the whole declined). I was able to monetize the blog via the WordPress ads program, but I eventually abandoned that commercial practice.

I was also posting a lot more. More unasked-for data: I published 2409 posts between 9 Sept. 2013 and 9 Sept. 2014. That’s too many posts! I picked that year — call it 2014 — because I’d say that was the last little gasp of the blogosphere’s cultural relevance. Blogs still exist, sure, but they are institutional, professional, and (to employ a term that will read as very mid-twenties ten years from now), niche.

I hope that Biblioklept is still a niche blog, dedicated loosely to art and reading and books, particularly oddballish literature. But as far as the biblioklept niche: I have of course long since run out of book theft stories to tell because I haven’t stolen a book in decades.

That last sentence is a lie; I took a small tract from a house I was renting on Anacapri in June last year, an Italian translation of Alexandre Dumas’ Capri. I would like to say I took it with the intention of returning it one day. I left a deposit, one of the two physical books I took with me to Italy that summer. The theft in question, Capri, is pictured below, nestled in a new old bookcase my father-in-law told me to take.

The Dumas is posed here; its natural place in the house is in a cache of small flat tracts I store horizontally in a box in a bundle. The books it sits among are seeking shelves, or reviews, or simply my tired reading eyes. They are recent acquisitions, books to be read, and occasional redundancies. They occupy roughly one sixth of the shelf’s apparent volume; more if I double stack. I’ll try to go about filling the case slowly in this next year, 9 Sept. 2026 through 9 Sept. 2027.

I will also probably post more slowly, or more sparingly, or more sporadically (I’ll find an adverb that fits). More data (last, I promise): I published about 300 posts in the last year (9 Sept. 2025-9 Sept. 2026). I think I can deflate a bit, no? Aim for something closer to that inaugural run of just over 150 posts. Let things wind down. I’ve carved this niche and I’m comfortable in it, but I can’t go on with this thing forever. Can I?

They had given robots to the world with the lie that they would save us from labor or relieve us from drudgery so that we could grow and develop inwardly | From Walter Tevis’s Mockingbird

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I had never looked at a robot that closely before, having been brought up to fear and respect them. And I became aware, looking at his stupid, manufactured face, that I was seeing for the first time what the significance of this dumb parody of humanity really was: nothing, nothing at all. Robots were something invented once out a blind love for the technology that could allow them to be invented. They had been made and given to the world of men as the weapons that nearly destroyed the world had once been given, as a “necessity.” And, deeper still, underneath that blank and empty face, identical to all the thousands of faces of its make, I could sense contempt—contempt for the ordinary life of men and women that the human technicians who had fashioned it had felt. They had given robots to the world with the lie that they would save us from labor or relieve us from drudgery so that we could grow and develop inwardly. Someone must have hated human life to have made such a thing—such an abomination in the sight of the Lord.

From Walter Tevis’s 1980 novel Mockingbird.

Read “The Raid,” John Steinbeck’s story of labor and violence

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“The Raid”

by

John Steinbeck

I

It was dark in the little California town when the two men stepped from the lunch car and strode arrogantly through the back streets. The air was full of the sweet smell of fermenting fruit from the packing plants. High over the corners, blue arc lights swung in the wind and put moving shadows of telephone wires on the ground. The old wooden buildings were silent and resting. The dirty windows dismally reflected the street lights.

The two men were about the same size, but one was much older than the other. Their hair was cropped, they wore blue jeans. The older man had on a peajacket, while the younger wore a blue turtle-neck sweater. As they swung down the dark street, footsteps echoed back loudly from the wooden buildings. The younger man began to whistle Come to Me My Melancholy Baby. He stopped abruptly. “I wish that damn tune would get out of my head. It’s been going all day. It’s an old tune, too.”

His companion turned toward him. “You’re scared, Root. Tell the truth. You’re scared as hell.”

They were passing under one of the blue street lights. Root’s face put on its toughest look, the eyes squinted, the mouth went crooked and bitter. “No, I ain’t scared.” They were out of the light. His face relaxed again. “I wish I knew the ropes better. You been out before, Dick. You know what to expect. But I ain’t ever been out.”

“The way to learn is to do,” Dick quoted sententiously. “You never really learn nothing from books.”

They crossed a railroad track. A block tower up the line a little was starred with green lights. “It’s awful dark,” said Root. “I wonder if the moon will come up later. Usually does when it’s so dark. You going to make the first speech, Dick?”

“No, you make it. I had more experience than you. I’ll watch them while you talk and then I can smack them where I know they bite. Know what you’re going to say?”

“Sure I do. I got it all in my head, every word. I wrote it out and learned it. I heard guys tell how they got up and couldn’t think of a thing to say, and then all of a sudden they just started in like it was somebody else, and the words came out like water out of a hydrant. Big Mike Sheane said it was like that with him. But I wasn’t taking no chances, so I wrote it out.”

A train hooted mournfully, and in a moment it rounded a bend and pushed its terrible light down the track. The lighted coaches rattled past. Dick turned to watch it go by. “Not many people on that one,” he said with satisfaction. “Didn’t you say your old man worked on the railroad?”

Root tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice. “Sure, he works on the road. He’s a brakeman. He kicked me out when he found out what I was doing. He was scared he’d lose his job. He couldn’t see. I talked to him, but he just couldn’t see. He kicked me right out.” Root’s voice was lonely. Suddenly he realized how he had weakened and how he sounded homesick. “That’s the trouble with them,” he went on harshly. “They can’t see beyond their jobs. They can’t see what’s happening to them. They hang on to their chains.”

“Save it,” said Dick. “That’s good stuff. Is that part of your speech?”

“No, but I guess I’ll put it in if you say it’s good.”

The street lights were fewer now. A line of locust trees grew along the road, for the town was beginning to thin and the country took control. Along the unpaved road there were a few little houses with ill-kept gardens.

“Jesus! It’s dark,” Root said again. “I wonder if there’ll be any trouble. It’s a good night to get away if anything happens.”

Dick snorted into the collar of his peajacket. They walked along in silence for awhile.

“Do you think you’d try to get away, Dick?” Root asked.

“No, by God! It’s against orders. If anything happens we got to stick. You’re just a kid. I guess you’d run if I let you!”

Root blustered: “You think you’re hell on wheels just because you been out a few times. You’d think you was a hundred to hear you talk.”

“I’m dry behind the ears, anyway,” said Dick.

Root walked with his head down. He said softly, “Dick, are you sure you wouldn’t run? Are you sure you could just stand there and take it?”

“Of course I’m sure. I’ve done it before. It’s the orders, ain’t it? Why, it’s good publicity.” He peered through the darkness at Root. “What makes you ask, kid? You scared you’ll run? If you’re scared you got no business here.”

Root shivered. “Listen, Dick, you’re a good guy. You won’t tell nobody what I say, will you? I never been tried. How do I know what I’ll do if somebody smacks me in the face with a club? How can anybody tell what he’d do? I don’t think I’d run. I’d try not to run.”

“All right, kid. Let it go at that. But you try running, and I’ll turn your name in. We got no place for yellow bastards. You remember that, kid.”

“Oh, lay off that kid stuff. You’re running that in the ground.”

The locust trees grew closer together as they went. The wind rustled gently in the leaves. A dog growled in one of the yards as the men went by. A light fog began to drift down through the air, and the stars were swallowed in it. “You sure you got everything ready?” Dick asked. “Got the lamps? Got the lit’ature? I left all that to you.”

“I did it all this afternoon,” said Root. “I didn’t put the posters up yet, but I got them in a box out there.”

“Got oil in the lamps?”

“They had plenty in. Say, Dick, I guess some bastard has squealed, don’t you?”

“Sure. Somebody always squeals.”

“Well you didn’t hear nothing about no raid, did you?”

“How the hell would I hear. You think they’d come and tell me they was going to knock my can off? Get hold of yourself, Root. You got the pants scared off you. You’re going to make me nervous if you don’t cut it out.” Continue reading “Read “The Raid,” John Steinbeck’s story of labor and violence” →

Sunday Comix

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A page from Prison Pit, Book One by Johnny Ryan, 2009, Fantagraphics Books.

 

Claudia Rankine’s Triage (Book acquired, 1 Sept. 2026)

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Claudia Rankine’s Triage is out now from Graywolf Press. A work of autofictive-poem-prose-essaying, Triage is larded with beautiful full-color reproductions of paintings, photographs, installations, and drawings, including this one, Jennifer Packer’s Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (Breonna! Breonna!):

Graywolf’s copy:

Claudia Rankine has widened contemporary literature with her consciousness-raising, genre-defying works. In her first book after her celebrated American trilogy, presented with full-color visuals, Rankine shifts into sustained narrative, memory, criticism, and essay to offer her most personal and emotionally resonant writing yet.

Triage follows the turbulent friendship between two composite characters, the narrator and the theorist, self-identified sisters struggling to define their wounded histories and their shared but separate lives. During college, they invent a game of collapse: Every time they see each other, they have to stop and fall to the ground. As their kinship continues off and on for decades, “collapse” takes on new meanings that are seen and felt in the violence of their pasts, artworks depicting couches where someone might ease their exhaustion, the ongoing devastation in Gaza, and the antagonism of their conversation and their love for each other.

Triage is an argument for the necessity of grieving and the demand for action in our time of relentless loss. “No matter our posture,” Rankine writes, “we are all among the rubble.” This is a book for those complicated but beautiful friendships that we come to rely on to unsettle us, to make us better.

“Poems for Bad Children” — Andrew Hudgins

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“Poems for Bad Children”

by

Andrew Hudgins

I

We buried the bird but the cat dug her up,
cat dug her up, cat dug her up,
we buried the bird but the cat dug her up,
so we ground her in the disposal.

We buried the cat but the dog dug her up,
dog dug her up, dog dug her up.
We buried the cat but the dog dug her up,
so we cremated her in the oven.

We buried the dog but the kids dug him up,
kids dug him up, kids dug him up,
we buried the dog but the kids dug him up
so we chopped him into pieces.

We buried the kids but the cops dug them up
cops dug them up, cops dug them up,
we buried the kids but the cops dug them up,
and where we are going we won’t be dug up
after we sit on Ol’ Sparky.

II

Oh, sure, he can’t control his bowels
and since the stroke he drools,
and sings those dirty army songs
about the family jewels.

Refrain: When Granddad says, “Please kill me!”
you mustn’t help him die,
no matter how he begs and pleads
and tries to tell you why.
No matter he’s incontinent
and when he pees he bleeds,
just look him in the bleary eye,
and deny him what he needs.

He tells you all about his sores
and tries to make you look.
He tells you all his friends are dead
and he resents their luck.

Refrain

O, you can prop pills on his pillow
fetch water by the quart
but you must not help him swallow,
though he’s on life support.

Refrain

O, you can put the knife beside him
and tell him what it’s for,
but you must not hold it to his throat
and then complete the chore.

Refrain

O, you can hand Granddad the gun
When you’re a little bigger.
You can even click the safety off,
but you mustn’t pull the trigger.

When Granddad says, “Please kill me!”
you mustn’t help him die,
no matter how he begs and pleads
and tries to tell you why

Mass-market Monday | J.G. Ballard’s The Drought

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The Drought, 1965, J.G. Ballard. Triad Panther (1978). Cover illustration by Chris Foss (uncredited). 188 pages.

“The Draining Lake,”

being the first chapter of The Drought

aka The Burning World

At noon, when Dr. Charles Ransom moored his houseboat in the entrance to the river, he saw Quilter, the idiot-son of the old woman who lived in the ramshackle barge outside the yacht basin, standing on a spur of exposed rock on the opposite bank and smiling at the dead birds floating in the water below his feet. The reflection of his swollen head swam like a deformed nimbus among the limp plumage. The caking mudbank was speckled with pieces of paper and driftwood, and to Ransom the dreamfaced figure of Quilter resembled a demented faun strewing himself with leaves as he mourned for the lost spirit of the river.

Ransom secured the bow and stern lines to the jetty, deciding that the comparison was perhaps less than apt. Although Quilter spent as much time watching the river as Ransom or anyone else, his motives would be typically

perverse. The continued fall of the river, sustained through the spring and summer drought, gave him a kind of warped pleasure, even if he and his mother had been the first to suffer. Their derelict barge–an eccentric gift from

Quilter’s protector, Richard Foster Lomax, the architect who was Ransom’s neighbor–had now taken on a thirty-degree list, and a further fall of even a foot in the level of the water would split its hull like a desiccated pumpkin.

Shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Ransom surveyed the silent banks of the river as they wound westwards to the city of Mount Royal five miles away. He had spent the previous week alone on what was left of Lake Constant, sailing the houseboat among the draining creeks and mudflats as he waited for the evacuation of the city to end. After the closure of the hospital at Mount Royal he had intended to leave for the coast, but at the last moment decided to give himself a few final days on the lake before it vanished for good. Now and then, between the humps of damp mud, he had seen the distant span of the motorbridge across the river, the windows of thousands of cars and trucks flashing like jeweled lances as they set off along the coast road to the south.

Ransom postponed his return until all movement along the bridge had ended. By this time the lake, once a clear stretch of open water thirty miles in length, had subsided into a series of small pools and channels, separated by the banks of draining mud. A few last fishing craft sailed forlornly among them, their crews standing silently in the bows.

By contrast, something about the slow transformation exhilarated Ransom. Continue reading “Mass-market Monday | J.G. Ballard’s The Drought” →

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Sunday Comix

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Drawings by Raymond Pettibon. From Weirdo #13, Summer, 1985, Last Gasp.

“Wash,” a very short story by Stuart Dybek

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“Wash”

by

Stuart Dybek

In a slip that is the only thing pink about the day, she strains from the décolletage of a third-story window. Rain beats her with an intensity reserved for glass while she reels in the pulley line hand over hand, a shoulder strap down, a breast nearly slipping free as clothespins drop from between her teeth, just before she disappears into white furls, fighting in the sheets as the L streams by with its cargo of eyes.

All you’ll ever know of her is what you’ve already learned about hanging out wash.

Two from the Dorothy Project | Brais Lamela’s What Remains + Denise Rose Hansen’s Blue Sunset (Books acquired, 16 Aug. 2027)

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Two new titles this October from indie powerhouse Dorothy: What Remains by Brais Lamela (in translation by Jacob Rogers) and Denise Rose Hansen’s Blue Sunset.

Here’s Dorothy’s description of What Remains:

Shifting between the present and the archival past, New York City and the remote mountains of Negueira de Muñiz, What Remains follows a young scholar’s journey into a forgotten episode of the Franco regime, uncovering both the tragic history and the still-present afterlife of a forced resettlement project in the Galician countryside of the 1950s.

Like the hybrid works of Valeria Luiselli, Nathalie Léger, and Cristina Rivera Garza, Galician writer Brais Lamela’s prize-winning debut novel blends fiction, memoir, essay, and archival research to set history in conversation with contemporary reality. The result is a work of striking intimacy that explores, with subtle prose and arresting imagery, the complexity of modern migration and the legacy of twentieth-century colonization.

Dorothy compares Hansen’s Blue Sunset to Ann Quin; I’m there:

At a conference somewhere in Europe, Maja meets the Author. Haunted by a recent tragedy, she leaves with him unexpectedly to his home on the Italian coast, where she wanders into the rhythms of his life, observing the world through the lens of his days. Yet everywhere over their new and tender intimacy hangs the knowledge that soon she will have to return home to Copenhagen, site of her devastating loss. With echoes of Virginia Woolf and Ann Quin, Denise Rose Hansen paints with spare, deft lyricism the complicated landscape of grief and yearning that Maja crosses over on her journey toward something new.