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Thank you David Lynch

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RIP David Lynch, 1946-2025

We weirdos lost a spiritual uncle today.

Lose isn’t exactly the right word–the work is still there, the tremendous body of works, the films and images that I’ve returned to for so much of my life, films and images my fourteen-year-old son has recently been drawn to himself, wholly independent of me, getting there through his own weird back channels, my son who asked me just the other day if we could watch Eraserhead, and I said, Not yet, although I was the same age as he is now when I watched Eraserhead and let it do something weird to me. Maybe we’ll start with The Elephant Man instead, let it break his heart a little. Keep him away from Fire Walk With Me until he can handle it (you can never really handle it). I saw them all too young. Was way too young when my older cousin showed me Blue Velvet; I think it imprinted on me. Rewatching it (for the fifth? tenth?) time a decade and a half later, I realized I was Kyle M’s Jeffrey Beaumont peering through the closet in horror at the Adult World. Maybe I wasn’t too young. But I’ve loved them all, again and again—Lost Highway, the first one I got to see in a theater, Mulholland Dr. (the best one?), Inland Empire (really the best one). Even Dune, the first one I saw, perplexed as hell. My parents let us watch it again and again on VHS and it always refused to cohere. I think they thought it was like Star Wars, which it both was and very much wasn’t. Even the straight one he made for the normies (especially the one he made for the normies–although I don’t know if they appreciated it). But really, especially, when he Got the Old Gang Back Together for Twin Peaks: The Return—it was such a gift, a gift that seemed to come out of nowhere, unexpected, but I think even then we could recognize what a beautiful gift it was — even if it broke my heart all over again at the end, in the best possible way (“What year is this?” / “Laura!” / HOWL). I think we all knew to say Thank you then; I think we showed our love in return for the artist’s gifts. I’m thankful now, sad, selflishly sad that there won’t be one more gift, one more vision that could never come from another mind. But thankful.

Best Books of 1975?

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Previously:

Best Books of 1972?

Best Books of 1973?

Best Books of 1974?

Not-really-the-rules recap:

I will focus primarily on novels here, or books of a novelistic/artistic scope.

I will include books published in English in 1975; I will not include books published in their original language in 1975 that did not appear in English translation until years later. So for example, Thomas Bernhard’s Korrektur will not appear on this list because although it was published in German in 1975, Sophie Wilkins’ English translation Correction didn’t come out until 1979.

I will not include English-language books published before 1975 that were published that year in the U.S.

I will fail to include titles that should be included, either through oversight or ignorance but never through malice. For example, I failed to include Dinah Brooke’s excellent 1973 novel Lord Jim at Home in my Best Books of 1973? post because I didn’t even know it existed until 2024. Please include titles that I missed in the comments.

So, what were some of the “Best Books of 1975?”

William Gaddis’s novel J R, one of the greatest 20th c. American novels, was published in 1975. I’ll make note of it first as an artistic ballast against the commercial list I’m about to offer up: The New York Times Best Seller list for 1975.

James Michener’s 1974 novel Centennial dominates the NYT list through winter and spring of 1975 (save for a brief one-week blip when Joseph Heller’s 1974 novel Something Happened published in paperback). By the summer, Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers rose to the top of the bestseller, the first novel of 1975 to do so. Judith Rossner’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar and E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime competed for the top slot throughout the fall of ’75, with Agatha Christie’s final Poirot novel Curtain taking over in the winter.

My sense is that of these bestsellers, Ragtime‘s critical reputation has probably endured the strongest. The editors of the NYT Book Review included Ragtime in their 28 Dec. 1975 year-end round-up, along with Donald Barthelme’s The Dead Father, Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, Peter Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga and V. S. Naipaul’s Guerrillas. 

William Gaddis’s J R won the 1976 National Book Award for fiction; Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory took the NBA for nonfiction; the NBA for poetry went to John Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Walter D. Edmond’s Bert Breen’s Barn won the NBA for children’s literature. NBA finalists that year included Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, Vladimir Nabokov’s story collection Tyrants Destroyed, Johnanna Kaplan’s Other People’s Lives, Larry Woiwode’s Beyond the Bedroom Wall, and The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher. (Robert Stone’s excellent 1974 novel Dog Soldiers won the 1975 NBA, if you’re keeping track).

If Bellow was sore about losing the NBA to Gaddis, he could console himself with the 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Literature (for Humboldt’s Gift). The 1975 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Eugenio Montale “for his distinctive poetry, which, with great artistic sensitivity, has interpreted human values under the sign of an outlook on life without illusions.” Montale did not publish a book in 1975.

The 1975 Booker Prize shortlisted only two of eighty-one novels (both published in 1975):  Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Heat and Dust and Thomas Keneally’s Gossip From the Forest. Heat and Dust took the prize.

The American Library Association’s Notable Books of 1975 list echoes many of the titles we’ve already seen, as well as some interesting outliers: Andre Brink’s self-translation of Looking on Darkness (banned by South Africa’s apartheid government), Alan Brody’s Coming To, Ben Greer’s prison novel Slammer, Dagfinn Grønoset’s Anna (translated by Ingrid B. Josephson), Donald Harrington’s The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks, Anne Sexton’s The Awful Rowing toward God, and Mark Vonnegut’s memoir The Eden Express.

The National Book Critics Circle Awards for 1975 were Doctorow’s Ragtime, R.W.B. Lewis’s biography Edith Wharton, Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, and Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory.

The 1975 Nebula Awards long list is particularly interesting. Along with sci-fi stalwarts like Poul Anderson, Alfred Bester, and Roger Zelzany, the Nebulas expanded their reach to include Doctorow’s Ragtime and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. William Weaver’s translation of Invisible Cities was actually published in 1974 — as was the Nebula winner for 1975, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War. Significant Nebula Awards shortlist titles published in 1975 include Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, Robert Silverberg’s The Stochastic Man, and Tanith Lee’s The Birthgrave. Most notable though is the inclusion of Samuel R. Delaney’s cult classic Dhalgren.

The 1976 Newberry Award went to Susan Cooper’s 1975 novel The Grey King; the Newberry Honor Titles were Sharon Bell Mathis’s The Hundred Penny Box (illustrated by Diane and Leo Dillon) and Laurence Yep’s Dragonwings. Other notable books for children and adolescents published in 1975 include Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting, Beverly Cleary’s Ramona the Brave, and Roald Dahl’s Danny, the Champion of the World. 

Awards aside, commercial successes for 1975 included Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, Joseph Wambaugh’s The Choirboys, Jack Higgins’s The Eagle Has Landed, James Clavell’s Shōgun, Michael Crichton’s The Great Train Robbery, Lawrence Sanders’s Deadly Sins, and Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda.

Some critical/cult favorites (and genre exercises) from 1975 include: Martin Amis’s Dead Babies, J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise, Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, Charles Bukowski’s Factotum, Rumer Godden’s The Peacock Spring, Xavier Herbert’s insanely-long epic Poor Fellow My Country, Gayl Jones’s Corregidora, David Lodge’s Changing Places, Bharati Mukherjee’s Wife, Gary Myers’s weirdo fiction collection The House of the Worm, Tim O’Brien’s debut Northern Lights, James Purdy’s In a Shallow Grave, James Salter’s Light Years, Anya Seton’s Smouldering Fires, Gerald Seymour’s Harry’s Game, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy, Glendon Swarthout’s The Shootist, and Jack Vance’s Showboat World.

I’ve only read about fifteen books mentioned here (although I’ve abandoned several of them more than once (I’m looking at you Illuminatus! Trilogy and Dhalgren), so my own “best of 1975” list is uninformed and provisional, and frankly pretty obvious to anyone who checks in on this blog semi-regularly. My picks for ’75: J R, William Gaddis; The Dead Father, Donald Barthelme; High-Rise, J.G. Ballard.

A few sentences on every book I read or reread in 2024

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☉ indicates a reread.

☆ indicates an outstanding read.

In some cases, I’ve self-plagiarized some descriptions and evaluations from my old tweets and blog posts.

I have not included books that I did not finish or abandoned.

Cake & Prostheses, Gerhard Rühm; trans. Alexander Booth

Sexy, surreal, silly, and profound. Lovely little thought experiments and longer meditations into the weird.

Abel Sanchez and Other Stories, Miguel de Unamuno; trans. Anthony Kerrigan

Both sad and funny, Abel Sanchez, the 1917 novella that makes up the bulk of this volume, feels contemporary with Kafka and points towards the existentialist novels of Albert Camus

After World, Debbie Urbanski

Debbie Urbanski’s debut novel After World reimagines the end of humanity—or perhaps the beginning of a new digital existence. The narrator, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc, reconstructs the life of Sen Anon, the last human archived in the Digital Human Archive Project, using sources like drones, diaries, and other materials. Drawing on tropes from dystopian and post-apocalyptic literature, this metatextual novel references authors like Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood while nodding to works such as House of Leaves and Station Eleven. Urbanski’s spare, post-postmodern approach also reminded me of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress—good stuff.

Walking on Glass, Iain Banks

Walking on Glass weaves together three narrative threads: an art student’s infatuation, a paranoid-schizophrenic secret agent, and two ancient warriors trapped in a castle playing bizarre games. While the novel has some wonderful and funny moments, Banks’s debut The Wasp Factory is the stronger effort.

Red Pyramid, Vladimir Sorokin; trans. Max Lawton

If you’re interested in reading Sorokin but aren’t sure if you want to jump into the deep end with Blue Lard (or abject hell with Their Four Hearts), the collection Red Pyramid is a good starting place. In her blurb for the NYRB collection, Joy Williams describes Sorokin’s writing as “Extravagant, remarkable, politically and socially devastating, the tone and style without precedent, the parables merciless, the nightmares beyond outrance, the violence unparalleled.”

Ava, Carole Masso

The controlling intelligence of Carole Masso’s 1991 novel is the titular Ava, dying too young of cancer. Ava spools out in an elliptical assemblage of quips, quotes, observations, dream thoughts, and other lovely sad beautiful bits. Masso creates a feeling, not a story; or rather a story felt, intuited through fragmented language, experienced.

Dune, Frank Herbert☉

I have always remembered liking the first half of the first Dune novel and thinking that the book’s pacing, depth, and characterization falls apart in the second half. I thought the second of Villeneuve’s Dune films was so bad that I ended up listening to the audiobook to confirm if there was anything in the original material. The audit confirmed my suspicion that the first half of Dune is good—there’s a dinner scene that’s excellent—but the novel falls apart under its epic ambitions. Herbert is very good at writing about deceit, mind games, spycraft; he’s awful with action, legend, and myth.

Escape Velocity, Charles Portis

Charles Portis wrote five novels, all of which are excellent. He may have a perfect oeuvre. Escape Velocity collects some of his early journalism (he was on the Elvis beat for awhile, and then he covered the Civil Rights movement); there are also some short stories, a play, a few odds and ends. For completists only.

I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett☆

A brilliant, picaresque satire that follows its absurdly named protagonist on a series of misadventures, washing the surreal in acid social commentary. A Candide for the cable teevee age.

The Einstein Intersection, Samuel R. Delaney

Shambolic and mythic, Delaney’s novel retells the story of Orpheus in a narrative style that mirrors the musician’s dismemberment and fragmentation.

Blue Lard, Vladimir Sorokin; trans. Max Lawton☉☆

I ended up writing seven riffs on this novel this spring. 

Telephone, Percival Everett

I don’t know which version I read, but it was sad.

How to Set a Fire and Why, Jesse Ball

I reviewed it here, writing, that the narrator “Lucia’s voice is the reason to read How to Start a Fire. It’s compelling and funny and persuasive and hurt. It seems authentic, and I admire the risk Ball has taken—it’s not easy to write a teenage girl who is also a maybe-genius-and-would-be-arsonist.”

The Pepsi-Cola Addict, June-Alison Gibbons☆

Loved this one. From my review: “The Pepsi-Cola Addict is a strange and unsettling tale of teen angst that stands on its own as a small burning testament of adolescent creativity unspoiled by any intrusive ‘adult’ editorial hand.”

James, Percival Everett☆

James will likely end up on everyone’s year-end “best of”; to be clear it is mine. Everett’s novel joins a shortlist of strong responses to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that includes Leslie Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, and Robert Coover’s Huck Out West.

Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon☉☆

The key to reading Gravity’s Rainbow is to read it once and then read it immediately again and post a series of silly annotations on your literary blog and then to read it again a year or two later and then a few years after that to listen to it on audiobook while you pressure wash your house and the shed you built a few years ago (with the help of your father-in-law and brother-in-law) and then repaint the house’s shutters and then invent a few other chores so you finish the audiobook. And then write two more annotation blogs about it, eight years after the first series.

Progress, Max Lawton

The Abode, Max Lawton

I’m the sliverest slightest bit wary to include Max Lawton’s novels here, as the versions I’ve read are not necessarily the ones that will publish—but they are big, bold, ambitious, and strange, and they left an incisor-sharp impression upon me this year. Progress is a “maybe-this-is-the-end-of-the-world?” catalog of horrors; The Abode is a self-deconstructing catalog of catalogs, bildungsroman, a (self-)love story.

Demian, Herman Hesse; trans. Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck

We’ve all had a good great bad evil friend.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson☉☆

I made my family listen to Ian Holm read RLS’s Jekyll and Hyde on a four-hire drive and learned that “Jekyll” is pronounced with a long e and not the accustomed schwa — it rhymes with “treacle” not “freckle.” The book is much better and weirder than I remembered.

One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez; trans. Gregory Rabassa☉☆

Much, much sadder than I’d remembered. I’d registered One Hundred Years of Solitude as rich and mythic, its robust humor tinged with melancholy spiked with sex and violence. That memory is only partially correct—García Márquez’s novel is darker and more pessimistic than my younger-reader-self could acknowledge.

On Homo rodans and Other Writings, Remedios Varo; trans. Margaret Carson☉

I enjoyed my discussion with Margaret Carson on her expanded translation of Remedios Varo’s fiction and letters.

The Son of Man, Jean-Baptiste Del Amo; trans. Frank Wynne

Enjoyed this one. From my review: “Del Amo gives us phenomena and response to that phenomena, but withholds the introspective logic of cause-and-effect or analysis that often dominates novels. Instead, he allows us to see what his characters see and to take from those sights our own interpretations.”

The Stars at Noon, Denis Johnson☉

A reread, but I honestly didn’t remember much about The Stars at Noon other than its premise and the fact that its narrator was an alcoholic journalist-cum-prostitute in Nicaragua. (That’s actually the premise.) It hadn’t made the same impression on me as other Johnson novels had when I went through a big Johnson jag in the late nineties and early 2000s, and I think that assessment was correct—it’s simply not as strong as Angels, Fiskadoro, or Jesus’ Son.

Radiant Terminus, Antoine Volodine, trans. Jeffrey Zuckerman☆

Excellent stuff; a highlight read of the year. From my review:

“Antoine Volodine’s novel Radiant Terminus is a 500-page post-apocalyptic, post-modernist, post-exotic epic that destabilizes notions of life and death itself. Radiant Terminus is somehow simultaneously fat and bare, vibrant and etiolated, cunning and naive. The prose, in Jeffrey Zuckerman’s English translation, shifts from lucid, plain syntax to poetical flights of invention. Volodine’s novel is likely unlike anything you’ve read before—unless you’ve read Volodine.”

Gringos, Charles Portis☉☆

Portis wrote five novels and all of them are perfect—but I think Gringos, his last, might be my favorite.

Lord Jim at Home, Dinah Brooke☆

Loved it. From my review:

“Lord Jim at Home is squalid and startling and nastily horrific. It is abject, lurid, violent, and dark. It is also sad, absurd, mythic, often very funny, and somehow very, very real for all its strangeness. The novels I would most liken Lord Jim at Home to, at least in terms of the aesthetic and emotional experience of reading it, are Ann Quin’s Berg, Anna Kavan’s Ice, Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast novels, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and James Joyce’s Portrait (as well as bits of Ulysses). (I have not read Conrad’s Lord Jim, which Brooke has taken as something of a precursor text for Lord Jim at Home.)”

American Abductions, Mauro Javier Cárdenas☆

Another favorite novel this year. From a riff back in October:

“If I were to tell you that Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel is about Latin American families being separated by racist, government-mandated (and wholly fascist, really) mass deportations, you might think American Abductions is a dour, solemn read. And yes, Cárdenas conjures a horrifying dystopian surveillance in this novel, and yes, things are grim, but his labyrinthine layering of consciousnesses adds up to something more than just the novel’s horrific premise on its own. Like Bernhard, Krasznahorkai, and Sebald, Cárdenas uses the long sentence to great effect. Each chapter of American Abductions is a wieldy comma splice that terminates only when his chapter concludes—only each chapter sails into the next, or layers on it, really. It’s fugue-like, dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish. It’s also very funny. But most of all, it’s a fascinating exercise in consciousness and language—an attempt, perhaps, to borrow a phrase from one of its many characters, to make a grand ‘statement of missingnessness.'”

Attic, Katherine Dunn☆

Truck, Katherine Dunn

Katherine Dunn’s first novel Attic is seriously fucked up—like William Burroughs-Kathy Acker fucked up—an abject rant from a woman in prison in the mode of Ginsberg’s Howl. The narrator seems to be an autofictional version of Dunn herself, which is perhaps why Eric Rosenblum, in his 2022 New Yorker review described it as “largely a realist work in which Dunn emphasizes the trauma of her protagonist’s childhood.” Rosenblum uses the term realism two other times to describe Attic and refers to it at one point as a work of magical realism. If Attic is realism then so is Blood and Guts in High School. Her second novel Truck is equally weird, but it was maybe too much for me by the end.

Soldier of Mist, Gene Wolfe

Great premise, poor execution.

Final Cut, Charles Burns☆

In my review, I wrote that Final Cut served up “all the sinister dread and awful beauty that anyone following Burns’ career would expect, synthesized into his most lucid exploration of the inherent problems of artistic expression.”

Wise Children, Angela Carter

An enjoyable and maybe old-fashioned effort from Carter. I breezed through it, and remember it fondly.

Garbage, Stephen Dixon☆

I think Stephen Dixon’s novel Garbage was my favorite read of the year. I don’t know if it’s the best novel I read this year, but it was the most compelling—by which I mean it compelled me to keep reading, way too late some nights. From a thing I wrote a few months ago:

“I don’t know if Dixon’s Garbage is the best novel I’ve read so far this year, but it’s certainly the one that has most wrapped itself up in my brain pan, in my ear, throbbed a little behind my temple. The novel’s opening line sounds like an uninspired set up for a joke: ‘Two men come in and sit at the bar.’ Everything that unfolds after is a brutal punchline, reminiscent of the Book of Job or pretty much any of Kafka’s major works. These two men come into Shaney’s bar—this is, or at least seems to be, NYC in the gritty seventies—and try to shake him down to switch up garbage collection services. A man of principle, Shaney rejects their ‘offer,’ setting off an escalating nightmare, a world of shit, or, really, a world of garbage. I don’t think typing this description out does any justice to how engrossing and strange (and, strangely normal) Garbage is. Dixon’s control of Shaney’s voice is precise and so utterly real that the effect is frankly cinematic, even though there are no spectacular pyrotechnics going on; hell, at times Dixon’s Shaney gives us only the barest visual details to a scene, and yet the book still throbs with uncanny lifeforce. I could’ve kept reading and reading and reading this short novel; its final line serves as the real ecstatic punchline. Fantastic stuff.”

Graffiti on Low or No Dollars, Elberto Muller☆

A weirdo novel-in-riffs that I loved: bohemian hobo freight hopping, drug lore, art. Muller’s storytelling chops are excellent—he’s economical, dry, sometimes sour, and most of all a gifted imagist.

Galaxies, Barry N. Malzberg

Southern Comfort, Barry N. Malzberg (as “Gerold Watkins”)

A Satyr’s Romance, Barry N. Malzberg (as “Gerold Watkins”)

I really wanted to get into Galaxies, but I couldn’t. Malzberg’s faux-sci-fi metatextualist experiment carries his postmodernist anxiety of influence like a lance tilted against the would-be contemporaries who were more likely to get covered in The New York Times. His metamuscle is as strong as those folks, but you have to tell a story. I preferred the “erotic” novels I read that he wrote under the pseudonym Gerrold Watkins, 1969’s Southern Comfort and 1970’s A Satyr’s Romance.

The Singularity, Dino Buzzati; trans. Anne Milano Appel

From my review of The Singularity:

“Ultimately, The Singularity feels less like a novella than it does a short story stretched a bit too thin. Buzzati adroitly crafts an atmosphere of suspense and foreboding, but the characters are underdeveloped. Like a lot of pulp fiction, Buzzati’s book often reads as if it were written very quickly (and written expressly for money). Still, Buzzati’s intellect gives the book a philosophical heft, even if it sometimes comes through awkwardly in forced dialogue. Anne Milano Appel’s translation is smooth and nimble; it’s a page turner, for sure, and if it seems like I’ve been a bit rough on it in this paragraph in particular, I should be clear: I enjoyed The Singularity.”

Waiting for the Fear, Oğuz Atay; trans. Ralph Hubbell

A book of cramped, anxious stories. Atay, via Hubbell’s sticky translation, creates little worlds that seem a few reverberations off from reality. These are the kind of stories that one enjoys being allowed to leave, even if the protagonists are doomed to remain in the text (this is a compliment). Standouts include “Man in a White Overcoat,” “The Forgotten,” and “Letter to My Father.”

Making Pictures Is How I Talk to the World, Dmitry Samarov

Making Pictures spans four decades of Samarov’s career, showcasing his diverse styles—sketches, inks, oils, and more—through a thematically organized collection. His art, like his writing, emphasizes perspective over adornment, vividly depicting Chicago’s bars, coffee shops, and indie clubs.

Magnetic Field(s), Ron Loewinsohn☆

A hypnotic, fugue-like triptych exploring crime and art as overlapping intimacies. Through a burglar, a composer, and a novelist, it frames imagining another life as a taboo act of trespass.

Body High, Jon Lindsey

A breezy drug novel that’s funny, gross, and abject but tries to do too much too quickly. The narrator, a medical-experiment subject, dreams of writing pro-wrestling scripts, but spirals even further into mania when his underage aunt enters his life and stirs some disturbing desires. Body High is at its best when at its grimiest.

Sunday, Olivier Schrauwen☆

An achievement for slackers the world over. Sunday is a true graphic novel, by which I mean a real novel. Maybe I’ll get to a proper review of it; maybe The Comics Journal will ask me to come back to write reviews again. Anyway. Great stuff, a real achievement to those of us willing to drink a few beers before noon and fail to open the door when neighbors ring the bell.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, John le Carré☉☆

Perfect book.

Breaking and Entering, Joy Williams☆

Joy Williams’ fourth novel, 1988’s Breaking and Entering zigs when you expect it to zag. It ends up in a place no reader would expect, and I don’t mean that there’s some weird twist. It twists weirdly like life. The sentences are excellent, but so are the paragraphs. Breaking and Entering is very, very Florida, crammed with weirdos and tragedies, farcical, ironic, and thickly sauced in the laugh-cry flavor. I’m not sure exactly where it’s set, but I do know that I do know the general area, the barrier islands, skinny shining strips of weird between the Gulf and the Tampa Bay.

Hyperion, Dan Simmons

The Fall of Hyperion, Dan Simmons

I listened to Simmons’ mass-cult favorites as audiobooks—Hyperion was good; Fall was pretty terrible! But seriously, the first one is a nice postmodernist sci-fi take on Canterbury Tales. 

Three Trapped Tigers, G. Cabrera Infante; trans. Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine with collaboration by Infante☆

Language! Language! Language! Bombastic, bullying, buzzing, braying, bristling— Infante’s dizzying mosaic of the fifties at night (and some hungover mornings) in Havana boxes you on your ear before kissing it, your ear, nipping the lobe even, showing off some neat tricks and other twisters of its fat vibrant tongue. A delight.

The Rest Is Silence, Augusto Monterroso; trans. Aaron Kerner

A quick clever slim novel that riffs on literary failure. A nugget from the so-called Latin Boom that surely (don’t call me Shirley!) influenced Roberto Bolaño.

The Obscene Bird of Night, José Donoso; trans. Hardie St. Martin, Leonard Mades, Megan McDowell☆

Heavy and gross, twisted and twisting, I loved Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night–reminded me of Goya’s Caprichos and William Faulkner and Anna Kavan soaked in Salò and Aleksei German’s adaptation of Hard to Be a God. About half way through I realized I needed to go back and put together some of the plot strands I’d missed; I think this novel is more coherent than its surreal and grotesque flourishes initially suggest.

Small dents, big books (tl;dr)

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I usually finish reading a novel if I stick with it for, say thirty-to-fifty pages. However, as is the case with many readers, I suspect, very long novels foil me; or, rather, time foils me. Obligations intercede. Here are some long novels that I had to put aside for another time. From the top:

Lies and Sorcery, Elsa Morante (775 pages)

If the bookmark I left in Jenny McPhee’s translation Lies and Sorcery is not lying (or ensorcelled), I got seventy pages into it before getting sidetracked with something else. I remember liking what I was reading but also that the book seemed very heavy over my head at night.

The Strudlhof Steps, Heimito von Doderer (840 pages)

I’ve really enjoyed the first fifty pages of Heimito von Doderer’s The Strudlhof Steps (in translation by Vincent Kling). I’ve enjoyed them so much that I’ve read them at least four times over the past three years. The longest I’ve waded into the Steps was to page 99. Again, a slimmer model comes round and I lose my focus—but of the four novels I’ve listed here, von Doderer’s is the one that’s made the biggest impression on me. My bites may have been shallow but I keep going in for seconds.

A Bended Circuity, Robert S. Stickley (637 pages)

Although it’s the shortest novel on this list, my edition of RSS’s ABC feels cramped and constrained. I think the novel would like a bigger home. The pages are too bright, the font too small, the margins too narrow. It’s a cramped reading experience. I suppose I could break down and buy the Corona\Samizdat edition, which may be easier to ease into. Or an e-book? RSS, please agree to an e-book! Some of us have aging eyes. Oh, I got to page 48.

Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, Marguerite Young (1321 pages)

I cracked into Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling twice this year; once in the Spring and once in the Fall. Maybe I’ll try again in the Winter. I stalled out 78 pages in, at the end of chapter 3.

More New Cult Canon

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(Context, entries 1-8)

(9-14)

15. Battle Royale, Kinji Fukasaku (2000)

I actually rewatched Battle Royale just the other week. In retrospect, it’s difficult to assess the film against the influence it’s had, especially on video games. In his 2008 New Cult Canon entry, Scott Tobias described the film as “Lord Of The Flies meets The Most Dangerous Game meets perhaps the cruelest year of teenage life.” I think what many of us remember about Battle Royale is first the concept, so widely imitated, and then the violence—but it’s actually a gentler film, with hints of Rebel without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955). It’s also kinda goofy and disjointed.

6/10

Alternate: I don’t think they’re widely available as legal streams, but you could track down Kinji Fukasaku’s early 1970’s crime films, the Battles without Honor or Humanity series.

Alternate alternate: 10 minutes of Friedkin on Fukasaku:

16. Dead Man, Jim Jarmusch (1995)

A perfect film, one that seems better every time I see it. Gary Farmington is amazing as William Blake’s spiritual guide (“Stupid fucking white man” is a sublime line reading), and Jarmusch has a loaded bench to bounce pretty boy Depp off of (Iggy Pop is particularly scary, but Robert Mitchum seems an embodiment of evil from a truly different time—magnificent).

10/10

Alternate: El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky (1970)

17. Wet Hot American Summer, David Wain (2001)

I have no idea if Wet Hot American Summer holds up well—I think I was always part of its intended audience, part of the tail end of the “Reagan-era latchkey kids who grew up watching” the kind of films Wain’s movie is—satirizing?—on television. I watched Wet Hot American Summer approximately 100 times in 2003; it was one of a handful of DVDs on repeat at my best friend’s childhood house, where my unemployed unstructured ass spent a few nights a week crashing. His folks were in the beginning of a (permanent) separation, and the house seemed to have been ceded to a loose configuration of a dozen or so of us. We’d drink tallboys on the beach, stumble in, and fall asleep to The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001) or Reign of Fire (Rob Bowman, 2002) or Human Nature (Michel Gondry, 2001) or Wet Hot American Summer. There were probably others, but those are the ones I remember.

10/10

Alternate: Porky’s, Roy Clark (1981)

18. The Boondock Saints, Troy Duffy (1999)

The Boondock Saints is a truly awful film. It is relentlessly stupid and when it is funny, it is funny by accident—except when Willem Dafoe’s charm takes over one of the scenes he’s chewing up. The viewer can almost sense Dafoe rewriting Duffy’s sketchy, shoddy, nonsensical script in real time. For all its retrograde bluster (and poor filmmaking), The Boondock Saints actually has a viewpoint.

3/10

Alternate: Payback, Brian Helgeland (1999)

19. Punch-Drunk Love, Paul Thomas Anderson (2002)

Another perfect film. In his original New Cult Canon, Tobias suggested that,

Punch-Drunk Love marked the moment when Anderson threw away the stylistic
crutches of forbears like Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, and came into his
own as an original filmmaker. That doesn’t mean he’s discarded these and other
influences altogether, which isn’t something he could or would want to do. But Punch-Drunk
Love has a unique texture that’s unmistakably Anderson’s, marked by a wired, coked-up
intensity and a yen for discord. It’s a film that sets viewers on edge from the
start, almost daring you not to like it.

Philip Seymour Hoffman might have stolen the film from Sandler, had he been in it more than the few minutes he’s actually on screen (he’s looming larger in our memory, as always).

10/10

Alternate: Popeye, Robert Altman (1980)

20. Wild Things, John McNaughton (1998)

This is another film that I watched because Tobias wrote about it. I had actually seen McNaughton’s film Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer entirely by mistake at a “party”; this probably happened around the same time that Wild Things released to theaters. But I never would have connected the two. I thought Wild Things was a different kind of trash than the trash it actually is. Tobias’s write-up makes an argument for Wild Things as high camp, a film told entirely within a set of quotation marks. I think he’s a bit too generous in his admiration for McNaughton’s film, but I ultimately enjoyed it.

6/10

Alternate: Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Werner Herzog (2009)

Mass-market Monday | Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers

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Three Trapped Tigers, G. Cabrera Infante. Translated by Donald Gardner and Suzanne Jill Levine with Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Avon Bard (1985). No cover artist or designer credited. 473 pages.

A busy buzzy book honking and howling and hooting, I am loving loving loving Three Trapped Tigers—it sings and shouts and hollers. The novel starts with a  polyglossic emcee announcing the parade of honorable horribles who will strut through the novel (if it is indeed a “novel”). Very funny, very engrossing, grand stuff, love it.

Here’s Salman Rushdie, reviewing the novel in the LRB back in 1981 (he’s just fumbled around answering “What is this crazy book actually about?”:

So much for the plot. (Warning: this review is about to go out of control.) What actually matters in Three Trapped Tigers is words, language, literature, words. Take the title. Originally, in the Cuban, they were three sad tigers, Tres tristes tigres, the beginning of a tongue-twister. For Cabrera, phonetics always come before meaning (correction: meaning is to be found in phonetic associations), and so the English title twists the sense in order to continue twisting the tongue. Very right and improper. Then there is the matter of the huge number of other writers whose influence must be acknowledged: Cabrera Infante calls them, reverently, Fuckner and Shame’s Choice. (He is less kind to Stephen Spent and Green Grams, who wrote, as of course you know, Travels with my Cant.) Which brings us to the novel’s most significant character, a sort of genius at torturing language called Bustrofedon, who scarcely appears in the story at all, of whom we first hear when he’s dying, but who largely dominates the thoughts of all the Silvestres and Arsenios and Codacs he leaves behind him. This Bustromaniac (who is keen on the bustrofication of words) gives us the Death of Trotsky as described by seven Cuban writers – a set of parodies whose point is that all the writers described are so pickled in Literature that they can’t take up their pens without trying to wow us with their erudition. Three Trapped Tigers, like Bustrofedon’s whole life, is dedicated to a full frontal assault on the notion of Literature as Art. It gives us nonsense verses, a black page, a page which says nothing but blen blen blen, a page which has to be read in the mirror: Sterne stuff. But it also gives us Bustrolists of ‘words that read differently in the mirror’: Live/evil, drab/bard, Dog/God; and the Confessions of a Cuban Opinion Eater; and How to kill an elephant: aboriginal method ... the reviewer is beginning to cackle hysterically at this point, and has decided to present his opinion in the form of puns, thus: ‘The Havana night may be dark and full of Zorro’s but Joyce cometh in the morning.’ Or: ‘Despite the myriad influences, Cabrera Infante certainly paddles his own Queneau.’

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part IV

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Previously,

Stories 40-36

Stories 35-32

Stories 31-28

27. “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby” (Amateurs, 1976)

This is probably the first essential story in Forty Stories—maybe at the end of this silly project I’ll put together something like Fifty Stories, whittling down Sixty Stories and Forty Stories. Here are the first few sentences:

Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him a while to decide.

Colby finally settles on Ive’s Fourth Symphony.

“Some of Us” showcases in a non-showy way the best of Barthelme—absurdity balanced by syntactic restraint; surreal humor weighted in the visceral specter of impending violence. It’s a very, very funny story, and while I think it resists simple allegorical interpretation, it’s nevertheless a little parcel of domestic fascism in practice. Great stuff. Read “Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby”  here.

26. “Pepperoni” (first published in The New Yorker, 23 Nov. 1980)

Published over four decades ago, “Pepperoni” is a depressingly prescient riff on what happens when capital decides to take over journalism. Newspapers become just another widget, a slice of pepperoni, a trifle, a nothing to sell and sell and resell:

Financially, the paper is quite healthy. The paper’s timber-lands, mining interests, pulp and paper operations, book, magazine, corrugated-box, and greeting-card divisions, film, radio, television, and cable companies, and data-processing and satellite-communications groups are all flourishing, with overall return on invested capital increasing at about eleven percent a year.

Despite the vertical integration, all is not well: “But top management is discouraged and saddened, and middle management is drinking too much.” Barthelme’s hyperbole is jaunty in 1980, where the paper’s “editorials have been subcontracted to Texas Instruments, and the obituaries to Nabisco, so that the staff will have ‘more time to think.'” But in 2024 it reads as a grim warning about the gross intersection of capital and journalism. Read “Pepperoni” here.

25. “Sentence” (City Life, 1970)

I mean what if I just…

Or a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom-if not the bottom of this page then some other page-where it can rest, or stop for a moment to think out the questions raised by its own (temporary) existence, which ends when the page is turned, or the sentence falls out of the mind that holds it (temporarily) in some kind of embrace, not necessarily an ardent one, but more perhaps the kind of embrace enjoyed (or endured), by a wife who has just waked up and is on her way to the bathroom in the morning to wash her hair, and is bumped into by her husband, who has been lounging at the breakfast table reading the newspaper, and doesn’t see her coming out of the bedroom, but, when he bumps into her, or is bumped into by her, raises his hands to embrace her lightly, transiently, because he knows that if he gives her a real embrace so early in the morning, before she has properly shaken the dreams out of her head, and got her duds on, she won’t respond, and may even become slightly angry, and say something wounding, and so the husband invests in this embrace not so much physical or emotional pressure as he might, because he doesn’t want to waste anything-with this sort of feeling, then, the sentence passes through the mind more or less, and there is another way of describing the situation too, which is to say that the sentence crawls through the mind like something someone says to you while you are listening very hard to the FM radio, some rock group there, with its thrilling sound, and so, with your attention or the major part of it at least already rewarded, there is not much mind room you can give to the remark, especially considering that you have probably just quarreled with that person, the maker of the remark, over the radio being too loud, or something like that, and the view you take, of the remark, is that you’d really rather not hear it, but if you have to hear it, you want to listen to it for the smallest possible length of time, and during a commercial, because immediately after the commercial they’re going to play a new rock song by your favorite group, a cut that has never been aired before, and you want to hear it and respond to it in a new way, a way that accords with whatever you’re feeling at the moment, or might feel, if the threat of new experience could be (temporarily) overbalanced by the promise of possible positive benefits, or what the mind construes as such, remembering that these are often, really, disguised defeats (not that such defeats are not, at times, good for your character, teaching you that it is not by success alone that one surmounts life, but that setbacks, too, contribute to that roughening of the personality that, by providing a textured surface to place against that of life, enables you to leave slight traces, or smudges, on the face of human history-your mark) and after all, benefit-seeking always has something of the smell of raw vanity about it, as if you wished to decorate your own brow with laurel, or wear your medals to a cookout, when the invitation had said nothing about them, and although the ego is always hungry (we are told) it is well to remember that ongoing success is nearly as meaningless as ongoing lack of success, which can make you sick, and that it is good to leave a few crumbs on the table for the rest of your brethren, not to sweep it all into the little beaded purse of your soul but to allow others, too, part of the gratification, and if you share in this way you will find the clouds smiling on you, and the postman bringing you letters, and bicycles available when you want to rent them, and many other signs, however guarded and limited, of the community’s (temporary) approval of you, or at least of it’s willingness to let you believe (temporarily) that it finds you not so lacking in commendable virtues as it had previously allowed you to think, from its scorn of your merits, as it might be put, or anyway its consistent refusal to recognize your basic humanness and its secret blackball of the project of your remaining alive, made in executive session by its ruling bodies, which, as everyone knows, carry out concealed programs of reward and punishment, under the rose, causing faint alterations of the status quo, behind your back, at various points along the periphery of community life, together with other enterprises not dissimilar in tone, such as producing films that have special qualities, or attributes, such as a film where the second half of it is a holy mystery, and girls and women are not permitted to see it, or writing novels in which the final chapter is a plastic bag filled with water, which you can touch, but not drink: in this way, or ways, the underground mental life of the collectivity is botched, or denied, or turned into something else never imagined by the planners, who, returning from the latest seminar in crisis management and being asked what they have learned, say they have learned how to throw up their hands; the sentence meanwhile, although not insensible of these considerations, has a festering conscience of its own, which persuades it to follow its star, and to move with all deliberate speed from one place to another, without losing any of the “riders” it may have picked up just being there, on the page, and turning this way and that, to see what is over there, under that oddly-shaped tree, or over there, reflected in the rain barrel of the imagination, even though it is true that in our young manhood we were taught that short, punchy sentences were best (but what did he mean? doesn’t “punchy” mean punch-drunk? I think he probably intended to say “short, punching sentences,” meaning sentences that lashed out at you, bloodying your brain if possible, and looking up the word just now I came across the nearby “punkah,” which is a large fan suspended from the ceiling in India, operated by an attendant pulling a rope-that is what I want for my sentence, to keep it cool!) we are mature enough now to stand the shock of learning that much of what we were taught in our youth was wrong, or improperly understood by those who were teaching it, or perhaps shaded a bit, the shading resulting from the personal needs of the teachers, who as human beings had a tendency to introduce some of their heart’s blood into their work, and sometimes this may not have been of the first water, this heart’s blood, and even if they thought they were moving the “knowledge” out, as the Board of Education had mandated, they could have noticed that their sentences weren’t having the knockdown power of the new weapons whose bullets tumble end-over-end (but it is true that we didn’t have these weapons at that time) and they might have taken into account the fundamental dubiousness of their project (but all the intelligently conceived projects have been eaten up already, like the moon and the stars) leaving us, in our best clothes, with only things to do like conducting vigorous wars of attrition against our wives, who have now thoroughly come awake, and slipped into their striped bells, and pulled sweaters over their torsi, and adamantly refused to wear any bras under the sweaters, carefully explaining the political significance of this refusal to anyone who will listen, or look, but not touch, because that has nothing to do with it, so they say; leaving us, as it were, with only things to do like floating sheets of Reynolds Wrap around the room, trying to find out how many we can keep in the air at the same time, which at least gives us a sense of participation, as though we were Buddha, looking down at the mystery of your smile, which needs to be investigated, and I think I’ll do that right now, while there’s still enough light, if you’ll sit down over there, in the best chair, and take off all your clothes, and put your feet in that electric toe caddy (which prevents pneumonia) and slip into this permanent press hospital gown, to cover your nakedness-why, if you do all that, we’ll be ready to begin! after I wash my hands, because you pick up an amazing amount of exuviae in this city, just by walking around in the open air, and nodding to acquaintances, and speaking to friends, and copulating with lovers, in the ordinary course (and death to our enemies! by and by)-but I’m getting a little uptight, just about washing my hands, because I can’t find the soap, which somebody has used and not put back in the soap dish, all of which is extremely irritating, if you have a beautiful patient sitting in the examining room, naked inside her gown, and peering at her moles in the mirror, with her immense brown eyes following your every movement (when they are not watching the moles, expecting them, as in a Disney nature film, to exfoliate) and her immense brown head wondering what you’re going to do to her, the pierced places in the head letting that question leak out, while the therapist decides just to wash his hands in plain water, and hang the soap! and does so, and then looks around for a towel, but all the towels have been collected by the towel service, and are not there, so he wipes his hands on his pants, in the back (so as to avoid suspicious stains on the front) thinking: what must she think of me? and, all this is very unprofessional and at-sea looking! trying to visualize the contretemps from her point of view, if she has one (but how can she? she is not in the washroom) and then stopping, because it is finally his own point of view that he cares about and not hers, and with this firmly in mind, and a light, confident step, such as you might find in the works of Bulwer-Lytton, he enters the space she occupies so prettily and, taking her by the hand, proceeds to tear off the stiff white hospital gown (but no, we cannot have that kind of pornographic merde in this majestic and high-minded sentence, which will probably end up in the Library of Congress) (that was just something that took place inside his consciousness, as he looked at her, and since we know that consciousness is always consciousness of something, she is not entirely without responsibility in the matter) so, then, taking her by the hand, he falls into the stupendous white puree of her abyss, no, I mean rather that he asks her how long it has been since her last visit, and she says a fortnight, and he shudders, and tells her that with a condition like hers (she is an immensely popular soldier, and her troops win all their battles by pretending to be forests, the enemy discovering, at the last moment, that those trees they have eaten their lunch under have eyes and swords) (which reminds me of the performance, in 1845, of Robert-Houdin, called The Fantastic Orange Tree, wherein Robert-Houdin borrowed a lady’s handkerchief, rubbed it between his hands and passed it into the center of an egg, after which he passed the egg into the center of a lemon, after which he passed the lemon into the center of an orange, then pressed the orange between his hands, making it smaller and smaller, until only a powder remained, whereupon he asked for a small potted orange tree and sprinkled the powder thereupon, upon which the tree burst into blossom, the blossoms turning into oranges, the oranges turning into butterflies, and the butterflies turning into beautiful young ladies, who then married members of the audience), a condition so damaging to real-time social intercourse of any kind, the best thing she can do is give up, and lay down her arms, and he will lie down in them, and together they will permit themselves a bit of the old slap and tickle, she wearing only her Mr. Christopher medal, on its silver chain, and he (for such is the latitude granted the professional classes) worrying about the sentence, about its thin wires of dramatic tension, which have been omitted, about whether we should write down some natural events occurring in the sky (birds, lightning bolts), and about a possible coup d’etat within the sentence, whereby its chief verb would be-but at this moment a messenger rushes into the sentence, bleeding from a hat of thorns he’s wearing, and cries out: “You don’t know what you’re doing! Stop making this sentence, and begin instead to make Moholy-Nagy cocktails, for those are what we really need, on the frontiers of bad behavior!” and then he falls to the floor, and a trap door opens under him, and he falls through that, into a damp pit where a blue narwhal waits, its horn poised (but maybe the weight of the messenger, falling from such a height, will break off the horn)-thus, considering everything very carefully, in the sweet light of the ceremonial axes, in the run-mad skimble-skamble of information sickness, we must make a decision as to whether we should proceed, or go back, in the latter case enjoying the pathos of eradication, in which the former case reading an erotic advertisement which begins, How to Make Your Mouth a Blowtorch of Excitement (but wouldn’t that overtax our mouthwashes?) attempting, during the pause, while our burned mouths are being smeared with fat, to imagine a better sentence, worthier, more meaningful, like those in the Declaration of Independence, or a bank statement showing that you have seven thousand kroner more than you thought you had-a statement summing up the unreasonable demands that you make on life, and one that also asks the question, if you can imagine these demands, why are they not routinely met, tall fool? but of course it is not that query that this infected sentence has set out to answer (and hello! to our girl friend, Rosetta Stone, who has stuck by us through thick and thin) but some other query that we shall some day discover the nature of, and here comes Ludwig, the expert on sentence construction we have borrowed from the Bauhaus, who will-“Guten Tag, Ludwig!”-probably find a way to cure the sentence’s sprawl, by using the improved way of thinking developed in Weimer-“I am sorry to inform you that the Bauhaus no longer exists, that all of the great masters who formerly thought there are either dead or retired, and that I myself have been reduced to constructing books on how to pass the examination for police sergeant”-and Ludwig falls through the Tugendhat House into the history of man-made objects; a disappointment, to be sure, but it reminds us that the sentence itself is a man-made object, not the one we wanted of course, but still a construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weakness, as opposed to the strength of stones

Is good if not great.

24. “The Temptation of St. Anthony” (Sadness, 1972)

After rereading this one, the thought that dominated my stupid brain was, How the fuck did an editor allow DB to use the word “ineffable” four times in this short story? He uses a version of the word here, in this nice little excerpt in which one of the things that St. Anthony did was the passive doing of being mugged:

 There was the ineffableness I’ve already mentioned, and there were certain things that he did. He was mugged, for example. That doesn’t happen too often here, but it happened to him. It was at night, somebody jumped on him from behind, grabbed him around the neck and began going through his pockets. The man only got a few dollars, and then he threw St. Anthony down on the sidewalk (he put one leg in front of the saint’s legs and shoved him) and then began to run away. St. Anthony called after him, held up his hand, and said, “Don’t you want the watch?” It was a good watch, a Bulova. The man was thunderstruck. He actually came back and took the watch off St. Anthony’s wrist. He didn’t know what to think. He hesitated for a minute and then asked St. Anthony if he had bus fare home. The saint said it didn’t matter, it wasn’t far, he could walk. Then the mugger ran away again.

If not essential, “St. Anthony” is a robust and colorful example of DB riffing in his prime. Read “The Temptation of St. Anthony” here.

22 Nov. 2024

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Bought some books today, mass-market paperbacks by Barry N. Malzberg and Walter M. Miller, Jr. I don’t need them and honestly my eyes are so bad by now that I probably couldn’t make it through one—I’ll have to find them online probably. But they were so cheap and such a cheap indulgence and so lovely as objects.

I’ve only ever come across two Walter M. Miller Jr. books: A Canticle for Leibowitz, a fantastic post-apocalyptic western theodicy, and its sequel, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman, which, for whatever reasons, I’ve chosen to abstain from reading. His 1965 novel The View from the Stars looks fairly generic but I picked it up anyway. I also picked up Barry N. Malzberg’s The Destruction of the Temple, simply because it looks so goofy. I listened to an audiobook of his 1975 novel Galaxies earlier this year. It wasn’t very good, but it was also fascinating, a metatextual mess dripping with anxiety about/against the “legit” lit of Barthelme, Barth, Pynchon, et al. I found pirated copies of two “erotic” novels he wrote under the pseudonym Gerrold Watkins, 1969’s Southern Comfort and 1970’s A Satyr’s Romance. Both were better than Galaxies, and not nearly as horny as, say, Robert Coover’s pornographies. Southern Comfort is actually a pretty good novel. (I mean it’s also, like, very deeply problematic in many ways, but those are the same ways that maybe makes it so more interesting than so-called “legit” so-called “literary” fiction.)

As a weird bit of chaotic (serendipity is not the right word) coincidence, The Destruction of the Temple features this blurb/description:

The year is 2016, and President Kennedy is being murdered – again and again and again. The director has come to the charred ruins of New York to re-enact a mad dream from the past – the assassination of President Kennedy.

JFK was assassinated 22 Nov. 1963, of course, sixty years ago today.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part III

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Previously,

Stories 40-36

Stories 35-32

31. “Sakrete” (first published in The New Yorker, 25 Sep. 1983)

“Sakrete” is a silly little domestic riff about garbage can theft, rats, and an alcoholic trying to work with concrete. It’s not a very good story and I have no idea why it was included in Forty Stories. I do like that it shows a general respect for garbage cans and garbage collection (very interested parties should check out Stephen Dixon’s excellent novel Garbage). Here is the last paragraph, the highlight of the story:

 There are now no garbage cans on our street—no garbage cans left to steal. A committee of rats has joined with the Special Provisional committee in order to deal with the situation, which, the rats have made known, is attracting unwelcome rat elements from other areas of the city. Members of the two committees exchange secret grips, grips that I know not of. My wife drives groups of rats here and there in her yellow Pontiac convertible, attending important meetings. The crisis, she says, will be a long one. She has never been happier.

30. “Porcupines At The University” (Amateurs, 1976)

Another trifle—am I regretting this project, this rereading of Forty Stories? The stories in Sixty Stories are so, so much stronger—and those stories were organized chronologically. Going backwards through these is not really going backwards through time, through the artist’s anti-maturation, but rather just, like, making it more difficult to find one’s place in a book. “Porcupines” is a goof on academia that — and I say this as a compliment — at best reads like an alcoholic’s surrealist riff on a college film. Skip it!

29. “The Catechist” (Sadness , 1972)

This is a good story, “The Catechist.” But also a very Catholic one, without being, like, small-c catholic. There’s a bit of narrativizing here that Barthelme would eventually dispense with in his dialogues, the form that he would eventually settle on for his short stories. I say “settle on” but Barthelme died quite young, or, it seems to me, at 45, quite young—dying at 58. Barthelme died from throat cancer, probably a result of his alcoholism (pure conjecture on my part, this last clause):

The catechist reads from his book. “The candidate should be questioned as to his motives for becoming a Christian.”
I think: My motives?
He says: “Tell me about yourself.”
I say: “I’m forty. I have bad eyes. An enlarged liver.”
“That’s the alcohol,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“You’re very much like your father, there.”
“A shade more avid.”

28. “Lightning” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

This is a great story. Or at least a very good story, unexpectedly so, written a mode approaching near-realism or even near-dirty-realism. Was Barthelme flexing his muscles in the mirror after having read a story by Raymond Carver? Probably not, but I like to imagine it (I imagine his muscles beefier and musclier than they likely were). “Lightning” has a fairly straightforward ( and unBarthelemesque) plot:

Edward Connors, on assignment for Folks, set out to interview nine people who had been struck by lightning. “Nine?” he said to his editor, Penfield. “Nine, ten,” said Penfield, “doesn’t matter, but it has to be more than eight.” “Why?” asked Connors, and Penfield said that the layout was scheduled for five pages and they wanted at least two people who had been struck by lightning per page plus somebody pretty sensational for the opening page. “Slightly wonderful,” said Penfield, “nice body, I don’t have to tell you, somebody with a special face. Also, struck by lightning.”

The story is ultimately a romantic comedy, with reporter Edward finally finding his “face”:

People would dig slant wells for this woman, go out into a producing field with a tank truck in the dead of night and take off five thousand gallons of somebody else’s crude, write fanciful checks, establish Pyramid Clubs with tony marble-and-gold headquarters on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse. What did he have to offer?

He finds something to offer. This is probably the best one yet in Forty Stories (in reverse, anyway).

19 Nov. 2024 (Blog about missing GY!BE and Alan Sparhawk this weekend in Atlanta)

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This is Friday—not today, I mean, this, this blog, is Friday, four or five days ago, depending on how you count such things. We were maybe fifteen or twenty minutes on the road heading northwest to Atlanta—my wife driving the first leg before we stopped for gas—when I checked social media again to see if Godspeed You! Black Emperor were still going to play that night. They were not. This information came via opener Low legend Alan Sparhawk, who had reported the past two nights’ shows canceled.

We headed north anyway. The kids had left school early; my daughter pointed out that she had already missed an AP Bio test and that she wasn’t going with me and the boy to the show anyway, she just wanted to go to Atlanta to hang out. Fair point, of course.

My son was bummed and I was bummed. I don’t know exactly how he came to Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s strange, hypnotic, droney anthems—via an algorithm, really—but a few years ago I heard him blasting Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven in his bedroom. I gave him my copy of their debut LP, F♯ A♯ ∞, which I’d bought from the band back in 1998 or 1999 when they opened for Low at a record story I was working at in Florida. They knocked our socks off. It seemed there were more Godspeeds Yous than audience members, and to be clear, the tiny record store was packed. It was a summer afternoon in Florida; very hot and very sunny, a throbbing miasma of sound across Hemming Park, now James Weldon Johnson Park, in beautiful ugly downtown Jacksonville.

(It was just such a night my friend Travis was arrested for skateboarding across Laura Street. Jayskating. (I don’t think it was the same night.))

After the show I bought their record. It had a pouch crammed with incidentals—flattened pennies, a Canadian stamp, some illustrated scraps. I think I listened to it a million times that summer. One of the guys in the band asked me where they could get some hash in Jacksonville. I suggested the Waffle House. Low played after; everyone sat down, exhausted from what Godspeed had required. It was lovely. Perfect day.

I had really wanted to experience my imaginative inversion of this concert this past weekend, but it didn’t emerge. I mean Alan Sparhawk, whose new record is so strange and daring and wonderful—I wanted to see that with my kid, who, he, my kid, wanted to see the ensemble Godspeed do their drone magic. I bought him an Aphex Twin record at Wax n’ Facts as a consolation prize, and he bought himself the first volume of Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira at A Capella Books. I picked up a first edition hardback of William Gaddis’s last novel Agapē Agape.

And so well we made a weekend of it, browsing book stores and record stores and walking the Beltline. Love that city and my best wishes to GY!BE founding member, Efrim Menuck—I hate that we missed you on the tour but I hope that your health recovers. Thank you for making music my son and I love. 

 

Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste (Book acquired, 14 Nov. 2024)

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Got a review copy of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste, a slim lil fellow from NYRB in translation by Charlotte Mandell. The back cover includes a blurb from William H. Gass—

Monsieur Teste is a monster, and is meant to be—an awesome, wholly individualized machine—yet in a sense he is also the sort of inhuman being Valéry aimed to become himself: a Narcissus of the best kind, a scientific observer of consciousness, a man untroubled by inroads of worldly trivia, who vacations in his head the way a Platonist finds his Florida in the realm of Forms.

What the fuck does Gass mean by “Florida” here? I really want to know.

This style of post, the book acquired post, is an established, which is to say tired, blog post format on this blog, Biblioklept, probably going back a decade now, born from a glut of review copies piling up, mostly unasked for but many asked for, books that stack up their own measures of guilt, unread, or then maybe read, months, years later—but the post style is ephemeral, yes, fluffy, sure, embarrassing even maybe. The form is stale; I apologize. I do think the Valéry book seems pretty cool.

I have a not-insubstantial stack of newly acquired new (and used books) stacked on the cherry side table by the black leather couch that I should have made book acquired posts about. These have piled up over the last few weeks. These are not interesting sentences (several of the books seem very interesting).

I am not going to find the new form I want here, am I?

When I was a freshman in high school, my then-girlfriend’s older brother gave me a mixtape that a girl had given him. He didn’t like anything on the mixtape; he liked Buddy Holly. I can’t remember why he gave me the tape—I think I saw it in his car and asked about it. But it ended up changing my life in some ways, as small giant things like songs or books or films can do when they come over you at the right time and place.

There were a few bands on the tape that I knew or had heard of, and even some I owned albums by, like the Cure and the Smiths. But for the most part, the tape opened a new aural world to me. I heard My Bloody Valentine, Big Star, Ride, the Cocteau Twins, and This Mortal Coil, among others, for the first time. There were also two songs by one band: Slowdive’s “When the Sun Hits” and “Dagger.”

(This particular blog post is no longer about acquiring a Valéry translation; it is about something else.)

Those songs are from Slowdive’s 1993 classic Souvlaki. I owned it on cassette. That cassette melted, just slightly, on the top of my 1985 Camry’s dashboard in like August of 1995. The tape was just warped enough not to fit into a cassette deck. I liked to imagine how it would sound. The next year, my lucky privileged ass found a used CD of Slowdive’s follow-up, Pygmallion on a school trip to London. Slowdive kinda sorta broke up after that.

I have always been a proponent of bands breaking up. I think a decade is long enough; get what you need done in five or six albums and move on. There are many many exceptions to this rule. But generally, I don’t think beloved bands—by which I means bands beloved by me—should keep going on too long. And if they break up, they should stay broken.

But I bought Slowdive’s 2017 reunion album Slowdive used at a St. Petersburg record store and listened to it again and again, amazed at how strong it was, how true to form. My kids liked it a lot. And then they put out a record last year, Everything Is Alive—I like that one too (not as good as the self titled one).

(There’s no point to any of this; I might’ve had some wine; I might just feel like writing.)

I guess if you’d told me back in ’95 or ’05 or even ’15 that I’d see a reunited Slowdive twice in one year I’d say that that sounded silly. (The ’15 version of me that had seen Dinosaur Jr.’s dinosaur act wouldn’t have been interested.) But we went out into the woods to see Slowdive this Sunday. They played the St. Augustine Amphitheatre to a large, strange, diverse crowd, out there in the Florida air. A band named Wisp, TikTok famous I’m told, opened, and they were pretty good. But Slowdive was perfect—better than back in May in Atlanta—echo and reverb ringing out into Anastasia State Park.

We stayed in a cheap motel off of AIA that night—another sign of my age. When I was younger, I could drive six hours, watch a band, and drive the six hours back without blinking. We are about 45 minutes from St. Augustine. It was a nice night out.

A younger version of me could’ve read the 80 pages of Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste in the time it took to twiddle my thumbs in this post and write a real (and likely bad) review to boot. Again, apologies. I’m getting old, a dinosaur act. But I can’t break up, not now.

Slowdive, St. Augustine Amphitheatre, 10 Nov. 2024 Slowdive, St. Augustine Amphitheatre, 10 Nov. 2024

7 Nov. 2024

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On 5 Nov. 2024, or, really, technically, it was the very early hours of 6 Nov. 2024, I found myself unable to read, the distraction I had wanted, and instead found some respite from anxiety looking again at online copies (is copies the right word? digital reproductions? images, of course, but none of it is the real thing) of Francisco Goya’s Pinturas negras, his Black Paintings. Goya painted these strange, engrossing murals on the walls of his homestead the Quinta del Sordo, outside of Madrid, his last home in Spain before his exile in France.

I’m not sure how I got there. I have an impulse to return to his depiction of Saturn chomping on his son any time I feel the pain of a modern world that is always and forever ancient.

I have never seen another painting that makes as much sense to me, which means I’m a fucken sicko—I am sure that there are nicer paintings out there (I’ve seen so many). The idea that Goya would paint such paintings on the walls of his own home captivates me. The dog painting is my favorite; all negative space, which I’ll edit out, the negative space, here:

I stumbled out my bed that night to look for Robert Hughes’ wonderful biography Goya, which sheds no true light on the black paintings, as far as I can recall. Here is what he offers:

THE GREAT SERIES of paintings Goya made for his own pleasure at about the same time is equally enigmatic, and likely to remain so. These were the Pinturas negras, the so-called Black Paintings with which, in his last Madrid years, Goya was covering the walls of his farmhouse on the other side of the Manzanares outside the city, now converted into his studio and semi-solitary hermitage. Nothing, he felt, obliged him to be available to the court anymore; as for private clients, they could come to him. The new house, according to its title deed, was “beyond the Segovia bridge … on the site where the Hermitage of the Guardian Angel formerly stood.” It had twenty-two acres of arable land, and a vegetable garden. Comfortable but not palatial, and in need of some renovation, it was sturdily built of brick and adobe, with two stories divided into several rooms, two attics, a well by the garden, and another in the courtyard. Goya paid 60,000 reales for it, cash. By a peculiar coincidence, the property next door had been owned by a farmer who was deaf, and so was named the Quinta del Sordo, the Deaf Man’s House. This name passed to Goya’s own property, since he was the only notable deaf man around.

But Goya painted wild things on his walls—Judith and Holofrenes, flying mystics, a pilgrimage, a Satanic Sabbath, old people eating soup. Men hitting each other with sticks, red blood white clouds lovely blue sky:

I mean I think I guess that it’s he did what he did—the gross, rough, beautiful paintings—that he, Goya, did them for himself, the so-called Black Paintings—I think that’s what makes me drawn to him, beyond their aesthetic powers, which is really what I mean to say, the images, the colors, the contours, the phantasies—

6 Nov. 2024

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Like a lot of US Americans I didn’t sleep too well last night. I went to bed too late and I rustled myself into some form of consciousness way too early. A veteran of past election eves, I did not overimbibe, but still felt groggy enough and well just plain like well disconcerted discombobulated discouraged enough to cancel meetings with my classes for the day. I didn’t have anything to give.

While I was in no way shocked by the results of the 2024 elections, I am nevertheless big-w Worried about all the things that may unfold, quickly, and without organized opposition, in the next six months. As has been the case for most of the presidential elections I’ve voted in, I voted against a candidate instead of for a candidate. I knew in Florida that my vote probably wouldn’t matter too much anyway.

I made myself go outside of my house into “Florida,” into Northeast Florida, which is, of course, also inside of my house, Florida, but I went outside early to take the air and look around. It was also garbage day in the neighborhood. I had a can with some nasty double-bagged rotten Jack O’Lanterns. We carved them on Halloween night and they wilted to a gray and black fuzz swarmed over with pestilence. I had to scrape their guts into the garden bed and hose the whole mess down. It’s not supposed to be this hot here this time of year, only it is and it has been, like regularly, consistently, predictably for well over a decade. The Florida air I stepped out into was gross: sticky, muggy, humidity near ninety percent and maybe 82° at nine in the morning. It did not feel like summer nor fall, but some other gross fifth season. None of this was colored by mood.

My mood was and is grim. I knew that voting for the incumbent’s proxy was simply kicking a can down the road; I knew that I was endorsing a system I had no belief in and that no one else I knew really seemed to believe in. I think I wanted just a little bit of the latter half of the 20th century to trickle down to my children, who are no longer really children. But it felt like a gross summer’s eve on this fall morning, and I remembered that climate change, which is to say global warming, which is to say the warming of the earth’s habitable surface as the result of fossil fuels—this so-called “climate change” didn’t even seem to be a blip in this election cycle. Again: kicking the can down the road, whistling past the graveyard, etc. Ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand though, and we all gotta know that the bill for the twentieth century is way past overdue.

But ostensibly this is a blog about literature or art; I don’t think anyone comes here for me to rant. So what am I reading?

I have been reading two books (three, really, or maybe more) and auditing two books. Audiobooks first: I am about half way through Dan Simmons’ Fall of Hyperion and I want to quit. I liked Hyperion but this one is just…I don’t have anything to say about it, except that I am sympathetic to Simmons’ anti-imperialist critique and I’m generally simpatico with his appropriation of the Romantics into a sci-fi epic (although, like, where the fuck is Blake?)—but the first book Hyperion was much better. Maybe it’s because he had a form to steal (Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales). I listen to this book in waking hours: driving, cooking, chores, etc.

The other audiobook is a fantastic rendition of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. I do not listen to this book during waking hours; I fall asleep to it (or to Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians or to Sleep’s Holy Mountain or something else). Specifically, I’ve been falling asleep somewhere between chapters seven and eight this week. I love this book so much. I love the film version that came out like ten plus years ago, with Gary Oldman as Smiley. I used to love falling asleep to that film. I don’t actually know what happens in the narrative.


The two books I switch between before falling asleep to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy:

Olivier Schrauwen’s Sunday and Joy Williams’ Breaking and Entering.

Sunday is a true graphic novel: that term, “graphic novel,” a marketing gambit I’m sure, gets appended to pretty much any cartoonists’ self-contained work of, say, fifty-plus pages. But a lot of what we (and we includes very much me) call graphic novels are really short stories in comix/cartooning form. Schrauwen’s effort is a real novel, a real graphic novel a la allah ah lah lah From Hell or Jimmy Corrigan. It’s really fucking great, and if this weren’t a low-effort I am writing this for me and not you post, I would tell you why I think it’s really fucking great (I would describe the story, the so-called story, such as it is; I would riff on all the motifs; I would get lost in the coloring. I would I would I would…)

The other book I’ve been reading, the one I read after I read a chapter of Sunday and before I fall asleep to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is Joy Williams’ 1988 novel Breaking and Entering, which is about a strange young couple who, like, break and enter and then live in other people’s houses. These other people are snowbirds, although I don’t think Williams actually employs the term: people who own houses on the barrier islands of Florida’s Gulf Coast which they, like, inhabit only a scant season or two a year. Breaking and Entering is very, very Florida, crammed with weirdos and tragedies, farcical, ironic, and thickly sauced in the laugh-cry flavor. I’m not sure exactly where it’s set, but I do know that I do know the general area—again, the barrier islands, skinny shining strips of weird between the Gulf and the Tampa Bay. Not my haunts, exactly, northeastern Florida man that I am, but still the locus of so many of my fondest memories, the places I return to, where my family is, where the cars and boats stacked up in the streets of Pass-a-Grille and Treasure Island and St. Pete Beach after the once-in-a-century storms that happen several times in a season, after Helene, after Milton, where the houses faltered folded soaked, where the snowbirds can defer their false falls and warm winters in favor of safer stabler climes, where the locals pledge a future allegiance against the heat, the water, the wind, the salt. A future against the future.

Mass-market Monday | Leslie A. Fiedler’s Waiting for the End

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Waiting for the End, Leslie A. Fiedler. Penguin Books, Pelican imprint (1967). Cover design by Freda Morris. 274 pages.

From a riff a few years back:

Fiedler begins with the (then-recent) deaths of Hemingway and Faulkner. Fiedler uses the deaths of these “old men” to riff on the end of Modernism, although he never evokes the term. Neither does he use the term “postmodernism” in his book, although he edges towards it in his critiques of kitsch and middlebrow culture, and especially in his essay “The End of the Novel.” In parts of the book, he gets close to describing, or nearing a description of, an emergent postmodernist literature (John Barth and John Hawkes are favorite examples for Fiedler), but ultimately seems more resigned to writing an elegy for the avant garde. Other aspects of Waiting for the End, while well-intentioned, might strike contemporary ears as problematic, as the kids say, but Fiedler’s sharp and loose style are welcome over stodgy scholarship. Ultimately, I find the book compelling because of its middle position in its take on American literature. It’s the work of a critic seeing the beginnings of something that hasn’t quite emerged yet—but his eye is trained more closely on what’s disappearing into the past.

Charles Burns’ Final Cut explores the irreal reality of artistic ambition

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Charles Burns’ latest graphic novel Final Cut tells the story of Brian, an obsessive would-be auteur grappling with an unrealized film project. Brian hopes to assemble his film — also titled Final Cut — from footage he shoots with friends on a weekend camping trip, but the messiness of reality impinges the weird glories of his vibrant imagination. He cannot bring his vision to the screen. He cannot capture all the “fucked-up shit going on inside my head.”

Capturing all the fucked-up shit going on inside my head is a neat encapsulation of the Artistic Problem in general. It’s not that Brian doesn’t try; if anything, he tries too hard. His best friend and erstwhile cameraman Chris is there to help him, along with his crush Laurie and their friend Tina—but ultimately, these are still kids at play. They indulge Brian’s artistic whims, but at a certain point they’d rather swim, drink, and smoke than shoot yet another scene they can’t comprehend.

Eschewing straightforward narrative conventions, Final Cut unfolds in a blend of flashbacks, dreamscapes, and flights into Brian’s imagination. The book also gives over to Laurie’s consciousness, providing an essential ballast of realism to anchor Brian’s (and Burns’, I suppose) surrealism. Brian would have Laurie as his muse, trying to capture her in his sketchbook, in his film, and in the intense gaze of his mind’s eye. And while Laurie is fascinated by Brian’s visions, she doesn’t understand them.

The last member of Brian’s would-be acting troupe is Tina, an earthy, funny gal who drinks a bit too much. She plays foil to Brian’s ambitions; her animated spirit punctures the seriousness of his film shoot. Again, these are just kids in the woods with a camera and camping gear.

And the film itself? Well, it’s about kids camping in the woods. And an alien invasion. And pod people.

The pod-people motif dominates Final Cut. We get the teens in their larval sleeping bags, transformed into aliens in their cocoons (echoed again in Brian’s imagination and in his sketches). The motif looms larger: Can we really know who a person is? Could they be someone else entirely? Can we really ever know all the fucked-up shit going on inside their head?

Indeed, Don Siegel’s 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a major progenitor text for Final Cut. Brian even takes Laurie on a date to a screening of Invasion; he’s so mesmerized by the film that he weeps. Burns renders stills from the film in heavy chiaroscuro black and white, contrasting with the vibrant reds, maroons, and pinks that reverberate through the novel.

Burns recreates stills from another black and white film, Peter Bogdanovich’s 1971 coming-of-age heartbreaker The Last Picture Show. Again, Brian is obsessed with the film—or by the film, perhaps. In particular, he’s infatuated with Cybill Shepherd’s Jacy, whose character he imaginatively merges with his conception of Laurie.

While Invasion of the Body Snatchers is a science-fiction horror film, a deep sense of reality-soaked dread underpins it; The Last Picture Show is utterly real in its evocations of the emotional and physical lives of teenagers. Both films convey a maturity and balance of the fantastic with the real that Brian has not yet purchased via his own experiences, his own failures and heartbreaks. 

The maturity and balance that Brian can imagine but not execute in his Final Cut is precisely the maturity and balance that Burns achieves in his Final Cut. Simply put, Final Cut is the effort of a master performing at the heights of his power, rendered with inspired technical proficiency. It delivers on themes Burns has been exploring from the earliest days of his career.

There’s the paranoia and alienation of adolescence Burns crafted in Black Hole, here delivered in a more vibrant, cohesive, and frankly wiser book. There’s the hallucinatory trauma and repression he conveyed in the X’ed Out trilogy (collected a decade ago as Last Look, the title of which prefigures Final Cut). There’s also an absence of parental authority here, a trope that Burns has deployed since 1991’s Curse of the Molemen. (In Final Cut, Brian’s mentally-unstable mother is a dead-ringer for Mrs. Pinkster, the domestic abuse victim rescued by the child-hero of Curse of the Molemen). There’s all the sinister dread and awful beauty that anyone following Burns’ career would expect, synthesized into his most lucid exploration of the inherent problems of artistic expression.

Ultimately, in Final Cut Charles Burns crafts a portrait of the artist as a weird young man. Brian wrestles with the friction sparked from his vital imagination butting up against cold reality. His ambitious unfinished film mirrors his own incomplete journey as an artist, highlighting the clash between youthful creative fervor and the inevitable constraints of life, experience, and maturity. Burns’ themes of alienation and artistic ambition may be familiar, but Final Cut feels fresh and vibrant, the culmination of the artist’s own entanglements with the irreality of reality. Highly recommended.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part I

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A few years ago, I reread Donald Barthelme’s collection Sixty Stories and wrote about them on this blog. I enjoyed the project immensely. A recent comment on the last of those Sixty Stories posts asked, or demanded, I suppose (the four-word comment is in the imperative voice) that I Now do Forty Stories. Which I am going to now do, Forty Stories.

40. “January” (first published in The New Yorker, 6 April 1987)

“January” begins as a dialogue between two characters, a mode Barthelme would return to repeatedly throughout his later career. The story is ostensibly a Paris Review style interview with one “Thomas Brecker,” who has authored seven books on religion over his thirty-five year career. The story begins as light satire; our Serious Writer is “renting a small villa” in St. Thomas; the interviewer notes that “a houseboy attended us, bringing cool drinks on a brown plastic tray of the sort found in cafeterias.” The interview quickly takes the shape of a career-spanning reflection, with Brecker sliding into a more melancholy mind frame. By the end of the story, the “interviewer” disappears, leaving us in Brecker’s imagination, where we have likely always been, and it’s hard not to read Barthelme’s autobiographical flourishes beneath Brecker’s mordant quips:

I think about my own death quite a bit, mostly in the way of noticing possible symptoms—a biting in the chest—and wondering, Is this it? It’s a function of being over sixty, and I’m maybe more concerned by how than when. That’s a … I hate to abandon my children. I’d like to live until they’re on their feet. I had them too late, I suppose. 

39. “The Baby” (Overnight to Many Distant Cities, 1983)

“The Baby” was composed around the same time as “Chablis” (1983); both stories are love letters of paternal affection for an infant daughter. Again, it’s hard not to see Barthelme’s own biography here. His daughter Katherine was an infant at the time he wrote them. While I don’t think “The Baby” is as strong as “Chablis” is (or, at least as strong in my memory — “Chablis” is the first story in Forty Stories, so we’ll get there, I guess) — while I don’t think “The Baby” is as strong as “Chablis,” it’s still a fun little ditty with an anarchic punchline. It’s also, like barely five short paragraphs–just read it.

38. “Great Days” (Great Days, 1979)

As I revisit my notes for “Great Days,” I realize I should probably read the story again, more slowly, and try to tune more into its voice. Or voices. Are there two voices here, or one? I think there is more of a n actual story story here than I can summarize — not that anyone wants summary of Barthelme —  but my takeaway is that this is Barthelme doing Stein doing Cubism doing… In his 2009 biography of Barthelme Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty wrote that New Yorker fiction editor (and early Barthelme champion) Roger Angell rejected an early version of the story (under the title “Tenebrae”). According to Daugherty’s bio, while Angell recognized the story as a “serious work” and a “new form,” he ultimately thought it was too “private and largely abstract” for publication.

I think this bit is lovely read aloud:

 —Purple bursts in my face as if purple staples had been stapled there every which way—

—Hurt by malicious criticisms all very well grounded—

—Oh that clown band. Oh its sweet strains.

—The sky. A rectangle of glister. Behind which, a serene brown. A yellow bar, vertical, in the upper right.

—I love you, Harmonica, quite exceptionally.

—By gum I think you mean it. I think you do.

—It’s Portia Wounding Her Thigh.

—It’s Wolfram Looking at His Wife Whom He Has Imprisoned with the Corpse of Her Lover.

Elisabetta Sirani, Portia Wounding her Thigh, 1664

 

37. “Letters to the Editore” (Guilty Pleasures, 1974)

A lively little gem from Barthelme’s mid-seventies “non-fiction” collection Guilty Pleasures. Its inclusion seems to show an editorial need to pad out Forty Stories with more hits than the old boy had strung together by ’87. Anyway. “Letters to the Editore” is a fantastic send-up of small aesthetic aggressions writ large in the slim pages of little magazines. The ostensible subject is a dust-up surrounding an exhibition of so-called “asterisk” paintings by an American in a European gallery—but the real subject is language itself:

The Editor of Shock Art has hardly to say that the amazing fecundity of the LeDuff-Galerie Z controversy during the past five numbers has enflamed both shores of the Atlantic, at intense length. We did not think anyone would care, but apparently, a harsh spot has been touched. It is a terrible trouble to publish an international art-journal in two languages simultaneously, and the opportunities for dissonance have not been missed.

Barthelme’s comedic control of voices here is what makes this “story” an early (which is to say, late) standout in Forty Stories. It is the “opportunities for dissonance” that our author is most interested in and attuned to.

36. “Construction” (first published in The New Yorker, 21 April 1985)

“Construction” is the non-story of a writer flying out West to complete the “relatively important matter of business which had taken me to Los Angeles, something to do with a contract, a noxious contract, which I signed.” The documents he signs are “reproduced on onionskin, which does not feel happy in the hand.” This is one of two decent verbal flares in “Construction”; the other is an extended episode (as verbal flare-ups go) in which we find our Writer-Hero up against the wall of absurdity:

The flight back from Los Angeles was without event, very calm and smooth in the night. I had a cup of hot chicken noodle soup which the flight attendant was kind enough to prepare for me; I handed her the can of chicken noodle soup and she (I suppose, I don’t know the details) heated it in her microwave oven and then brought me the cup of hot chicken noodle soup which I had handed her in canned form, also a number of drinks which helped make the calm, smooth flight more so. The plane was half empty, there had been a half-hour delay in getting off the ground which I spent marveling at a sentence in a magazine, the sentence reading as follows: “[Name of film] explores the issues of love and sex without ever being chaste.” I marveled over this for the full half-hour we sat on the ground waiting for clearance on my return from Los Angeles, thinking of adequate responses, such as “Well we avoided that at least,” but no response I could conjure up was equal to or could be equal to the original text which I tore out of the magazine and folded and placed, folded, in my jacket pocket for further consideration at some time in the future when I might need a giggle.

Barthelme’s stand-in confesses here to what we’ve always known: He’s a scissors-and-paste man, a night ripper with a good ear, a good eye, but mostly one of us, a guy who needs a good giggle.

Riff on some books I’m reading, have read, and should really review

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Hurricane Milton passed far enough south last night to leave our city relatively untroubled. There were power outages here but not the expected flooding. Most of my anxiety was focused on my family in the Tampa Bay area, all of whom are safe; we’re just not sure about the material conditions of the things they left behind.

Milton seemed to suck the summer air out of Northeast Florida; when I got out of bed and went outside to investigate the loud THUNK that woke me up at four a.m., I was shocked at how cold the air felt. It was only about 66°, but all the humidity seemed gone, even in the cold sprinkling rain. (The THUNK was our portable basketball hoop toppling over.)

I thought I might try to knock out a review or a write-up of one of the many books I’ve finished that have stacked up as the summer has slowly transitioned to autumn. College classes have been canceled through to Tuesday. I have, ostensibly a “free” week; maybe some words, harder to cobble together for me these days, would come together, no? For the past few years I’ve focused more on reading literature with the attempt to suspend analysis in favor of, like, simply enjoying it. I realized I’d gotten into the habit of reading everything through the lens of this blog: What was I going to say about the book after reading it? I’ve been happier and read more sense freeing myself from the notion that I need to write about every fucking book I read. But the good books stack up (quite literally in a little place I have for such books); I find myself simply wanting to recommend, at some level, however facile, some of the stuff I’ve read. So forgive this lazy post, organized around a picture of a stack of books. From the top down:

Forty Stories, Donald Barthelme

A few years ago, I read Donald Barthelme’s collection Sixty Stories in reverse order. A few days ago, a commenter left me a short message on the final installment of that series of blogs: “Now do Forty Stories.” I think I have agreed–over the past week I’ve read stories forty through thirty-five in the collection. More to come.

Waiting for the Fear, Oğuz Atay; translation by Ralph Hubbell

A book of cramped, anxious stories. Atay, via Hubbell’s sticky translation, creates little worlds that seem a few reverberations off from reality. These are the kind of stories that one enjoys being allowed to leave, even if the protagonists are doomed to remain in the text (this is a compliment). Standouts include “Man in a White Overcoat,” “The Forgotten,” and “Letter to My Father.”

Graffiti on Low or No Dollars, Elberto Muller

Subtitled An Alternative Guide to Aesthetics and Grifting throughout the United States and Canada, Elberto Muller unfolds as a series of not-that-loosely connected vignettes, sketches, and fully-developed stories, each titled after the state or promise of their setting. The main character seems a loose approximation of Muller himself, a bohemian hobo hopping freights, scoring drugs, and working odd jobs—but mostly interacting with people. It kinda recalls Fuckhead at the end of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son (a book Graffiti spiritually resembles) praising “All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them.” Muller’s storytelling chops are excellent—he’s economical, dry, sometimes sour, and most of all a gifted imagist.

American Abductions, Mauro Javier Cárdenas

If I were to tell you that Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel is about Latin American families being separated by racist, government-mandated (and wholly fascist, really) mass deportations, you might think American Abductions is a dour, solemn read. And yes, Cárdenas conjures a horrifying dystopian surveillance in this novel, and yes, things are grim, but his labyrinthine layering of consciousnesses adds up to something more than just the novel’s horrific premise on its own. Like Bernhard, Krasznahorkao, and Sebald, Cárdenas uses the long sentence to great effect. Each chapter of American Abductions is a wieldy comma splice that terminates only when his chapter concludes—only each chapter sails into the next, or layers on it, really. It’s fugue-like, dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish. It’s also very funny. But most of all, it’s a fascinating exercise in consciousness and language—an attempt, perhaps, to borrow a phrase from one of its many characters, to make a grand “statement of missingnessness.”

Body High, Jon Lindsey

I liked Jon Lindsey’s debut Body High, a brief, even breezy drug novel that tries to do a bit too much too quickly, but is often very funny, gross, and abject. The narrator, who telegraphs his thoughts in short, clipped sentences (or fragments cobbled together) is a fuck-up whose main income derives from submitting to medical experiments. He dreams of scripting professional wrestling storylines though, perhaps one involving his almost-best friend/dealer/protector/enabler. When his underage-aunt shows up in his life, activating odd lusts, things get even more fucked up. Body High is at its best when it’s at its grimiest, and while it’s grimy, I wish it were grimier still.

Garbage, Stephen Dixon

I don’t know if Dixon’s Garbage is the best novel I’ve read so far this year, but it’s certainly the one that has most wrapped itself up in my brain pan, in my ear, throbbed a little behind my temple. The novel’s opening line sounds like an uninspired set up for a joke: “Two men come in and sit at the bar.” Everything that unfolds after is a brutal punchline, reminiscent of the Book of Job or pretty much any of Kafka’s major works. These two men come into Shaney’s bar—this is, or at least seems to be, NYC in the gritty seventies—and try to shake him down to switch up garbage collection services. A man of principle, Shaney rejects their “offer,” setting off an escalating nightmare, a world of shit, or, really, a world of garbage. I don’t think typing this description out does any justice to how engrossing and strange (and, strangely normal) Garbage is. Dixon’s control of Shaney’s voice is precise and so utterly real that the effect is frankly cinematic, even though there are no spectacular pyrotechnics going on; hell, at times Dixon’s Shaney gives us only the barest visual details to a scene, and yet the book still throbs with uncanny lifeforce. I could’ve kept reading and reading and reading this short novel; it’s final line serves as the real ecstatic punchline. Fantastic stuff.

Magnetic Field(s), Ron Loewinsohn

I ate up Loewinshohn’s Magnetic Field(s) over a weekend. It’s a hypnotic triptych, a fugue, really, with phrases sliding across and through sections. We meet first a burglar breaking into a family’s home and learn that “Killing the animals was the hard”; then a composer, working with a filmmaker; then finally a novelist. Magnetic Field(s) posits crime and art as overlapping intimacies, and extends these intimacies through imagining another life as a taboo, too-intimate trespass.

Making Pictures Is How I Talk to the World, Dmitry Samarov

Making Pictures spans four decades of Samarov’s artistic career. Printed on high-quality color pages, the collection is thematically organized, showcasing Samarov’s different styles and genres. There are sketches, ink drawings, oils, charcoals, gouache, mixed media and more—but what most comes through is an intense narrativity. Samarov’s art is similar to his writing; there isn’t adornment so much as perspective. We get in Making Pictures a world of bars and coffee shops, cheap eateries and indie clubs. Samarov depicts his city Chicago with a thickness of life that is better seen than written about. Some of my favorite works include interiors of kitchens, portraits of women reading, and scribbly but energetic sketches of indie bands playing live. What I most appreciate about this collection though is that it showcases how outside of the so-called “art world” Samarov’s work is–and yet this is hardly the work of a so-called “outsider” artist. Samarov trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and yet through his career he has remained an independent, “not associated with an institution such as an art gallery, college, or museum,” as he writes in his book.

Beth, Dmitry Samarov, 2000

Final Cut, Charles Burns

I don’t know anything about Charles Burns’s upbringing, his youth, his personal life, and I don’t mean to speculate. However, it’s impossible not to approach Final Cut without pointing out that for several decades he’s been telling the same story over and over again—a sensitive, odd, artistic boy who is out of place even among others out of place. This is in no way a complaint—he tells the story with difference each time. And with more coherence. Final Cut is beautiful and sad and also weird enough to fit in neatly to Burns’s oeuvre. But it’s also more mature, a mature reflection on youth really, intense, still, but without the claustrophobia of Black Hole or the mania of his Last Look trilogy. There’s something melancholy here. It’s fitting that Burns employs the heartbreaking 1971 film The Last Picture Show as a significant motif in Final Cut.

Image from Final Cut, Charles Burns, 2024