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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

RIP Robert Coover, Prince of American Metafiction

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RIP Robert Coover, 1932-2024

Robert Coover passed away a few days ago at ninety-two years old. In his decades-spanning career, Coover published twenty-one novels, four plays, and four short story collections. He also published dozens of (as-yet) uncollected stories, essays, and a host of so-called “electronic fiction.” A fifth short story collection, 2018’s Going for a Beer, collected some of Coover’s greatest hits, and is generally an excellent starting place for those interested in Coover’s metatextual fabulism.

Coover didn’t start out as a metatextual fabulist. His first novel, 1966’s The Origin of the Brunists, is vivid, humanist realism with the slightest tinges of magic brightening its edges. 1968’s follow-up, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., strays much deeper into the pop-myth fantasies that Coover would perfect in his mature career.

Coover’s 1969 collection Pricksongs & Descants shows a remarkable shift into postmodern metafiction. Pricksongs features some of his better stories, like “The Brother” (told from the point of view of the biblical Noah’s brother), “The Elevator,” and “The Magic Poker,” which begins with the sentence “I wander the island, inventing it” — a tidy encapsulation of Coover’s growing motif of the self-creating story. At times, this metatextual motif can exhaust the reader, as in Pricksongs’ capper “The Hat Act.” However, the collection features one of Coover’s best stories, “The Babysitter,” in which the titular character serves as a locus for a mundane suburban community’s collective repressed anxieties of sex and violence.

Coover would continue to explore such themes throughout his career, refining and sharpening his metatextual hat act in standout novels like Spanking the Maid (1982), Gerald’s Party (1986), and 1977’s The Public Burning—arguably Coover’s most important novel. It’s easy to think of The Public Burning as the last part of a loose postmodern American trilogy of large daring novels, the first two parts comprised of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) and William Gaddis’s J R (1975).

Indeed, Coover was regularly grouped with a (very white, very male) clique of postmodern American writers. In his 1980 essay “The Literature of Replenishment,” John Barth halfheartedly counted up the members: “By my count, the American fictionists most commonly included in the canon, besides the three of us at Tubingen [William H. Gass, John Hawkes and Barth himself], are Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.”

There was some chatter on social media that Coover’s passing left just Pynchon–and maybe Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy–as the last living luminaries of twentieth-century US American postmodernist fiction. Of course, Pynchon really wasn’t a member of this or any other clique (he declined an invitation to Donald Barthelme’s so-called “postmodernists dinner“), and, as is too often the case with such groupings, Ishmael Reed’s contribution to American postmodernist fiction continues to be marginalized.

Let it stand then that Robert Coover, despite whatever connections and friendships he held with other writers and artists, was his own special self-made creation. He was prolific, especially later in life, publishing nine novels in the twenty-first century. One of these was The Brunist Day of Wrath (2014), a sequel to his debut; he also collaborated with comix artist Art Spiegelman on the graphic novelette Street Cop (2021) and even found a sliver of mainstream readers with Huck Out West, his wonderful 2017 “sequel” to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Coover’s latest novel Open House was published just over a year ago.

Clearly, Coover leaves behind a large body of work, and we’ll likely see more of his work collected and published over the next decade. I won’t pretend to have read most of what he’s written, but I’ve loved a lot of it—particularly Pricksongs & Descants, Huck Out West, Spanking the Maid, and Briar Rose, which, as far as I can recall, is likely the first thing I read of his (my girlfriend at the time’s sister had to read it in college; she professed that she hated it but thought I’d like it). The aforementioned 2018 collection Going for a Beer is a nice starting place for Coover; those more interested in novels might like Spanking the Maid. Or jump into one of his later short novels, like 2004’s Stepmother or 2018’s The Enchanted Prince, both of which exemplify his metamagicianist mode. Or hell, just go for the big boy, The Public Burning. Ultimately, Coover leaves behind a trove of trembling, writhing, vividly-living words, an oeuvre that will continue to engage readers fascinated by a certain stamp of so-called experimental literature–and for that I thank him.

 

 

Riff on some Friends of the Library Sale acquisitions

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I ducked out of work maybe a little bit early on Friday and filled a brown paper bag with books at a Friends of the Library sale.

I picked up some hardback first editions of books I already own in cheaper formats–Lucia Berlin’s A Manual for Cleaning Women, Denis Johnson’s The Laughing Monsters, P.D. James’s The Children of Men, and Ben Marcus’s Leaving the Sea. I also got hardcover editions of Rachel Cusk’s Second Place, Amy Hempel’s Sing to It, Atticus Lish’s The War for Gloria, and Eugenio Corti’s The Red Horse.

I also grabbed some duplicates or alternate paperback editions of books I already own, including an academically-oriented edition of Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, and William Faulkner’s Light in August. I gave the Calvino to my son; the Stein is for a colleague. I’ll give Light in August to a student. (I got the same edition of the Faulkner at the last Friends of the Library sale I went to; my son claimed it.) I’ll also probably offer the Bourdain memoir to a student. I’m pretty sure we have a copy of Kitchen Confidential somewhere around the house. I couldn’t pass up on the cheap mass-market copy of Melville’s White Jacket. I mean, just look at this cover—dude’s wearing a white jacket—

The book also bears a stamp claiming it originated (in a sense) at the old Melville Manse, Arrowhead:

I also couldn’t resist letting a paperback copy of Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport take up a lot of real estate in my paper grocery bag. The hype has died down enough for me to perhaps eventually sink into it. The edition of Alan & John Lomax’s American Ballads & Folk Songs is kinda beat up, but it’s got a lovely cover:

I was also attracted to this strange edition of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls. It’s a 1987 hardback from the Soviet house Raduga Publishers, featuring a full-color portrait of Gogol and blue (?) page headings. The translation is by Christopher English and the book was printed in the U.S.S.R.—I’m not really sure who the intended audience was.

Albert Cullum’s The Geranium in the Window Sill Just Died But Teacher You Went Right On was another oddity I came across. Ostensibly a children’s book, The Geranium ultimately seems aimed at teachers. It features illustrations on every other page, each one by a different artist; many are remarkable, like this one by Stanley Mack–

There were a few titles, not pictured in the image at the top of this post, that I grabbed to cram into my bag simply because I had extra room at the end. I can usually offset the ten dollar bag fee by identifying a handful of pristine trade paperbacks that my local used bookstore will take for trade credit. So maybe I’m not, like, really offsetting the ten dollar fee so much as redirecting it toward obtaining more books.

There were plenty of titles at this particular sale that I would’ve crammed into the bag maybe ten or fifteen years ago—lots of books by Haruki Marukami, who has never been my guy, Jonathan Lethem (who I once really loved), Michael Chabon, Irvine Welsh, and even Chuck Palahniuk (there was a time when I was younger and had a broader range of friends that I could’ve given Palahniuk titles away easily). But I ended up imagining some younger person showing up to the sale, maybe today, Saturday, filling up a bag with titles that promised something beyond the YA formula stuff that makes up their current literary diet.

And if I imagined a younger person growing their library, I also imagined some of the older people whose collections had clearly ended up at the sale. Beyond the obvious airport thrillers and glut of titles by fiction factory Authors™, there were sets of strange, off-brand looking fantasy series in hardback, a seemingly-full run of Agatha Christie mysteries (also in hardback), Westerns no one will read again. Other people’s oddities ended up here; their children had no place for them, having subscribed to their own burdensome addictions.

I’ll have to give away all these books I’ve acquired at some point. But there’s joy in that too.

 

Man is doomed to constantly fabricate new agonies for himself | On Dino Buzzati’s novella The Singularity

Edwin Turner3 Comments

Two years after it was first published in Italy, Dino Buzzati’s 1960 novella Il grande ritratto got its first English translation by Henry Reed under the title Larger Than Life. This year, NRYB issued a new translation of Il grande ritratto by Anne Milano Appel under the title The Singularity. This is the second new English translation of a Buzzati book from NYRB; last year saw the publication of Lawrence Venuti’s translation of Buzzati’s most famous novel, Il deserto dei Tartari, published as The Stronghold (in lieu of the more recognizable title The Tartar Steppe).

It makes sense, from both a cultural and a marketing stance, that Il grande ritratto would find new life as The Singularity, a term that refers to the hypothetical point where artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, which in turn triggers a dramatic existential change for humanity. AI slop abounds on the internet; misinformation replicates and mutates; we are told that the chatbots that frustrate us so frequently are an inevitable part of a future that no one seems to want. A sci-fi novel called The Singularity is pretty zeitgeisty.

The scant plot of The Singularity builds to the revelation of an artificial intelligence, part of a military science project perched high in the Italian Alps. I don’t think I’ve necessarily spoiled the grand reveal; both its title and its publisher’s blurb declare The Singularity “a startlingly prescient parable of artificial intelligence.”

Perhaps it’s this prescience that makes the central sci-fi conceit of The Singularity seem a bit dated. There’s a creakiness to Buzzati’s staging of his grand portrait of an artificial intelligence. The novella is more compelling in its initial chapters, which ignite a mood of slow-burning dread, the kind of Kafkaesque foreboding he served up in his superior novel Il deserto dei Tartari.

That slow-burn starts with a certain Professor Ismani, “who had always had an inferiority complex with respect to figures.” He and his much younger wife, the archetypal innocent Elisa (who “had not gone beyond middle school”) agree to undertake a mysterious journey up the mountain to “Experimental Camp of Military Zone 36,” where Ismani will join a scientific project he knows nothing about. As they zig and zag up the mountain, chauffeured by their military liaison, Ismani and Elisa (and the reader) gather crumbs about their destination. “So many mysteries,” a soldier tells them, at a penultimate stop. “If they at least told us what it is we’re guarding. I mean, let’s call it what it is, a kind of prison.”

In response to all this anxious foreboding, we are told that “Ismani felt the return of apprehension and dismay, the feeling of being insignificant in the face of immense, threatening things, a panic that he had once experienced in the war.” None of Ismani’s time in the war comes to bear on the narrative itself. Indeed, Ismani is thrown to the reader as a decoy; initially presented to the audience as the potential big-brain hero of a sci-fi thriller, he ends up a background ghost.

We eventually achieve the summit, where the natural splendor is overrun by the enormous complex that houses the titular singularity:

But the cliffs were no longer visible, nor could any vegetation be seen, or land, or flowing waters. Everything had been invaded and overwhelmed by a tangled succession of buildings similar to silos, towers, mastabas, retaining walls, slender bridges, barbicans, fortifications, blockhouses, and bastions, which plunged in dizzying geometries. As though a city had crashed down the sides of a ravine.

But there was an exceedingly abnormal element that gave those structures an air of enigma. There were no windows. Everything seemed hermetically sealed and blank.

From this moment, more or less, the best bits of The Singularity come not from sci-fi plotting but rather philosophical asides that add weight to the pulp narrative. Most of these are delivered by the handful of scientists who haunt the experimental camp. One of these scientists repeats the mantra, “Language is the worst enemy of mental clarity.” In their attempt to author an artificial consciousness, these scientists decreed that their singularity would have “No language,” for “Every language is a trap for the mind.”

Here in their “little kingdom, hermetically closed off and apart from the rest of the world,” the scientists have created a “machine made in our likeness” which “will read our thoughts, create masterpieces, reveal the most hidden mysteries.” Through hints, intimations, weird noises, and other creaky trappings of pulp horror, we come to learn that the singularity might not be, like, sane. As one of our (maybe not like exactly sane either) scientists declares, “before we knew it we had lost the reins, and all that was left for us to do was to record the machine’s behavior.”

In a move that would surprise no one familiar with the tropes of Gothic romance, we come to learn that the singularity’s consciousness is based on a beautiful dead woman. The whole operation is powered by a mysterious glowing egg. Indeed, The Singularity is perhaps most interesting if approached through a feminist lens. As it rushes to its climax, Elisa the innocent takes over the role of hero. She somehow learns to speak the strange “language” of the pre-lingual singularity, and through conversation, comes to understand that the singularity views herself as a desiring machine. The singularity wants a body; specifically a female body; specifically a body that can be desired by a male body and bear offspring.

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.

Like many of the modernist writers of the twentieth century, Buzzati intuited a future in which technology would become increasingly self-propelled, mutating unchecked in the notion of a progress wholly divorced from the needs of the human spirit. In our own era, we see con artists and hucksters banging the drum for “artificial intelligences” to “read our thoughts, create masterpieces, reveal the most hidden mysteries” for us. The results have been utter shit. Buzzati’s mad scientist isn’t so much prescient as he is simply describing the human condition then, when he declares that “man is doomed to torment himself, he doesn’t see the consolations offered to him, right there, within reach, he has to constantly fabricate new agonies for himself.” We can fabricate the agonies, but we can fight them too.

Mass-market Monday | Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville

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Billy Budd, Sailor and Other Stories by Herman Melville, Herman Melville. No collection editor credited. Bantam Books (1989). No cover designer credited. Cover is a detail of Ships and an Approaching Storm Off Owl’s Head, Maine, 1860 by Fitz Hugh Lane. 278 pages.

I read Bartleby in 10th grade and took up I prefer not to as a mantra that I’d throw at poor dear Ms. Hall any time she asked me to do something I didn’t want to do, which was often. I never returned the book at the end of the year. I’m not sure if there is another book in the household, apart from old children’s books, I suppose, that I have read so many times.

I wrote about Bartleby here.

I wrote about Benito Cereno here.

Here is Billy Budd, but just the punctuation:

, , – , – – ‘ – . , , – , . ” ” . , – , . . , , – ‘ ( ) , . . ; , . ; , , . , , . . – – , , – – . . , – – , , , , , , – . , . . . ; ; . – – , , – – , ” , ” ” ” , . , , . . , , , , . , , , , – , , , – , . ‘ , – – – , . . . ; , , . , ‘ – . . , – , , . ‘ , ‘ , . , , . , , . , – – ” . ” – – – – , – , . , , , , , – – , . , . , , . , , . . , ‘ , , ‘ , , , – , . – . ; , , , . ‘ . , – . , , , , , , . , ; : ” , , ‘ . ” ” , , ” , ; ” , . . ” ” , ‘ , . . , – . , , . . ; . ; , . ; , – . , , , ‘ , ‘ , – , . – – , , – – . , – , – – – – . . , . , . , , . , , – – , . . ‘ , ; . ; ‘ . , , – – . , , – – , , . , , ‘ ; ! ” . ” , ” , ; ” , , ! – – – – – , ” ‘ . ” ! ‘ , . , . ; ; , , , , . – – ‘ ? , ” ‘ , ” ; , – – – – ! – – , ” , ” ‘ – . – . , . , – – ‘ . ” . , , – – . – ‘ ; ‘ . – ‘ . ‘ , , , , , , , . , ‘ , – – , – – ; , , – . , , ” – , – – . ” ” , ! ” , , . , ‘ . ; . ‘ , , . , , , , , ‘ , , , . . . , . , , , , . , , , . – – – . , – – . : ‘ ; , – , . , ; , , , , , , . – , ‘ , . ; , , , , , , . , – ; . , , , , . , ‘ – . . – . – . . , , . . , , , , – ‘ , – ; , , , , ; . – – – , , . , , , , , ” , , ‘ . ” ” ‘ ? – – ? ” ” , . ” , , ” ? ” ” , . ‘ . ” ” ? , ” ; ” , . ‘ , ; . ” , , – , , , . . , , , , . ; , , . – , ‘ . , , , – , , ” ‘ – , ” . , ” ‘ – , ” ? ; , , , ; . , , . ‘ , , , , , ‘ . – , , , . , , , – ‘ , , , : – – ” , , , , ? ” ; , ‘ , . , , ; , . , – , , , , , . , , . , , – – . , . ‘ . . – , ‘ , , , . , . . . , , . . – . ; – – – – – , – – – , , ; , ‘ . , . – – – – – , , : ” , ‘ ‘ ! ” ‘ ; ( . . . ) ” . ” , . . , , . , . – , . , , – – – – , ; , , – – – – . , , ; . , . , – – , , , – – , . , , : , , , , . , , – . – . . , . – . – , , , , , . , , ‘ , , , , , , , , . , , , , ‘ , , , , , . , – , . , , , , ; , . , ‘ – , ‘ , , , . , , ; ; ; , , , , , . , , . – – . , , , – – , – – . ; , , , . , . , ‘ ” . ” , , , . , ; , , , , . , . . , , , , , , , , . , , , , . , , – , , , ; , . , . , . : , , – , , ; : , ; , , , , , . – . . . , , , . – , . , . , , , . , . , , , ; , , . – ‘ , – . , , , , . , . , , , , ‘ , ‘ – , . , , . ‘ , , , . – – , , . ; . – – . , , : , , – , ; ‘ , , , , , , , ” ‘ , . ” , ‘ , , , ” , ; , ! ” , ‘ , , , . , . – , . ‘ , , . . , , . , , – , . , ; – – , , , , , . – – , , , . . , , , , . , , . , , , , , . , : ” , . , ” ( ) ” . , ‘ ‘ ? , ‘ – ? ” ; ‘ , . , , . ‘ . , – . ‘ , – . – , . , . , – – . – . , , – ‘ , . , – – , ; – – – , . , , . . ; ; , ‘ , . . , . . ; , , – . , , , ‘ , . , , . . ; , . – – – – ‘ ‘ . , , . , , – – . ‘ , , , , ; , , ; . ‘ – – – , – , , – , . , – . , . , ‘ – , , . , , , , , , ; , ; , , . : – , , . . , ‘ , . , . , , ‘ , . . ‘ , . – , – – . , , , ; . ‘ – – ‘ ‘ . – , , – – – , – – . , , , , , , , – – ‘ , , . , , , ; – – . ‘ – , , , ; , , . ‘ , ‘ , , , – . – . , , , , ‘ , , . ‘ . , . . – . , , – , . , , , ; , . ‘ , ; ‘ , . . , ‘ – , . , ? , . . ” , ? ” . ” , , , ‘ . ” , . – , . , , . , – – , – . ; , , , , , ‘ . – , ‘ . , – , ‘ ” – – – – . ” – , . , , , – ‘ , ? , ‘ ; , , , – – , , ; . , . . . ‘ , , , , , , , . , , – ; , ‘ , , . . , , , – , – , . , . , ‘ . , , ” , , . ” , , , ” , ” ( – – – ) ” . ” ” ! ” , ; ” ? , . ” ” ? ” ; , ” , , . ” ” , . . . ” ” ‘ ‘ , . ” , , . ; – , , , . , – , . ‘ – – . , , , , , – . , – – , , , . , , , . . , , , , , , ” , ! ! ” . , , , , ‘ . . , ” , ” ; , , , ; , ” , ! ” ” , ? ” . , , – – – – , – – . , , , , ; – . , , , ” ! ” – – ? , , , , , ? – ‘ , ‘ ” ” ? , , ‘ , ? , , , , , . , , , ‘ – – – , , . . , , , , . , , , ? – . , . ‘ . ? , . ” . ” . , , , ” , – – – – ‘ . . , , – – – , , ” ” – – , . ” ” , ” , ” – – – , , , , . ” ” , , . , , , . , , , . . . . ‘ . . ? . ” . . , , , . , . , , : ” : . ” ‘ , ‘ . . . , , , . , , . . . . . . . , . . : ‘ , , . : , . , , , ; , – , , , , – – – – . , , , , ” . ” , , , ? , ? ? ? , , ; ; , , . , . , . ? ” ” ? , , – . – – . , , , . ‘ , , , , . , . ; ‘ , , , , . – . , – – , , , , , . , , . ? , , ? . , . , . ‘ . , , ‘ . ‘ . , , , , . , , , , , . , – – . , , – – . ! , – – , , . , ‘ ; , ; ‘ , , . , , . , , . , , . , – – – ‘ – ‘ . – – , – – , – – , ‘ . , , , , . ‘ . – , , , , , . ‘ – – – – – – – , , , , . – – , , – – , – – , – – ; ( ) . , ‘ . , . , ; , , . ; ? ‘ ? , , ” , ” . ‘ , , , , , , ; , . . . , – – ‘ ; – ; , , . , , . , . ; , , , . – , , – ‘ , , . , – ; , . – , , , , , ” , ; . ‘ . , ” ; . – – ; , , , , . . , . , , . , , , , , , – – ; , – , ‘ ; , , , , – , . . ; – . ‘ . , , , . ” ! , ” ; ” , ‘ ? , ! ” ; , . , , . : ” , . ‘ . – – – ‘ – – – – ? ” ” ? ” , . ” , ! ” , ” ” ; ; ” , , , ‘ – – ” , : ” – – – , ‘ – – , , – – ! ” , , ; , , ” – ‘ ‘ – – – ! ” – . ” , ‘ ? ” – ‘ . ; ” , , ? , – – . ” ” , ” , ; ” . ” ” , ? ” , – , ; ” ‘ ! ” . , ‘ , ‘ , , – , , , , , – , . . ; . , , , . ? , ? ? . , – , . ‘ , , . , . . , – , , . , , . – – – , ; , , . , . , , , , . ‘ , , , , , . , , – , , , , . . , . , – . , , , , – , . . , , ; , , , . , . ‘ , ; , , ” ‘ , ? ” ” ? ” . ” , . ” ” , ” , ” ? ” ” , . ‘ – , ‘ – ! ” , , , , , ‘ , ‘ , , , . . , ‘ – – , , ‘ , ” . ” . . , . , – . ‘ , . , , , . ; ‘ . , , , , . ? – , – – – , , , ‘ , . , . , ; , ; , , . , , . . ‘ . , , , , , . , , ; ; – – – , – – , . , – , , , – – – , ; . . , , , , , . , . ‘ – , ; – , . . , , . , , , , . , , , , . . , , . ‘ , . . – – . . , ” – . ” , , . , . . – – , , ; , . , ‘ , , ‘ – , , , , – – , . ‘ , – , , , . , ‘ , , ‘ – , . ‘ , , , . ( ) , , , . , – . , , ‘ . , . , , ‘ . , – – – – , – ; , . . – – – – – . ( – – ) , , . , , , , , , . , , , – . . ‘ , , . – , . , , – – , , – , – – , . – – – . – – ; , , , . , , ‘ , . ‘ – ‘ , , , – – . , . , , , . , , , , ” ? , – – ? ” , , , , , . , , , , , , , , ‘ . : ” , ; . ” , . ( ) , . , . , , , , , . , , . , ‘ ‘ . , . , , : ” , , ‘ – – ” ” ! ” , , , . . , – , . , – , . . , , . , – , , , , ‘ . , , , , , , , . . , ‘ – , , , , . : ” . . ” ” . , – ” ” , ” ; ” – – – – , ‘ , ‘ ? ” ” , ; , . , . ‘ , ‘ ‘ ? – . . – – . ” , , ‘ . ‘ , , . ‘ – – , , , , ‘ , ; , . ‘ , , ‘ , , ‘ – , , , . – – , , , . , ” ‘ , ” , ‘ . ‘ ” – , ” ‘ , : ” , – – , ? , . , ” , ” . , , – – – – . ” ” , ! ” , . , – – – – – , , , . , , . ‘ , ; . , – – – ‘ – – , – – , – . , – , – ‘ , , . – – – – . . , , , ‘ . , – – . , ; . , – . – , , ‘ – ; ‘ ; ‘ , ‘ ; ; , ‘ . , . , ” – – , ‘ ? ” ” , . ” , ” . ! ” , ” . ” ‘ – , – . . ” ? ” ” , . ” ” . . . . . , . . . – – – – , , , . ” , , , . . , ‘ . ‘ : , , , . ‘ . . – – . ” , , ” ; ” , . – – , – – – , ; ” . – , , , . . , – . . ‘ , , . , . ; – . ” , ! ” , ‘ , ” ! . ” ; ; , , , , – ; , , . ‘ , , ‘ . , , , ” , . , . ” , , ‘ , – – , . , , , . ‘ , , – – – ; , . , . ” , ” , ” ! , . ” . , . . . . , ? ; . , , . – ( ) , . . – – , , ” . ” . ” , ” , ” . . ” – – – , – – , , ‘ , , ” , , ” . , – , . ‘ , . ‘ . ” ? ” . ” . . ” ‘ , , . , , . , ‘ , , – – ” ! ! ” ‘ , , , . . , – – ” ! ! ” , , . , . ” ; , ” , ” ” ( ) ” , ” . , , . ” , ” – – ” . – . , . , ” , ” . ” . , , ? – , , . , , , , . . ? , . ? , , . . . ; ‘ . . . ? , ? . . , , ‘ . . , , , . . , , – – – . . , , . ; , , . . , , – . ‘ , , . , ; , , , , . . , , – , , , . . , , – ; . ‘ , . . – . , , , , . ‘ , ‘ . , , . , , , , . – – , , , , . – , . , , . , , , , , ‘ . , , , . . , ‘ , . , , – ; – , , ‘ . – . , , , , , , , ‘ – , – . , ‘ . , . , , , ” . ? ” . : ” . , – – . ‘ . ” ” , , ” , . ” , ! ” , . – , , ” , . – – . . . . , , , ! ” – , , ‘ – – ‘ , ” , . ” ( , ‘ ) ‘ . . . ; ‘ – . ‘ – – – – – , , ; , , , . . ” , ” . ” – – . , , ? ” ‘ , , , , . , , . , . ” . ? ? , ” . ” . , ‘ , , . – – , , ‘ , ‘ . ” , , , . , . , ‘ . . ; : ” – – ‘ , – – , , . ” ” , ” ; ” . , ; , , ‘ , ‘ . ? – – – – – , ” . ” ‘ , – – . ” , , , . , , , . , ” , ” , , ” , , . ” ; , , , , ” , . ” – – – – – , – – , , . , ‘ , . , . , , , – . ‘ , , . , – – ; , ‘ ; . . , – , . . , , . , , , ‘ . : ” , ; , , , , – – – – , , , – – – . , ? , . , , . , . , , . ” : ? . . : ? , , – – ‘ , ? ‘ ? – , ? – – ? . , , . . ? , . , , ‘ , ‘ ? , – . ? . , . . . . ? , . : , . ” . . . ? , ‘ , . ” , ; . ” , , . , , ? ” , . , ; , . ” , . – – – – – ‘ – , . , , , . – ” ” , , ” , ” . . ” ” , . , . . ? . – – . ‘ – – – – . , . ‘ – , , ? . . ‘ , , . , . , ‘ , . ‘ – . ” , , – – – – . ; – – . ” ” ? ” , , . ” , , . , ” ( ‘ ) ” – ; ; ? – – – – , . , ‘ , , . , . . ? . . ? . – – – . . , – – . , . , , , . , , . . , . ” , – , . ‘ . , , , , , , . , – , , – – ‘ – ‘ . . . – – , – , , – . . . , . , . , – , . , ” – . . , . , ‘ . – . ” , – , . , , . – , – – – – – . ; . . – , – – – – . – – , . ‘ . ‘ . , . . . ‘ . , , . , , , ‘ . , , , , . . , , , ‘ , . ‘ . , , . , ; , . ‘ – – ; , ; – – . – , , , . ; , , – – . – , ; – , . . ; – – ; ; . . , . ‘ ‘ . , , . . , , , . ‘ – . , , , – – . , . , , ‘ , , – – – ‘ – , . , , . ‘ – – – . , . ; ‘ . . . – – . ; , – , ‘ , . ‘ , , , . . – . , – – – , , ; , , . ‘ , , , ‘ . . , , – . – ( , , ) , ‘ . , – , – . . – , . . – . – , ‘ . , , ‘ , ‘ – – . . , . , – , . ‘ , . , , , , , , ‘ , . . , , , , , . , . , ; , . . , , – . , , ; , , , , . , , , , ( – ) , , , , , ” ” ( ) ” ? ? ” ‘ , , – . , , – ; . , ; – – . – – – ‘ . , . . ‘ . . , ; , ; , . , – , , ; . ‘ ( ) . , , . , – – . , . ? ; . , – , , – – – . , , . , . . , . ‘ . . , , – – , – – . – , – , . , , . – – , – – – . – . , – . , – . – , . , . , . ‘ , . . , , , – – ” ! ” – – – ‘ ; – , , ‘ . , ‘ , – – ” ! ” , . , , ‘ – , – ‘ . , , , . , ‘ , , , ; , , . , – , , ‘ , . , , , , ” – , ” – – , , , , ” , . . – – ‘ – – , . – – – – . ” ” , ? ” ” , . . ” ” , , ? ” ” . , . – , . , , . ‘ , , – – , – – , ? ” ” . ” ” , . , . ” ” , , ” , ” ‘ , ? ” ” , . , – : – – – . , – – , . , ” , ” – . , . ” . , ‘ , . – , ; , . – , ‘ . , , ‘ ‘ . , . ” , , . ” – , ; , . , – – – . – , ‘ . , ‘ , , – , – ‘ , . . . , , – , , . , – . , – , . , – – ‘ – ; – , ‘ , . , . . , , . . – , . , , ‘ . , – , ; , . , , . , , . ” , ” , ” , ; – . ” . , . – . ‘ . , , , , . . – , . – ‘ . . ; . . ‘ , . . – , . – – . , , , ‘ , , , – ; , ( ) – . – , . ; , , – – ‘ . – . . , . , . , . . , , . , , – – ” , . ” , ‘ , – , , ‘ , . , , , , . , ‘ , , , . : – – ” . . . . , ‘ – – , ‘ , ; , , – . ” , ‘ , . ” , , – , , – , , , ‘ . , & , . , , , . , . ” . . . . . . ” , , . . . , – . – – , – . . ‘ , , . , . , . , , , , , , ; , . ‘ . – ‘ , . – – : – ! ‘ ; ‘ ‘ . – ‘ – , – – – – – , ‘ , ‘ . , , , ; , . , , . ‘ – – ‘ . , ; , , ! . – – ‘ ? ‘ ; . ? ? , ? ; ‘ . – – ! ‘ , . . . ‘ , . , , ‘ . . , ? , , , .

Mid-August riff; some books acquired, etc.

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The last two weeks flew by. My kids went back to school this week; they are attending the same school for the first time since elementary school, high school,my own dear mother, that school, and I am relieved, if only temporarily from driving duties. We are making pizzas in an hour or two to celebrate the first Friday of their school year (we make pizzas every Friday as a nifty fridge clearing activity, but let’s not ruin the sparkle). My own semester starts the week after next and I realize that I need to do something more with my summers now that my children are so much older than they were when they were little children, when I was with them all summer, or if I wasn’t exactly right there with them I was hovering in the background.

I am on track to read fewer novels, or books, or whatever, than I read in July of this year. I finished Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel American Abductions and liked it very much, or liked the experience or feeling of reading it, whatever that means, and I owe it a proper review. In July I read Katherine Dunn’s debut novel Attic and loved it. I couldn’t find her 1971 follow-up Truck in any of the used bookstores I frequent, so I ended up listening to it on audiobook. Maybe it was the narrator’s narration but I found it disappointing, but I still appreciate its grime and its abjection and its picaresque energy. I also checked out some Stephen Dixon e-books from my library; I read a handful of fucked up stories (a piece called “The Intruder” was especially weird) before digging into his 1988 novel Garbage. I read the first half of Garbage last night and I don’t even know how to describe it—it’s sort of like wandering upon some forgotten gritty 1970s American exploitation film made by an insane but focused auteur. But it’s also very normal in a way I will not explain. It’s uncanny.

I purged about thirty paperbacks last week at my local used bookstore and ordered a copy of the latest Antoine Volodine novel, Gina M. Stamm’s translation of Mevlido’s Dreams. A recent reading of Volodine’s Radiant Terminus left me hungry for more of that sweet gross post-exotic flavor. I went to pick up the Volodine today and ended up with two hardbacks. I admit that the blurb on the back of Thomas Sullivan’s 1989 novel Born Burning sold me; it compared his previous novel to William Gaddis, John Barth, and Kurt Vonnegut. I also snapped up a first-edition hardback 1985 edition of William S. Burroughs’s novel Queer, which I fear was quite underpriced, although I don’t fear that too much. (All my sweet purged paperback credit is gone!)

I am ready for the summer to end.

A(nother) completely subjective and thoroughly unnecessary ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s novels

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In 2018—six years ago—on Thomas Pynchon’s 81st birthday, I put together a thoroughly unnecessary ranking of his eight novels. I’m somewhat ashamed of the post, as I included two novels I had abandoned a few times—Vineland and Bleeding Edge. Three years ago, on Pynchon’s 84th birthday, I wrote a few sentences on each of Pynchon’s novels, having, at that point, made my way through all of them. The first post, perhaps because it contains the word “ranking” in its title gets far more traffic to this day than the more thoughtful and finished post from 2021. Indeed, the “ranking” post regularly shows up in the top ten percentile of my weekly and monthly stats on Biblioklept, which, I guess, has bothered me enough to write this (thoroughly unnecessary still) “ranking.”

I know that if I were to approach Pynchon’s eight novels on eight different days, I’d likely end up with a consistent #1, #2, #3, and #8—but the other spots would shift depending on my memory or fancy or whatever spell I’d fallen under, chemical, metaphysical or otherwise. But here’s the list I came up with today.

8. Vineland (1990)

In my 2018 post (where I ranked Vineland at number 7) I noted that “Vineland seems to have a strange status for Pynchon cultists—its a cult novel in an oeuvre of cult novels,” and I’ve found that intuition confirmed over the years. I stick by my assertion in my 2021 post in which I asserted that “Vineland is ultimately depressing and easily my least-favorite Pynchon novel, but it does have some exquisite prose moments.” I’m sure I’ll revisit it before seeing Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation though.

7. Inherent Vice (2009)

Speaking of Paul Thomas Anderson—I think I like his film adaptation of Inherent Vice more than I like the novel. And I love Inherent Vice. But I think PTA provides an emotional ballast that gives the narrative a center that’s missing from Pynchon’s novel (which is, likely, the point, or at least the byproduct of Pynchon’s shaggy dogging it). (I originally ranked Inherent Vice at number 6).

6. Bleeding Edge (2013)

So I finally found my way into Bleeding Edge in the earliest weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown. I’d stuck the book at the bottom of my 2018 list. I’m not really sure why I stalled out on—maybe it feels the closest to my own timeline of any Pynchon novel. Anyway, it’s one I want to revisit again soon. I riffed on it some in 2020, writing “Pynchon captures a time in America during which I was, at least theoretically, becoming an adult (a becoming which may or may not have happened yet). Reading Bleeding Edge helped evoke all the weirdness the 2000s were about to lay out for us. It made me angry again, or reminded me of the anger that I’d sustain for most of the decade. It reminded me of our huge ideological failure after 9/11, an ideological failure we are watching somehow fail even more today.  But I also loved the novel’s unexpectedly sweet domestic plot, and found a kind of solace even in its affirmation of family, even as its final image pointed to the kind of radical inconclusiveness at the heart of being a parent.”

5. V. (1963)

So from here on out my rankings are identical to my stupid 2018 list, with that big caveat that I would easily swap, say, V. and 49 here. I’ll repeat my endorsement that “V. makes a good starting place for anyone new to Pynchon” and recommend that anyone interested in Pynchon but daunted by the scope check out the book from their library and read the ninth chapter, the story of of Kurt Mondaugen.

4. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

The Crying of Lot 49 is probably a better novel than V. but I think I like V. better. 49 is very funny and showcases Pynchon’s tonality of paranoia/hope wrapped up in zaniness/horror. It’s an excellent sophomore novel, but also dense, claustrophobic even. I guess I like the Pynchon sprawl a bit better.

3. Against the Day  (2006)

Speaking of sprawl: Against the Day is Pynchon’s biggest novel, just fat and giddy and overstuffed with goodies. I think this novel would make an excellent American history textbook. Its thesis: resist the military-industrial-entertainment-complex. Start here!

2. Mason & Dixon (1997)

A measurement of the world and a story about friendship. It would be Pynchon’s best novel if he hadn’t written—

1. Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

The best book. I reread it earlier this summer and it’s roomier and stranger and more rewarding each time.

Riff on July 2024 reading, etc.

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I experienced the middle weeks of July 2024 as simultaneously rapid and static. Doldrums should never be so frenetic. If this decade were a novel I would’ve put it down several chapters back. I try not to obsess over things I cannot control. I try to get away from screens. I try to go outside, but the feels like heat index here in north Florida goes over a hundred and five every day. (At least it’s raining again and nothing is on fire.) So I try to read more (and actually write more).

This July I read some great stuff.

I finished Katherine Dunn’s first novel Attic a couple of days ago. The book 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. I need to read her second and third novels (Truck, 1971 and the posthumous Toad) and then go back and reread Geek Love, which I remember as being Gothic and gross but also whimsical. (I don’t sniff any whimsy in Attic.)

There are eight stories in Oğuz Atay’s story collection Waiting for the Fear (in translation by Ralph Hubbell); I’ve read the first five this summer, including the long title story, which is especially good, as is the opener “Man in a White Overcoat.” Atay’s heroes (I use the term loosely) find their antecedents in Kafka’s weirdos. Or Paul Bowles. Or Jane Bowles. I should have a proper review up near the end of October when NYRB publishes Waiting for the Fear.

I had picked up Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s third novel American Abductions earlier this summer and finally started it a few nights ago after finishing Attic. Each chapter is a run-on sentence that has made me want to keep reading and reading, running on with it. The novel is, at least so far, both challenging and entertaining; it is not difficult, exactly, but rather engrossing. Sometimes I’ll find myself a bit lost in the layered consciousnesses, layers (layerings) of speech in Cárdenas’s sentences—especially when I find myself startled by an image or a joke or idea—and then I’ll wade backwards again and pick up the rhythm and keep going. The plot? I’ll steal from the Dalkey Archive’s blurb: “American Abductions opens in a near-future United States whose omnipresence of data-harvesting and algorithms has enabled the mass incarceration and deportation of Latin Americans—regardless of citizenship.” But that’s not really the plot; I mean, this isn’t a third-person dystopian world-building YA thing. The novel, at least its first half, is about a family, daughters Ada and Eva and their father Antonio, a novelist who was abducted by the titular abductors (the Pale Americans!). It’s also about writing, how we construct memory in a surveillance state, and, I suppose, love.

I reviewed Jean-Baptiste Del Amo’s latest novel The Son of Man (in translation by Frank Wynne) in the middle of July, although I think I probably read it in late June. In my review I suggested that The Son of Man “is ultimately a novel about the atavistic transmission of violence from generation to generation.” I also highly recommended it.

I went on a big Antoine Volodine binge a couple of years ago which stalled out before I got to (what I believe is) his longest novel in English translation, Radiant Terminus. I finally started into it a few weeks ago (in translation by Jeffrey Zuckerman), and I think it might be Volodine’s best work. In my longish review, I declared Radiant Terminus “an astounding novel, a work that will haunt any reader willing to tune into its strange vibrations and haunted frequencies. Very highly recommended.” I think it’s a perfect starting place for anyone interested in Volodine’s so-called post-exotic project.

Denis Johnson’s The Stars at Noon was one of two novels I revisited via audiobook this month (the other is Portis’s Gringos, which we’ll get to in a moment). 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. 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. As an audiobook though I enjoyed it, especially in Will Patton’s reading. (His narration of Johnson’s perfect novella Train Dreams is the perfect audiobook.) I guess the audiobook came out in conjunction with Claire Denis’ 2022 adaptation of the film, which I still haven’t seen.

The collection of Remedios Varo’s writings On Homo rodans and Other Writings is another book I read earlier in the summer but didn’t write about until July. I was fortunate enough to get a long interview with the translator, Margaret Carson, and I think the result is one of the better things Biblioklept has published this year.

I picked up Dinah Brooke’s “lost” novel Lord Jim at Home in late June, and then read it in something of a sweat over a few days. In my review, I wrote that

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).

Gringos is the other book I “reread” via audiobook this July. Charles Portis wrote five novels and all of them are perfect—but I think Gringos might be my favorite. David Aaron Baker’s reading of the novel is excellent. He conveys the dry humor of narrator Jimmy Burns as well as the cynical sweet pathos at the core of Portis’s last novel. Highly recommended.

So well I guess July is over; the kids will be back in school again soon, and so will I. The air here will remain swamp thick, humidity that starts cooking you the minute you venture out of the desiccating AC that licensed growth on this weird peninsula. It might let up by November. Maybe because I’ve spent my entire adult career as a teacher I have always thought of August as the end of the year, not December. And some years I feel melancholy at this end, this pivot away from freer hours. But writing this on the last day of July, I think I want a return to routine, to something I can think of as a return to normalcy, the kind of normalcy that makes me appreciate the weird fucked up oddball novels that I do so love to hang out inside of.

Mass-market Monday | Philip K. Dick’s A Maze of Death

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A Maze of Death, Philip K. Dick. Dawn Books, first Daw printing (1983). Cover art by Bob Pepper. 191 pages.

In my review of Philip K. Dick’s 1970 novel, I wrote that A Maze of Death is

…a mishmash of metaphysical mumbo jumbo, filtered through touches of space opera and good old fashioned haunted housery. A Maze of Death is a messy space horror that threatens to leave its readers unsatisfied right up until the final moments wherein it rings its sad coda, a reverberation that nullifies all its previous twists and turns in a soothing wash of emptiness. Not the best starting place for PKD, but I’m very glad I read it.

Biblioklept Does Atlanta (Books acquired, some time last week)

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Last week, the wife and I drove five hours north to Atlanta, Georgia where we stayed five days in the Cabbagetown neighborhood. Our ostensible purpose was an anniversary trip focused around a Slowdive concert last Friday, but I think we really went to just hang out and eat and drink away from our kids for a few nights. It was famous times.

The Slowdive concert itself was excellent, despite the best efforts of the awful opening band, a dubious and I must assume ironic project called Drab Majesty, and the sound system at the The Eastern. The venue seemed ill-equipped to handle the tonality of either band. I don’t want to sound like a very old man but it was Too Fucking Loud. Opener Drab Majesty, whose sound came from a single guitar, a single synth, and, I’m guessing, a few loop pedals, seemed to have plugged directly into the PA system. It was the absolute worst sound I’ve ever heard. (Earlier that day, driving in awful Atlanta traffic, we listened to a seventeen-minute Merzbow song on the alternate band of Georgia Tech’s WREK radio station; although Merzbow is “noise” music, that song had more musicality, tonality, and depth of rhythm than Drab Majesty.)

Slowdive was excellent live–much more of a rock sound than I’d expected; I’ve really enjoyed their two newer records, particularly the self-titled one from a few years back, but the songs from Souvlaki sounded particularly fierce live. The setlist was great, and they closed with a cover of Syd Barrett’s “Golden Hair” that might have gone on for 10 or 12 minutes; it was hypnotic. Here is the single picture I took during the show:

But books—

Without children about and with my wife having to work half days from the rented garage apartment, I had enough time to indulge going to pretty much any bookstore I wanted to in Atlanta. I ended up sticking mostly to East Atlanta where we were staying though.

I had been to A Capella Books a few years ago and had somehow entirely missed their used book annex, which had some really great stuff in it, including a first edition of Blood Meridian and Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men. I ended up chatting with the owner Frank for a bit; a very nice guy, he showed me his personal collection of Vintage Contemporaries and we talked in general about our shared sickness of book collecting. I left with Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s new novel American Abductions and a first-edition hardback of McCarthy’s Cities of the Plain. This second purchase seems to have initiated the trip’s theme of buying editions of books I already own—but now I have all three Knopf editions of The Border Trilogy, so everyone can sleep easier.

I stopped by Criminal Records in Little Five Points and didn’t pick anything up, although I’m happy to see that CDs have made such a comeback. (I almost certainly would have bought the new Gastr del Sol box set if it was out yet.) I then made my way to Bibliotech Books in Candler Park. The proprietor assured me that he was in the process of reorganizing, but the store was frankly a mess. One bookcase was organized by the color of the book’s spines. The inventory seemed to be someone’s childhood and adolescent books.

I headed to Virginia Highland Books, a perfectly-respectable book shop in the perfectly-respectable Virginia Highland neighborhood. The perfectly-respectable inventory was not particularly interesting, although I imagine it perfectly suits the perfectly-respectable clientele. On the way to Virginia Highland Books, at a red light, I found myself stopped next to something called Videodrome, so of course I pulled in. I got dizzy in Videodrome a DVD-rental shop stuffed with thousands and thousands of cult films, non-English language films, art films, concert films…amazing stuff. The only thing I could compare it to were some of the rental shops I’d gone to decades ago when I lived in Tokyo. I mean, this place had the Cannibal Ferox soundtrack on vinyl. I spoke to the proprietor for a while. He gave me a sticker. I saw him at the Slowdive show the next night but left him alone.

My last bookshop visit that day was to Bookish, a small indie spot specializing in books by women. I liked the store but was honestly too tired to look around much after two tallboys at a PBR-themed bar in Virginia Highland.

Over the next few days, I visited three more bookshops, all more or less by chance. We went to Decatur, simply to check it out, and parked in Decatur Square right in front of Little Shop of Stories. Framed original artwork by visiting authors adorns the walls of this children’s bookshop, and there’s a life-sized reproduction of the room from Margaret Wise Brown’s classic Good Night Moon that one can hang out in. I felt a little melancholy that our children have outgrown children’s books.

On the way back to Atlanta, we swung by Eagle Eye Books, a Decatur spot specializing in used books (with a large collection of vintage sci-fi hardbacks in a back room). They have several carts of dollar books that are supposedly accessible 24/7—there are lock boxes to slide your dollars into. I ended up picking up different editions of two books I already own: Wells Tower’s Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned in hardback and the 1985 Elisabeth Sifton Books/Penguin Books printing of William Gaddis’s J R. The J R is basically falling apart and is crammed with annotations; I love it. I gave three crumpled dollars over for these two books and then drove back to our garage apartment so we could walk to tacos and then the concert.

The mid-morning after the Slowdive concert we hung out for a while at the Virginia Highland Porchfest. We parked at the Ponce City Market to walk to Porchfest and on the way back stopped at Posman Books. I’d been there before, and while it’s basically a gift shop, its literature section is surprisingly robust, and it even offers a decent number of Spanish-language novels. The vibe at Porchfest was more frat-boys-drinking-sixers and sunburned golf dads than it was hippies and freaks. The neighborhood is Nice, with plenty of In This House signs declaring Attested Beliefs. We felt more at home in Cabbagetown, with its murals and ambivalence, even if our own presence as fucking tourists made us balk at times. But in a plant shop in Virginia Highland, we did meet an interesting clerk who let me take a photograph of their Pynchon tattoo. So that was pretty cool.

Atlanta I heart you.

 

 

Mass-market Monday | Ishmael Reed’s The Last Days of Louisiana Red

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The Last Days of Louisiana Red, Ishmael Reed. Bard Books, First Bard Printing (1976). Cover art is by Andrew Rhodes (not credited). 191 pages.

From my review of The Last Days of Louisiana Red:

Ishmael Reed’s 1974 novel The Last Days of Louisiana Red is a sharp, zany satire of US culture at the end of the twentieth century. The novel, Reed’s fourth, is a sequel of sorts to Mumbo Jumbo (1972), and features that earlier novel’s protagonist, the Neo-HooDoo ghost detective Papa LaBas.

In Mumbo Jumbo, Reed gave us the story of an uptight secret society, the Wallflower Order, and their attempt to root out and eradicate “Jes’ Grew,” a psychic virus that spreads freedom and takes its form in arts like jazz and the jitterbug. The Last Days of Louisiana Red also employs a psychic virus to drive its plot, although this transmission is far deadlier. “Louisiana Red” is a poisonous mental disease that afflicts black people in the Americas, causing them to fall into a neo-slave mentality in which they act like “Crabs in the Barrel…Each crab trying to keep the other from reaching the top.”

Gravity’s Rainbow — annotations and illustrations for pages 627-28 | Our optimum time is 8 May

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Page 628 from Zak Smith’s Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel Gravity’s Rainbow (2006)

A week before she1 left, she came out to “The White Visitation”2 for the last time. Except for the negligible rump of PISCES, the place was a loony bin again. The barrage-balloon cables3 lay rusting across the sodden meadows, going to flakes, to ions and earth4—tendons that sang in the violent nights, among the sirens wailing in thirds smooth as distant wind, among the drumbeats of bombs, now lying slack, old, in hard twists of metal ash. Forget-me-nots boil everywhere underfoot, and ants crowd, bustling with a sense of kingdom. Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs.5 Jessica has cut fringes since Roger saw her last, and is going through the usual anxiety—“It looks utterly horrible, you don’t have to say it. . . .”

“It’s utterly swoony,” sez Roger, “I love it.”

“You’re making fun.”

“Jess, why are we talking about haircuts for God’s sake?”6

While somewhere, out beyond the Channel, a barrier difficult as the wall of Death7 to a novice medium, Leftenant Slothrop, corrupted, given up on, creeps over the face of the Zone. Roger doesn’t want to give him up: Roger wants to do what’s right. “I just can’t leave the poor twit out there, can I? They’re trying to destroy him—”8

But, “Roger,” she’d smile, “it’s spring. We’re at peace.”9

No, we’re not. It’s another bit of propaganda. Something the P.W.E. planted10. Now gentlemen as you’ve seen from the studies our optimum time is 8 May11, just before the traditional Whitsun exodus, schools letting out, weather projections for an excellent growing season, coal requirements beginning their seasonal decline, giving us a few months’ grace to get our Ruhr interests back on their feet—no, he sees only the same flows of power, the same impoverishments he’s been thrashing around in since ’3912. His girl is about to be taken away to Germany, when she ought to be demobbed like everyone else. No channel upward that will show either of them any hope of escape13. There’s something still on, don’t call it a “war” if it makes you nervous, maybe the death rate’s gone down a point or two, beer in cans is back at last and there were a lot of people in Trafalgar Square one night not so long ago . . . but Their enterprise goes on.

The sad fact, lacerating his heart, laying open his emptiness, is that Jessica believes Them14. “The War” was the condition she needed for being with Roger. “Peace” allows her to leave him. His resources, next to Theirs, are too meager.

1 The she here, for those wishing to tune in, is Jessica Swanlake, who has decided post-War to return to her normie roots: she will choose a petite bourgeoisie life with Beaver/Jeremy, and reject Roger Mexico (and, implicitly, refuse the Counterforce and the mission to save Tyrone Slothrop).

2 Normally wouldn’t give a gloss for this, as its so late in the novel, but it’s been like eight years since I’ve done one of these, so: Pynchon Wiki gives the following description for the White Visitation:

former mental hospital located in the fictional town of Ick Regis on the coast of southern England; now part of SOE [Special Operations Executive; aka the “Firm”]; location of PISCES; D-Wing still has “loonies”; “devoted to psychological warfare”

I like to imagine The White Visitation as a kind X-Men scenario–or, more geekily, an X-Force scenario–a group of the freaky preterite using their weird powers for Maybe Good. But at this point, post eurowar, it’s all over, a “negligible rump” to be absorbed into post-war administrative Control.

3 I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow like half a dozen times and rusting barrage-balloon cables is the kind of image I just keep going past, just kinda sorta like, letting my imagination fill in the details. But doing these posts makes me stop and look around a bit. A description from Keith Thomson’s website:

Barrage balloons are large balloons tethered to the ground or the deck of a ship with metal cables. They are deployed as a defense against low-level air attack, damaging aircraft on collision with the cables or, at the least, making flying in the vicinity treacherous.

1940s Barrage Balloon At The Kew Bridge Steam Museum, London. Jim Linwood.

4 Everything in the Zone is disintegrating–including Our Hero Tyrone Slothrop.

5 “Commas, brimstones, painted ladies coast on the thermoclines along the cliffs” — an absolutely gorgeous sentence, and also one we might pass over at this fragmented, surreal section of the novel as a bit of surrealist poetry.

But it’s not—these are butterflies. From Pynchon Wiki:

627.28-29 Commas, brimstones, painted ladies
Three taxa of butterflies. The Comma (Polygonia c-album) is one of the anglewings; sulfur-yellow brimstones are in the genus Gonepteryx in the family Pieridae; painted ladies are in the genus Vanessa. The Comma is named for a so-shaped white mark on the underside of its hindwing; a similarly-marked North American congener is called the Question Mark (P. interrogationis).

Cigarette card depicting a fanciful “brimstone butterfly”

6 “Can’t say it often enough–change your hair, change your life,” Inherent Vice.

7 “Wall of Death,” Richard and Linda Thompson, 1982:

Let me ride on the Wall of Death one more time / You can waste your time on the other rides / This is the nearest to being alive / Oh let me take my chances on the Wall of Death / You can go with the crazy people in the Crooked House / You can fly away on the Rocket or spin in the Mouse / The Tunnel of Love might amuse you / Noah’s Ark might confuse you / But let me take my chances on the Wall of Death

8 Every time I go through Gravity’s Rainbow, I find Slothrop’s fate more distressing and dispiriting—but also more inspiring. I think what’s important to remember here is that Roger Mexico is a numbers guy, a statistics guy—in 2024 terms, he might be a spreadsheet guy, a potential money guy. But he finds himself dedicated to Something Bigger Even If It Destroys Him, which means dedicating hope to the ever-fragmenting figure of Tyrone Slothrop, who, through his dispersal, might sow new seeds.

9 A devastating reversal of “They are in love. Fuck the war,” the lines we get from our first meeting of the failed lovers.

10 Political Warfare Executive (an iteration of Them). From Pynchon Wiki:

In 1940, MIR and Section D were combined with the War Office to form the Special Operations Executive (SOE). A “black” (sub rosa) propaganda section of SOE, created by the Foreign Office and named “Electra House,” was attached to the SOE in 1940 to become the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), charged with political and psychological warfare.

11 Thomas Ruggles Pynchon was born on 8 May 1937. Today is his 87th birthday.

If you’re the kinda weirdo who likes to celebrate Pynchon’s work and legacy, indulge in Pynchon in Public Day.

Steven Weisenburger’s 2nd’ edition of the Companion gives the following gloss on the date:

8 May, just before the traditional Whitsun exodus. Recall that part 2 ends with Pointsman and crew spending “Whitsun by the sea” (V269.26n). This traditional British holiday weekend fell on May 20 in 1945.

12 Roger Mexico “sees only the same flows of power, the same impoverishments” that he’s seen throughout the war. Unlike Jessica, he’s hep now to the knowledge that “the real business of the War is buying and selling.”

13 Pynchon here reiterates one of GR’s central themes, of the preterite vs the elect, of a “channel upward” or crashing down. The theme permeates the book, right from its opening lines. Consider the novel’s fourth sentence “The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre.” The opening “evacuation” scene is surreal and apocalyptic, with each potential evacuee hearing an inner voice that cruelly coos, “You didn’t really believe you’d be saved. Come, we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going to take the trouble to save you, old fellow. . . .” The narrator’s very early note that “it’s all theatre” is one of Pynchon’s central diagnoses of power in GR, and one that not every character comes to fully understand. As if to underline that it’s all kayfabe, Pynchon ends GR by introducing a new character, Richard M. Zhlubb, a parody of Nixon. Zhlubb is the night manager of the Orpheus Theatre.

14 I think what finally most breaks Roger’s heart isn’t the loss of Jessica, but that “Jessica believes Them.” She’s subscribed to the theater of “war” and “peace,” an illusion that can no longer comfort Roger.

Mass-market Monday | Muriel Spark’s Robinson

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Robinson, Muriel Spark. Penguin Books, (1964). Cover art by Terence Greer. 175 pages.

Terence Greer illustrated six midsixties Muriel Spark Penguin editions. I would love to own the other five.

Robinson is Spark’s second novel, and not her finest (of the ones I’ve read I’d argue for Loitering with Intent or The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.)

Gravity’s Rainbow — annotations and illustrations for pages 712-13 | The Man has a branch office in each of our brains

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Illustration for Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Gustave Doré, 1876

Well1, if the Counterforce2 knew better what those categories3 concealed, they might be in a better position to disarm, de-penis and dismantle the Man4. But they don’t. Actually they do, but they don’t admit it. Sad but true. They are as schizoid, as double-minded in the massive presence of money, as any of the rest of us, and that’s the hard fact5. The Man has a branch office in each of our brains, his corporate emblem is a white albatross, each local rep has a cover known as the Ego, and their mission in this world is Bad Shit6. We do know what’s going on, and we let it go on7. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We need that. And how they know it–how often, under what conditions. . . .8 We ought to be seeing much popular-magazine coverage on the order of The Night Rog and Beaver Fought Over Jessica While She Cried in Krupp’s Arms, and drool over every blurry photo–9

Roger must have been dreaming10 for a minute here of the sweaty evenings of Thermidor11: the failed Counterforce, the glamorous ex-rebels, half-suspected but still enjoying official immunity and sly love, camera-worthy wherever they carry on . . . doomed pet freaks.

They will use us. We will help legitimize Them12, though They don’t need it really, it’s another dividend for Them, nice but not critical. . . .

Oh yes, isn’t that exactly what They’ll do.

1 Well, hell, the last time I composed one of these silly annotations posts was way back in the unfortunate Fall of 2016, when I lost my goddamn mind for a while. I never made any notes on the novel’s final quadrant, “The Counterforce,” and never mustered any more notes when I reread GR in 2020. Over the past two weeks, I listened to George Guidall’s excellent narration in a long, long audiobook that kept me good company through some serious Spring cleaning projects. As has been the case in each of my treks through GR, I found it intensely prescient, a wonderful, terrifying diagnosis of the grand ugly 20th c. that we will never recover from.

2 I’ve read Gravity’s Rainbow all the way through six or seven times now, and each time I always find myself buoyed by the Counterforce—Pynchon’s heroic band of preterite rebels who resist the forces of Control. And every time I reread it I seem to forget that the Counterforce fails—the Counterforce (I dare not use the appropriate pronoun they, for They is the enemy of the Counterforce’s We) simply can’t stop the coming new world order of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. The short passage I’ve selected here, with Counterforce hero and one-time lover Roger Mexico as its medium, showcases one of the many reasons the Counterforce will fail.

3 Those categories refers to Pynchon’s previous paragraph, an academic spoof highlighting various “albatross nosologies”; nosology refers to the classification of diseases; the albatross is a metaphorical curse, of course.

Illustration for Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Gustave Doré, 1876

4 The Man: authority, control, They, the force, the fuzz, the cops, the heat, the money guys, the enemies of art, love, and the human soul…

5 A depressing notion, of course, and one Pynchon would return to in his 1990 follow-up to GR, Vineland, a novel that parodied the so-called counterculture of the 1960’s massive ideological failure, to, like, follow through with any true revolutionary project. 

6 The economic metaphors here are appropriate. Again, fuck the money guys whose mission in this world is Bad Shit.

7 An even more depressing notion—that the double-mindedness of Counterforce consciousness includes knowing that we let the Bad Shit go on; maybe our resistant spirit curdles into a brittle apathy; maybe we overindulge in mindless pleasures; maybe we explode. 

mindless-pleasures
An early trial cover for GR, featuring one of its working titles, Mindless Pleasures

8 The date of publication for this post coincides with the May 6, 2024 annual Met Gala, a capitalist spectacle of wealth and fame costumed in the trappings of art. This year’s ticket is $75,000, more than the average U.S. salary. And yet it might be fair to consider that those “massively moneyed” costumed revelers at the Met Gala aren’t even really the true massively moneyed, but rather their avatars, projected on innumerable screens, avatars of mindless pleasures to distract us from all the Bad Shit the massively moneyed are up to.

9 Pynchon here plays on lurid tabloid headlines that aren’t too different from the ones we see today, reconfiguring the one-time lovers Jessica and Roger as the elect, figures of celebration. It’s all fantasy though—literally; as the next lines seem to suggest, we’ve been in Roger’s addled mind. Pynchon’s headline reminds me of Donald Barthelme’s 1964 short story “Me and Miss Mandible,” which includes a list of trashy titles about Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, and Eddie Fisher like “The Private Life of Eddie and Liz,” “Debbie Gets Her Man Back?” and “Eddie’s Taylor-Made Love Nest.”

I found the wartime love affair between Jessica and Roger more depressing this time than in previous reads of Gravity’s Rainbow. When we first meet them, we get one of the best lines in the novel: “They are in love. Fuck the war.” But it is the war that licenses their love; in its absence (or, really dormancy), a bureaucratizing control subsumes their ardor. They fail.

The Lovers card from the Rider–Waite tarot deck

10 The gerund dreaming here helps to foreground Roger’s current tabloid-headline-revenge-against-the-powers-that-be-fantasy as fantasy while also analeptically connecting the post-WW2 Counterforce’s nebulous mission to the fallout of the French Revolution. Dreaming also suggests that Roger is the “narrator” of this section; it also reminds me of Roger’s mentor Pirate Prentice, whose dream (of failed escape, “all theater”) initiates Gravity’s Rainbow. Pirate’s psychic power is to inhabit the fantasies of others; this is also Thomas Pynchon’s power.

11 In the second edition of his A Companion to Gravity’s Rainbow, Steven Weisenburger gives the following gloss:

If Roger Mexico is dreaming of these evenings, then his dreams contain a warning. Thermidor was the eleventh month of the French revolutionary calendar, corresponding to the period from July 19 to August 17. Moreover, it was on the eighth of Thermidor, in the French Revolution’s second year (in other words, July 27, 1794), that Robespierre, Saint-Just, and other leaders of massive redistribution of wealth and upheaval of the aristocratic order, known as the Reign of Terror, were arrested and, the next day, executed.

Weisenburger’s annotation here is a significant update from the Companion’s first edition, which essentially gives a brief definition of what Thermidor was without any greater political or historical context.

The Pynchon Wiki Gravity’s Rainbow annotation gives the following,  which repeats (or precedes?) Weisenburger’s note, adding also that, “In one of his newspaper articles later, Pynchon would speak of the Nixon years as a ‘Thermidorian reaction’ to the 1960s.”

I have no idea what “one of his newspaper articles” is being referenced here. What immediately came to mind was likely “Is It Okay to Be a Luddite?” or “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” both of which appeared in The New York Times, and neither of which, as far as I can tell, use the phrase “Thermidorian reaction” or “Nixon.” (In “Luddite,” Pynchon does refer to the French Revolution—and also gives us a nice little summary of Roger’s complaint against Power in our little passage here: “there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed”). The closest phrasing I can find to the Pynchon Wiki’s framing comes from a 2016 essay by James Liner that primarily deals with Inherent Vice. Liner writes: “Even in the Thermidor of Nixon’s 1970s, on the eve of the Reagan/Thatcher ’80s, Doc holds fast to utopian hope and the possibility of antisystemic praxis.”

Execution de Robespierre et de ses complices conspirateurs contre la liberté et l’egalité : vive la Convention nationale qui par son energie et Surveillance a delivré la Republique de ses Tyrans

12 Doomed pet freaks. The money guys will put the counterculture on the market as a Fuck You to freaks and rubes alike, icing on their cake.

Don’t legitimize their grasping at capital as culture. 

We might be freaks, but We are not doomed and We are not Their pets. 

Mass-market Monday | William Melvin Kelley’s dem

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dem, William Melvin Kelley. Collier Books (first Collier edition, 1969). Cover art by Leo and Diane Dillon. 141 pages.

Possibly one of my favorite covers by the Dillons. dem is not Kelley’s best novel–that would be Dunfords Travels Everywheres—but his knives are out here and the book is very funny. Thankfully, WMK’s books were reprinted a few years ago (used copies of his first novel A Different Drummer aren’t hard to find, but the rest are). Here’s a bit from my riff on dem back in 2020:

Kelley’s style in dem is choppier, sharper, more cartoonish than his Faulknerian debut A Different Drummer and if dem skews towards absurd irony where Drummer was heroic-tragic, both novels are rooted in intense anger tempered by strange empathy.

As its subheading attests, dem is, like Drummer, a take on white people viewing black people, and over a half-century after its publication, many of the tropes Kelley employs here still ring painfully true. His “hero,” Mitchell Pierce is a lazy advertising executive, bored with his wife, a misogynist who occasionally longs to return to the “wars in Asia.” He’s also deeply, profoundly racist; structurally racist; the kind of racist who does not think of his racism as racism. At the same time, Kelley seems to extend little parcels of sympathy to Pierce, even as he reveals the dude to be a piece of shit, as if to say, What else could he end up being in this system but a piece of shit?