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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?

Mass-market Monday | Arkadi & Boris Strugatski’s Hard to Be a God

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Hard to Be a God, Arkadi & Boris Strugatski. Translation by Wendayne Ackerman. Daw Books, first edition, first printing (1973). Cover art by Kelly Freas. 205 pages.

Like many anglophones, I first sought out the Brothers Strugatsky–which I will continue to spell with a final –y here, in line with the spelling variation I’ve used on this blog for years now, while also above conceding this 1973 Ackerman translation uses the –i variant—like many anglophones, I first sought out the Brothers Strugatsky sometime after seeing Andrey Tarkovsky’s 1979 film Stalker, an adaptation of their 1972 novel Roadside Picnic. And, as I expect is the case with many anglophones seeking out Strugatsky novels, I had to wait quite some time to get my hands on one. The English translations of the Strugatsky’s novels were out of print and hard to find second hand.

In 2012, a new translation of Roadside Picnic by Olena Bormashenko was issued by Chicago Review Press; it was the first one I was able to get my paws on. Over the next decade CRP would release several more Bormashenko’s translations of Strugatsky novels, including Hard to Be a God. It was actually this translation of Hard to Be a God that I read, not the Ackerman version above, which I was stunned to find used and in pristine condition a few years ago (I paid about three dollars for it). Bormashenko’s translation came out a year or two after Alexei German’s film adaptation came out (or at least became available for me to watch on Netflix a dozen times over six months). It would be silly to say the book is “nothing” like the film, and the book is very good, but German’s film is a masterpiece. Those interested in the Strugatsky’s sci-fi might want to start with Roadside Picnic; I think my favorite that I’ve read so far is Snail on the Slope.

The translator of this edition, Wendayne Ackerman, also translated Stanisław Lem’s 1964 novel The Invincible, working from a German translation of the book and not the Polish original. Her bread and butter though, it seems, was translating dozens and dozens of novels in the German space opera franchise, Perry Rhodan.

Kelly Freas, the cover artist of this edition, had a long and extensive career creating sci-fi covers and illustrations, including covers for novels by Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delany. I like his cover (and love the font!), even if it’s a bit to King-Kongy for the novel.

On Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, pp. 188-222 (black brows, white silk, silver belt, golden syringe)

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Previously on Blue Lard…

pp. 1-47

pp. 48-110

pp. 111-61

pp. 162-87

The following discussion of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in translation by Max Lawton) is intended for those who have read or are reading the book. It contains significant spoilers; to be very clear, I strongly recommend entering Blue Lard cold.

We’d left off with the Earth-Fucker’s successfully sending an enormous frozen cherub with enormous frozen genitals backwards in time to land in the middle of the Bolshoi Theater in the Spring of 1954. The alarmed comrades in the audience are (momentarily) pacified by Joseph Stalin’s chief advisers who are in attendance, even if their Leader is not.

In our—which is to say our historical timeline as persons in this historical world, and not our timeline as in our timeline as readers of this novel—in our own timeline, both Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria, the head of his secret police, died in 1953. But the world of Blue Lard is quite different and Beria and Stalin are both quite alive.

Stalin is somehow extra-alive, ultravivid, a kind of holographic pop art caricature of himself whose bearing, attire, and aura seem to owe more to glam rock and Hollywood than drab Mao tunics. We first meet him as his lieutenants try to give him the news of the time-travelling ice cone. His private rooms are opulent pink marble, adorned with Chinese rugs, vases, and priceless art, and attended by “Uzbek governesses in silk Uzbek dresses, bloomers, and tubeteikas” — all guarded by Sisul, his “personal servant” who sleeps like a guard dog upon a carpet in front of Stalin’s rooms. And Dear Leader himself?

The leader was tall and well built with an open, intelligent face that looked as if it had been carved from ivory; his short-cropped black hair was streaked with gray, his tall forehead smoothly intersected with the beginnings of his baldness, and his beautiful, black brows smoothly arched up from his lively, penetratingly brown eyes….Stalin looked to be about fifty years old. He was dressed in a kosovorotka of white silk with a silver belt and tight pants of white velvet tucked into patent leather white ankle books lacquered boots with silver embroidery.

An aging rock star. But he still has the juice.

And no wonder Stalin is aging. When we first meet him, he is berating his sons Yakov and Vasily who are in full evening cross-dress:

A long evening dress of black velvet hugged Yakov’s thin, muscular figure; it was fastened with a diamond scorpion and emblazoned with white spots upon its wearer’s miserly bosom; his curly, chestnut-colored wig drowned in the dark-blue boa around his naked shoulders; black mesh gloves, one of which was torn, reached from his thin, feminine hands to his forearms; three rings of white gold with sapphires and emeralds and two platinum bracelets with the tiniest of diamonds decorated his hands and wrists; his thin face, with his father’s distinctive features, was covered in a thick layer of powder, which couldn’t disguise the swelling of his bruised right cheekbone; his eyes, made up with blue eyeliner, were fixed on the floor; he held a thin snakeskin handbag underneath his armpit. Vasily, short and very portly, was dressed in a beige crepe-de-chine dress with a standing collar and high shoulders cascading down to the floor in tiny ruffles and embroidered with peach-colored roses upon the bosom; a large pearl dangled from his neck along a long, thin chain; his chubby hands were squeezed into white kid gloves soiled with filth from the street; though his blond wig had lost its initial shape, there was still a mother-of-pearl comb stuck into it; his chubby neck was covered with ribbons of black silk; his puffy, painted face, with an abrasion on its chin and features that very much recalled his mother’s, also looked down at the floor; a white patent leather bag on a massive golden chain dangled down from the leader’s youngest son’s shoulder.

Perhaps I have over-quoted here–and I will do so, I fear, in a moment–but I am in love with Sorokin’s lush descriptions of opulent decadence in these scenes (captured in the blue warmth of Max Lawton’s translation). Sorokin’s not exactly crafting a satire or a parody in the alternate Soviet reality he’s ushering us through. Sure, there are satirical and parodical elements and devices, but Sorokin weaves them into something odder, something harder to recognize. It’s beautifully grotesque, and while the bruised cross-dressed half brothers’ attempts to get laid in a fine restaurant and ending up in a brawl is played for slapstick laughs, there’s also real pathos to the familial dynamic Sorokin establishes among the Stalins. And, as I promised to over-share, let me give a description of the rest of Stalin’s family when his second wife and his only daughter enter (giving the half brothers some reprieve):

Both spouse and daughter were dressed in the traditional Russian style. Alliluyeva was wearing an evening dress of apricot-colored silk with a sable fringe and a pearl necklace infiltrated by a large ruby at its lowest extremity; her beautifully styled dark-chestnut hair was fitted into a samshara cap covered in pearls; hanging from her ears shone diamonds on ruby pendants and on her chubby hands gleamed a heavy bracelet and two enchanting diamond rings that once belonged to the Empress Maria Feodorovna. Stalin’s daughter’s slim figure was beautifully enveloped in a tight whitish-grayish-lilac sundress embroidered with gold, silver, and pearl; Vesta’s head was ornamented by a pearl- and diamond-covered kokoshnik and coral threads were woven into her long black braid; dangling from her ears blued earrings of turquoise and pearl and her fingers glittered with emeralds and diamonds.

The lush decadence of the Stalin clan in the second half of Blue Lard mirrors the sordid partying of the BL-3 team way back in the future (?), in the book’s first section (perhaps the monastic Earth-Fuckers, chaste in the main, despite their moniker, mediate these depraved poles). Sorokin’s style is highly-cinematic, and the second half of Blue Lard is particularly filmic, recalling the glittery surrealism of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. But if there’s a tinge of Jodorowsky, there’s also a big dose of Pasolini’s Salò. (Writing this now, I realize that maybe the happy (?!) medium or synthesis of this decadent filmic axis is the comedy/horror of Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover.)

Blue Lard’s Iosif Stalin exudes a glamorous depravity that’s both charismatic and menacing. Again, Sorikin crafts him into a heightened, pop art reinvention of his historical counterpart. Sorokin’s Stalin dons high-neck collars under bottle-green suits, pomades his thick black hair into a pompadour, and sports a thirty-karat emerald pendant. He’s also addicted to an unspecified substance, which he consumes in an elegant ritual involving a mobile marble column:

Atop the yellowed marble of the column, there was a thin, golden pencil case. Stalin picked it up, opened it, and took out a small golden syringe and a small ampoule. With a deft and laconic motion, he broke the ampoule, filled the syringe with the transparent liquid from the ampoule, opened his mouth, stuck the syringe under his tongue, and made an injection. He then put the syringe and the empty ampoule back into the pencil case and onto the column. This entire procedure, which had long been part of the leader’s life, described and elaborated thousands of times in dozens of world languages, captured by hundreds of film cameras, embodied in bronze and granite, painted with oil and watercolor, woven into carpets and tapestries, carved into ivory and onto the surface of a single grain of rice, glorified by poets, artists, scientists, and writers, sung in simple drinking songs by workers and peasants, was done by Stalin with such striking ease that all those present froze and lowered their eyes, as they had often done in the past.

Again, I didn’t mean to share so much of the language, but I felt myself rushing on the run of Sorokin’s long last sentence there. The decadence of Blue Lard is fun.

And Blue Lard’s fun decadence continues to ramp up as Stalin and his boys prepare for a sumptuous, sinister dinner to discuss the Earth-Fuckers’ time-travelling gift, which they bring into their dining area to observe thawing as they chow. (Meanwhile, elsewhere, Sorokin treats us (?!) to a not-quite-incestuous-but-still-disturbing-sex-scene.) Who is invited to Stalin’s special Earth-Fucker time-travelling ice-cone supper?

In addition to Molotov, Voroshilov, Beria, Mikoyan, Landau, and Sakharov, Stalin had invited Bulganin, Kaganovich, Malenkov, Prince Vasily, the sugar producer Gurinovich, the writers Tolstoy and Pavlenko, the composer Shostakovich, the painter Gerasimov, and the film director Eisenstein to dinner.

For such fine company, a fine meal must be set; again (I repeat again again), I perhaps overshare—but I’ll just lay out the appetizers here (noting that the main course Stalin’s crew will later enjoy a roast pig costumed to resemble “the Judas Trotsky”):

The table was gorgeous; Alexander I’s gold and silver tableware was laid out on a whitish-blue tablecloth, homespun in the Russian style; the abundant Russian appetizers were provocative in their variety: there was smoked eel and jellied sturgeon, venison pâté and stuffed grouse, simple sauerkraut, calf tongue and calf brain, salted mushrooms and jellied suckling pig with horseradish; a golden bear towered up in the middle of the table with a yoke over its shoulders, from which were hanging two silver buckets filled with the oily gleam of black beluga caviar and small, grayish sterlet caviar.

The dinner scene is comic and menacing, giving voices to the various Soviet luminaries and artists assembled. The filmic quality again recalls the aforementioned The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover, as well as the infamous dinner scene in De Palma’s The Untouchables. The violence here never reaches those limits, but it is still grotesque and climaxes in a (literal) punchline.

The night ends with the cone finally cracking, revealing “A frozen giant with monstrous genitals and a small suitcase in his lap was left sitting atop the pallet in the melted water and surrounded by chunks of ice.” Beria and Stalin share an amusing exchange about the creature’s enormous pecker (“How they must love their native soil,” Stalin muses of the Earth-Fuckers), before taking the briefcase and retiring for bed (to Beria’s apparent chagrin).

Next time on Blue Lard: The return of AAA aka Anna Akhmatova and the first appearance of Nikita Khrushchev, whose relations with Blue Lard’s version of Stalin led Russians to protest the book by throwing copies of it into a giant sculpture of a toilet—an abject pop art stunt worthy of a scene from Blue Lard itself.

Mass-market Monday | Donald Barthelme’s Unspeakable Practices, Unspeakable Acts

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Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, Donald Barthelme. Bantam Books, first edition, first printing (1969). No cover artist credited. 165 pages.

While there is no artist credited for the frenetic, Boschian cover of this Bantam edition of Unspeakable Practces, it is likely the work of Steele Savage — compare it in particular with Savage’s cover for Ballantine’s 1969 edition of John Brunner’s novel Stand on Zanzibar.

Barthelme’s second collection of short stories (most of which first ran in The New Yorker) is larded with some of the postmodernist’s greatest hits: “The Indian Uprising,” “The Balloon,” “Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning, “Game,” “See the Moon?”….It would be an ideal starting point for Barthelme if Sixty Stories and Forty Stories didn’t already exist. I wrote about many of the stories collected in Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts a few years ago when I revisited Sixty Stories. 

And if you want to get into Barthelme but aren’t sure of where to start, you could do far worse than to hear him read his classic, “The Indian Uprising”:

A review of June-Alison Gibbons’ unsettling novel The Pepsi-Cola Addict

Edwin Turner1 Comment

Fourteen-year-old Preston Wildey-King has a lot of problems. He’s on the outs with his girlfriend Peggy. His best friend Ryan always leers at him in a funny way, and Ryan’s older brothers want him to join their gang and do crimes. His older sister Erica accuses him of stealing from her. Preston’s failing at math, and his teacher might be trying to seduce him. His mother doesn’t know what to do with him.

And he’s addicted to Pepsi Cola.

This is, roughly, the premise of June-Alison Gibbons’ 1981 novel The Pepsi-Cola Addict, a raw and distressing young-adult novel that was actually written by a young adult. Gibbons was just sixteen-years-old when she wrote The Pepsi-Cola Addict and pooled her dole money with her twin sister Jennifer to have it published by a vanity press. Two years later, after a spree of petty crimes and then more serious crimes culminating in arson, Gibbons and her sister were committed to a psychiatric hospital and confined there for over a decade. The Gibbons twins’ story was detailed in a book by journalist Marjorie Wallace called The Silent Twins, later followed by a television documentary; in 2022, Wallace’s book was adapted into a feature film of the same name.

I knew nothing of the Gibbons’ sad early life when I picked up The Pepsi-Cola Addict at an indie bookstore, intrigued by the goofy title and bright pop art cover. The jacket copy informed me briefly of the Gibbon twins’ incarceration in Broadmoor psychiatric hospital and called the novel “one of the great works of twentieth-century outsider literature,” but I restrained myself from further exploring the author’s biography until after I’d read her novel (I’d recommend you do the same, reader).

It is difficult to explain how unnerving the world of The Pepsi-Cola Addict is. Gibbons grew up in Wales, the daughter of Barbadian immigrants, but she sets her novel in a version of Malibu Beach the creation of which seems informed primarily by picture postcards and pure fantasy. Preston lives in a shabby apartment in Malibu with his mother and sister. This ratty apartment is across from the beach, where he often wanders at night. He attends something called MALIBU STATE SCHOOL, which (contrary to U.S. school customs) runs year round, even in the (contrary to coastal California meteorological customs) sweltering summer heat.

Everything is more-than-slightly off in Gibbons’ setting. She anchors the plot in realistic visual detail, but the events, mediated via Preston’s bewildered consciousness, can’t square with their own apparent reality. The effect reminds one of the sinister dread the films of David Lynch often evoke from the most mundane of images—a lawn sprinkler, a Dumpster—or the fiction of Roberto Bolaño, which so frequently gnaws at the reader’s stomach, anxiously assuring him that everything could go to shit at any moment.

There’s a grittiness to Gibbons’ version of “Malibu” that belies its pop art contours, an essential griminess that finds its most repeated expression in Preston’s constantly sweating. Our hero sweats and sweats some more. And why shouldn’t he? Preston might be confronted with radical violence or unwanted sexual encounters at any time, and even if it’s not the twin axis of sex and violence coming at him, he’s always in danger of misinterpreting the language, faces, and intentions of every single person he interacts with. But he sweats nonetheless, addict that he is.

I haven’t really touched on Preston’s Pepsi addiction, although it’s definitely a problem, although no one can quite say why it’s a problem. (And, to be clear, he’s addicted to Pepsi, not Coca-Cola, as he makes very clear to Peggy during a date gone wrong (she tries to bring him a Coke)). Girlfriend Peggy has already left Preston once before because of his addiction. Preston’s sister Erica beats him up over the apparent theft of a five-dollar bill she’d saved, which she’s convinced he’s used to buy Pepsi. Preston’s mother is concerned that the Pepsi addiction prevents her boy from his studies—and indeed, he does skip class to surreptitiously sip the sweet nectar from a can he’s hidden in his gym locker.

The novel’s opening scene depicts Preston buying Pepsi in bulk, openly at a grocery store, during daylight, but as the story progresses, his purchases become more coded in furtive anxiety and sexual confusion. Consider this night scene, where a young liquor store clerk looks “somewhat lasciviously” at Preston while he purchases his cans:

He took three cans of pepsi and walked directly toward her. She looked about twenty; her large blue eyes seemed prominent from the rest of her face. Her white pinafore dress strained across her breasts as she turned to calculate money on the large till.

Preston glanced at her hands. Finding no ring on her finger, he looked closer at her. She looked back at him.

“That’ll be one dollar, two nickels please.” Feeling the touch of her hand as he handed her the money, Preston felt a quiver pass through him. He looked intently into her eyes, his excited passion aroused as he sensed a new look come about her. Immediately a hardening pain hit him between his eyes. Preston detached himself from his trance. Hot, speechless he turned and went through the open door, carrying his cans awkwardly.

By the novel’s climax, Preston’s craving for the soda has crossed into criminal territory. He helps a gang ransack a store, but only has eyes for the fizzy dark stuff:

He watched as they pulled down the shelves, scattering food onto the floor. He watched as they raided the store tills, pushing money into their pockets. Preston glanced around nervously. His eyes rested on a familiar stack standing in the corner of the store. With one move of his body Preston was over there, fighting desperately to free them from the cardboard box. His eyes dilated; he ripped off the ring, tilting the can to his lips, as the liquid ran down his chin. The pepsi cola, cool and tingling, entered his throat, like the spray of a fireman’s hose, killing the hotness of the fire.

Have I spoiled the plot’s trajectory by sharing that Preston takes part in the gang’s crime? I don’t think so. The Pepsi-Cola Addict is a picaresque novel, sure, but it also, perhaps paradoxically to the claim I made just a few words before, has clear, linear, and somewhat tragic plot.

And that plot—well, look, I have no idea whether or not Gibbons had read S.E. Hinton’s 1967 novel The Outsiders, a seminal work of American (so-called) “young adult” fiction—but it is the book that, at least in my narrow estimation, The Pepsi-Cola Addict has the most in common with. Like Hinton, Gibbons captures the ever-present anxiety of being a teenager, that time of amorphous body and amorphous mind, that time we find ourselves an outsider among outsiders. And like Hinton, Gibbons was also a teenager writing about teenagers—again, this is truly a “young adult” novel, and to read it is to be thrust into an alienating and alienated consciousness.

It is likely though that we do not immediately think of S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders as the work of an “outsider artist,” although she likely fits the loosest definitions of that term. (The term’s originator, Roger Cardinal, didn’t really think much of the term; he wanted to use Art Brut for his book’s title, but the publisher made him go with something more “English.”) But The Outsiders was and remains controversial and still faces challenges in school libraries, even if its apparent grittiness has since been synthesized and integrated into the confines of the YA genre proper. In contrast, The Pepsi-Cola Addict truly is “outsider” (even if its author took a correspondence writing course)—the general vibe is closer to a Paul Morrissey or early John Waters film than it is the gentle realism of Francis Ford Coppola. Like Hinton’s teens, Gibbons’ adolescents have their own argot, but it is bewildering at times. Characters call frequently call each other “babe,” for example, no matter if their relationship warrants it or not. At one point, his sister demands to know where he got the “roorback” on her. Has any teen—any person, really—used the term “roorback” in slang?

I’ve neglected so much in this short book—Preston’s confused sexual/nonsexual relationships with his best friend Ryan and his teacher Ms. Rosenberg, in particular, are central to the themes of the book, and will no doubt be of great interest to many readers. I might also have made the book sound befuddling and unattractive, when, to be clear, I fucking loved it—The Pepsi-Cola Addict is odd and distressing, yes, but it’s also very well-written, somehow simultaneously naïve and sophisticated, raw and refined, resoundingly truthful and plainly artificial. It’s full of strange little flickers, images that creep into Preston’s view, never to be explored or explained, simply witnessed in a kind of anxious low-level terror. And while I’ve compared The Pepsi-Cola Addict to The Outsiders, the feeling of reading the book is much closer to, say, Ann Quin’s Berg or João Gilberto Noll’s Quiet Creature on the Corner or Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. Obviously, this book Not For Everyone, but I think it will appeal to readers who enjoy a certain queasy, semi-surreal flavor. Finally, I think the novel can and should be enjoyed outside of any lurid interrogation of its author’s mental health and unusual background. Undoubtedly, there will be some readers drawn to Gibbons’ novel by the various Silent Twins stories out there—the film, the documentary, the book…but, to be clear, 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. Recommended.

On Vladimir Sorokin’s Blue Lard, pp. 162-87 (indigo pill, fecal culture, piss blood, ice cone)

Edwin TurnerLeave a comment

Previously on Blue Lard…

pp. 1-47

pp. 48-110

pp. 111-61

The following discussion of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in translation by Max Lawton) is intended for those who have read or are reading the book. It contains significant spoilers; to be very clear, I strongly recommend entering Blue Lard cold.

We left off right before the gross abject center of Vladimir Sorokin’s novel Blue Lard (in gross abject translation by Max Lawton). The midpoint is a strange short story, “The Indigo Pill” (by one Nikolai Buryak, author of The Flood). “The Indigo Pill” is the textual tissue between Blue Lard’s warped lobes, a segue that marries opera and shit, champagne and piss. Buryak’s setting (which is to say, of course, Sorokin’s setting) is the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow sometime in an alternate 1950s—one that is, presumably, an alternate version of the alternate 1950s Moscow the second half of Blue Lard will deliver.

But “The Indigo Pill” is really about a romantic date. Our first-person narrator will escort his belle to Tchaikovsky’s opera Eugene Onegin. How might one dress for the Bolshoi?

I am wearing a lightweight ultramarine diving suit. The mask is shifted back on my head. Freshly fallen snow crunches beneath my lead soles.

Our country’s main theater is brightly illuminated. All around it are people in diving suits of every possible color and shape. I ascend the steps, stand to the left of the second and third columns, and look at my waterproof watch. 7:22. No Masha.

Don’t worry! Masha’s just a minute or two late. Our young (oldish) lovers will have plenty of time to enter the airlock and descend into the theater, the seat of post-war Soviet big-C Culture:

The hall of the Bolshoi Theater constitutes the primary sump of the Moscow sewage system. Those who are superficially familiar with fecal culture suppose the contents of a sewer system to be a thick, impenetrable mass of excrement. This is not even remotely the case. Excrement makes up only twenty percent of its contents. The rest is liquid. Though this liquid is murky, it is still possible to survey the entire hall with enough lighting––from the floor spread with carpets to the ceiling with its famous chandelier.

(By now you, sweet dear reader, know if the Blue Lard is your particular flavor or not, right?)

Sorokin’s Buryak’s “Indigo Pill” episode ends in textuality: “the Bolshoi opens like a fat book, letters running and jumping, I swallow my own head and wake up.” Again, Blue Lard is writing about writing, writing as a kind of living (or at least counter-history/future). This metatextuality evinces in one of the stranger paragraphs in a novel full of strange paragraphs—a very short paragraph, which begins right after “I swallow my own head and wake up”:

Night.

Must go piss blood. Then make myself a coffee. And disdainfully recall my own ordinary life.

The lines are presumably, at least in the text proper, the final words of Nikolai Buryak reading his story “The Indigo Pill” over a loudspeaker to the Earth-Fuckers. But might they also be an authorial intrusion from Sorokin himself who, even if he may not piss blood (or prepare coffee, for that matter), shows a disdain for “ordinary life” in his fiction? Or not.

We transition back to the Earth-Fuckers who, in a time-travel sequence worthy of the Golden Age of Looney Tunes, explode a giant-testicled babe to deliver a package of iced blue lard (and Blue Lard; and us, the readers) to Sexy Swingin’ Moscow in the Spring of 1954! We land at a “celebratory concert dedicated to the opening of the All-Russian House of Free Love” in the Bolshoi Theater.

In a novel full of twists and turns, the next few pages of Blue Lard are especially challenging. Sorokin offers up an alternate post-war USSR history radiating decadence. Of course he does not follow the “rules” of sci-fi, whereby we might be treated to exposition (or at least a brief overview) that explains the alternate timeline we are about to navigate. Instead, the transition into Blue Lard’s second half is alarming, vivid, and very funny.

A “great Russian bard” delivers a song to the Bolshoi audience from a massive pink granite bathtub “filled with a translucent jellylike substance” (he’s tub-bound from a “pathological softening of bone matter.” The audience is moved by the drama of the bard’s song, but it’s soon interrupted by the interposition of the Earth-Fuckers’ time traveling blue lard in the form of a “semi-transparent funnel about the size of a person.” Luckily Joseph Stalin’s top lieutenants are in attendance to calm the audience and take control of the situation.

The first time I read Blue Lard I went through it stunned and guffawing, jogging in places to keep up and not lingering too long for fear of getting left behind. I didn’t pick up on the significance of that year, 1954–a whole year after Stalin’s historical death in March of 1954. Rereading Blue Lard, I took the time to apply the paltry bits of Soviet history I recalled and to index the various Politburo members who show up in this section.

The predominant of these Politburo ministers is Lavrentiy Beria, chief of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. The historical Beria was responsible for purges and other crimes against humanity; some historians conjecture that Beria poisoned Stalin; Beria was executed in the summer of ’53 after Khruschev’s coup. He was also a serial rapist.

Beria explains the rude intrusion of the funnel to the aghast theatergoers:

“This is the so-called ice cone sent to us from the not-too-distant future by the Order of the Earth-Fuckers of Russia. The order will be formed from numerous smaller sects of Earth-Fuckers in 2012. In 2028, some members of the order will settle in Eastern Siberia, on Bald Mountain, in dungeons in which there is evidence of the settlements of Siberian Zoroastrians, descendants of a small sect that… it seems… fled from the great Achaemenid Empire to the north at the end of the sixth century BC. They slowly ended up in the taiga, between the two Tunguskas, then on to Bald Mountain, into the granite of which they successfully burrowed over the course of four centuries. Why? They were searching for the so-called Underground Sun, the rays of which, according to their belief system, would destroy the difference between good and evil and return the human race to a heavenly state. The Siberian Zoroastrians invented a time machine capable of sending small objects into the past. One of those objects is what you see here.”

Wait, didn’t I say this section of the novel eschewed exposition? Because that’s a lovely exposition dump there, friends!

Beria continues his exposition—if we believe it!—assuring his audience that the theater-crashing “ice cone” will likely be the last one: the Siberian Zoroastrians possessed but three time travel devices. These Earth-Fuckers blew their first load in “the summer of 1908 near Torzhok… Inside of it was a book bound in buckskin describing the history and structure of the Order. Nikolai II’s talentless government considered it to be a prank.” Again, in rereading Blue Lard more slowly and deliberately, I was attenuated enough to see the obvious cue here; namely, the Earth-Fuckers precipitated the Tunguska Event. (Blue Lard is a brother book then to Pynchon’s Against the Day.)

Beria’s audience demands to know what was in the second cone, which “destroyed a train going from Moscow to Vladivostok on July twenty-ninth, 1937.” Beria informs them the cargo “was the body of a half-human, half-animal being. A six-year-old boy with horns, hooves, and a tail. There was a tattoo on his forehead that said: ‘A Babe of the Whorish World.'” Beria helpfully adds that the corpse was pickled and then hidden. 

Beria’s audience then asks the question of Blue Lard’s second half “And where is Comrade Stalin?”

And where’s Stalin? We’ll meet him in a few pages. More to come.

The William Gaddis Centenary roundtable on “Para-Academic Venues for Discussing Gaddis” I took part in last summer is up now at Electronic Book Review (as well as other Gaddis stuff too)

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Last August, I took part in one of Electronic Book Review’s “Gaddis Centenary” roundtables. Our discussion was on “Para-Academic Venues for Discussing Gaddis,” and that conversation is live on EBR now.

I really enjoyed talking with the other invitees, although I felt a bit out of my league. The roundtable included Victoria Harding, who managed the Gaddis listserv, as well as WilliamGaddis.org; novelist and critic Jeff Bursey;  book vlogger Chris Via of Leaf by Leaf; Chad Post, host of the Two Month Review podcast and founder of Open Letter Books; and moderator Ali Chetwynd.

I think we talked for a little over an hour, and while William Gaddis, his novels, and how we share ideas about him online (and elsewhere) was the focus, the conversation went to many other places: William Vollmann, Antoine Volodine, a fuck you to Jonathan Franzen, and the revelation of Evan Dara’s true identity (okay not really that last one).

There was also an underlying sense with most of the roundtable that the internet of yore as a means of deep conversation is slipping away; Chad summed it up neatly at one point, stating that “One of the disadvantages I see with everything right now, with the blog, podcasts, and so on, is being able to reach people, because the standard mechanisms have been screwed with for so long: it used to be that Google Reader and RSS feeds were a way to keeping aware of what was coming out. You could put something up and you’d have as much space as you wanted to, you could do whatever you wanted…”

There are also lots of new pieces up at the Gaddis Centenary page beyond our fun little roundtable, including a write-up by Mark Madigan of Gaddis’s 1979 lecture “On the Theme of Failure in Contemporary Literature” at St. Michael’s College in Vermont. Madigan’s piece shares John Puleio’s photograph of Gaddis and links to Vermont Public Radio’s audio recording of the lecture., which I enjoyed listening to this afternoon as I pulled weeds from my garden.

William Gaddis at St Michael’s College, November, 1979. Photograph by John Puleio.