Tag: riffs

It still believes in night | A review of Antoine Volodine’s post-exotic novel Mevlido’s Dreams

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Antoine Volodine’s 2007 novel Mevlido’s Dreams is a bleak, dystopian noir novel set several centuries in the future in the ruined city-state of Oulang-Oulane. Here, weary revolutionary Mevlido lives in a decaying ghetto called Henhouse Four, an eerie quarter inhabited by indigents, junkies, and other remnants of failed uprisings who must contend with the giant mutated birds who terrorize the borough.

Once a soldier of the revolution, Mevlido now serves as a policeman, yet he may also be a double or even triple agent, a sleeper sent through time from a kind of liminal afterlife, a bardo between death and rebirth. The novel drifts between waking and dream states, war memories and spectral futures, as Mevlido’s fragmented consciousness becomes a vessel for Volodine’s haunting post-exotic vision of history, language, and apocalypse.

About halfway through the novel, Mevlido’s bardo boss offers a handy summary of the apocalypse:

They’ve become an inexplicable species. They are just getting out of multiple wars of extermination, but a new conflict is already in sight. The population has decreased by a hundredfold, even more. Entire continents are currently uninhabitable. Those who have survived remain socially organized, but they no longer believe in themselves, or in society. They’ve inherited political systems to which they’ve lost the keys; for them ideology is a prayer devoid of meaning. The ruling classes have become criminalized, the poor obey them. Both classes act as if they were already dead. And as if, on top of that, they don’t even care. … Something in them has changed. You’d think that they no longer have the ability to differentiate between life, dreams, and death.

Our hero will be reborn into this turmoil, his consciousness a roiling mess of anxious irreality. “Even if I’m dreaming, I’m in reality,” he concludes at one point, as if to anchor himself in his mission. What that mission is, exactly, is never fully clear to Mevlido or the reader. Or perhaps the mission is very clear; as translator Gina M. Stamm puts it in her introduction, the plot of Mevlido’s Dreams “has the elements of a fairly classic tragic romance: man and woman are in love, the world prevents their being together, man descends into tragic circumstances.” This motif repeats in dreamlike iterations in the novel; Mevlido drifts through a post-exotic wasteland following orders no one remembers giving, haunted by his dead wife Verena Becker, whose presence threads through his days like a recurring dream or a flickering film reel.

We come to learn that Verena Becker died cruelly, murdered by the “child soldiers” who were pressed in to service by agents of the exploitative upper class. In Mevlido’s present time (or, more specifically one of Mevlido’s present times), the child soldiers are now “ex-child soldiers,” reviled refugees who hide under new identities, hoping to avoid the vengeance of people like Mevlido. The vengeance is not aimed just at these foot soldiers though; one of the novel’s heroes, Sonia Wolguelane, plots the assassination of the upper-echelon genociders who, now absolved of their war crimes, continue to rule the city-state with their one-time political foes. Here is Volodine’s description of one of the men Wolguelane assassinates:

Toni Müller, forty-nine years old, delegate to the Office of Fuel, policy officer during the final project of pacification of the remaining zones, initiator of the so-called controlled genocide practice, threatened with legal action after the disappearance of the Wongres, the Spanish, and the Myrzes, sued for not having been able to provide an explanation for the mysterious annihilation of the inhabitants of the Philippines. Amnestied. Director of the petroleum trusts in the remaining zones, billionaire, numerous books of economics published in his name, numerous honorific titles. During his last self-criticism, he admitted having constantly hidden from the masses the fact that he didn’t share the household chores with his wife.

While the apocalyptic stakes here are swollen to hyperbolic levels, Volodine’s critique of how the ruling class wields power nevertheless applies neatly to our own 21st-century blues. Henry Kissinger, for example, died fat and happy. I’m reminded too here of Thomas Pynchon’s critique of power, particularly in Gravity’s Rainbow, where the narrator laments that the Nazi war criminal Weissmann will not be punished but rather elevated, set to sit “among the successful academics, the Presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost certainly there. Look high, not low.” Look low for the preterite heroes of Mevlido’s Dreams though. They are the “faded zombies, probably candidates for another hallucinatory expedition, left-behinds who imagine they will be able to leave again.”

I am making the novel sound too grim. It is rich, and much of that richness comes from a bureaucratic, deadpan humor, the laughter of exhausted ideologues trapped in their own paperwork. But what happens to faith in any ideology when it is sundered from observable reality? Consider this exchange, in which a lost Mevlido tries to communicate with a band of men who fail to recognize him as a human being:

“Incredible,” says one of the normal ones, “it’s still talking.”

“And what is it talking about?” asks the red cap.

“About the night,” says the fat one.

“It’s talking about the night?” the bare-chested one asks, surprised.

“Yes, it must still believe in night,” says one of the normal ones.

“Incredible,” says the other normal one, “it still believes in night.”

And beneath the satire, there’s love. Volodine writes love as a metaphysical condition, a persistence that outlasts ideology, memory, and even death. The tenderness between Mevlido and Verena gives the novel its pulse. It’s the one human rhythm left in a mechanical world. Stamm’s translation conveys this rhythm in clipped, moody sentences, wounded and precise.

Like Volodine’s 2014 novel Radiant Terminus, Mevlido’s Dreams operates in the twilight between horror and tenderness. But Mevlido’s Dreams is quieter, more interior—a story of a single man’s dissolution told in flickering vignettes. It reads like the afterimage of a life projected on a cracked wall.

That light, dim and trembling, is what Volodine and Stamm preserve. Mevlido’s Dreams reads not like a film script but like a film itself: shadowy scenes unfolding in silence, broken by bursts of deadpan dialogue and ghostly humor. You can see the ash swirling, hear the echo of curses in an alley haunted by mutant birds.

Oulang-Oulane feels shot through a grim lens, intense, ugly, beautiful, like something from Tarkovsky’s Stalker or a Béla Tarr film, with scenes of desolation punctuated by tenderness. Volodine isn’t cinematic because he borrows film tropes, but because he composes through atmosphere and rhythm. His sentences drift like a camera through fog and memory.

That line above—“it still believes in night”—could be the novel’s credo. Dreaming isn’t retreat; it’s resistance. Writing, too. Mevlido’s Dreams works as both a political fable and a séance for the lost, a way of keeping consciousness flickering in the dark. Highly recommended.

 

A review of Rebecca Gransden’s novella Figures Crossing the Field towards the Group

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In Rebecca Gransden’s novella Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group, an unidentified blight spreads from the south of England, driving refugees northward. Our hero, a girl named Flo, walks north through this ruined England on a quest to find her lost twin brother. In her strange journey, Flo encounters scattered figures who spill fragmented stories in broken voices. This England is barren, etiolated, and foul. Gransden conjures this apocalyptic barrenness in oblique and elliptical language. Most of the narration in Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group slips out in clipped single-syllable beats, as if the world itself has been pared down to bone. The book’s end-times aren’t explosions or spectacle but the exhausted rhythms of a world already gone, the voice itself a survivor stumbling forward, blunt and breathless. What remains is not plot so much as the scraping of words against ruin.

And yet, within that scraped-down ruin, Gransden finds a strange fullness: stark fields and broken voices bloom with uncanny images, fleeting surges of feeling, flashes of lyric intensity that make the blasted landscape thrum with life even as it crumbles. Consider this passage, in which our hero Flo encounters a band of freed apes:

Howls eke out through branch and twig, and bods slink down the fell trunks, climb in shift shads on the broke build roof, a mess of swol leaves and wet spikes. Lab apes crawl and tick, their mugs stretch flesh, their heads bolt. Freed by the flee, and left to lone, their house fell in and they, shy and of wound nerve, did peek to the wood, and then run out and claim the trees. They stay near to where they know, fear keeps them so. One ape chomps on a bat, its legs kick as it dies. Most of the lab apes have one eye, a square patch of bald skin, a rash and some scabs.

Figures propels forward with a loose, picaresque energy, its moody, elliptical atmosphere stretched across an almost shapeless structure. It’s best not to look for causality here; things just happen. This isn’t post-apocalyptic fiction. The apocalypse is underway. And Gransden’s language drifts on the fumes of that apocalypse. I often found myself reading lines aloud, even repeatedly, in gnarly little loops: “Town rats puff with nits in their ruffs” is a simultaneously abject and beautiful image. Or consider this lovely little passage:

A shock of white moth wings sings from the shrubs, makes Flo step back and near fall. White flies round her like a snow storm, and moth dust fills the small grove. A film forms on dark leaves and the air smells of old nests. Moths brush her,just close to push a soft stroke on her face. Small round white moths, small white moth round.

The monosyllabic narrative style that dominates Figures may challenge or, more frankly, irritate some readers. I found it hypnotic. Gransden’s characters are not bound to single syllables though. When Flo talks to someone she encounters (an insane royalist, say, or a man sacrificing his body as food to tiny furry beasts), they speak in normal, multi-syllabic dialogue. More fascinating is a solitary chapter that divides the novella in halves. “Public Information Dreams” reads almost like its own Ballardian short story. Told in a clinical, detached style, the chapter gives an incomplete picture of observations made from afar on two children, Kid P and Kid Q. A taste:

Observer: 35

Day: 163

10:37:45 am — Kid Q exits property by back door (3b) and moves to end of garden. Weather is bright sunshine, occasional cloud shadows. No occlusion. Kid Q walks back and forth between end of garden and house, carrying objects. Objects observed to be recording equipment as previously noted (ID476). Kid Q collects the objects together on an empty patch of lawn behind the garden shed. The patch of lawn is square and is mostly unseen from the house. It ends at an overgrown fence, approx. 6ft tall that marks the perimeter boundary of the property’s rear. Beyond the rear fence are fields but the garden is not visible from this location due to the density of the foliage (full description and photographs of the layout of the property and garden are included in additional notes, at this time in the process of compilation). Kid Q assembles the recording equipment. Video camera on tripod is situated in the corner behind the shed and arranged to point across the lawn square diagonally, taking in as much of the space as possible.

10:52:13 am — Kid P exits house by the open back door (3b). Observed to have a listless demeanour. Kid P joins Kid Q. Kid Q and Kid P engage in long conversation (see transcript).

Are Kid Q and Kid P Flo and her brother? If you care, this book probably isn’t for you.

Too, Gransden refuses to settle Flo’s quest—or the apocalypse itself—into any final meaning. The ruined England she describes is not a backdrop but a language, one that stutters, doubles back, and opens fissures rather than closing them. Flo walks north, chasing the shadow of her brother, but whether she finds him, or whether there is anything left to find, hardly matters. What matters is the walking, the scraping of words across ruin, the pulse of strange life inside the waste. Figures Crossing the Field Towards the Group dwells in that space where endings blur into continuations, where survival is indistinguishable from loss, and where language itself flickers like the last light left to see by. Strange, gnarly, alive–great stuff.

A put-upon frogman with too little oxygen vs. his angry father in Markus Werner’s novel The Frog in the Throat

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The hero of Markus Werner’s 1985 novel The Frog in the Throat is Franz Thalmann, a disgraced, divorced, defrocked clergyman, who lives ashamed and diminished, yet nevertheless resilient in a philosophical recalculation of his life. There’s a major complication to Franz’s reevaluation though: the memory (or ghost?) of his stern father Klement turns up as a literal (or is it just metaphorical?) frog in his throat. Klement presents as a tragicomic, pestering apparition who ventriloquizes his son—and the novel—with rural grumbles. He milks cows, rants against modernity, and accuses Franz of having betrayed the world he was born into. In Michael Hofmann’s translation, Werner’s prose is crisp, dryly mortified and quietly savage: intimate cruelty turned into a dark, pinprick comedy about guilt, family, and the stubbornness of provincial life.

The voices of son and father drive The Frog in the Throat. These voices collide in bursts that never find harmony. There are ten punchy chapters: Thalmann the Younger takes the odd chapters; Daddy Klement narrates the even ones. Franz’s chapters are philosophical, discursive, and given to a choppy, aphoristic rhythm. (Franz does, however, declare at one point, “Well. I’m not a philosopher, am I. I’m a put-upon frogman with too little oxygen.) Klement’s sections are denser and earthier, but, for all their ravings and rantings, somehow easier to digest. The voices prickle and stick, evoking that ancient tale, a failure to communicate. This is not a duet, not a dialogue.

Franz, helming the novel’s odd chapters, takes the lead. Here’s childhood, adolescence, nascent adulthood, distilled into fragments:

Obedience. Belief. Suffering. Instructions followed. Expectations fulfilled. Said yes and please and thank you and three bags full, sir. Controlled stray impulses. Cleaned teeth, ditto ears. Swilled elderberry syrup. Studied the Good Book. Knew mastery and eventually self-mastery. Did what was dinned into me, and eventually started doing some dinning of my own. Shoveled snow. Madonnified women. Got in shape. Fiddled. Suffered. Was afraid. Could barely stand Father’s glower. Rarely laughed. Prayed. Fed swine. Visited libraries. Mucked out the cowshed. Dogmas, apologias, ethics. Kissed Helen. Struggled for purity. Homiletics, catechesis, liturgy. Forswore eggs. Was afraid. Was good. Marriage. Ministry.

Franz betrays Helen not in a torrid tryst or a meaningful long-term affair with an extramarital soulmate. It’s a one-off, an almost comically ordinary lapse. It’s not a fling; it’s a thing that happens—and yet it detonates his life, initiating an existential crisis in Franz-as-preacher:

Once it’s been understood that our existential crisis is first and foremost a crisis of our senses, then in spite of metaphysical obfuscations we can see the therapy: The extension and promotion of sensuality. An expansion of the realm of the senses. Humanity will only have a future if we are successful in establishing a new Age of Tulips. The individual sets aside his gloom as soon as he feels his body is a house of joy. A precondition for this is moral enfeeblement, because morality has seen its role for thousands of years as an impediment to French kisses. To put it briefly: Traditional morality impedes sensuality.

Franz’s desire for sensuality is undercut by an intellectual airiness, a quippiness of the spirit. Our man is full of aphorisms:

Castrate the fathers, gag the mothers.

and

I say again, gladly: Happiness is remote.

and

Cleared out the attic, threw all the rubbish away. My concern: The head empty of rubbish and without level crossing attendant will produce badness.

and

Humor, though. Almost eludes description. Strangely adorable bastard child of love and wistfulness.

You can throw a small dart in this short book and find a nice line from Franz. (I plucked most of these from very early in the novel, before too much of the (non)plot develops.)

But back to our Franz’s claim that “Traditional morality impedes sensuality” and thus human joy requires “moral enfeeblement” — a problem for a one-time theologian.

In contrast, Franz’s father Klement expresses an earthy sensuality in each of his chapters; he milks his cows and reflects on their udders, their calfing, their literal breeding. His bovine reflections drift into memories of his family, sketching out the often painful history of his children. We also come to see that, like his son, Klement is an outsider. He doesn’t quite fit in at the local pub. The other patrons can’t comprehend his contempt for the modern world.

Some of the finest moments in The Frog in the Throat happen when Franz wanders into a theme that Klement, grumbling from the cowshed, will half-pick up on in the next chapter—less a conversation than a comic game of misheard telephone. These echoes and prefigurations create a thematic tone, however discordant. Take for instance middle-aged Franz, feeling as if he’ll never really mature:

I’ll be fifty soon and I wonder what being grown-up will feel like. Was I grown-up when I turned twenty-two? For a bet, then, I ate a coffee cup. No problem. My stomach was equal to the challenge. Today, I poke at my sauerkraut. An un-grown-up way of behaving, only confirming one’s suspicion that being grown-up, like everything else, is a passing condition.

And a chapter later, Klement confirms Franz’s intuition:

People remain a mystery, you can read a hundred books and you’ll be no closer to understanding them, that’s my view, and when I was younger, I always used to think: When I’m older, I’ll work it out. You see, when you’re young, you see old fellows with white hair, and you think: They may be old and knackered, but they have experience of life, they’re not floundering like us, and maybe they have wisdom. And suddenly you’re old and gray yourself, and you realize that’s all you are, old and gray and just as clueless as you ever were, and so I say: No one’s got the secret. I often think we should view everything from above, we should look down on the world from way up high, and who knows what we would see, what connections, what never-guessed bridges and linkages, or then again maybe not. What a tangled mess, what a confused jumble, I don’t know.

Perhaps the two preceding passages might give a prospective reader the incorrect impression that The Frog in the Throat is a dour novel; it is not. It is often quite funny and quite moving. It’s easy to identify with Franz’s groping questions, and as the book progresses, we come to see under Klement’s anger a wounded pathos. Perhaps the father’s name is not ultimately ironic; perhaps there is a mercy in his haunting his son. Maybe Franz sees the past with new eyes (or, rather ears) through his father’s visitation. But I’m inclined to agree with translator Michael Hofmann in his introduction, when he suggests that “reconciliation is out of the question, but equally there is no possibility of not laughing.”

Synthesis between father and son was never the goal of this novel, let alone a metaphysical coherence. Rather, Werner seems to express his own literary ambitions most directly near the end of the novel, when his antihero Franz declares his admiration for novels that

…are subversive, making clear that their authors, in writing them, did so to avoid doing something far worse…the books that crackle subtly, the semi-house-trained powder kegs of books, the incautious, unconsidered, and if you like erroneous ones…

I’m not sure that The Frog in the Throat is a powder keg, but it does crackle subtly.

I have perhaps overshared Werner’s prose in this review. The truth is I just really loved the way his sentences stack up. And I must again applaud translator Michael Hofmann’s work here; his new  translation of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz was one of my favorite reads in recent memory. So I’ll share one last stack of sentences, again from a Franz section. It’s a passage I dogeared, perhaps thinking it exemplary of the novel’s sharp pacing and shifts between pathos and dark humor:

In the morning I’m miserable, at night I’m scared, and during the day I am at pains not to attract attention, putting one foot in front of the other, forming sentences, combing my hair, leaving tips for the waitstaff and buying five tomatoes and answering the telephone in my best and brightest voice, reading this and that in the newspaper, not killing myself, showering regularly. And I give advice to people and listen to them and feel moved by their confidence in me. I sit around, I drink, I brood, I pat myself down for flaws and find many and each evening I say: Starting tomorrow I’m going to get a grip on myself.

—but really it’s that last clause there hanging from the colon that I most connect to. For tomorrow, I too will get a grip on myself.

Highly recommended.

 

 

Birthday stacks | Not really a blog about Biblioklept turning nineteen

Biblioklept7 Comments

A few weekends ago we did the take-your-kid-to-college thing, made the ninety-minute SW drive to Gainesville, FL to move our daughter into her first place on her own. She’s living in the same apartment complex her mom lived in, only under a different name. (The apartment complex has a different name. Not my daughter or wife — although I guess my wife has something of a different name, having taken my own last name up as hers.) There was some nostalgia, some weird feelings, etc. But mostly excitement, followed by backache, muscle ache, and an intense week of schlepping even more stuff around my house, cleaning, painting, refinishing, etc. as we repurposed our daughter’s room into an office and my wife’s old office into a studio space for our son.

This process displaced many many books. The house was already littered with stacks, with at least two established semi-permanent piles of incoming volumes and TBRs and etc., but somehow all the furniture relocation led to an entire bookcase heading south and west of Biblioklept World Headquarters. I culled what I could and vowed to get to the rest later. And here we are.

I started this blog on 9 Sept. 2006, nineteen years ago today. I don’t think I would have remembered this connection, even though I’ve blogged about Biblioklept’s birthday several times before, if I hadn’t heard the local sportscaster on his local morning-commute sports show give a shoutout to his wife, whose birthday is today. I thought, Oh, that’s Biblioklept’s birthday too.

(The local sportscaster’s wife is his second wife, or maybe third, I’m not really sure. But he used to be married, way back in the gay nineties, to the news anchor. They were our little big town’s version of a celebrity couple, maybe. (I remember I took a date to Barnes & Nobles and then the Chili’s by the Barnes & Noble — these places are long gone — and I saw the sportscaster and his anchor wife bickering in the Chili’s parking lot before I ate fajitas or whatever.) The sportscaster’s news anchor wife had an affair with the weatherman, a bold blond surfer specimen who frequently wore suspenders on air. This affair was something of an open secret, and I think some of the people involved were fired, or shuffled to different networks. It’s like the most low rent version of prime Fleetwood Mac you could imagine.

Anyway, the anchor and the weatherman are still married. He still does the weather and she’s the mayor of the city now. Her ex covers local sports on TV, the web, and the radio. I listen to his show in the mornings as a diversion from reality. It’s not very good, but it’s better than the complacent centrism of NPR. I haven’t been able to listen to music on morning drives in decades (I would have to pull the vehicle over and weep); I cannot follow audiobooks or even podcasts in the mornings; I take the inane meaningless chatter for aural breakfast. Today was the sportscaster’s current wife’s birthday. And Biblioklept’s.)

So well and anyway, I thought, I should do some kind of birthday post for the blog. So again, here we are. (Or maybe you have wisely left by this point.)

How about those promised stacks, those totem poles that keep getting moved from room to room? Here’s one:

What these books have in common is that some of them used to be in a bookcase that is now in Gainesville and I don’t know where to put them. All the B.S. Johnson books came from a B.S. Johnson jag I went on a few years ago, and they ended up tucked away — can’t stick them on the shelf of American postmodernists, right? And Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry? What an amazing novel? How have I not reread it. I got the Tim Tebow and Werner Herzog books for Christmas and I read them both. José Donoso’s The Obscene Bird of Night is maybe my richest reading experience of the past year.

Here’s another picture of a stack of books:

I got another copy of Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway a few weeks ago, which I think led to me pulling out some Woolfs (Wolves?); everything else here seems random, chaotic, emblematic maybe of my self-disgust—what am I doing with all these books? Of course I want to own a hardback first of Angela Carter’s Wise Children, even if I can’t find a proper home for it, right? And why wouldn’t I snap up every Alasdair Gray novel I come across? I think all these Evan Dara books were stacked up in the same missing bookcase that the B.S. Johnson books were stacked in; now they are loose, reminding me of the novelist’s diminishing career. Do I really need to hold on to Permanent Earthquake? The novel is terrible and the book itself is a cheaply-bound print-on-demand thing. It makes me feel sad. The Lost Scrapbook is amazing.

I was 27 when I started this blog.

What am I even doing here?

The Gordon Lish books were almost certainly smashed up against the B.S. Johnson and Evan Dara books — I think I wasn’t sure where to shelf them. I have been very mad at Gordon Lish for a few years now for reasons I promised not to divulge but which basically have to do with his being a flaming asshole. I finished Markus Werner’s novel The Frog in the Throat a week ago and the ending made me tear up. It’s a novel about aging and failure and fear; it’s very, very funny. The late great David Berman once said that Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers was his favorite novel. I loved it and I suppose I’ll refuse to read another Robert Stone novel. (Why?)

For some years, David Berman kept Biblioklept on the blog roll of his blog Menthol Mountains. That’s like the proudest I’ve ever been of anything that ever happened on this blog. I miss him.

Last stack — not really the last stack, there are at least three others, but I’m getting tired of this, in several senses:

John Keene’s collection/semi-novel Counternarratives is one of the best things I’ve read in forever. He refracts history through these layered polyphonic fictions that pull truth from the margins. My favorite piece in the collection reads like a riff on Melville’s Benito Cereno. I read Leonora Carrington’s novel The Stone Door, realized I misread it, then read it again. I have about four tabs open attempting to properly review it, but alas! I don’t know. I keep failing to find a grip into Di Benedetto’s The Suicides; maybe it’ll take soon. I started reading Antoine Volodine’s Mevlido’s Dreams around 12:30am this morning. It’s much funnier so far than I would have imagined. I’d mislaid the novel maybe a year ago; it was in a pile in the back of a bookcase that is now south and west of here.

I don’t have a way out of this post. I’ll do this blog at least one more year. Odysseus did twenty years, right? That’s a ridiculous stupid fucking sentence, the previous one.

This summer has been the weirdest one of my life, but it’s over now, right?

Paul Kirchner’s metaphysical trip continues in The Bus 3

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Paul Kirchner’s surreal comic strip The Bus is a looping, deadpan fugue of modern alienation and mechanical ritual, where a lone Commuter drifts through absurd, Escher-like permutations of transit life.

The Commuter’s foil and ferry is the titular bus (which Kirchner himself described as “demonic” in a 2015 essay in The Boston Globe); his Charon (and, really, partner) is the bus’s Driver. Each Bus strip is a double-decker one-pager rendered in precise black ink; most strips are wordless and consist of six or eight panels. Kirchner uses these constraints to conjure metaphysical gags that upend the banality of everyday existence. The previous two sentences that attempt to describe Kirchner’s formal techniques are a poor substitute for an example — so here is an example:

The strip above is the first entry in Kirchner’s new collection, The Bus 3. This strip neatly ushers us into The Bus’s charms. Old partners Commuter and Driver reunite; the bus subtly transforms into a theater; the Commuter turns to witness the loop start anew. Is there an exit? And would the Commuter want to escape the loop?

The second strip reaffirms Kirchner’s commitment to the Commuter’s eternal return. Our hapless hero is a kind of chthonic demigod, simultaneously plastic and immutable, wholly absurd:

The Bus’s first route was between 1978 and 1985 in the pages of Heavy Metal magazine. French publisher Tanibis Editions republished this original run in 2012. In 2015, they published The Bus 2, a sequel of new material. In my review, I wrote that “The Bus 2, like its predecessor, is a remarkably and perhaps unexpectedly human strip.” The same is true for The Bus 3. Kirchner’s strips demonstrate that the absurdity of the modern condition, for all its dulling machinations, reaffirms humanity and the imaginative, artistic vision as a site of surreal resistance.

I kept The Bus 3 out on my coffee table the entire summer. I tried not to gobble up all the strips right away, but rather to read one or two a day, each page a small treat against the absurdity of the day. As I reached the end of the volume a week ago, I found myself strangely moved by the last three strips. Kirchner’s Möbius strips always send the Commuter back to his starting position. These last three pull the same move, but with a difference. In the first of the final three, the Commuter dies (waiting on the Driver, natch) and his spirit ascends. In eight speechless panels, Kirchner retells Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.”

The penultimate strip, a gag on Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons literally deflates the bus. The crowd has left, but the Commuter remains, stoic, waiting. And the last proper strip shows a techno-utopian future with a splendid flying bus — but our Commuter refuses to board. His neck stooped, he wanders to the outskirts of town to find the apocalyptic wreckage of his beloved broken down bus. It’s a lovely moment.

Has Kirchner retired his Commuter? Perhaps. The last page of the book shows our hero somehow looking bemused in a folding lawn chair, a cold one in his hand. He sits in front of the bus, now converted to an immobile home, scene of domestic bliss, maybe, everything tranquil and normal (just ignore the fish).

Is it really the end of service? If so, The Bus 3 offers a sweet send off for its hero. But I’ll hold out hope for one more ride. Great stuff.

Thirteen ways of looking at a portal | A review of Debbie Urbanski’s Portalmania

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Debbie Urbanski’s new collection Portalmania is a metatextual tangle of science fiction, fantasy, and horror where portals don’t offer escape so much as expose the fractures beneath family, love, and identity. Her characters navigate asexuality, neurodivergence, and the quiet violence of domestic life against an uneasy backdrop of porous reality. At any moment a portal might appear, or a mutation might take hold, or, a wife might sell her daughter to a witch to assassinate her husband. Nothing is stable in Portalmania.

There are nine stories in Portalmania. Or maybe there are ten stories. Or eleven. Or maybe thirteen. If there are thirteen stories, maybe I could riff on that Wallace Stevens poem for my review titles (that would be too fucking precious and obnoxious though, wouldn’t it).

There are nine or ten or eleven or thirteen discrete “stories” in Portalmania, depending on how you want to count or what you want to count as a discrete story. But this need to count, or, more precisely, to pin down what-something-is-and-is-not, runs counter to the spirit of Portalmania, whose heroes push back on the definitions that are literal placeholders, linguistic lines that bind identities.

Perhaps the biggest through-line of the nineteneleventhirteen stories in Portalmania is the big ole question: What is love? In the story “How to Kiss a Hojacki,” a character puts the problem succinctly, writing a note to her husband: “We need to redefine love.”

The opening story, “The Promise of a Portal,” helps to establish a realistic world punctured by magical sci-fi. In “Promise,” we come to understand portals as personal escape hatches away from the humdrum domesticity of family life. “I think you can love people–children, mothers–and still want to leave them,” the hero of the story muses. These same portals pop up throughout the collection, creating continuity so that the nine (or are we saying thirteen? I misremember) stories here read more like a loose, discontinuous novel.

The second story, “How to Kiss a Hojacki,” also introduces a sci-fi conceit that repeats in the collection. In this story women transform into “Wonderfuls” — “Hojackis,” “Smith-Smiths,” or “Tangers” — asexual beings who must fight for their autonomy against a reactionary Trumpian politician who campaigns on interring them in camps.

“Hojacki” hovers around the viewpoint of a husband who is becoming increasingly resentful and sexually frustrated with his changing wife. He is unwilling to even try to redefine love: “having sex is how people love each other,” he contends. “Hojacki” is most fascinating when set in context against the stories at the back end of Portalmania, which deal far more directly with themes of asexuality, sexual coercion, and marital rape. While it would be a stretch to say Urbanski depicts the husband sympathetically, her rendering is nevertheless nuanced enough to be later deconstructed in far more visceral detail in stories like “The Dirty Golden Yellow House,” “Hysteria,” and “Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions).”

“The Dirty Golden Yellow House” is the strongest piece in Portalmania. It rewrites “How to Kiss a Hojacki” (and reimagines Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”) from the perspective of an asexual writer trapped in a marriage marked by marital rape and emotional coercion. “Yellow House” combines elements of fairy tales and Gothic horror with the more prosaic forms of the essay and the internet forum to yield a harrowing story. “Yellow House” also quickly registers as a metatextual tale, a self-deconstructing narrative that pauses early to take would-be critics to task:

Certain reviewers and readers have already started complaining about my recent stories, both their thematic similarities and their very specific view of relationships. I have examples. From one reviewer: Other than the overt political addition to the obvious social metaphors which helps extend this to novelette length, this [one of my stories] is exactly like the same author’s [another one of my stories] in being an overlong underplotted offputtingly narrated story of a repugnant asexual wife and a repugnant husband and their repugnant relationship. From another reviewer: It [one of my stories] is probably sending a message about something—menopause maybe?… I have no clue what the ending is supposed to mean.From a reader: My takeaway is that the story [one of my stories] was an exercise in catharsis for the author, and has no real value as a morality tale beyond—

My past self slams her (our?) body against the window glass. Has she not been clear enough. Here is what she expects in my writing: revenge, on me, on him, on them, on the structure of the story itself, and if I ever consider not placing her at the bloody heart of whatever I write, she will do this to me. She acts out what she will do to me. There is so much blood.

Angry, self-aware, and emotionally scorching, “Yellow House” nevertheless offers sparks of mean humor. The narrator observes that her “neighbors staked colorful rainbow signs into their front yard: WE BELIEVE LOVE IS LOVE AND KINDNESS IS EVERYTHING.” While the sentiment of the sign might be progressive, the tautology “love is love” is reductive and unhelpful in a book where redefining what love is is the (de)central problem. 

Another highlight of the collection is “LK-32-C,” a triptych of stories about a troubled child’s fantasy world. (We might count “LK-32-C” as three stories, not one; each section has its own title.) The narratives in “LK-32-C” seem to run in concurrent yet divergent directions, where fantasy punctures reality or vice versa. In one such topsy-turvy moment, a distraught mother dreams up a magical totem of familial security: “if anyone questioned whether or not there was some love here, she could have pointed to that sphere.”

And again, in “The Portal,” fantasy punctures reality and metatextuality punctures the narrative. Our narrator interrupts building her fantasy world to tell us that,

I do realize that, as an author, I’m not supposed to let my other worlds become utopias. At least, that was one successful writer’s advice to me when I told him I was working on this story. He explained that when portal worlds are utopias, it’s like a flashing neon sign that says lazy writing. If we want such fantastic places to be believable (and who doesn’t want their writing to be believed?), they have to possess a substantial dark side.

Our author-hero’s rejoinder points out that the dark side is the absence of the utopia: “What if I’m trying to create an untroubled and pleasant world that might haunt someone for as long as they could remember it?” We’re always looking for that perfect portal.

Not everything in Portalmania works. “How to Kiss a Hojacki” has a great premise but its collapse into a political satire is dissatisfying. “Long May My Land Be Bright” is the weakest link in the collection. Its central conceit is that there are literal rifts in the USA, which create two separate antithetical political-cultural realities. It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to the sentiment here, it’s just that I think the metaphor should be pushed even further, to more absurd places.

I’m also not sure how I feel about Urbanski’s decision to include a tenth chapter in her book titled “Story Notes.” By the time I got to the (ostensibly)-last story “The Portal,” I was having a really hard time keeping all the New Criticism, death-of-the-author, grad-school reading training stuff out of my head. With its constant metatextual interruptions and its deeply– personal themes, it became very, very difficult not to read Portalmania as in part a work of autofiction. So the notion of “Story Notes” both intrigued and repelled me. Here is how “Story Notes” begins:

One of the indisputably vital roles of the modern reader is to tease out what is autobiographically true for the fiction writer versus what that writer made up in their stories. What is fiction after all if not a porthole into the author’s private life? So allow me to get this out of the way: Everything you’ve read in Portalmania (or will read, depending on your preferred order) actually happened to me. The portals, the lack of portals, the witches, the monsters, the ghosts, the murders, the space travel of beloved family members—every story in this collection is a factual account of my own experience. And now that you know this, I can spend the remaining space of these notes discussing whatever I want.

And I suppose she does discuss whatever she wants in the notes.

If we are counting “Story Notes” as a story, there are ten stories in Portalmania. If we keep reading after “Story Notes,” there is a final piece, “Coda” an unlisted hidden track of sorts. I love the decision to put this last, brief, and strong piece after “Story Notes.” “Coda” revisits the themes of Portalmania and concludes by pointing to “a terrifying and wide-open future,” which is what I suppose we can all expect as we fumble toward our own redefinition of love, storytelling, and escape. Good stuff.

Blog about recent (non)reading

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I read one novel in May 2025, the historical graphic biography The Woman with Fifty Faces: Maria Lani and the Greatest Art Heist That Never Was, by Jon Lackman and Zack Pinson. I think it was the only book I’ve read in full in the past two months. It was excellent and I owe it a full review.

I’ve read so so so many Wikipedia pages lately, tunneling down there almost every night (even all night) over the last six weeks. Last night I think I started, for some reason I can’t recall, on Julia Lennon’s page, maybe around eleven pm, and a few hours later I was reading about the visual systems of cuttlefish (this is when my wife woke up and told me to go to sleep). I didn’t start Leonora Carrington’s The Stone Door and I didn’t finish Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest Is Silence, even though they were on my cute little night stand.

I read a big chunk of The Rest Is Silence last Monday at the beach. I took my son and his friends there; despite their claims to being “goth” (or whatever, false claims) they wanted to hang out all day at Hannah Park. So we did that. I walked for a few miles and then discreetly drank a carton of sauvignon blanc and almost finished The Rest Is Silence and then promptly forgot all of the feeling of having read it, having replaced that feeling with the blazing Florida heat (a heat obscured by a heavy gray Atlantic breeze). There was a camp of young musicians wading in the water. I don’t know how I recognized them as teenage musicians, other than years of recognizing such persons in public — the same way I can recognize, say, college football coaches out for barbecue on a Saturday afternoon or late Friday. Some people just look like some people. I chatted with one of the music camp coaches. A lot of these kids hadn’t ever been to the ocean, he assured me, which he didn’t have to. Their movements against the waves showed it. I’m sure they are all graceful with their chosen instruments. Like I said, the slim novella was gone. The sand covered it over (this is a stupid metaphor; I am all rotten inside lately).

I have also not finished Paul Kirchner’s The Bus 3, mostly because I wanted to not finish it, to save it for a different shade of my disposition that is sure to arrive any day now. I love what Paul Kirchner has done, and I have never felt the strips whimsical; or, rather, their whimsy struck me as wise, a sharper whimsy. I’m having a hard time laughing lately.

I read a big chunk of an anthology called The New Gothic about three weeks ago. It was in the house we — we my family, my wife and kids — were staying at in Minori, a smallish town in the Amalfi Coast of Italy. We spent the first fifteen days of June in Italy to celebrate my daughter’s 18th birthday and high school graduation. In a lovely little house on the side of a mountain (maybe it was a big hill, I’m a Florida boy), in a small shelf of mostly non-English language books, I picked out The New Gothic and read tales by Coover, Carter, Vollmann and others. The book is a love letter to Poe, really, with a wonderful introductory essay by editors Bradford Morrow and Patrick McGrath.

The story that really stood out though was Lynne Tillman’s “A Dead Summer.” This particular paragraph made me cry:

The Mets were doing better, but with so many new players on the team, she didn’t have the same relationship to them. Her dead friend had loved the Mets too. Sometimes she watched a game just for him, as if he could use her as a medium. She was sure his spirit was hovering near her, especially at those times. But she did not speak of this to her boyfriend who was talking about breaking up. That night she let him gag her. She didn’t have anything to say anyway, not anything worthwhile. She read that the Ku Klux Klan had marched in Palm Beach.

The story is about grief and bad dreams set against a terrifying American political backdrop. The notion of witnessing something so that one’s dead friend might use your eyes as a medium is what did me in. I’ve had such thoughts a few times in the last two months after my best friend died unexpectedly, moments where I thought I might somehow channel his spirit to, say, listen to the new Pulp record. But I don’t think he’s haunting me.

(I didn’t steal The New Gothic from the house in Minori, although I thought about it for two or three minutes.)

I have almost finished reading the stories in Debbie Urbanski’s collection Portalmania (it is a “collection” but I suspect it is a stealth novel — about escapes, transitions, aesexuality, monsters, uh, portals, etc.). Review to come. (I will absolutely get might shit together, any day now.)

I read and reviewed Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s American Abductions back in March. It’s only in this stack — this organizing picture that I use as an outline — because it is the most timely novel in America right now. It is a novel I read, loved, and highly recommend. Its narrative power surpasses the timeliness I’ve imposed upon it.

I was, what?, maybe 200, 225 pages? into Stephen Dixon’s massive novel Frog before I abandoned it. I was really loving it, its tics, repetitions, its noisy monotonous howl, its droll jabs at normal fucking people. It could have been one of my favorite novels ever, I think, but I’m not sure I’ll ever wade back in. I tried a few times, but it’s all enmeshed with some bad intense feelings I felt in early May.

Which is what? I guess? another way of saying that reading is just a series of feelings for me now. Maybe at some point I thought of reading novels as an intellectual exercise, and maybe at one point I turned that into an ideal of an aesthetics of reading — but I don’t care about any of that shit now.

I believe in reading for

pleasure

pain

other feelings, in between and otherwise.

And another Moby-Dick

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Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick is probably my favorite book.

***

Years ago at an awful dinner party a man I didn’t know asked me What do you do?, by which he meant how I made money to live, or, maybe charitably, if I had a specific profession. When I told him it had something to do with literature and college students he followed up with a question no stranger should aim at another stranger-

-So what’s your favorite book then?

-Moby-Dick is my favorite book, I offered, this being my somewhat standard answer then.

-Oh no, I mean, what’s your real favorite book—not just the one you say to impress people?

–Okay Gravity’s Rainbow is my favorite book.

-I haven’t read that one yet but I like Tom Clancy too. 

***

A dear friend at our house this weekend, under truly awful circumstances, circumstances that have no bearing on this riff, claimed to have counted “eighteen copies” of Moby-Dick around the house. As far as I could tell, there are only about thirteen, including a children’s pop up version and three comic book adaptations (I don’t know how he would’ve found the comic adaptations, as they are slim and I think in drawer or box). He asked for one; I offered him the UC Press edition illustrated by Barry Moser, the one I’d used the last time I reread Moby-Dick. He opted instead for the most recent Norton Critical Edition, which a rep sent me a few years ago.

***

The last time I reread Moby-Dick I used the UC Press edition illustrated by Barry Moser. This was in 2021. I ended up writing forty riffs on the novel, likely trying the patience of any regular readers of this blog.

***

If you’re not up for forty riffs, I wrote a very short riff on this very long book back in 2013.

***

The two preceding notes are my way of saying: Moby-Dick is probably my favorite novel; it’s fantastic and I’ve written about it in both short and long form, and I think anyone can read it and should–it’s funny, sad, thrilling, captivating, meditative, beguiling, baffling–a thing larger than its own frame, certainly larger than its author and his era. And so now–

***

I have another Moby-Dick. This one is designed and illustrated by Dmitry Samarov. It’s about 650 pages, and is a pleasing, squarish shape that rests easy in the hands (a contrast to the coffin-shaped Norton Critical Editions). The pages are not too bright (I hate bright white pages) nor too crisp; the spine is not so rigid that one seeks to break it before setting about the business of checking into the Spouter Inn. It is a very readable copy — relaxed, not too heavy and not too cramped, no precious footnotes. And there are Samarov’s sketches.

***

***

Rifling (or is it riffling? I can never remember) through this edition today, reading a few passages aloud even, just to feel myself go a little crazy and then get a small relief from that craze, the dominant sense I got from Samarov’s accompanying sketches is something like this: Someone riffing along to Ishmael’s ghost-voice, not competing with it nor trying to turn the mechanics of its verbs and nouns and adjectives into a mimetic representation of action or thought. I think the drawings, as a body, rather approximate something like an aesthetic ear tuned to Ishmael’s wail: scratchy ink lines tangle into and out of shapes in a discourse with the narrative. Others tuned to the voice might on any given page jot down a note or circle a phrase or even, dare, dream of a crowded footnote; Samarov offers a sketch. His love for the novel comes through.

***

If you haven’t read Moby-Dick, you should. Samarov’s edition is a worthy entry into the fold. Check it out.

 

Riff on some Friends of the Library Sale acquisitions

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My move over the last few years when I go to a Friends of the Library Sale is to fill the ten dollar paper bag with a handful of pristine trade paperbacks I think will recoup the ten bucks in trade at my local used bookstore. I then pick through for titles to bolster my children’s growing personal libraries and for books that I might want to give away to friends, family, and students. And maybe I might get lucky with some overlooked gem — a first edition, a rarity, an oddity.

Most of what I picked up today was for my son to pick through. He took the Camus, Vonnegut, O’Connor, Palahniuk, and McCarthy. My daughter had zero interest in any of the haul.

I wound up with several of the exact same editions of titles I already own (Camus’ Exile and Kingdom; Faulkner’s A Light in August; William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch) and lots of books we already have in other editions, most of which I’ll give away or trade. But I’ll be happy to trade out the cheap mass markets of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse I’ve had forever in favor of these HBJ Woolfs (Wolves?):

My two favorite finds today were cummings’ six nonlectures (the midcentury cover is lovely) and a Gwendolyn Brooks chapbook, The Near-Johannesburg Boy:

It wasn’t until I got home that I realized the Brooks’ chapbook was signed:

I had actually found two signed Brooks’ books at my favorite local used shop, also both inscribed to “Marilyn” (one was Blacks; I can’t remember the other one; they were both priced a bit beyond my casual range).

But maybe my favorite find was this Kmart bookmark:

The Kmart bookmark was tucked into a trade paperback University of Illinois Press copy of Randolph’s Pissing in the Snow. I doubt the collection of Ozark folktales was originally purchased at Kmart. But who knows.

Pissing in the Snow was one of the first books I wrote about on this blog, nearly twenty years ago. I look forward to passing it on to a student sooner or later.

 

873 words from Stephen Dixon’s 1991 novel Frog, followed by 469 words on Stephen Dixon’s 1991 novel Frog

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Here are 873 words from Stephen Dixon’s long looping loopy lucid antilaconic 1991 novel Frog; the words are a segment of the ninth chapter, “Frog’s Brother”:

Alex was the only passenger on the freighter. His father’s patient called his son in England and asked as a favor to the man who’s treated his family’s teeth for forty years if he could take Alex aboard free. Alex was in London then, wanted to get back home, had little money, could have borrowed plane or ocean liner fare from his parents or Jerry, wanted the experience of being on a freighter during a long crossing. Though he got free passage, he asked to work without pay at any job the captain wanted him to. He’ll clean latrines, even, he said in his last letter to Howard. Anything the lowest-grade seaman does, just to get the full feel of it and perhaps seaman’s papers for a paid trip later. He was a newsman turned fiction writer. Two months after the ship disappeared a parcel of manuscripts arrived at their parents’ apartment from England by surface mail. Maybe the manuscripts he didn’t much care about. Maybe the ones he cared most about he took with him on the ship. Howard read the stories and vignettes soon after and then some of them every three or four years till about ten years ago. He never found them very good, but Alex was just starting. Two diaries and some oriental figurines in the parcel also, and lots of letters from his parents, brothers, friends. He’d traveled around the world. Saved up for three years to do it. Did it for a year. A prostitute in a dilapidated hut in a small village outside Bangkok. Why’s that experience come to mind first? It was in a letter to Howard, not the diaries. He searched the diaries for it, thinking an elaboration of it might be interesting, revealing, sexually exciting. She was fourteen years old. That made Alex sad. She asked him to marry her. She said she’d be devoted, would learn to cook and make love American, bear him many children if he wanted, all boys if he wanted (she knew how), would return to grade school. He gave her his silver ID bracelet, pleaded with her to give up prostitution. Then he did it a third time with her the same day and came back the next. Talk about hypocrisy! he said. What’s the trick of turning a customer into a suitor? he asked. But one who’ll be good to her and an adequate provider. If he knew, he’d give it to her. Sent her a pearl necklace from Manila. If he got a venereal disease from her he’d worry more about her than himself. He might go back for her before he leaves for India, or send for her once he gets back to America, and maybe even marry her when she comes of age. Keep this between them just in case it does happen. Taught English to Malaysian businessmen for a month. Met two old men in New Guinea—Canadians—who were living the primitive jungle life. They were good friends of his till they tried to drug and rape him. He’s afraid he had to kick them both in the balls to get out of there and then steal their canoe to get back to town. Fell in love with a witch. Read Proust’s Remembrances in five nearly sleepless days, an experience that’s left him dreaming of the books every night for the last six weeks. A Goan fortuneteller told him his trip would end badly. He said to go home by plane, don’t sail. Remind him when the time comes, for the man wouldn’t take any money. Had a fifteen-year-old girl in Nairobi. What can he tell Howard?—he likes young girls. It’s more than just the way their hair blows and breasts point and bellybuttons dimple and thighs are so even. Maybe it’s because of all the girls who barely let him pet them when he was a teenager. Rode a camel through part of the Sahara. Ate lizard, locusts, grasshoppers, grubs. Never felt very Jewish before till he started hitting all the old synagogues and Jewish cemeteries he could find in the Orient and Middle East. Wait’ll he gets to Poland and Prague and also tries to look the old families up. He’s afraid it’s converted him, but not to the point of wearing a skullcap. Hitchhiked with a sixteen-year-old sabra through Turkey and Yugoslavia, though she might have been younger. When she had to go back she said she thinks he got her pregnant—her device wasn’t put in right a few times, she was so new at it. He told her he’s heard that one before, but if she has the baby and the calendrical configurations fix it as his, or just if she still says it is, he’ll love and provide for it, adopt it if she wishes and take it to America with or without her or emigrate to Israel if she prefers, marry her if that’s what she wants—she’s quite striking and clever and potentially very artistic and smart. He’s written what he thinks is fairly decent work recently, he said in his last letter. He’s glad he’s found something he wants to do for the next twenty to thirty years, has Howard?

The titular “Frog’s Brother” is Alex. (“Frog,” by the way, is “Howard,” the protagonist of Frog.) Alex’s freighter goes missing in the North Atlantic; the ship is never recovered nor are lifeboats. No bodies. The only evidence of the disaster is absence.

In this absence, Frog imagines and reimagines Alex’s death at sea in different looping cycles; these reimaginings are also framed within Frog’s attempt to accurately recall his receiving the news that his brother Alex is lost at sea–was it by phone, that he received this awful news? in his other brother’s apartment? what were the specific conditions of this heartbreak?

Imagining and then reimagining the specific details of a horrifying, horrible, horrendous event is the rhetorical gist of Dixon’s 1995 follow-up to Frog, Interstate, a fucked-up eight-way riff on the narrator’s daughter’s murder by way of random highway violence.

I have read around 120 of Fog’s near 800 pages, and many of those pages feature the same rhetorical and narratological techniques or repetitions with differences that were so off-centered in Interstate: fraying phrases, looping tics, paranoid passages. In the absence of the one thing, Dixon’s narrators pony up iteration after iteration, something after something. But the narrators know that there’s not enough somethings to ever even come close to approximating everything. The iterations sharpen and highlight the beauty of the absence’s abyss.

That abyss was real, or true, or True, for Stephen Dixon, whose brother “Jimmy, a magazine writer, died in 1960 when the freighter he was on in the North Atlantic disappeared,” as the New York Times reported in Dixon’s 2019 obituary. The Times obituary continued: “Mr. Dixon felt that he was continuing his brother’s work. Jimmy Dixon had a short story published after his death.” If Jimmy Dixon was prototype to Alex Frogbrother, what are we to make of the fantastic paraphrase of his letters, above? The passage reads like a bizarre failed adventure tale, something we might expect from William T. Vollmann, who, with his heart of gold, tried to “free” sex workers. It’s also quite queasy when it comes to sex (a constant I’ve noticed in Dixon): “What can he tell Howard?—he likes young girls,” our narrator flatly, grossly reports.

The saddest and realest bit might be this though, the admission that “Howard read the stories and vignettes soon after and then some of them every three or four years till about ten years ago. He never found them very good, but Alex was just starting.” But Alex was just starting. The last bit of the section, “He’s glad he’s found something he wants to do for the next twenty to thirty years, has Howard?” seems both boon and curse, a door that opens and shuts simultaneously, cursing our Stephen Dixon, our Frog, to write write write write write write write write write…

 

 

Cristina Peri Rossi’s The Ship of Fools is a surreal novel of exile and dislocation

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The Ship of Fools by Cristina Peri Rossi, first published in 1984 and released in English translation by Psiche Hughes in 1989, is a novel of dislocation—political, psychological, and existential. Its protagonist, Ecks, drifts from place to place in a world that feels suspended between dream and memory, never quite solid: “He felt he was travelling not in space but backwards in time.” That sense of slippage—temporal, emotional, narrative—is central to the book’s effect.

Plot is secondary, if it exists at all. The novel drifts like a bottle at sea: beautiful, opaque, marked by the presence of something urgent inside—but sealed, floating, unmoored. Like Renata Adler’s Speedboat or Ann Quin’s Passsages, this is a novel that prefers jump cuts to journeys, broken signals to neat resolutions. It unfolds in fragments, circular musings, moments of stasis that shimmer with strange possibility. At one point, a character suggests that “conversation is more a question of style than ideas,” a description of the novel itself. Style is idea in The Ship of Fools. The syntax itself seems to think.

There are recurring characters, loose thematic arcs, and strange moments of connection, but the novel often seems to turn away from linearity. It’s what the book itself calls “a story without progress,” or perhaps a tapestry of passing encounters and unresolved longings. There’s a Bolañoesque sense of drift to it, too—a wandering narrator collecting impressions like scars, haunted by disappearances that resist explanation. At the same time, there’s something in the intensity of The Ship of Fools—its visceral depictions of trauma and social rupture—that evokes the furious lyricism of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season. Both authors understand that political horror isn’t always best addressed by realism—it seeps in more disturbingly through atmosphere, voice, and repetition.

Peri Rossi was herself an exile, having fled the civic-military dictatorship of Uruguay in 1972. She fled the regime, first to Barcelona and later Paris, and this personal history pulses quietly through every page. The Ship of Fools isn’t autobiographical in the conventional sense, but its texture is soaked with the disorienting logic of exile: the sense of being always elsewhere, never quite present, both seen and unseen.

One of the pleasures of The Ship of Fools is the way it captures fleeting impressions in striking, lyrical language. Descriptions of people and places often feel like fragments from a half-remembered dream. The narrator describes a girl “bursting with youth; with that radiant beauty which, more than a quality of feature or of line, is the result of organic perfection that only later would begin to fall apart, breaking its essential but precarious harmony.” Elsewhere, the sea is evoked with the precision of a surrealist painting: “Green eyes and wide sea, swinging hips and plunging necklines. The sea was rolling like the water in a glass. Or the ship was. The ship was a glass floating on the high tide.” It’s not hard to imagine Jodorowsky filming this image—bodies on a tilting horizon, symbolic without being decipherable.

Beneath the dreamlike surface runs a steady current of political urgency. Ecks is an exile, and many of the novel’s characters—some named, some merely sketched—are displaced or disappeared. “To disappear is no longer voluntary,” the narrator tells us, “but acquires passive form: ‘We are being disappeared.’” It’s a haunting line that collapses grammar and violence in a single breath. One character, laboring in a sinister “camp for the disappeared,” wonders “if there was still any point in measuring time by the clock, when it seemed like ten years to him and twenty to his friend suffering agonies about him.” These grim lines are delivered without sentimentality, but with unmistakable clarity. The book never lectures. It haunts instead.

The novel’s philosophical core is found in its reflections on art, memory, and identity. One of the longest and most striking passages describes the medieval Tapestry of Creation:

There the missing parts unfurl, fragments intimating the larger harmony of the universe. What we love in any structure is a vision of the world that gives order to chaos, an hypothesis which is comprehensible and restores our faith, atoning for our having fled and scattered before life’s brutal disorder. We value in art the exercise of mind and emotion that can make sense of the universe without reducing its complexity. Immersed in such art one could live one’s life, engaged in a perfectly rational discourse whose meaning cannot be questioned because it resides in an image containing the whole universe.

What surprises and will always surprise is the notion that a single mind could conceive of such a convincing and pleasing structure, moreover a happy one, a structure which as well as being a metaphor is also a reality.

This longing for order—however temporary or illusory—is deeply felt throughout the novel, even as its own structure resists resolution. The moment we seek meaning, it slips sideways. Identity, like narrative, fractures under pressure.

That same ambiguity runs through the book’s treatment of gender. Lucía, one of the more vivid figures in Ecks’s drifting life, is described as “dressed in men’s clothes,” her appearance perfectly androgynous. Ecks is both drawn to and overwhelmed by her. “He saw the unfolding of two parallel worlds… yet inseparably connected in such a way that the triumph of one would cause the death of both.” Later, another character remarks, “Don’t we all attribute ourselves a sex? And spend our lives proving it?” Gender is not a stable identity but a performative act—one repeated until it congeals into something that passes for truth.

Memory and history, too, are always in motion. “Ship captains and sailors of the past were those who best knew the universe,” the narrator reflects. Their journals once held the world’s accumulated knowledge: “One referred…to these journals” to understand distant plants, animals, and stars. But now, “they stopped writing and their main tasks became trade and war…Their journeys are now shorter and safer. But also less interesting.” It’s a quiet lament for a world that’s abandoned curiosity for control.

Ecks himself seems increasingly hollowed out by this world. “I stopped my work. Since then wheat and chaff have mixed. Under the grey sky the horizon is a smudge, and no voice answers.” His sense of loss—of self, of direction, of connection—is profound. “I shall lose,” he thought, and then: “I’ve already lost.” Like a Bolaño narrator spiraling through half-empty towns or an Ann Quin character trying to read meaning into chaos, he is less a man than a vessel for disappearance.

And yet, The Ship of Fools still finds a kind of poetry in this fragmentation:

Dreams have their own logic; only in the ambiguity of daylight do we need to reason and compare, to pin down the weft of things. Dreams are so persuasive, they need no argument.

Peri Rossi’s novel lives in that twilight logic, where estrangement becomes its own kind of truth. Exile, here, is not just a matter of borders—it is a way of seeing. “Those who live always in the same place… do not realize that to be a stranger is a temporary situation, one that can be altered; in fact they assume that some men are strangers and others not. They believe that one is born — and does not become — a stranger.” In The Ship of Fools, everyone becomes a stranger, even to themselves.

In the end, the novel is both deeply political and deeply personal. It captures what it feels like to live under systems that make life feel increasingly unreal, to grasp for meaning in a world of exiles and silence, to lose and keep losing—and yet keep imagining, keep remembering, keep writing. Our days, the novel suggests, “are no different from the past, except in the number of tyrants, their systematic methods and the cold logic with which they lead the world to madness.”

Although it is often bitterly funny, The Ship of Fools is not a cheerful book. But it lingers like a half-remembered dream, like the texture of a forgotten language, like a map you keep reading even after the landmarks have vanished. Very highly recommended.

Briana Loewinsohn’s graphic novel Raised by Ghosts turns absence into haunting art

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A decade ago I finally tossed out most of the contents of an old shoebox crammed with high-school nostalgia. Notes from ex-girlfriends, summer postcards, flyers from local shows, a handful of choice mixtapes. Some Polaroids. Our stupid band’s stupid lyrics, which we usually forgot or simply abandoned live. There was even a pair of fat shoelaces. The pain of return always hits me hard at such times, and I got dizzy. That box was crammed the scraps of an older life.

The preceding paragraph is an unfair opening to a review of Briana Loewinsohn’s excellent graphic memoir Raised by Ghosts. Reading Raised by Ghosts felt like opening that old shoebox: painful, dizzying, beautiful. Loewinsohn is one of us, one of us to borrow a chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks. “Sometimes I feel like I am an alien at this school…But there are other aliens here,” protagonist Briana writes in her diary.

Raised by Ghosts covers Briana’s seven rough years through middle and high school. These are the gay nineties. The narrator, like Loewinsohn herself, is about my age, which makes reading Raised by Ghosts an eerie act of self-recognition. It’s not a conventional memoir—it doesn’t hold your hand or deliver a clean, linear narrative. Instead, it moves like memory does: in flashes, in vignettes, in small sensory moments that coalesce into something greater than the sum of their parts. Everything here feels true. We have here the relics of a teenage moondream, those little ghosts of the past that flicker through memory like frayed photos freed from the rubberbanded bundle in an old Converse box. Briana’s adolescence unfurls as an ebb and flow of loneliness and acceptance among fellow weirdos. She finds her people, but never quite makes the scene; she dances at the live show but finds as much fun in playing cards in the back.

Loewinsohn’s art conveys Raised by Ghosts’ emotional weight. Soft, muted tones in drab olive and rust hues fill square panels that often resemble fading Polaroids. Candids and close-ups capture the messiness of high school. Briana is a sympathetic and endearing character, her sensitivity registering in ways she cannot understand herself, as when she skips out on a living-room VHS double feature. Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers would be way too much after the tragedy of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Loewinsohn includes full handwritten pages to accompany the traditional comic strips in Raised by Ghosts. These handwritten pages serve as a kind of diary, but often take on subtle visual changes that suggest other media. Often, the handwritten pages mimic the form of the long notes bored Briana composes in class to pass to friends. A passage composed on graph paper praises the note-writing skills of a particular friend; the technique suggests this friend prefers squares to lines. A passage on a brown paper lunch bag reflects on how Briana’s father always takes the time to write her name in detailed, expressive lettering. The variations of handwritten pages enrich the narrative and subtly inform us of Briana’s artistic development.

My favorite of the handwritten passages though is simply a list of bands scrawled on lined paper. When I got to that page, about a third of the way into Raised by Ghosts, I was already persuaded by the book–but the page of band names seemed so utterly true, so beautiful and banal. We used to do that, I thought, and: Why did we used to do that? knowing the answer has no good intellectual answer.

But let’s get to the ghosts. Loewinsohn never “shows” us Briana’s parents, yet the picture we get of them is hardly incomplete: a distant, detached mother and a father in arrested development. “I would say I was raised in an AA meeting,” Briana remarks of her mother, noting that it’s often hard for single mothers to find childcare. Of her father’s abode: “My pop’s house is a combination of Indiana Jones’ office, Pee Wee’s playhouse, and an opium den. I am kinda like a roommate here.”

Briana’s parents exist in Raised by Ghosts the way memories of the absent often do—fragmented, elusive, more felt than seen. Loewinsohn never lets them fully materialize, yet their presence, or lack thereof, shapes Briana’s interactions with her world. Neither parent offers Briana guidance. She’s a latchkey kid left to cobble her own sense of belonging among friends, music, and the small rituals of adolescence. In the absence of stability, she builds meaning from mixtapes, handwritten notes, and fleeting moments of connection.

And art. The memoir climaxes in a moment of transformation—an act of self-possession and, ultimately, self-creation. Throughout Raised by Ghosts, Briana moves through a world shaped by absence, by the ghosts of parents who are physically present but emotionally distant. Yet, in the book’s remarkable penultimate sequence, she steps beyond that absence, beyond memory’s hazy grip, into a space that is entirely her own. The panels swirl into a dreamscape of shifting lines—formless and chaotic at first—until Briana gathers them together, lassoing meaning from the void. It is a moment of artistic alchemy, where creation becomes a form of agency, a way to shape her own narrative rather than just mimic one. When she carries those lines from dream to waking life, the transition is profound: she is no longer just a kid collecting relics of meaning from the world around her—she is an artist, making meaning herself.

Publisher Fantagraphics labels Raised by Ghosts as a “young adult graphic novel,” and teenagers will likely identify with Briana’s story—the loneliness, the search for belonging, the quiet acts of self-definition. They may also feel a strange twinge of envy for a world that no longer exists. Being a latchkey kid could be lonely, but it was not without its freedoms. Those of us who were teenage weirdos in the nineties will see in Loewinsohn’s memoir not a young adult novel, but rather a reflective elegy composed by a mature artist in control of her talent. Raised by Ghosts lingers like the echo of an old song in your dim memory — you know the one, right? It’s a memoir about growing up in the margins, about finding meaning in scraps and silence, about turning absence into something tangible. It haunts, in the very best way.

Statements of missingnessness | On Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s prescient novel American Abductions

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Mauro Javier Cárdenas’s American Abductions is a novel of relentless, layered consciousness, its immersive, labyrinthine sentences pulling the reader into a fugue of voices, memories, and anxieties. American Abductions takes place in a proximal version of the United States, a digital carceral state where palefaced goons kidnap Latin Americans. Sometimes the abductees are deported; sometimes they are disappeared. Sometimes they tell stories.

The dystopia here is hardly a YA world-building exercise full of hope and heroics. Instead, the novel moves through fragmented, fevered perspectives, primarily those of sisters Ada and Eva their disappeared father, Antonio, a novelist abducted by the Pale Americans, the faceless bureaucratic enforcers of this new regime. The novel oscillates between Ada and Eva’s attempts to reconstruct what happened, Antonio’s own recursive, metafictional writing, and interjections from various other voices—family members, interrogators, digital surveillance logs—until the narrative itself becomes a reflection of the fragmented reality the characters are trapped within.

Yes, American Abductions is bleak, but it is not merely dystopian horror. Cárdenas builds his world through a dizzying interplay of language, wielding the long, unspooling sentence with the precision of Bernhard, Krasznahorkai, and Sebald. Each chapter is a single winding comma splice that careens from realism to surrealism. Cárdenas’s run-ons layer and loop back on themselves, rhetorically mirroring the characters’ attempts to make sense of their unraveling world.

The book moves forward with an absurdist energy that resists despair, its rhythms and repetitions building not just a critique of authoritarian power but something stranger, something more human—an exploration of consciousness itself, an attempt, perhaps, to make a grand “statement of missingnessness,” to borrow one of the character’s phrases.

The effect is hypnotic, dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, but often, surprisingly, very funny. There is a dark, absurdist humor in the way bureaucratic jargon collides with intimate grief, in the way digital surveillance reports are laced with banal observations, in the way Antonio’s own metafictional writing seems to both clarify and obscure the truth of his disappearance. The novel is not just about authoritarian violence but about how language itself is manipulated under such regimes—how it obfuscates, justifies, betrays, resists. At times, American Abductions reads like a political thriller rewritten as a fever dream, at others, like a linguistic experiment that spirals into a meditation on memory, exile, and state terror.

American Abductions is not just unsettlingly prescient. Rather, it obliquely underscores the U.S. surveillance state’s direct lineage to Latin America’s Dirty Wars. Governments systematically disappeared those deemed threats to the state—intellectuals, activists, ordinary people unlucky enough to be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Cárdenas’s dystopia does not just critique contemporary American immigration policies; it situates them within a long history of state-sanctioned violence in the Americas.

The novel’s themes take on chilling immediacy when considered alongside the real-world abductions of those who speak truth to power, like Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk. Indeed, the disturbing video footage of Ozturk’s kidnapping by masked men this week has gone viral, echoing the opening of American Abductions, wherein we learn that Ada has captured “that moment when the American abductors captured her father as he was driving her and her sister to school, which she recorded on her phone.” Ada’s video goes viral, mutates, becomes its own beast:

…and later, after her father had been captured and hundreds of thousands of people around the world were watching her video of her father asking what have I done, officer, the supervisory official probably watched it too and left an anonymous comment below it that said ice / ice baby great job ICE, illegal is illegal and wrong is wrong bye you forgot the crybaby in the backseat, for years Ada arguing in her mind with the thousands of messages berating her and her father, even after she discovered some of the comments had been manufactured by bots controlled by a Pale American in Salt Lake City — twelve million to go please continue to remove the illegal alien infestation — except the comments by Doctor Sueño, of course, which made no sense to anyone but her, just as it made no sense to anyone but her to feel, for no more than a few seconds, proud that the supervisory official of the supervisory official of the supervisory official in an agency building had taken time out of his busy schedule to focus on her father — if enough time passes, Doctor Sueño says, even the most preposterous possibilities will navigate the sea of your mind — cry like an eagle / to the sea — just as it made no sense to anyone but her to laugh at some of the videos her video had spawned for instance the video of her video but with sappy music instead of her sister politely asking the abductors where were they taking her father, as if someone figured hey no one’s going to feel sorry enough for you people let me add sad violin music to the video of your father saying I’ve done nothing wrong, officer, or how about the video from a self proclaimed irreverent news organization from China that, via computer animation as if from an obsolete video game, replicated the trajectory from her house to the sensitive location as if it were a car chase, the abductors rushing to drag her father out of the car as if it were a drug bust, the video game representation of Ada recording her father’s capture with her phone from the backseat of the car, waterfalls of tears surging from her eyes, no not waterfalls, more like someone’s comical representation of lawn sprinklers superimposed on the eyes of the video game representation of me…

Apologies if I’ve let the run-on run on too long — but you’ll have wanted a taste of Cárdenas’s style, no? His sentences, unbroken and unrelenting, mimic the inexorability of history itself—cycles of erasure, resistance, recovery, and repetition. American Abductions is not just a novel about the present; it is a novel that recognizes the past has never ended. Its characters, trapped in linguistic torrents of grief and absurdity, seem painfully aware that history is repeating itself. And yet, as despairing as that recognition might be, American Abductions refuses to be silent. It makes its “statement of missingnessness” loud, insistent, impossible to ignore, resisting erasure, demanding we listen. Very highly recommended.

A run-on sentence on Gabriel García Márquez’s delirious novel The Autumn of the Patriarch

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Gabriel García Márquez’s The Autumn of the Patriarch isn’t so much a novel as it is a delirium, a swamp fever, a sun-bleached hallucination stretched across centuries, a beast that coils and uncoils, bloated with its own rot, a thing that does not begin or end but only festers, looping back on itself in great, heaving tides of unpunctuated or undepunctuated or mispunctuated thought, García Márquez dragging us under, drowning us in the mind or minds of the titular dictator, a paranoid consciousness so swollen with its own power that it warps reality itself, a man who reigns forever and is always dying, whose past rewrites itself with every breath, whose power is infinite and yet always slipping, slipping, slipping through his fingers like the stolen sea, parceled off and shipped to Arizona, because why not, because what is truth if not what he declares it to be, because when you have lived for centuries, when your general is served up at a Thyestean feast, when your nation’s children are disappeared to an island, never to return, when the cattle are branded with your mark, when the very hour itself is subject to your whim, then nothing is real, nothing but the fear, the violence, the rape, the predation, the endless grinding machinery of power that must sustain itself, and so we cycle, we spiral, we convulse through six sections, six deaths, six endless iterations of his reign, six grotesque confirmations that absolute power is an ouroboros swallowing its own tail, devouring itself, erasing itself, until nothing is left but the silence of his ruin, the empty palace where his corpse will be found again and again, where his legacy is nothing but absence, and translator Gregory Rabassa—mad saint, linguistic necromancer—renders it all in English without breaking the spell, his translation a relentless incantation that doesn’t just mimic the novel’s crushing, hypnotic cadence but becomes it, suffocating, pressing, forcing you to inhabit the mind of this eternal, rotting god-tyrant, this cosmic mistake, this doomed and doom-dealing beast whose power, no matter how total, will crumble, will fade, will rot, will vanish into nothing, just like everything else.

Eight notes on Stephen Dixon’s novel Interstate

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1,  It upset me deeply, reading Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. It fucked me up a little bit, and then a little bit more, addicted to reading it as I was over two weeks in a new year.

2,  What is it about, Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate? I mean, you probably won’t like it, but that wasn’t the stupid rhetorical question that led this point. (And also but maybe like, you will like it.) Interstate was a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award. It didn’t win. The NBA’s website’s one-sentence summary fucks up: “In the author’s first novel since Frog, a Finalist for the National Book Award, a father mentally replays, in eight variations, the shooting of his daughters on an interstate highway.”

3,  There is (or is it are?) one too many esses in the NBA’s summary of Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate—there are two daughters, plural, but only one is shot, and shot tragically, awfully, fatally—and really, as its variations play out, it’s not entirely clear if anyone was shot, if anyone was even on the highway, if anyone was even real. Are all the so-called events of the novel simply (there’s no simply about it) in the narrator’s imagination? “…but there I go again, the world’s easiest and most desirable copy out, the dream,” muses the narrator at one point. Not even a dream though, it’s all just words.

4,  It’s all “just” words, and if someone told me they read and hated Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate, I’d shrug and ask if they made it all the way through all the words and still hated it. If someone told me that they made it all the way through Interstate and found it to be a strange and unappealing writing experiment, I’d mildly agree with them, and then tell them that I loved that particular flavor and if they didn’t like that particular flavor, well, cool.

5,  If someone read all the words in Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate and concluded that it seemed like an ambitious and highly-achieved creative writing exercise — writing experiment, rather — I’d likely initially agree and then hedge a bit before mumbling something like, I don’t think it was an exercise or experiment on the author Stephen Dixon’s part. It might make for experimental reading, but I think he absolutely knew what he was doing; this wasn’t practice or exercise — it was the real thing.

6, I have, thus far, done a lousy job, not even really a job, of describing the force of language in Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. Normally I’d crib a few choice passages—and to be clear, Interstate s fat and juicy with choice passages—but we are talking about long, twisty, tangled passages, sentences that go on for pages, sentences that find the predicate verb sundered for a few paragraphs from its eventual object, sentences that move us through thought, how divergent thought can be how, how imprecise, indirect, yet still sharp and often painful. An easy, lazy comparison would be to liken Dixon’s paragraphs to Thomas Bernhard’s (although Dixon denied the influence, much like William Gaddis did in his final novel)—there’s a different flavor here but our guys are working in a similar mode. (Think too of László Krasznahorkai or Gabriel García Márquez or Faulkner or Mauro Javier Cárdenas or any number of practitioners of the long paragraph). John Domini, in his contemporary review in the Portland Oregonian (reprinted in his excellent collection The Sea-God’s Herb) does a better job of describing Dixon’s style than I can do:

Characters talk themselves through backwaters of memory (sometimes creating comic relief) or sail into dreamy what-ifs, all in order to put off some looming and drear inevitability. In conversation, one may mention an important insight that he or she has to share, then spiral away through a half-dozen distractions before revealing what matters. The format feels like a natural fit to the shuttered claustrophobia of worry and loss. So do the jam-packed paragraphs, sometimes running several pages without a break. Better still, these blocks of talky phrasing flicker with light, even (every now and again) with happier possibilities.”

(Maybe I just wanted to quote that lovely phrase of Domini’s, “blocks of talky phrasing flicker with light.”)

7,  “Better still, these blocks of talky phrasing flicker with light, even (every now and again) with happier possibilities,” Domini wrote of Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate. The last of Dixon’s eight Interstates is an unexpected gift — a happy ending, or, rather a banal ending, a plain ending, an ending without tragedy or comedy or epic heroism. An ending where everyone gets to bed in time to fit in a little light reading before shuteye. It sounds hokey when I write it out, but there’s nothing trite about the conclusion. The reader purchases this moment of catharsis from all the terror (and horrifying comedy, which I’ve neglected in this riff and will continue to neglect) — the reader purchases the cathartic conclusion from the preceding horror.

8,  I wonder how I might have reacted to Stephen Dixon’s 1995 novel Interstate if I had read it, say, when it was first published, back when I was a junior in high school. Or how would I have reacted to it ten years after that, not yet a parent? (And writing these thoughts out now, I realize that, more than anything by Bernhard or Krasznahorkai or Faulkner or the other Dixon I’ve read, Interstate most reminds me of (at least at this moment that I write) of Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life. I’ve watched It’s a Wonderful Life once a year for the past four decades, finding it strangely different every few years — first baffling and even a bit scary, then boring, then exasperating, infuriating even, then schmaltzy, sentimental, ludicrous, and then magical, endearing, heartbreaking, perfect–I’ve veered off course, where was I?) I wonder how being a parent has colored my psychic engagement with the novel Interstate? I was not so much manipulated by the tragedy of losing a child through violent, chaotic, meaningless death but rather the more banal tragedy the novel repeatedly engages — losing a child through half-neglect, through half-listening, through selfishness, through an inability to focus on now — not really so much losing a child but losing out on connections, memories, time you’ll never get back. It fucked me up, Interstate, and I don’t think I’d like to go down its road again — but I loved it. Very highly recommended.

Donald Barthelme’s Forty Stories in reverse, Part V

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Previously,

Stories 40-36

Stories 35-32

Stories 31-28

Stories 27-24

23 . “A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking” (Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, 1968)

I’ve been reading the stories in Forty Stories as kinda-sorta palate cleansers, usually ingesting one or two between novels; my method is to take a few initial notes to come back to, cross-reference against Tracy Daugherty’s Barthelme biography Hiding Man, and then riff on my general impression. Sometimes a few weeks go by from the time I’ve read or reread one of these stories and the time I actually get around to writing about them. Until now, the title alone has activated some memory or aesthetic impression about the story, but “A Few Moments of Sleeping and Waking” was a total blank for me. I suppose in my memory it simply segued out of the story that preceded it in Barthelme’s excellent 1968 sophomore collection, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. That story was “Edward and Pia,” metapseudoautobiographical stand-ins for Barthelme and his third wife Birgit. “A Few Moments” is more droll low-stakes tension between the pair; there’s a little here on films and dreams and their interpretations. The best bit of the story is a moment on cabbage:

Pia was chopping up an enormous cabbage, a cabbage big as a basketball. The cabbage was of an extraordinary size. It was a big cabbage.
“That’s a big cabbage,” Edward said.
“Big,” Pia said.
They regarded the enormous cabbage God had placed in the world for supper.

22 . “The Flight of Pigeons from the Palace” (Sadness, 1972)

A lovely little story, so short and sweet it really can’t be summarized! But I’ll give it a shot: “The Flight” is a comic riff on the audience’s addiction to novelty and sensation. The third-person “we” who narrates “Flight” is a kind of postmodern carnival barker, barking new wonders into existence:

The lineup for opening night included:

A startlingly handsome man

A Grand Cham

A tulip craze

The Prime Rate

Edgar Allan Poe

A colored light

We asked ourselves: How can we improve the show?

We auditioned an explosion.

Barthelme’s not really a moralist, hardly a Hawthorne, but I think he does offer oblique lessons, or warnings really, to his reader. “Flight” culminates thus:

The supply of strange ideas is not endless.

The development of new wonders is not like the production of canned goods. Some things appear to be wonders in the beginning, but when you become familiar with them, are not wonderful at all.

The story concludes in the threatening specter of newly-contracted volcano.

21 . “At the Tolstoy Museum” (City Life, 1970)

Like “Flight,” “At the Tolstoy Museum” is one of Barthelme’s literal cut-and-paste collage stories — that is, a story to include the author’s own visual collages, juxtaposed against his verbal collages. In “Flight,” the collages seem incidental. They aren’t exactly affectations, and they don’t add anything to the story–but they don’t detract either. The visual collages in “At the Tolstoy Museum” are deployed more judiciously, serving as punchlines that resound off of the narrator’s flat, affectless pose:

I was eating a sandwich at the Tolstoy Museum. The Tolstoy Museum is made of stone—many stones, cunningly wrought Viewed from the street, it has the aspect of three stacked boxes: the first, second, and third levels. These are of increasing size. The first level is, say, the size of a shoebox, the second level the size of a case of whiskey, and the third level the size of a box that contained a new overcoat. The amazing cantilever of the third level has been much talked about. The glass floor there allows one to look straight down and provides a “floating” feeling. The entire building, viewed from the street, suggests that it is about to fall on you. This the architects relate to Tolstoy’s moral authority.

Tolstoy’s Coat

In Hiding Man, Daugherty relates that after “At the Tolstoy Museum” was published in The New Yorker (24 May 1969) “a family from Holly Hill, Florida [wrote to the magazine to learn the location of the Tolstoy Museum.” About two weeks later, Tolstoy’s daughter, the Countess Alexandra L. Tolstoy sent a more indignant letter to the magazine, referring to the story as “Donald Barthelme’s absurd article…What is the aim of such an article? To make people laugh? … How funny! Ha, ha, ha.” Great stuff all around.

20 . “The Wound” (Amateurs, 1976)

A surreal sketch featuring a bullfighter, his mother, his mistress, a bishop, and a famous aficionado (of, implicitly, bullfighting, and, explicitly, breasts), as well as a cast of grumbling minions and peons. Barthelme’s stories are often collage-like, anti-real, hyper-real, or outright absurd, but they are, at least in my estimation, rarely dreamlike. But “The Wound” moves like a dream — a brief, stifled dream, one that reveals something about himself to the dreamer, who later might lament, But I already knew that, like the Bishop who laments his therapy:

The Bishop begins to talk about his psychoanalysis: “I am a different man now,” the Bishop says. “Gloomier, duller, more fearful. In the name of the Holy Ghost, you would not believe what I see under the bed, in the middle of the night.” The Bishop laughs heartily. The torero joins him. The torero’s mistress is filming the Bishop. “I was happier with my whiskey,” the Bishop says, laughing even harder.

The Queen of Gypsies arrives, claiming wounds. There’s “An ecstasy of shrinking” and the final vision of “an immense black bull” blocking the door way. It “begins to ring, like a telephone.”

“The Wound” is a short example that might be handed off to any young person clamoring for meaning or theme or symbolism from every text they read. Sometimes it’s just a dream, a goof, an aesthetic gesture. Sometimes there’s just a surreal punchline that needs to erupt, like a giant black bull ringing like a telephone, blocking the only exit in sight.

On Tove Jansson’s odd and touching illustrations for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

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This fall–just in time for the holiday season–the NYRB Kids imprint has published an edition of Lewis Carroll’s classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland illustrated by the Finnish author and artist Tove Jansson. Jansson is most famous for her Moomin books, which remain an influential cult favorite with kids and adults alike. She illustrated Carroll’s Alice in 1966 for a Finnish audience; this NRYB edition is the first English-language version of the book. There are illustrations on almost every page of the book; most are black and white sketches — doodles, portraits, marginalia — but there are also many full-color full-pagers, like this odd image about a dozen pages in:

Here we have Alice and her cat Dinah, transformed into a shadowy, even sinister figure, large, bipedal. Bats float in the background, echoing Goya’s famous print El sueño de la razón produce monstruos. The image accompanies Alice’s initial descent into her underland wonderland:  “Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again,” addressing Dinah, who will “miss me very much to-night, I should think!” Wonderlanding if Dinah might catch a bat, which is something like a mouse, maybe, “Alice began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to herself, in a dreamy sort of way, ‘Do cats eat bats? Do cats eat bats?’ and sometimes, ‘Do bats eat cats?; for, you see, as she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way she put it.” Jansson’s red flowers suggest poppies, contributing to the scene’s slightly-menacing yet dreamlike vibe. The image ultimately echoes the myth of Hades and Persephone.

All the classic characters are here, of course, rendered in Jansson’s sensitive ink. Consider this infamous trio —

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head.

I love Jansson’s take on the Hatter; he’s not the outright clown we often see in post-Disneyfied takes on the character, but rather a creature rendered in subtle pathos. The March Hare is smug; the Dormouse is miserable.

And you’ll want a glimpse of the famous Cheshire cat who appears (and disappears) during the Queen’s croquet match:

Jansson’s figures here remind one of the surrealist Remedios Varo’s strange, even ominous characters. Like Varo and fellow surrealist Leonora Carrington, Jansson’s art treads a thin line between whimsical and sinister — a perfect reflection of Carroll’s Alice, which we might remember fondly as a story of magical adventures, when really it is much closer to a horror story, a tale of being sucked into an underworld devoid of reason and logic, ruled by menacing, capricious, and ultimately invisible forces. It is, in short, a true reflection of childhood,m. Great stuff.