Tag: Stanley Crawford

End of merry month of May blog

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I have always loved the month of May. Spring semester is usually over and done by the last week of April and I seem to breathe a little easier. I love May Day and there’s always been a neat little run of interesting dates in the first week, including my wedding anniversary. (My silly ass has taken to including Thomas Pynchon’s birthday as the capstone to the first week of Merry May). I get that May the Fourth is stupid, but it seemed fun when my kids were little, and I get that Cinco de Mayo, even with its roots in the Chicano movement, is probably now just a marketing tool for amateurs to do it up, a la St. Paddy’s Day and NYE. But it’s fun to have a little treat. My best friend died on 5 May 2025 though and I was dreading the date, although the anxiety over it was worse than the actual day. But then I dreamed about him for a few weeks straight. The month seemed incredibly long but at least the terrible drought in Florida broke with heavy heavy rains.

The wife and I make a point to sneak in an anniversary trip in early May. We spent a few nights in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami and saw Belle & Sebastian perform their 1996 album If You’re Feeling Sinister in full. I felt incredibly old but it was magical. I’ve never been a big fan of Miami, but we had some good meals and enjoyed talking to a few of the artists at the Bakehouse Art Complex. This is the closest I actually got to a bookstore in Miami. Bookleggers is not actually a bookstore, it’s a free library, and it wasn’t open, although there was a loaded library cart full of titles out for offer. I love the idea and if I lived down there I’d pop in to donate at least once a month.

But on to books!

I’ve wormed into William H. Gass’s massive novel The Tunnel again. This is like my fourth or fifth serious attempt. I love Gass’s essays and shorter fiction, but I find that I stall out. My tactic this time has been to read one section a day, or at least to try to. I’m somewhere around page 160 now, and I think I’ve finally gotten into the “story,” or whatever, but it’s all pretty damn windy, and Gass’s penchant for alliteration, which I enjoy in short doses, is, like, too much (there’s a moment where the narrator remarks his wife’s calling him out on all the alliteration; I didn’t dogear it though).

I’ve also stalled a bit on Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything; I was attempting the same approach as that I’ve taken to The Tunnel — a section a day — but I keep getting distracted by shorter morsels, like Gabriel García Márquez’s In Evil Hour and Chronicle of a Death Foretold (both in translation by Gregory Rabassa, of course). Chronicle was even better than I’d remembered; In Evil Hour was rough, mean, and short.

The pictured stack is not all May reading, although I did read and review Antoine Volodine’s novel The Monroe Girls (tr. Alyson Waters) in early May.  I read and reviewed Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man in April; I then read Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died and meant to review it and kept moving it up the stack and then eventually lost track. On Bluesky, I tweeted that I was “baffled by the whole thing. Like if Kathy Acker wrote a sci-fi psionic satire. Very weird, I think I loved it, it might not be a ‘good’ novel.” That’s still basically my memory. I picked up a first edition Grove Press copy of WSB’s The Ticket That Exploded and I now have to reshelve all the Burroughs which means I have to reshelve a whole bookcase. So it can hang there for awhile.

I gave up pretty quickly on Stanley Crawford’s Gascoyne — probably too quickly — but I wanted the weirder flavor of his slim 1972 novel Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine. I ended up reading Crawford’s 2005 novel Petroleum Man over two nights and loving every minute of the experience. I highly recommend the novel, as well as Dan Visel’s 2010 review of the novel at his blog With Hidden Noise. I also recommend the blog With Hidden Noise, which was somehow not on my radar fifteen or some such years ago, but which I have very much enjoyed browsing now, which is to say over the past few days. There’s a rich backlog there. I lament too often that There Aren’t Any Good Websites Anymore, but maybe I don’t look enough; maybe I’m guilty of spending too much of my internet time on social media sites. The first book I mentioned here was by William H. Gass; I’ll take my offramp from this cursed blog by suggesting you read a real blog post, this With Hidden Noise post on Gass’s On Being Blue, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and Thomas Browne.

Blog about some recent reading (Jan. and Feb. 2026)

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Joy Williams’ collection The Pelican Child was the first book I read this year. I picked up a copy back in December and surprised myself by reading most of it over a few days. It’s a much heavier collection than the wry vignettes of 2013’s Ninety-Nine Stories of God or its sequel, Concerning the Future of Souls (2024). The stories here alight on mortality, human ecological cultural aesthetic, etc. Opener “Flour” strikes me as a postmodern riff on Emily Dickinson’s “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” and the fable (literally fabulous?) closer “Baba Yaga and The Pelican Child” made me tear up a little and then hate myself a little. A book about death where young people, tattooed with the lines of long-dead poets, are the clean-up crew working the night shift sweeping up the detritus of the 21st century. (It was “Argos,” about Odysseus’s good and loyal boy, that really killed me if I’m honest.)

There are still a few stories at the back of Robert Bingham’s 1997 collection Pure Slaughter Value. I will tuck them away for another time. I loved these stories and then I found myself angry at his spoiled clever preppy narrators. “The Other Family” is one of the better stories I’ve read in a long time.

I reread Robert Coover’s second novel, The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), back in January and made some notes for a review. This is not that review. I am not a Coover expert but I think this is as good an introduction to his novels as anything. (No it’s not; get Pricksongs & Descants.)

Speaking of Universal—I had an early misfire with Thomas Kendall’s 2023 novel How I Killed the Universal Man, but then started it again the other night with a perhaps clearer idea of what the author was trying to do. I think I was thinking something more straightforward, more cyberpunknoir, something less, I dunno, formally meta or post. More thoughts to come.

I think George Saunders’ new novel Vigil fucking sucks.

Is Helen DeWitt’s The English Understand Wool a novella? A novelette? A short story? Should we care? I loved The Last Samurai (2000), thought Lightning Rods (2011) seemed like a novel written quickly for money, and found myself embarrassed for everyone involved with her collection Some Trick (2018), including the editor, publisher, bookseller who sold it to me, and myself — but maybe I should go back and try it again? I thought The English Understand Wool was really good! It was funny and silly and sharp.

I have spent the past few months reading what I could get my little pink hands on of David Ohle’s incredible post-apocalyptic comedy, the Moldenke Saga (a term I have just now coined, maybe). I will do a Whole Thing on these novels at some point, but I read The Blast in one night and felt really sad that it was over and then the next night I read most of the last Moldenke novel, The Death of a Character, and then I woke up around 4am that morning and finished it and got a little choked up. In novels like Motorman, The Age of Sinatra, and The Old Reactor, Ohle has given us a fittingly grotesque, grody, gnarly, abject, hilarious, zany, and emotionally-resonant zombie funhouse mirror for our own gross times. These novels are woefully underread and still, for the most part, in print. Seek them out.

Wanting to scratch an Ohle itch, I turned to Literature Map to suggest some proxy; this machine offered Stanley Crawford as a proximal prosist. I picked up a few of his novels the other weekend, including 1972’s Log of the S.S. The Mrs Unguentine, which I read over the course of a few hours late at night and then reread the next night. It’s not like the Ohle oeuvre, excepting that it’s wholly, utterly original at the conceptual aesthetic rhetorical level, is generally tragicomical, mythical, epic — but also compact, and funny and alarming. So it’s very much in the Ohlesphere. Seek it out.

And also scratching that apocalyptic itch is  Antoine Volodine’s 2021 novel The Monroe Girls (in translation by Alyson Waters). It’s got this cracked bifocal Bardo thing going on, which I will not explain here and now. The print in the Archipelago edition is small for my aging eyes. I’ve read it in the afternoon; it is not an afternoon book, it is a 2am book.

I read the first half of Jan Kerouac’s “semi-autobiographical” novel Baby Driver (1981) last night. The writing immediately struck me as very bad, very overwritten, ostentatious and clumsy, but I kept going, charmed by the charmingly charming naivety of the novel, which is not a naive novel at all, which turns into a rough and ready sex and drug novel, or sex and drug autobiography, or autofiction. (My instinct is that this is an autobiography with a lot of whoppers.) Our heroine is on heroin pretty quick, then turning tricks, then on to other adventures. But there’s a glib smudging of purple prose over any would-be tragic contours. She likes it! She really likes it! At least I think.

And yes, J. Kerouac is J. Kerouac’s only (acknowledged) child, and yes, he pops in now and then, a jolly fibbing wino, the poseur some of us always pegged him for, maybe a better phrase-turner than lil Jan, but somehow I think less real.