To add my own log to the fire, what makes Musk an even more particular danger is that Musk's pursuits are useless, vindictive, and wasteful. To whit, the Hyperloop2. His mostly failed venture into disrupting traffic and transit was a costly, time-consuming misdirection that fleeced mayors and city councilors, and others. Only one hyperloop was actually built, in Las Vegas, where it operates as single-track Tesla conveyor belt which moves slower than the nearly dozen other transportation options afforded in the same space. This little experiment may have cost the city’s tourism bureau 48.7 million dollars.3 Yet, his dream - which is better served by pre-existing infrastructure like subways, beats on and festers where else but Florida. The threat that Musk poses isn’t just that he’ll be annoying and vindictive but that he will engineer and redirect federal contracts to save his 0/10 moonshot ideas like the Hyperloop, X, and xAI, further enriching himself in the process.

The dangers posed by Musk are unprecedented, surely, though not wholly unique. Musk is not an innovator. As ever, he is mimicking other annoying dickheads that came before him. In this case, the loyalist task forces staging soft coups inside company bureaucracies is reminiscent of Ross Perot and Electronic Data Systems' takeovers of public and private health agencies in California. Like the United States Digital Service (now rechristened "DOGE"), EDS was intended to help modernize the bureaucracies and onboard clerks and other staff into the nascent world of digital data processing. However, owing to the greedy narcissist leading it and the regressive corporate culture he developed, EDS exploited its position and cast out state employees it found unworthy. These workers were overwhelmingly non-white, women, or pro-labor. These choices resulted in poorer working conditions for its staff and a derelict bureaucracy that served the financial interests of the executives, not the needs of the people.

Electronic Data Systems entered the scene at the exact right time, securing an early contract with Texas Blue Shield shortly after President Johnson announced the creation of the Medicare and Medicaid programs in 1965. These programs required massive technological overhauls for the offices and EDS was primed to assist with this onboarding process. Perot already worked with Texas Blue Shield which made his own accession into the American bureaucracy simple. EDS would be the only bidder on these federal contracts and would regularly overcharge for processed claims, passing the cost onto taxpayers. Auditors estimated that the cost of each claim processed was $0.36 and a fair profit would be about $0.55. EDS charged $1.06 per claim, a 200% profit margin.4

Even as government budget analysts criticized the contracts he made with Texas health care companies, EDS were setting their sights nationwide, selling their services to California, Massachusetts, and New York’s health care agencies. A 1969 California contract proved especially lucrative and controversial, signed off on by then-Governor Ronald Reagan and the CA Director of Health Services, with the latter going to work for EDS one year later. This extension of Perot’s business brought to light his, and his cutting-edge company’s, most repellent qualities.

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Perot had an obsession with controlling the "quality" of his employees. The Dallas EDS offices were staffed by clean-cut starch shirts with uniform violations, like having facial hair, being grounds for termination. Salary discussion and unionization was explicitly forbidden, no one could drink alcohol, out-of-office behavior by you or your spouse was closely monitored, and long hours weren't just an expectation, they were a demand. Many of Perot's hires were in their twenties, fresh out of college or coming away from stints at IBM or other firms. Perot's Eagle Scout intensity and proximity to new technology made EDS an appealing place to work for the type of young men disenchanted by the counterculture they would have seen on television or in the newspaper. Transferring these conservative ideals as the company expanded outside of Perot's compound proved difficult, and it was in California where the arbitrarily severe, intensely Protestant work culture fostered by Perot inflamed tensions between the civilian state workers and their new dogmatic enforcers.

The California contract saw the greatest influx of new workers under the EDS umbrella and the culture shock stoked significant conflict between acquired staff, Perot loyalists and Perot himself. The uniform policy was a particular bugbear. The white shirt, black tie look, the uniform of the office drone, met with backlash from California staff leading to the company enforcing it even more stringently, adding specific restrictions on things like jewelry, long hair, and anything considered a "mod look." 5 A group of keypunch operators began to talk unionizing shortly after the takeover. Perot responded by shutting down the shop. Racist and sexist cultures were reinforced in policy and rhetoric; over half of the black workforce in the operations department was laid off in the first two years of the takeover, most others were demoted. Women, even the small number in leadership roles, were often denigrated by Perot himself who believed that women were only fit to be secretaries or in public relations. These aspects were not in of themselves unusual for a Southern company in the 1960s, but their export to other states fostered a regressive culture in a business that only months prior had embraced equality and did not police self-expression.

The cultures at these companies prior to the EDS takeover were decidedly more liberal but Perot's hostile reformation of the health care divisions necessitated in his mind, oaths and tests. A former female employee recounted "We were told that EDS had taken over and that we were all working for them. The dress code was explained…. If you didn't go along there was no place for you. Either you signed the new contract by the next day or you had to leave the premises. Immediately. There wasn't even an arrangement for personal property. You couldn't go back to your desk and get your personal belongings.”6 State employees were given forms asking invasive questions like what church they attended and what debts they owed. To ensure that these company policies were followed to the letter, Perot's most trusted staff occupied offices and directly applied force against dissenting voices. Security guards were now posted by computers to monitor workers. Behind their back, the state employees called these loyalists "storm troopers."

The parallels to Musk are numerous. Of particular interest is the way in which Musk has mimicked Perot's takeover of the state's healthcare agencies. The demanding contracts, loyalty oaths, young jackboots raiding the offices, the ostracization of non-white, non-male staff - all of it describes Perot's EDS-operated state offices and Musk's seized Federal agencies. Differences emerge though. Lawsuits and investigations were filed against EDS for racist dismissal practices and engineering preferential contracts, and it was Perot's own presence at the company that created such a draconian atmosphere. Once he stepped away from EDS, the culture started to shift. The number of female leadership staff rose dramatically, with 31% of EDS' management being female by 1986, and the company did acquiesce to audits and reprimands, developing an affirmative action plan after several lawsuits were brought against the company alleging race discrimination.7

Perot was this type of megalomaniacal flim-flam man in the time of institutional safeguards, of Rockefeller Republicans and the Warren Supreme Court. If you wanted to be corrupt, you had best be Old Money or failing that, Joe Kennedy. In the era of two-term Trump and the Nancy Pelosi stock tracker, the notion that the system has guardrails that can reprimand, let alone punish this sort of abusive, corrupt behavior is terribly naive. There is also the wrinkle that modern technology and Musk's domination over Twitter has allowed him to be essentially omnipresent, a constant hackle in the throat. Even if he's in Berlin getting rejected from the nightclub Berghain8, at 53 years old with 12 kids that he mercifully ignores, he can still fire off a tweet that jeopardizes the thousands of jobs and the personal information and financial futures of millions more. He is far more dangerous than Perot was. Perot could be slowed, even stopped by policies, lawsuits, and his own hubris. The tactics that politicians like Chuck Schumer and Gerry Connolly are attempting may have stopped Perot, they cannot stop Musk. In fact, people like Musk thrive because Perot failed for them. We shouldn’t doom over a total overhaul, like we saw Musk accomplish at Twitter, but we’d be fools to think a Perot-like fade out in is in the cards either. It will require greater in-person action from civilians and unions and greater stubborn inaction from career employees in order to save the SSA, Labor Department, and Treasury from plunder and seizure. Protest, Resist, Strike, but don’t resign.

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2024 marked my tenth year using Spotify. This wasn’t a proud anniversary but I thought it notable because it was the first subscription service I acquiesced to and remains the one toughest to cut. Looking over my Spotify account, I still hesitate to break away the enclosed garden that Spotify and I tended over the decade; my customized playlists, my “saved” albums, and my Wrappeds. Yet, as the quality of the service degrades and as my own personal dislike of the service grows, I find myself interested in pursuing the alternatives including, if you could believe it, actually purchasing music from artists. Bandcamp, with its “Bandcamp Friday” promotion, is the most alluring option as the promotion allocates the proceeds directly to the label and artist. It places the culture manufactured by Spotify in stark contrast. If not legally true, it is spiritually true - Spotify is Piracy.

How Spotify hoards wealth up and away from the musicians that create the platform’s value make the company worse than that convenient devil called piracy because the theft of residuals is guaranteed. It is codified into legally binding contracts that prioritize platform and record label profits. Musicians are now required to adjust around the ever-shifting demands of the hosting platform. The streaming agnostic will say that this is nothing new, that the music industries are always screwing the indie musician. And while true to extent, Spotify represents the most consolidated approach yet, one that has reshaped artist and listener behavior alike in order to funnel wealth toward the top labels and their preferred artists. This doesn’t just squeeze non megastars, it suffocates them. The facts on this are clear; according to a 2019-2020 price bible, Spotify's payouts per stream is 0.00348 cents1 below leading competitors like Apple, Amazon, and Deezer.

And while that’s a striking statistic on its own, the truth is even grimmer. Royalties are actually distributed in proportion to an artist’s popularity meaning that artists with larger catalogs and greater existing name recognition - or with industry marketing muscle are assured more payout more consistently than independent artists2. The only musicians that could reliably succeed in this system are those with industry money already behind them. Spotify and other streaming ecosystems exist on a larger scale than peer-to-peer services ever did and are designed to keep users tethered to a system that thinks and discovers for them. On the whole, there is minimal moral difference between an individual playing an album on Spotify or lifting it wholesale from a seedy site. The actual difference is that if you are pirating or file-sharing, you’re about 30% likelier to actually buy music3.

I was a high school senior with little disposable income when I began using Spotify. Up to that point, I used a variety of methods to get any music I wanted for free. On occasion, I'd buy a record for my collection, typically albums that I listened to first through downloading. Spotify appealed to me because I saw it as what it was, a convenient, safe way to do what I was doing before - listening to music without paying for it. Even in 2014 Spotify had the bulk of what I wanted to listen to and it was readily available on my phone for $6 a month with the Student Membership, a tier accessible primarily to the youngest group of users.

Piracy, and admitting to it, has been a hot button issue since high speed internet took hold. Even the term “piracy” and the imagery around it evokes unauthorized reproductions with a financial incentive. But calling it piracy is an intentional conflation with a more legally grey act - file sharing - which has no intended commercial gain4. Growing up in the shadow of Napster, it is my prescription that one of the primary functions of the internet is easy exchange of content & media. These peer-to-peer sharing platforms came with risks; their files were often mislabeled or riddled with malware. Unless you had the hook-up to a trusted server, you - or a younger, dumber family member - ran the risk of destroying your computer for a “lost” Weird Al song where he sells crack to Elmo. These risks combined with limited tech literacy and declining revenue for the record labels made it easy for industry forces to tether the developing file-sharing sphere to its more dangerous cousin.

As the gavel came down against those platforms, index sites like The Pirate Bay took their place but were bogged down by similar issues. Malware was a constant threat and it seemed like every week, another domain would be sunk by the notorious DMCA.5 For diehards, private “trackers” existed but required commitment and investment. These sites rewarded community participation from top “seeders” - uploaders - and often banned “freeleechers” - downloaders who did not seed their fair share. Meanwhile, file hosting sites like MegaUpload offered an alternative for scared away by torrenting culture’s lingo and arcane rules. And of course, YouTube was (and is) a hydra of illegal song uploads which could be downloaded via various shady 3rd party add-ons. The message was clear, if you go looking for it, you can get it for free.

This message was as clear to teenage me as it was to the executives and lawyers who managed album releases, song catalogues, and other media. Yet, finding effective ways to combat piracy took time. Infamously, Metallica and Dr. Dre sued Napster in 2000 accusing it of copyright infringement and racketeering6. This would become a popular tactic, suing platforms as well as individual downloaders but it proved costly and garnered bad press7. Corporations wanted to subvert piracy passively. Apple’s iTunes store, which allowed users to download MP3 files to their devices was one adaptation to this new distribution model and dovetailed nicely with developing theories of distribution being tested elsewhere. In 2004, Valve Software launched Steam, an online game distribution platform. Steam streamlined features that prior would require a base literacy in computers; it had an online marketplace where you could buy games digitally, patches could be easily implemented through the client, and it hosted servers for free, reliable online play. In a 2011 talk, Valve CEO Gabe Newell cut against the contemporary rhetoric that piracy was a cost issue; "One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting anti-piracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.”8

Daniel Ek, Spotify's founder and CEO, recognized all this. As the former CEO of uTorrent, the young businessman was better positioned to recognize the realities of pirating culture and how one could profit from it9. Launching operations in Sweden in 2006, it wasn't until July 2011, a few months before Newell's talk, that Spotify came to the United States. The market was ready for something like Spotify to appear. The age of the iPod was fading and the iPhone was taking its place in the pockets of Americans. The iTunes marketplace was a phenomenal success, internet radio like Pandora was blossoming, but there were gaps. Android phones didn't have a reliable iTunes replacement, YouTube's app had to be kept open to play a song, and downloaded music, even on iPhone, took up a lot of storage space. Spotify's concept was novel - you could stream individual tracks and albums like on YouTube and you could download your favorite albums for a reasonable monthly subscription fee. For the casual music listener, it was too good to be true.

That sort of dazed, fantastic thinking about Spotify, and its rival clients like Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube Music never disappeared. Even as their subscription costs rise, the cost/benefit rationale seemingly skews in favor of the platform. For $13 a month, a user can listen to just about the entire canon of American music, sans Joanna Newsom, on demand or they could buy one album. Family, student, and other bundle plans drive an even harder bargain. For that rate, who can complain?

A hypothetical scenario emerges in discussions about streaming - “What if a company decides to take their stuff off?” It’s a valid concern and if any of the Big 3 labels, Sony Music Group, Universal Music Group, or Warner Music Group, were to lift their libraries off any streaming platform, it’d be a death warrant for that platform. The reality of the situation is that these major labels are engaged in massively profitable licensing deals with streaming platforms. All three major labels have equity in Spotify, all three labels brokered extensive licensing contracts that grant them overwhelming leverage in negotiations. In 2015, it was reported that about 70% of Spotify’s payouts went to the copyright holders, meaning the labels. A study conducted by consulting firm Ernst & Young and French record label trade group SNEP attempted to determine where the money from a subscription fee ended up. In France, the label kept just under 46% of the revenue with just under 7% going to the artists. After taxes, the labels kept over 75%, extracting revenue from the publishing rites and recouping artist payouts10. For American artists and companies, the finances are even murkier owing to a business culture cloaked by NDAs. At present, there is no clear reason for the big three to stop renting out their library but this arrangement tilts the table well in favor of the Big 3 record labels. Andrew DeWaard lays it out in his book “Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture.”11

“In essence, the Big 3 have a compelling financial incentive for accepting low royalty rates for their artists: it benefits the streaming services, which the labels have equity stakes in. Rather than sharing profits with their artists directly through royalty rates, they wait for a large payout through IPO or acquisition, which will not need to be shared with the artists.”

For the customer, this results in higher subscription costs and a degrading product desperate to find new veins of profit. If you have used Spotify at all in the past several years, you have likely noticed a push - at first gradual, now inescapable, toward AI integration. AI generated playlists, AI generated artworks, AI generated songs, even AI generated podcasts and an AI "DJ” can all be found on Spotify. While it remains to be seen what AI initiatives survive 2025, Spotify has created a marketplace hostile to musicians who must now compete with AI generated music, angling to find discerning listeners among a sea of subscribers who have been trained by the application to not go searching, physically or digitally.

The Baffler’s Liz Pelly12 optioned the term “lean-back listener” to describe the type of user that Spotify not just attracts, but molds. She described the lean-back listener as “one who thinks less about the artists and albums and more associates music with moods and activities13.” Through its heavy promotion of playlists, some of them user-generated, most of them algorithmic creations, Spotify shifts user attention away from albums and funnels it toward abstract markers defined entirely by Spotify or a corporate sponsor. If you aren’t already a curious listener, discovery is automated by the app. Even with the iTunes Store and file-sharing platforms, users were engaged in a discovery process. Spotify has rewritten the playbook entirely. They successfully rewired a generation of listeners to free-leech (for a cost, ironically) music but without any of the etiquette that governed file-sharing culture. With this model of consumption popularized, Spotify is emboldened to make the customer its actual product.

Spotify's goal is to develop and keep a captured, contained audience. This is what makes them markedly different from their rivals and why they specifically draw such ire. In 2017, then Head of Global of Audio & Podcast Monetization Les Hollander said “What we’d ultimately like to do is predict people’s behavior through music.”14 User data is all they own and all of it is to fed into bettering their AI. Every Spotify user, every Spotify playlist, and every song uploaded to Spotify is data for the machine taken via passive consent. If their gambit for your loyalty is that their AI will know you better than Apple's or Google's, shouldn't it be then that you will know you better than any AI could? Spotify's hope is that you have delegated out the responsibility to absorb and appreciate music so much so that you won't go searching for it yourself. This is extremely dangerous to the social history of music which is predicated on people understanding songs not just as "vibes" but as objects with cultural and historical context that give texture to people, ideas, and places in time.

Spotify's rerouted piracy has a chilling effect on crowdsourced archival efforts for music that is otherwise out of circulation. The RIAA recently filed a lawsuit against the embattled Internet Archive alleging that the site's effort to digitize and preserve 78rpm records was in violation of copyright law. Over 300 musicians penned an open letter “Save Music, Save the Archive!” to the record labels in defense of the Internet Archive pointing to the organization's mission to protect and preserve media15. In digitizing not only these recordings of old 78s but music journals, magazines and live show recordings, the Internet Archive is building context for these projects so that they exist with their full importance, personal, political and communal. This ability to assess music in its totality is antithetical to the Spotify model.

One of the most successful projects in digital archiving must be the John Peel Radio Archives. While not complete, the Peelheads who have compiled and rigorously catalogued a staggering amount of BBC radio DJ and tastemaker John Peel's four decades of broadcasts have ensured the continued survival of tracks and bands that otherwise would be completely lost to time. For example, the 1990s Swedish indie pop group Girlfriendo's digital presence can be almost entirely attributed to these preserved John Peel broadcasts. The John Peel Wiki is one of the most well curated fan Wikis I've seen and serves as a repository of information about artists and bands who vanished after releasing just a few tracks. Its existence pays homage to the spirit of building a scene and artistic collaboration, things fundamental to a healthy artistic culture. By contrast, Spotify artist bios are either marketing label rehashes or coolly dismissive, like Joey Valence & Brae's "Who tf reads Spotify bios"

Is it all doom and gloom with Spotify? Are they destined to soak up the music industry, bloblike, endlessly hungry? If it’s any company, I doubt it’ll be Spotify. In 2023, the company reported that it grew more than expected but still lost money, blaming that on a company restructuring, including the podcast expansion. Their podcast expansion gamble looks to be an expensive misfire. Joe Rogan does not come cheap, nor do Prince Harry or Barack Obama. Although they're on track to break even this fiscal year, this may be tied more to their firing spree, firing 1500 employees in December 2023, a symptom of the massive downsizing crisis occurring in tech right now. This recent push towards AI is slowly painting over their attempt to copy TikTok. Their constant pivoting has degraded their app’s UI steadily over time, suffering from feature bloat and a lack of a cohesive vision. They need to please investors more than they need to please users but there’s little room for “innovation” in a service like this. Apple, Amazon, and Google have streaming services to incentivize investment in their ecosystems, Spotify just has the music and your user data.

That said, serious damage has been incurred. For at least a decade, Spotify has been terraforming the music industries to the benefit of Ek, record labels, and investors. Through cartel-like backroom deals, Spotify came to the bargaining table with no leverage, helped to onboard the Big 3 into the new streaming ecosystem, and ultimately ceded overwhelming control to them. It has become exponentially more difficult for bands of any size or legacy to make money from album sales or song residuals. Listeners are given a vanishingly small number of artists and tracks to listen to, playlists and radio stations are algorithmically generated based on abstract concepts like "mood" - and soon the songs won't even be real.16 The suits got their long-awaited win too. Many younger tech users have spent their entire life in closed app ecosystems like Spotify, never learning the importance of a positive leech/seed ratio, and expecting Every Song Ever for a small monthly sum. After all, piracy is a service issue and for over a decade, Spotify circumvented the appeal of piracy by doing it for the customer and telling them it was all legal. The only person who suffers in this arrangement are the people making the music. But with their new AI initiatives, maybe they can lacquer over that little inconvenience too.

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The main goal of Eliminate Down was to finish books and write about them on a reliable and consistent schedule. The sub-goals of Eliminate Down were mostly unwritten, dependent on my mood, how much time I could dedicate to the project, and if I felt like holding myself accountable to them. I did finish books, forty isn't fifty two or sixty two but it is forty. I've got a full time job, a social life, other interests and other stressors, I'm happy with forty. I noticed that as the year went on, my average reading speed increased and my retention skills improved too. In past years, my reading schedule was irregular but owing to this project’s deadlines I carved out rituals for myself that made the experience as desirable as my other hobbies. More surprisingly, I did write about all the books I read! Did I like the write-ups? Not all of them. Were they out on a consistent basis? Well, no, but I did finish December's by December 31st and I didn't abandon the project midway through the year even if it definitely looked and felt like I was going to do exactly that. I have a poor track record of finishing projects I start, especially as I become disillusioned with their quality. One only need to look at my publishing history on this platform to confirm. A variant of this happened with Eliminate Down but I stuck by it.

One thing I've noticed with book discourse on the internet is that there is a comparative lack of it. You look at film, music or video games and there are multiple websites dedicated to deep dives into even the most narrow of tastes and objects. That hyperfixation drive is less present in literary subculture and there were multiple books I covered here where finding information or reviews of them presented a serious challenge. Books like Arc D'x, Mother London and Secret Rendezvous could be pretty dense and these books have so little written about them despite coming from established authors with famous or large bibliographies. Some of these books don't even have Wikipedia pages. I think if there is value in blogging and creating noise on the internet, it's in building out conversations about overlooked pieces of media and books have not received the same care & attention to chronicling that other forms of mass media have in the digital age. So I used that as motivation to push forward even when I disliked the project. You can read smarter essays about Dubliners or Crime & Punishment elsewhere. And while I'm not writing a dissertation on Secret Rendezvous, there are a vanishingly small group of people who can talk about it at all. Even if and when I'm unhappy with the write-ups, they exist and I am more critical of my own write-ups by necessity than potential readers likely would be. Should we all have access to academic databases, the world would be a better place but for now, we must rely on hobbyist yammering on Substack and Wordpress.

One of the unwritten goals was to better triangulate my own tastes. I knew what and who I liked but I wanted to bring myself to read authors who I thought I might like. Louise Erdrich, Nicholson Baker, and John Williams sat on my shelf for some time but it wasn't until I had a measure of structure that I actually dared to open their books. Sometimes this experiment paid off, I adored Baker's The Mezzanine, and other times it was a flaming wreck - like with John Langan's interminable The Fisherman. Reading through this forty book spread firmed up my tastes a fair bit, I developed my own palette to recognize more subtle gradations in why the genres & authors who appeal to me are appealing to me. Below is a tier list designed to cheapen that exercise and reduce it to a grotesque albeit easy to decipher ranking system.

As you see, I shamelessly enjoy the classics. Those are considered great for reasons that I found self-evident. I like crime and detective fiction a lot, especially when stripped down to its barest, most cynical forms as seen in Eddie Coyle and To Each His Own. Transgressive and experimental fiction like Secret Rendezvous and Pitch Dark drew me in, their sinister opaque horrors expanded my understanding of how writing can be used to express a full range of emotions from fear to envy to insecurity. Simultaneously, I love the inevitability and relative obviousness of a melodrama; the high emotions of Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea, Mildred Pierce and despite my criticisms - The Fortress of Solitude captured me from front to back. I was less fond of the adventure genre fiction, the Delanys and Burroughs were okay but never impressed upon me like I hoped. Most often when I disliked a book, it was because I thought it was trying to impress me. Anderson, Kleeman and Langan all committed the mortal sin of elbowing me in the ribs to ensure that I knew what we were laughing about.

The thing I dreaded most with Eliminate Down was talking about my favorite books. The stuff I disliked was easy to talk about, it's easier for me to be critical than it is for me to identify things to praise. Moreover, the books I loved the most were, as seen above, the ones with the most serious writing on them. I was provided a few options while writing about them. I could try and write an English 101 paper on why you should read Dostoevsky which is something you probably already know. I could have talked around the book, going into the circumstances around it, or I could try and pass off the task of talking about it completely - instead offering a few words of effusive praise and quickly shuffling away. I tried all of these approaches throughout the year and found each of them equally dull and not worth writing or publishing. I published them anyway much to my chagrin.

Eliminate Down quickly took on a punishing reputation internally. It wasn't so much that I hated the idea of being consigned to the list of books, there were runs of books that I greatly looked forward to and when I was reading books that I truly liked, it was an enriching experience. But I limited myself so much here. Obviously, that was part and parcel of its design but being unable to engage with what my friends were reading or what they recommended to me because of some bizarre project I developed for myself was alienating and greatly irritating. Stubborn as I am, I relented on myself in November and cheated a little bit. I read through Jon Fosse's Septology for a book club and shuffled the reading list around to better supplement that nearly seven hundred page tome. I moved Mildred Pierce, The Little Sister, and Sweet Thursday around Mother London because I could tell from the outset that Mother London was going to sink me like an elephant on a submarine if I didn't devote my full attention to it.

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In the interest of continuing to break kayfabe, I never finished Mother London. Although I made a personal promise to actually finish all the books I would write about, I thought it would be a total waste of everyone's time to publish a December blog where the only topic of discussion was a sequel to a b-tier John Steinbeck book. As I'm writing this, I still haven't finished Mother London. That was a thick novel and as I've remarked to multiple people in my personal life, reading all of this fiction was making me restless. I am so, so sick of it. On January 1st, I had to dive into nonfiction, into textbooks, journals, essays, biographies, anything other than narrative fiction. I still feel the need to finish books I've started so I will be going back to it before handing it off but I had to draw the line in the sand somewhere. I cannot recommend this experiment to people. To use the cliche, variety is the spice of life and by October, I felt like running my head into a wall.

One of the other, less important but more practical goals was to not buy any books in 2024. This was a failure, though a happy one. I was dogmatic about it for several months but when I started traveling in the summer and fall, I visited bookstores and wanted to mark the occasion so I'd buy books there. I left Buffalo with five new books, I exited Ireland with ten new books, my Christmas holiday dropped ten more books in my lap. Some of them were those exemptions I had outlined in my first post, Ross MacDonald novels and gifts, but I was not as austere about it as I'd planned.

The other major issue I encountered with Eliminate Down is that for a hobbyist writer, it's a bigger project to tackle than I expected. Had I slashed and burned my social life, ignored my other interests and invested the time and energy into reading, research, and writing that this project demanded, I could have likely met my vision halfway. At the very least, I'd probably have finished every book. But between my real life responsibilities, the small subscriber base of this blog, and my own unproven critical chops, I simply lacked the hustle to develop this feature into a serious workshop for analysis. I made the choice for myself to emphasize quantity over quality in the write-ups. I wanted to read these books more than anything, the writing about them was secondary and often tertiary to whatever else was happening in my life. There's no shame in that, I've heard from more than one person that you should never publish something for free. I understand and agree with that notion but I am doing so anyway because it's the truth that what I have to say with Eliminate Down is not worth the cash.

My hope for my next year of writing is that I can use what skills and work ethic I did build up through Eliminate Down to write better essays on a broader range of topics that align better with my own interests. I hoped with Eliminate Down that I'd develop an expertise in 16th century religious conflicts while reading Doctor Faustus overnight that I'd be able to implement into each blog. This didn't and wasn't going to happen. Allowing myself to develop projects on less contracted time-frames should ideally help me write pieces that I'm prouder of. Maybe some of them will even be informative and useful, not just hazardous tastemaking excursions. As I said above, I couldn't really recommend that you pursue something like this - it was a silly idea and although I am happy to have read all that I've read, more than anything, I am thrilled to be done with this project. But, you might be wondering - what were the remaining twenty-two books?

As follows;

1. Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov

2. Dog of the South - Charles Portis

3. The Underdogs - Manuel Azuela

4. Dreams of the Witch House - HP Lovecraft

5. Season of Migration to the North - Tayeb Salih

6. The Impossible Fairy Tale - Han Yujoo

7. Day of the Locust - Nathaniel West

8. The Sons - Franz Kafka

9. The Dig - Alan Dean Foster

10. The Underground Man - Ross MacDonald

11. The Book of Imaginary Beings - JL Borges (was unclear if this was a novel, honestly)

12. The Moviegoer - Walker Percy

13. The Book of Evidence - John Banville

14. The Rings of Saturn - W.G. Sebald

15. Europe Central - William Vollmann

16. The Baron of the Trees - Italo Calvino

17. The Ruined Map - Kobo Abe

18. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevsky

19. The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck

20. Rum Punch - Elmore Leonard

21. Pleasure - Gabrielle D’Annunzio

22. Bend Sinister - Vladimir Nabokov

Yes, next year I will read more women, Mom.

Thank you all for reading this blog in 2024. I hope you enjoyed it and maybe even found the drive to read your own books or failing that, added the ones I posted here to your own ever expanding wishlist.

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Sweet Thursday (1955) - John Steinbeck

I’m unable to tell you why but I have been trying to shake John Steinbeck for years. Although he's considered one of the preeminent American authors of the 20th century and in spite of liking just about all of his books I've read, every time I open a new one it is with a vague hope that this is the one that means I can be done with him. I have trouble knowing where exactly this spite comes from. I have read more Steinbeck than I have most other authors, it's the way my education shook out. Some of the distaste must come from having read him so much in high school, a sort of unfortunate guilt by association.

When I read Steinbeck, I find myself loving Steinbeck. His story concepts and his ability to execute these visions of California as sites of biblical struggle brought to Earth by political and other disputes of dignity form a bedrock in the Americana canon. California, which has featured in this column more than any other region, cannot escape mythmaking whether by Steinbeck, Hollywood, Fox News hosts or its own District Attorneys. Which brings us to Sweet Thursday, a lesser known and lesser regarded Steinbeck book - his only sequel, a post-war iteration on his 1945 novel Cannery Roy…er Cannery Row.

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(truly I have typed "Cannery Roy" every time I went to type "Cannery Row")

Cannery Row is a comic novel about the folks on the fringe of Monterey, California's harborside industrial district. A huge fishing town until the 1950s when the industry collapsed due to overfishing, Sweet Thursday meets its characters during this downturn. As with Cannery Row, the characters are still living a meager though optimistic life. The prologue reacquaints us with affable tramp Mack and the book reintroduces its cast of bums, sex workers and the other residents. Like its predecessor, Sweet Thursday's central story is set around Mack and his boys cheering up Doc, a marine biologist who acts as a sort of saintly benefactor to everyone in the district. Cannery Row saw Mack trying to throw Doc a party and here he wants to get him hitched. It's a convivial story, light on drama and high on optimism.

Steinbeck returns to these characters with sincere affection which renewed my own fondness for this cast of misfits. It’s been nine years since I read Cannery Row but I was able to slide back into the rhythms of the characters with ease. The Monterey harbor is rendered with a gauzy sheen, a section of town on an endless vacation despite the economic precarity. The bums drink and party, the prostitutes entertain and gossip, and the district maintains its own peculiar, precious culture. The surf rolls gently in the background, the weather is always temperate and markers of satisfied compromise, like an old boiler converted into a home, dot its streets and vacant lots.

Even the looming threat of redevelopment and industry collapse cannot imperil the good tidings of its cast. The villain of the story, if it has one, comes in the form of the shopkeeper's new proprietor, Joseph and Mary Riva, who bought out the shop from Lee Chong in between the two books. Joseph and Mary sees the world in less than humanistic terms, believing that every interaction is a con-or-be-conned scenario. He spends much of the book pondering Doc's maxim that it is impossible to cheat at chess. Unlike Chong, he runs a labor racket that exploits Mexican farm workers and he uses the grocery store as a way to legitimize that less-than-legal business. Riva is depicted as both threat and destined claimant to the region. Like the other Cannery Row residents, he is practical and sharp and knows how to have a good time but unlike Doc, Mack and Lee, his motivations are not for subsistence but for profit.

Even so, Steinbeck is less interested in making this gang another proving ground for his grandiose moral plays. He wants to have a good time. Riva is brought down to Earth by his own lust, knocked around a bit and handed a strong drink to make up for the fists and bad names. Cannery Row is a site for amends and goodwill. Charity is the ideal here, not profit and not revenge. With charity comes dignity and with dignity comes contentment. There is so much charm packed away in these pages and even though I approached the book with some trepidation, I found myself remembering why I fell in with Steinbeck's starry-eyed humanism in the first place.

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Mother London (1988) - Michael Moorcock

A fitting juggernaut to close out with, Michael Moorcock’s Mother London is a five hundred page whopper of a novel set across 20th century London from the perspectives of three characters who experience sensitivity to voices they hear from the Londoners around them. I expected this one to be a severe hurdle and with Pale Fire directly after it, I was eager to finish it so I could move onto something I was anticipating, not dreading. My assessment was correct, this fella stonewalled me and not for the reasons I expected.

For starters, I got the genre all wrong. Moorcock, who against all odds survived the British school system with his last name, is known for his fantasy and science fiction, most of which is written as a corrective to the fascistic traits present in the genres. I knew Mother London was not Moorcock in his usual genre but I believed that it was akin to Gravity’s Rainbow - a nonlinear war story set in London during the Blitz about folks recruited for the war effort due to a mysterious para-psychological link. This sort of baseless assumption is indicative of my typical buying habits. I hear about an author, find their books on a shelf for cheap, and buy them sight unseen, inventing a new plot based on scattered keywords found on the back jacket. Mother London does indeed have some chapters set during the Blitz but color me surprised when the book spends far more time traveling up and down the 20th century, in mental clinics, coffee shops, fairgrounds and funerals, depicting how London changed to adapt to its post-war climate - and in doing so, boxed out the people who made London what it was.

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Mother London focuses on three primary characters; Josef Kiss, Mary Gasalee, and David Mummery. All different ages (Kiss & Gasalee born in the 1920s, David in 1940), the three of them capture the decades from various angles as they dip in and outer of ever-evolving counterculture scenes. Kiss is a large dandy, a Falstaff type whose mind-reading capabilities are the most pronounced of the three. Mary Gasalee is a widow who spent the bulk of the War and the post-war in a coma, residing instead in a dream world populated by the stars of the day, and David is a social dissident and former wunderkind, admiring his uncle’s role as aide to prime ministers but engaged to the social pressures of the cadre of leftist intellectuals he’s aligned himself with. The book presents nearly all its characters with a great sympathy, not dissimilar from Steinbeck’s own in Sweet Thursday. Moorcock is a fascinating writer in his own right, as outspoken as he is prolific, and wrote at length about his own identification with the outsider cultures, styling himself as an anarchist. True to his politics, Mother London finds its strengths (and its best passages) in community. The funeral chapter early on in the book was what hooked me into the story’s rhythms while my least favorite chapters were the isolated ones, the ones in Gasalee’s comatose dream land.

There exists the chance that this was all by design. I’ll admit, I found Mother London impenetrable. Throughout this series I’ve readily tackled books and found myself able to approach a host of time periods, writing styles and bizarre concepts. This one bounced me back without mercy. Moorcock is writing a book for Londoners, outsiders need not apply. This book is steeped in English history, local London lore and mythology, references to allegedly famous pubs and restaurants, decades-old gossip and traumatic recollections of the urban devastation incurred by the Blitz. It’s a cliche that Americans are always amazed by how old everything is in Europe but given that I can read books about Los Angeles & New York City and know the bulk of events referenced, while getting utterly spun around by the centuries of knowledge built around this sprawling city is testament to the richness of London’s culture and history. I have no doubt, Mother London is a rich text with much to say about how government, liberal or conservative, played a major role in hollowing out London to serve the interests of capital. I just did not fully understand all that I read

Moorcock’s writing style may also not be for everyone and I hesitate to endorse it too readily despite thinking the substance of his ideas is well above par. I disliked the floweriness of the prose, every sentence loaded with adjectives and adverbs like he was buying them on deep discount. The intent here must be to imbue London with some of that tempered mythology that is imparted into his own fantasy settings, and it works in small strokes, his description of the small corridor alleys, newly renovated suburbs filled with detached and attached houses, and a large public greenhouse loomed large in my mind but there were many other moments where his tendency to build out prose exhausted me, something not helped by his layering of references. Too often I was begging for a life preserver, a reference to Eric Clapton or the Three Day Week or Alfie. The repeated sidebars into inner monologue or into the voices overheard by other characters are done to confuse and I find myself interested in Moorcock’s blunt technique here but they made an already tough book that much tougher.

I find myself thinking highly of Mother London despite not finding it a particularly strong read on its own. I’m taken by two things; first is its aforementioned depth of knowledge about London, the other is its depth of admiration for the people who populate London. To Moorcock, the place and the people - its soil and their voices are intertwined and give the region more value than any land appraiser, golf course, or king’s treasure ever could. When Moorcock hits upon a fount of joy in the book, the structure of it is such that it lets its characters revel in those moments. Moorcock’s winding sentences come alive, communicating the spirit of optimism and passion felt in those moments. Meanwhile, the reader knows that all these things are temporary because Moorcock utilizes the non-linear timeline to suggest to the reader at the start that a core tenet of the story is that places will not remember you, that those that walk by may never have heard of you, but one’s presence lingers there all the same. There’s a perceptibly bittersweet quality to the story and while it never built to the apocalyptic, stoned mania of Gravity’s Rainbow, I found something profoundly touching about Moorcock’s diagnosis about how we find meaning in being after It all.

The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams (1944)

I mixed what few plays I had into the shuffle because I thought it would be prudent to have shorter non-prose pieces mixed in throughout Eliminate Down. Unfortunately, the randomizer punted the first of them to the 33rd position. First up is a play I was fairly sure I read while in college but the memory of which I could not summon. So onto the list it went and here we are now.

Menagerie is presented as a memory play, with its narrator Tom floating in and out of the action and with its other characters presented as remembered in his memories. This creates space for interpretation, a wonderland for stage actors and directors. Amanda's memories of her childhood are blissful and exaggerated, with seventeen suitors and endless, innocent summer nights. In contrast, her daughter Laura remembers her high school experience as isolating, suffocating. Her adolescence is loaded with unspoken, unseen trauma while her mother wields her memories of her salad days like a bludgeon. Amanda & Laura live in separate but equally suppressive dream lands. Given that the play is his to control, Tom's recollections are then presented with an assumed objective quality. However, Tom’s own recall should be subject to the same scrutiny that his mother’s and sister’s inner worlds are.

What seems closest to objective truth is that the family’s position is precarious with each member’s various quirk fracturing the family unit beyond repair. For Williams, the play seems intensenly autobiographical, as has been covered in the hundreds of other write-ups on Williams and his works. One of the most interesting knots to untie in Menagerie is determing where Tom ends and where Williams begins. I was impressed by Williams’ control over the tone, as a drama of domestic dissatisfaction, as it's tender without slipping into schmaltz. Williams incorporates nostalgia as something that only evokes pain, using the generational perception of memory to heighten the divide between Amanda, the mother, and her children. Williams uses the act of writing & staging the play as a way to exorcise his own anxieties about how he left his family in the lurch to pursue his own dreams, one that was every bit as fanciful and absurd as Amanda and Laura’s.

The Lover - Marguerite Duras (1984)

With Eliminate Down, I find myself often facing up to my own limitations as a writer on these things, books, that I do not know much about. The better the book is - and the less circumscribed it is to my own obsessions, the more difficult it is for me to write about it. The Lover is not outside of my strike zone though if you were to scan my shelf, the thin novella would stick out among the dozens of books about California detectives. The recommendation for The Lover came from an interview with Min Jin lee, author of the megahit novel Pachinko. At the time, I was looking for as many on-ramps as possible into literature and grabbed it when I saw it on the shelf at a used bookstore.

The Lover is an autobiographical novella about a girl living in French-occupied Vietnam (then Indochina) who meets a rich Chinese man and becomes his young lover. Their ages, 16 and 27, may give some readers a wry eye though the book is explicitly about staking out agency, with Duras forthright about how her adolescent self sees the man as a way to, if not rebel, then at least mark out independence from her family, a spiraling family similar to the one seen in Williams' play. The older brother in particular is regularly alluded to as an abusive drunk, a malevolent presence whose indulgences imperil his family members as often as himself. The mother is widowed and affected by waves of melancholy that disable her emotionally and physically. The younger brother is sketched more vaguely, the most well adjusted of the four but in possessing that trait, the most likely to become victim to history. 

The central relationship is a well-exhumed exercise in contrasts; she is sixteen, he is twenty-seven. She is from a poor French family - one that lives in an old estate, representative of the French's loosening grip in Indochina. Her lover is a nouveau riche member of the Chinese diaspora, the son of a wealthy Chinese industrialist. Neither are native to the land they occupy and their romance is seemingly only possible in this dying nexus of colonialist overreach. The man falls in love with her, sincerely, and she keeps his affectations at arms' length. Meanwhile her mother regards the relationship, once she learns of it, with trepidation while the man's father outright rejects it - preferring to arrange a marriage for his son. The book's high emotions are anchored by Duras's sober, undramatic recounting. The book has an incredible economy of language; names are not given, sentences are kept short, and traumas and victories are granted equal weight. 

Duras is a fascinating artist, one of the most diverse of the post-war era having worked as novelist, screenwriter, director and playwright. Unbeknownst to me, I was familiar with her through her script for Hiroshima mon Amour. Hiroshima mon Amour is notable for many things, though a detail that tends to rankle viewers is that "Her" was once the lover of a Nazi in Vichy France. In adding this detail to Emmanuelle Riva's character, it adds a measure of moral dubiousness to her love. It'd be one thing for the lover to be a French resistance fighter, an American soldier, or Jewish refugee - but a Nazi creates an unpleasant current to their love. For Duras, love is not a transcendent thing. Love exists as a response to material conditions and is a way to negotiate power for yourself against those conditions. The Lover was her second time chronicling this early, formative relationship of hers, having previously written about it in the 1950s fiction novel The Sea Wall so The Lover comes to us as conspicuously and intentionally shaped. Its reputation is not overstated, it's a serious classic.

The Fisherman - John Langan (2016)

“I suppose we have to backtrack to Rainer and his fellows standing around George’s corpse. Once the men have determined that George had indeed shuffled off his mortal coil, most of them flee the scene. No doubt some were terrified by what they’d been part of, but likely the majority wanted out of there before anyone in authority, namely the police shows up. The camp has its own police force, and while I don’t know that they’re much worse than any other police force at the time, I haven’t heard that they were any better.”

Let’s begin a quick paragraph autopsy. This section of the book is being told by a new narrator, the diner owner, to the previous narrator, our protagonist. The “I suppose” is the diner owner returning to a previous detail from a previous chapter. The book regularly lapses between this sort of captured retelling and linear narrative, like the storyteller is coming out of a stupor, or rather that the author, Langan, is remembering and resenting this bizarre framing device he’s implemented. Weasel quantifiers dot the paragraph, “some”, “most”, “majority.” Langan’s unwillingness to pin down crowd size bleeds into his motivations for the crowd’s fleeing. Some members are scared of the police, but not all of them, because some of them might be scared of the work camp bosses. Those scared of the police might be because the police might be crueler than other contemporary cops but that’s unknown too because the depths of their cruelty is relative. A reader comes away from this paragraph knowing about as much about the situation as they did starting it.

I hated reading this book.

Two years ago, I thought I wanted to read a modern horror novel. Going online, I looked around to see what books came recommended. I'll preface this by saying that I don't like Stephen King but did not know my distaste for him at that point so I went into this search an innocent babe, untainted by the noxious pomp of American horror writing. I knew I liked Shirley Jackson and I found PKD's UBIK chilling well after I'd finished the book but my exposure to genre horror was and is bound to the classics. One of the more common recommendations was John Langan's The Fisherman. Its champions cited the book's imagery, the way it paid homage to Moby Dick and Lovecraft - creating a vision of New England horror that grows cosmic. I should have considered who I was listening to and who I'm wise enough to never listen to again; GoodReads users and Redditors. The entire book felt like being cornered by a guy at the board game store. It's the worst book I've read this year, full stop.

I'm no great writer, I can admit this readily and Langan has that sort of tactical humility that he'd probably admit the same thing. To me, this is the most embarrassing thing about The Fisherman. The tone and tenor of his sentences are ceaselessly grating. The pitch is that Langan's narrator knows what he's describing sounds absurd and unnatural and that he wants the reader to know that too. The sentences do the thinking for the reader, a tedious play-by-play of events and emotion. Even when the book changes narrators, that ironic detachment persists. It's an obvious and pernicious crutch that undermines any stab the book makes at drama, let alone terror. Langan dedicates so much space to ensuring that readers understand that what they've read is understood to be totally freaky. What the book is otherwise "about" is coming to terms with grief. Lots of books are about that and Langan's observations about it are obvious and tedious. If I'd suffered a terrible loss and someone tried to console me with The Fisherman, I'd file a restraining order.

Planet of Exile - Ursula K. LeGuin (1966)

I grabbed this along with Delany's Jewels of Aptor, an affordable, appropriate twofer from a local thrift store. Planet of Exile was LeGuin's second book, written before she made her legend with The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness or the EarthSea series. Of those, I've read The Left Hand of Darkness which is one of the rare books where everyone I've met who reads it - science fiction fan or not - loves it. Left Hand is striking in its patience and adherence to pacifism, a rejection of the usual Ace Double action-adventurer format we've seen a few times already in Eliminate Down. In a genre so beholden to the tropes laid out decades before by Burroughs and Verne, LeGuin was one of the hottest lightning bolts to the genre format and worked her alchemy in the same format as those she was trying to move on from. I grabbed Planet of Exile because it was cheap and by a recognizable author but I wanted to read it to see the ruminative qualities I appreciated in Left Hand could be found in her earlier works too. 

After reading, I learned that both Planet of Exile and Left Hand exist in the broader "Hainish" cycle - a loosely interconnected series that have some proper nouns in common and use humanity's access to intergalactic travel as a way to explore LeGuin's desired theme per book. In Left Hand, she uses the biology and social customs of its two protagonists to explore gender construction and the social role of androgyny. For Planet of Exile, her focus is simpler - can love ever bloom on a battlefield? Admittedly, this is a more reductive reading than it deserves but Planet of Exile is a more minor text in the LeGuin canon than the epochal Left Hand. LeGuin was the first to admit that her feminist politics developed over her career and while Exile shows interest in interrogating patriarchal structures, the book's lead female character, Rolery, is of a more prescriptive tradition than the protagonists of her later novels. There is a great deal of concern about marriage traditions and the discontent over Rolery’s relationship with it has less to do with the institution itself, here interpreted as transactional, than it does the fact that she has fallen in love with a man who is not her race.

Despite how much I enjoy Left Hand, LeGuin's style has me reaching for my deodorant on occasion. While I admire her thematic passions and the seriousness to which she approached genre fiction, her naming conventions and world building occasionally leave me feeling like I'm trapped at the Ren Faire. The lead male character is named Jonkendy, a syllabic smashburger of John Kennedy that never stopped sounding goofy. It's a personal sour press on my palate and one that has no bearing on my opinion of her actual writing which, especially after coming off The Fisherman, conveys heady themes about internalized racism and wartime displacement without ever clubbing the reader over the head with it. Weighing in at under 130 pages, LeGuin tosses off a no-nonsense Ace Double fastball. Her editor was probably thrilled but I am growing ambivalent toward these more traditional science fiction adventures.

Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe (1592)

Edited & Introduced by Sylvan Barrett

A clearinghouse sale grab from many years ago that’s floated from bookshelf to bookshelf unread finally has its day in court. Was it good? These aren’t really the questions I’m interested in asking or answering. What it is is four hundred and thirty two years old and I still know about it. I try to respect my elders within reason. If you’re centuries old, that’s points added.

The pitch behind Doctor Faustus is well embedded into Western narrative history, a talented but unscrupulous professional makes a deal with the devil to achieve his fantasies of power and glory but in doing so, signs away his life and guarantees his spot in Hell. Somewhat appropriately, October saw me reading two stories containing wizards or magicians. Doctor Faustus did it better than The Fisherman. I’ve decided I have no great affinity for either.

Even centuries on, I thought it was clear that Marlowe wrote the play like he knew he was getting away with something. There’s an air of playful mischief to the whole thing. Doctor Faustus is gleeful in its heresies with Faustus’ corruption bleeding into other characters, his dark magic influencing not just clowns and servants but cardinals and emperors. Marlowe sets up Faustus for a dramatic, damning fall but keeps the character comical throughout. There’s an entertaining contrast with the devils acting patient and rational and Faustus demanding, impulsive and petulant. Whatever historical events or attitudes that Marlowe is satirizing elude me and the introduction, while a helpful onboarding, doesn’t give me enough of a backbone to confidently assess the story on its historical import. Consider it one for rainy day research but I’ve got to publish this Eliminate Down eventually.

The Little Sister - Raymond Chandler (1949)

From Christopher Marlowe to Phillip Marlowe, the linkages I find in what I read are every bit as strained as they need to be to make this paragraph start. I love Chandler's Marlowe stories. For as legendary as they are, there are relatively few of them but in each of them Chandler bares his soul through gritted teeth. There's this image, I think, of Chandler as elder statesman of the genre and bearing that burden of responsibility with pride but the reality of the situation was he was a difficult, emotionally volatile perfectionist who struggled with alcoholism his entire life. The Marlowe stories, as movie-ready as they are, reveal about as much about the writer and his miseries as they do about the developing history of Los Angeles. The Little Sister is one of the lesser regarded Chandler stories but shows Chandler shifting from his prime pulp mode seen six years prior in The Lady in the Lake and toward the more self-reflexive noir he'd master in The Long Goodbye. 

The cover I’ve got is the one above, a $2 Ballantine paperback, with a young girl pulling her sweater over her head, the bottom of her boob peeping out. That picture is also pasted on the back. In the story, it’s nowhere to be found. Nevertheless, The Little Sister is Chandler's most indulgent Marlowe story. Whereas past Chandler novels see him getting worked over by every Tom, Dick, and Jane he comes across, The Little Sister allows Marlowe a measure of horny grace. If I counted correctly, he makes out with just about every woman in the book between the ages of 18 and 45. Chandler is especially fixated on the dubiously Hispanic Dolores Gonzalez, writing her as dripping with a cartoonish sexiness. I can't help but feel that after a few years in Hollywood that Chandler was doing a bit of wishcasting with his stories, knowing that they'd more likely than not be adapted to screen. The Gonzalez character in particular feels like he's writing out an Ava Gardner role. Like MacDonald's books, the suspicion of women is baked into the text to a troublesome degree and there are femme fatales lurking around every dark corner. The Little Sister's Los Angeles is a devious town populated by devious persons. Scammers from across the nation descend upon the valley looking to work over some old connection or another.

Marlowe is no avenging angel here, he seems even more remiss to take this case than usual. As I round the bend on Marlowe stories after reading so many Lew Archer noirs, I detect slight variations in how they write what is essentially the same character. Archer has modeled Lew Archer after the Bogart Marlowe, the wisecrack square-jaw. But the Marlowe that Chandler developed in these later books is closer in mood and inaction to Gould's Marlowe. Although Altman & Gould styled that Marlowe like he was perpetually stoned, that adaptation captures the trudging indifference that Chandler has imbued in The Little Sister & The Long Goodbye. He's only in it for the money and he's fictional so the money isn't even real, he's actually just in it to close the case that way the book will end and so Chandler can get his check. So in a way, yeah, he is in it for the money. 

Mildred Pierce - James M. Cain (1941)

Noirvember moves apace with Cain's Mildred Pierce, a book often misclassified as noir adapted into a film that was a noir! I've been trying to cover my bases on these classic American hard-boiled writers and the inclusion of Cain knocks out the last of the big three, Cain, Chandler & Hammett. The three play to different strengths of the genre; Chandler conducts autopsies of Los Angeles, flecking his paragraphs with details that turn pulp mystery into quiet class war, Hammett is the most adept and forward thinking writer - identifying genre cliches & rebuking them years before these devices were canonized, and Cain writes salacious page turners about the residents in America's newest Eden - the city of Los Angeles and its rapidly developing exurbs. 

Despite being wrapped up in a Vintage Crime binding, Mildred Pierce is a regular Depression era psychological drama about a single working mother trying desperately to make it in America. There's a pushing forward momentum to the early pages of the book that echo Mildred's own determination to pull herself up by her own bootstraps, using what was left to her in a (relatively amicable) divorce to reclaim some of her own dignity, status and wealth. Cain works a neat trick here. He casts Mildred as humbled by her temporary freefall into poverty before allowing her to rebuild her abhorrence towards poverty, a belief now strengthened by her status as a self-made businesswoman. Cain goes to great lengths to illuminate the contradiction here, how many of her opportunities are informed not only by Mildred's personal gumption but by co-workers, friends, and lovers who generously extend help and material support. Mildred's own ignorance nearly comes across as hard-headed and tone deaf. 

Yet Cain keeps Mildred sympathetic through two devices. The first is through describing the strictures placed on women of the day. Although separated in the opening pages of the book, Mildred is still financially tied to her chronically unlucky husband Bert and legally cannot open a business without his permission. No fault divorce was not the law of the land at this time so when they agree to divorce, Bert agrees to hit her to make their divorce proceedings go smoothly. Boggling bureaucratic and paternalistic barriers are placed in front of Mildred at every turn and turn Mildred's fight back to middle class complacency into one for dignity. If women can operate independently from their husband, their lives, the lives of their children and the lives of their husbands become simpler too. 

The other device is Mildred's daughter, Veda. Mildred lives for her daughters, specifically the ice queen Veda. Even at a young age, Veda is a demon. Judgmental, snobbish and sneaky, she resents her mother for consigning them to a life less glamorous than the one promised to her by the Hollywood Hills just miles away. Veda's class insecurity is also Mildred's class insecurity. For as much as Mildred frets about how Veda doesn't resemble her in appearance or behavior, Veda did pick up on Mildred's distaste for low class "uniform jobs" like maid or waitress. She declines a live-in maid position for a wealthy family on the premise that Veda would resent the class stratification that they'd be firmly exposed to and she later hides her waitress uniform from her daughters, instead pretending that her pie-making job is her primary source of income. Mildred's own insecurity elusively imprints onto her daughter, who magnifies that behavior ten-fold and turns it against her mother as a way to mark out her own independence and get wealthy doing so. 

There's a tenuous balance Cain had to strike between tedious morality play and scintillating character drama. If the division between Mildred and her daughter were too siloed, the story could easily be a Methodist paean to the virtues of hard work & humility, a cautionary tale against the glitz & glamour of the nouveau riche. But Mildred is not given the peace of lionization. Her impulsive overspending and the considerable misguided expansion of her small business is reflective not just of her own need for control but of an American tendency to exert that control by going big and going back to the betting table. Cain assesses that the psychic fallout from the Great Depression made Americans especially prone to this class envy and that the newly emerging suburbanite class, represented through Veda, would grow up with a corrupted and childlike vision of the American Dream. As the book closes, there is no hug-around-the-hearth moment to reassert the All American sanctity of the mother-daughter bond. In its closing moments, Cain brings Mildred Pierce back to familiar territory with pure pulp cynicism.

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My Name is Lucy Barton - Elizabeth Strout (2016)

At this point in the project, some readers may have noticed a slight (2/30) preference toward male writers. My collection is primarily comprised of guys writing about guys, this is true. In an effort to break me away from this, my mom championed My Name is Lucy Barton. About a year ago, we were talking about Larry McMurtry, who I believe (and I’m sure she’s reading (Hi, Mom) so she’s free to correct me via cryptic unpunctuated text message) has some of the best writing on American identity. She recommended Strout’s book on what she felt were shared strengths between the two. Every time I went home, she’d ask me if I read the copy she lent me. Well, now I have. And she wasn’t wrong, I did like it and the sensitively depicted mother-daughter relationship that centers the book was reminiscent of McMurtry’s most endearing relationships.

Comparing Strout to McMurtry is apt because like McMurtry, her stories explore how American identities are animated by thoughts of escape and freedom-seeking individualism. The first two causalities of this are the family and the small town but both authors reject a conservative diagnosis of this phenomenon, instead depicting these developments as merited by behaviors perpetrated and perpetuated in their home communities. Abuse, indifference and repression define McMurty’s Thalia and Strout’s Amagash. Both authors left their small towns; McMurtry bounced around the country as one did in the 1960s while Strout took a more direct route from small town New England to New York City. In their stories, the city becomes the locus of independence but the move, that act of escape, is guaranteed to irreparably fracture their childhood relationships. The struggle for its characters to reconcile their love or respect for their home with their need to realize themselves as individuals forms the crux of the conflict.

As Lucy recovers in a New York City hospital from an appendix surgery, her estranged mother, who remains nameless, visits. This is the first time these two have reconvened in many years and their reunion is no joyous occasion. There is no small resentment on Lucy’s side, her mother a passive enabler and witness of childhood abuse toward Lucy and her siblings. Her move to New York City in the early 1980s was an escape from the despair and repression of her hometown. As Lucy’s stay in the hospital continues, she reminisces on her time as an adult in the city; her neighbors, her ex-husband and others that came into her life during her grand bohemian adventure.

In Lucy Barton, reconciliation is achieved with more abstraction than is seen in a McMurtry story. Lucy’s period of disability creates a situation in which she cannot continue her escape. As a result, there is a staid quality to the prose. I guess the in-season word is “demure" but “staid” works better because it is phonetically similar to “sedate” or “sedentary”, the conditions its bed-bound protagonist finds herself in. Her mother’s sudden appearance at her hospital room creates a space for reflection. Her mother cannot bring herself to address the guilt over her role in her daughter’s childhood dissatisfaction so she uses hometown gossip to obliquely relate to her daughter. Even in adulthood and through grief, her mother is unable to communicate through her wall of repressed emotion.

As Lucy and her mother talk through their stories, Lucy comes to realize what her departure meant for her family in Amagash. When Lucy leaves her mother’s farmhouse, the stability of the Amagash family life erodes with death an inevitability. After the passing of her husband, Lucy’s mother’s grief becomes unbearable and a loneliness sets in at the farmhouse. Elsewhere, the other members of Lucy’s fractured family try to reconstruct their own sense of family like her brother, a town oddball, who is described as sleeping with pigs as if they’re stuffed animals. The book never visits Amagash as a physical location, it, like the mother’s name, left to the reader’s imagination. Strout’s later books in this series set more of the action in Amagash which strikes me as working against the book’s greatest strength, a recognition that the hometown that exists in memory is no more, that its death came by a thousand cuts and that you were among those holding the knife.

Orient Express - Graham Greene (1932)

Sure. Whenever you spot a book that seems like it’d belong in the Penguin Classics canon, you can assume I grabbed it in the notorious clearinghouse sale that’s so often the catalyst for my most indifferent acquisitions. Orient Express - also known as “Stamboul Train” is among those. I like Graham Greene a fair bit, especially his post-war spy stories which feel like living Lalo Schifirin compositions; all martini-glasses, manilla folders and shag carpet. I was tasked with reading his most famous novel “The Power and the Glory” in high school, a duty which I shirked for some now unrecoverable reason. Orient Express was among his first novels and only his second to survive a ruthless period of disavowal wherein he eliminated early books from his canon.

Orient Express is frustrating in all the ways that a book of its time can be frustrating, from its clumsily assembled treatise on antisemitism, its bizarre, pernicious homophobia, and antiquated rote assembly of its story. Pitched as “An Entertainment”, it’s the sort of haughty bore that James Lipton would mirthfully chuckle at from the seat of a smelly velvet chair. Owing to the strictures of this exercise, I wasn’t going to allow myself a skip and decided that I might as well see what I could enjoy about a book that, if I valued my time more, I really did not have to read. To whit, Penguin wrapping this book with a beautiful soft jacket, serrating the pages and giving it an introduction from (hilariously, tellingly) Christopher Hitchens was way overselling what is essentially a junko airport thriller.

Write down for future consideration, an exploration of Penguin Classics designer Paul Buckley. Were his Don DeLillo softcovers cool or kitsch?

Much of the writing on Orient Express centers on how Greene writes about the other Europeans. Of particular interest for most essaysists are Myatt, a Jewish currant salesman, or Czinner, a Serbian communist covertly returning to Belgrade to stand trial. Czinner takes on the classic Greene role of Christlike figure, a good man volunteering for punishment as penitence for the sins of himself and the world at large. His character drifts through the train cars without pretension, appearing and defusing tensions with sagacity and divine patience. Myatt is more controversial with the currant salesman being cited as another example of early Greene’s trafficking in anti-semitism. Although the character is intentionally written the stereotypes of the day and while his doomed relationship with Coral Musker forms the book’s most sympathetic symbiosis, there’s a suggestion, as there is with every endearing non-British character here, that they are of distinction because these traits are exceptional in regards to their heritage whether that be Jewish, Serbian or Turkish. Greene encounters a similar issue as Sherwood Anderson wherein trying to magnanimous and include other cultures in his book, he mystifies their being. Greene has the taste or tact to not indulge in atavism but still traffics in silly Orientalist descriptive work and constantly invokes inane desert imagery.

Greene reserves most of his mockery for his fellow English. The English onboard the train are blustering, judgmental and selfish and others are at the mercy of their foul moods. Of note is the yellow journalist Mabel Warren, a middle-aged, alcoholic lesbian who bumbles and lies her way onto the Express, spends most of the book conspiring to exploit Czinner for a hot story and plots to seduce the showgirl Coral Musker. She’s presented as a comic foil, a sort of outrageous acceptable target; a haughty, man-hating feminist whose pretensions of moral goodness are contrasted by her visible degeneracy. I’m amused that so much concern floats around the depiction of Myatt while this diabolical lesbian skates by critique often unmentioned. Outside of its gleeful German sadist and the fascistic Serbian police, she is the villain of the story and belies Greene’s winking contempt for feminist politics.

One of the goals of this project was to speak about books without hyperbole. Orient Express isn’t worth discussing at length but I don’t mean to dismiss or imply that it’s wholly without interesting moments. Greene is able to evoke the mood of the Continent - as seen through the eyes of an anxious, sympathetic Englishman. Greene’s ensemble drama is heavy on caricature work but throughout there’s a sense that what he’s depicting is reflective of the culture he comes from. One of the book’s major issues is that Greene’s differentiation of his characters, whether in internal monologue or in exposition, often comes down to explanations as to how they’re different from the preconceptions of who they are. This preoccupation means that its characters all suffer from a plodding didacticism, trying to stave off the Oswald Moselys before they gained too much momentum. Even with the historical context, it reads as too simplistic to be of much help.

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The Professor of Desire - Philip Roth (1977)

One of my larger 20th century blind spots is Philip Roth. I’ve never read American Pastoral, Portnoy’s Complaint, Goodbye, Columbus, nothing. The Professor of Desire is among the weirder entry points into his canon, the middle book of his Kepesh series. I grabbed this one from a bizarre bar-bookstore hybrid in Orlando, Florida - the only good idea in that city. Most Roth experts would recommend, well, at least eleven of his other books including the previous Kepesh book “The Breast.” But I’ve made my bed and I find myself with The Professor of Desire, a book with a name that still makes me giggle.

The common refrain on Roth is that he’s a good writer and a noxious chauvinist. With its sexually suggestive cover and quadruple entendre title, there’s no escaping discussion of this accusation when talking about The Professor of Desire. In this book, the women are not rendered with emotional fullness, their wants and needs are usually designed with intent to foil or complement Kepesh’s wants. The book’s strengths do not lie in these characters and there’s little denying that in writing out Kepesh’s agonies that Roth is working to dispel his own agonies and anxieties. True to its name, The Professor of Desire is about the appeal of libidinous behavior. From a young age, when his flatulent, funny cousin shows him the joy of faking farts and goofing off, David Kepesh grows to appreciate and need the less polite impulses of the flesh. As he grows from childhood to adulthood, his desires inevitably turn sexual in nature. Indulgence in his desires is entwined with his understanding of freedom but these needs are conflicted by an equally powerful need for security with his lovers, his own ego, and most pressingly, with his parents.

The book shines when chronicling Kepesh’s relationship with his parents. Roth writes this inter-generational dynamic with the most passion. Kepesh’s father, a mountain town motel manager, serves as a model of maturity and stability for a young David. When his bases of security are taken away from him, we witness how that erodes his own sense of self and the behaviors he takes on to reassert his autonomy. Roth regards the father’s pivots with observable concern with worries about his father’s increasing paranoia, increased fervor over Israel and visible restlessness. His mother is less present, dying midway through the book, with her death forcing David to reconsider how he’s spent life on the backfoot. The elder Kepeshes have a nostalgia built into them, elements that frustrate David are charming to the reader. Roth renders them delicately and with great affection.

The book’s final act is its strongest, functioning almost like a short story unto itself. It’s the one that best ties the book’s thematic concerns together and is what Roth had been sketching at the whole time. The closing dinner scene with Kepesh, his girlfriend, his father, and his father’s friend Mr. Barbatnik is sensitive and subtle, a far cry away from the book’s beginnings. In fact, The Professor of Desire seems like a deliberate provocation on Roth’s existing reputation with its salacious title promising his most indulgent book yet. Roth’s real interest is in bringing Kepesh closer to his father. This is where we find Kepesh at the end, closer to his father and no more comfortable in the knowledge that he’ll never be rid of his desires, will never experience the contentment he believed his father had.

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You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine - Alexandra Kleeman (2015)

In 2022, I read Kleeman’s second novel, Something New Under the Sun, a surreal eco-noir about an actress, a press agent and the creep of the California wildfires. In that book, California is rendered nearly inhospitable by years of accelerated climate devastation but Los Angeles still presses forward with the Hollywood Hills still existing at the peak of privilege. The story’s overall mood is one of tunneling despair before its final pages turn that despair into something transcendent. The metaphysical final turn of Under the Sun, which describes the evolutionary track of the far-flung future of the story was such an obliquely hopeful read on our situation that it endeared me to Kleeman’s concerns and styles. I was lucky enough to stumble upon her first book, You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, for cheap.

Even with only the two books, Kleeman has carved out space for herself as a writer with particular concerns about the dissociative aspects of modern living. Under the Sun is about how people use distancing techniques to remove themselves from the reality of climate change while Body Like Mine is more broadly about how a culture of consumerism initiates a death of self and perverts one’s relationship to their body. The linkages to J.G. Ballard and Don DeLillo are clear, dry-mouthed recountings of highly strange goings-on and overwhelming depictions of superstores make up large sections of this book. What the book feels like it owes the greatest debt to though is Todd Haynes’ film Safe. Both the book and Haynes’ film are about suburban women who develop obsessive hypochondriac tendencies rendering the world hostile, strange and impossible to live in. To manage their rapidly fracturing mental and physical states, they surrender themselves to clean living New Religious groups that isolate them further from their previous lives.

Near as I can tell, Kleeman has never outright stated what her influences are, though I suspect that these entries feed into what she’s observed in her own life. For n+1, she wrote about a Fruitarian gathering, the rhetoric of which bears distinctive echoes to what’s found in Body Like Mine. Unlike Safe, Kleeman assembles her ersatz America with a calculated and overbearing cynicism. The nameless town the protagonist lives in is impossibly sterile. Similarly, Kleeman obscures her characters’ names to their first letters; A, B, and C, to draw out the anonymizing condition of consumerism, a device I found gratuitous and obvious. To complement this the rhythm of the book is intentionally inert. I’d be more endeared to this if I found the repeated motifs vaguer but they all fall down as unimaginative pastiche. Descriptions of Kandy Kat, a rubber hose Trix Rabbit type mascot, commercials are explained with granular, tedious precision.

“…like in the commercial where an impish young Kandy Kake lures Kandy Kat on a chase through frame after frame of a happy suburban neighborhood populated by cute yellow houses. Kandy Kat’s clubby feet kick up a wake of dust behind him, his body blurs with speed, the world scrolls manically by, breaknecking. He runs with claws out ahead of him, swiping at the little Kake that is always somehow a step or two away. Then a stray claw snags on a piece of sky, and the world starts to stretch and then slump in a startling way: Kandy Kat has literally torn through the scenery, caused a widening rip in the world. He stops to look, perplexed, at the fluttering material, blown by a breeze of unknown origin. On it you can see a piece of house, mostly window and some lilac-painted shutter. The shot widens, and we see that Kandy Kat is standing in a studio soundstage in front of a flat, painted background that slips past him while the little Kake turns a crank. One yellow house after another scrolls by before Kandy Kat looks down and realizes that he’s been running on a treadmill the whole time, a treadmill that yanks him suddenly backward and threatens to throw him off completely. Kandy Kat starts running for his life, running toward the giggling Kake, and he is still running with no sign that he will ever stop when we see the words projected over his body. “KANDY KAKES: HOPELESSLY DELICIOUS”

Deadpan satire like this is repeated to diminishing effect throughout the book. I took the most umbrage with its dystopian game show, That’s My Partner, a miserable exploitation ritual where lovers gamble their relationship away for a chance to be on television. I have no illusions about the evils of reality televison and with shows like Naked Attraction baring it all, some could argue that there’s a degree of prescience in this, but it’s senselessly cynical function over form with the unsubtle suggestion that the characters will be here eventually and that the reader is here already.

The book isn’t without its successes. As the characters are nameless, they are instead identified primarily by their physical attributes. Kleeman pores over bodies in detail describing the texture of skin, the softness of hair, the feeling of sweaty rot that comes with staying in bed or not changing clothes. Her skill at depicting physical malaise informs the story’s real anxieties about how consumerism is informing self-image. The book’s best scene, wherein A eats a clump of B’s hair, is when the book finally shifts modes from sterile satire to something darker and more tactile. It’s a grotesque power play, a misguided one with a dimension of pathos despite the vileness of the act. By this point in the story, A has become convinced that her roommate is acting to replace her, body and spirit, and eats the braid of hair in a manic attempt to reassert dominance over her roommate. It’s a nasty scene that is contrasted well against the otherwise antiseptic prose. That it didn’t have the confidence to arrive there more quickly may be the book’s biggest sin. That it spends about one hundred more pages meandering with the dullest industrialized New Age cult you’ve ever read about is its second biggest.

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Arc D'x - Steve Erickson (1993)

I was not looking forward to Arc d’X. I grabbed it while loitering in a book shop for too long. I grabbed it because I loved the other and only Erickson book I'd read, Zeroville. I wanted to read more Erickson but the only book of his I could find on the shelves across all local bookstores was Arc d’X. The pitch thrown out by publisher listings sold it as an alt-history novel about Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved paramour, Sally Hemmings. It was an allegory about America but was about more than the relationship, it was about the original sin of the country and uh huh, uh huh, white author. I've read Russell Banks, it can be done with grace (Cloudsplitter) and it can be done with woeful overconfidence (Continental Drift). At any rate, I wanted to read more Erickson and this wasn't an appealing continuation of his career. But here I was, at a crossroads and the only book that looked appealing was this sun-faded copy of Arc d’X. 

If not the best book I've read this year, it's been the most absorbing. Erickson blows up the alternate history approach fairly quickly, switching out the Jefferson-Hemmings narrative for a surrealistic story that jumps through time and space. The broad genre definition "slipstream" helps unravel what Erickson is doing here. Characters fall in and out of these different pockets of time, the linearity of the story jumbled by these slippages. Images of black smoke, swarms of black moths emerging from deep wounds, a city out of time cloaked in smog and pockmarked by marble obelisks, a vision of the Reign of Terror that has more in common with Alighieri than Robespierre, and apocalyptic visions of the incipient Millennium; Erickson possesses the knack to weave these disparate images into something wholly arresting and coherent. Using Hemmings and Jefferson as his lodestars, he creates a story that could be obvious and instead creates something cosmic, something ethereally strange. 

One of Erickson's earliest champions was Thomas Pynchon and my copy of Arc d’X came jacketed with his praise. If you find Pynchon’s genre mind melds appealing, you can find something similar in Erickson. While Zeroville feels more in conversation with Pynchon's Southern California stories, Arc d’X has the global, spiritual concerns of Gravity's Rainbow. Erickson's story is concerned with America as a perverse symbol of masculine liberatory politic, a politic that it fundamentally cannot follow through on due to the circumstances of its creation. A country for the people by the people that uses slavery as its spark plug for its economic engine cannot execute its utopian vision. Using Hemmings and Jefferson to explore this dynamic; first between individuals and later in the abstract, should feel cheap but Erickson spends the first quarter of the book with Sally and Thomas, humanizing the former and mythologizing the latter with chilling results. In real life, Jefferson looms large - a man of such national stature that we carved a sixty foot granite effigy of him into the side of the mountain. Erickson chips away at that visage, depicting him as a compromised idealist, a man whose convictions on liberty and slavery are undermined by his need to dominate. 

For as excellent as his descriptive work is, the characters sometimes lumber and lurch under the burden of their symbolism. Erickson echoes the Hemmings/Jefferson dynamic for all its sets of characters and while the surrealism of the situation paints over some of the more labored dramatic sections, Erickson is a writer far more interested in the ideas of his story than he is in the story itself. I find his winding detours generally thrilling though several sections of the book devolve into fighting and fucking for pages upon pages. All this action is not without artistry or purpose but it feels like a crutch for Erickson after too long, a way for him to repeat a theme well-addressed over its nearly three hundred pages. For every section that felt a touch too long, pages or passages usually followed that upended my interpretation of the story. Erickson’s descriptive work is key here, creating an otherworld that is foreboding and capital S-Strange even when adapting historical events.

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Seize the Day - Saul Bellow (1956)

Before I sat down and read it, I took the title of Bellow's novella at face value. I assumed "Seize the Day" had the same sort of carpe diem quality I found so nauseating in Dead Poets Society. Mercifully, Seize the Day eschews any sort of feckless Hallmark optimism, preferring a measured cynicism. I don't take my coffee with sugar and I don't like my mid-life crisis stories to sand down their edges. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind a turnaround but some protagonists haven't worked toward that. Bellow's Tommy Wilhelm definitely does not put in the work. Seize the Day is an ironic dark comic work that successfully draws out the woefulness of downward mobility.

It is somewhat surprising that the Coen Brothers have yet to adapt any Bellow work. Their sensibilities seem to fit Bellow's, especially Seize the Day, the three of them being interested in a sort of cosmic incompetence, not malevolence, just a person made pathetic by the repetition of failure. From changing his name from William Adler to his adrift acting career, nothing in his life seems to have panned out as planned and all of his choices seem ill-informed. Presently, he is led around by Dr. Tamkin, a charlatan obvious to everyone but Wilhelm. Wilhelm agonizes over the possibility that Tamkin might not have his best interests in mind even as he gives him money to invest in lard futures with, even as he signs over power of attorney to him.

Tamkin is a hilarious invention, an itinerant liar who enters Adler’s life by physical proximity and shared heritage. He seems to exist entirely to scam Adler out of his rapidly diminishing wealth. Entire paragraphs are dedicated to recounting Tamkin’s expanding web of cartoonish exaggerations and fibs.

“He realized that Tamkin was watching to see how he took it. More elements were continually being added. A few days ago Tamkin had hinted that he had once been in the underworld, one of the Detroit Purple Gang. He was once head of a mental clinic in Toledo. He had worked with a Polish inventor on an unsinkable ship. He was a technical consultant in the field of television. In the life of a man of genius, all of these might happen. But had they happened to Tamkin? Was he a genius? He often said that he had attended some of the Egyptian royal family as a psychiatrist. “But everybody is alike, common or aristocrat,” he told Wilhelm. “The aristocrat knows less about life.”

Center to the story is the other major male interpersonal relationship in Wilhelm’s life, the one he shares with his father, a retired, respected doctor - an actual one. His father is a pillar of the community who has done what he can to support his wayward son. At the start of the book, their relationship is under great strain as Wilhelm tries again to press his father for money, money that his father knows will be swindled away by his son’s newest guru. Tamkin acts as a sort of conditional, corrupted stand-in for Wilhelm’s relationship with his father. Unlike Dr. Adler, Tamkin encourages all of Wilhelm’s bad behavior, because he seeks to profit from it, but Wilhelm misreads his scamming as genuine support. In placing his trust in the substitute father and distrusting his real father, Wilhelm starts the story on the precipice of total oblivion.

Wilhelm’s continued reliance on get-rich quick schemes has echoes today as seemingly nearly every divorced man has turned to r/WallStreetBets or crypto-currency or drop shipping to reclaim some small piece of dignity they've supposed they lost. As I've found with so, so many of these books, the story might be about a problem thought endemic to the era but its continued strength and relevance comes from how little our concerns and insecurities have changed. As Wilhelm is depleted of what remains of his money, his identity begins to fracture. He begins to look inwards to find his real self, the William Adler that the Tommy Wilhelm identity obscured. As he enters the story’s final destination, a stranger’s funeral, he resolves to reorder his life - the dead man on the bier a catalyst for reconciliation.

Seize the Day lightly applies its misery and cynicism to effective means before allowing its protagonist a measure of ecstasy through despair. Like so many in the post-war milieu, Wilhelm is a self-pitying goofball, a middle-aged man totally limited by situations he has imposed upon himself through ambivalence and privilege. Bellow draws out how Wilhelm’s insecurities, about his own identity, his previous failures and his relationship with his father, have compounded to create the man in front of the reader. It’s an excellent character study and one that doles out empathy and ridicule in equal dosages.

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Dubliners - James Joyce (1912)

Having never read Joyce before, I was over the moon to finally arrive at Dubliners. I'd looked forward to this one for a while and it didn't disappoint. How could it? Fifteen short stories about townsfolk, the model for so much short-form fiction for the past century - it's the sort of essential text that I should have read a decade ago had my high school's English program been worth the tuition or had my cultural curiosity been better directed toward classic literature and not toward trying to replicate the high of watching Twin Peaks for the first time. It's mildly unfair to saddle this short story collection with such high praise in contrast to the other books I've read this year but make no mistake, Dubliners currently stands as my favorite work I've read so far. 

I'll be revisiting Dubliners throughout my life. Joyce created a wealth of culture here, telling stories about the nascent Irish middle class during a period of time in which their basic humanity was being decided in courtrooms and in the chambers of Parliament. Stories like Eveline or A Little Cloud, are more universally human with their dramas about lost loves or interpersonal insecurities than stories like Ivy Day in the Committee Room, which leans on contemporary Irish history, but all of them are flecked with contemporary cultural & political detail like gold leaf on fine china. Joyce has rendered Dublin in totality, using the fifteen stories and the characters within to capture the fullness of a community's life. Bundling these stories together in one volume draws out each story’s shared humanistic vision, a quality made vital under an occupying force determined to render them as less than. 

In spite of adoring the book, I’ll keep my praise of it that short and superficial. Joyce is among (if not) the most written about author of the 20th century. Contributing to the white noise of discourse surrounding him without even a pebble-sized amount of knowledge on Irish history, Dublin’s culture in the early 20th century or Joyce as a person (proclivity for farting notwithstanding) is a fool’s errand. I’ll dash my head against that rock in the future and privately at that. If you’re reading this and have not read Joyce because of your own indifference and your education system failed you as badly as it failed me, do yourself a favor and read him next. The above links bring you to the entire Dubliners as it’s in the public domain. One of the annoying things about this entirely self-imposed project and setting progress markers is that I’m not allowing myself time to sit and ruminate on these works that demand it. To paraphrase David Lynch, I’m not allowed to go dreamy. I don’t recommend this approach. Anyway, onto the next book.

To Each His Own - Leonardo Sciascia (1966)

Sciascia's most famous book, The Day of the Owl, is one of the most important crime novels of the 20th century. Written in 1960, it was among the first pieces of Italian fiction to talk openly about the culture of silence that the Mafia engendered in Sicily and Italy. The Day of the Owl resonated with the public for its proper diagnosis of a perceived breakdown of social and moral responsibility. His writing is brisk and humorous, the violence of the crimes depicted within ironically contrasted by the hypocrisy and indifference of all characters but its protagonist. To Each His Own is a continuation of this style of detective novel and may be even darker and more cynical than The Day of the Owl. 

Both books are about unsolved murders in the Sicilian countryside. Owl takes on the classic procedural plot of having an outsider detective go south to break the case. To Each His Own flips the script instead having a local teacher, Laurana, take interest in the case out of his own morbid curiosity after he uncovers a clue that he believes is the key to the case. As Laurana digs further, he begins to discover tightly held secrets among his neighbors and a conspiracy that he believes may go all the way to the top. It's a standard conspiracy thriller in its broad strokes but Sciascia's political convictions and personal animosity toward the Italian elite make for a more effectively venomous story. 

The haplessness of its protagonist gives the book its darkly comedic tone. Laurana is not portrayed as particularly clever or subtle. His self-preservation instincts are null and his situational awareness is somehow worse. He borders on parody of Sciascia's other detective characters as someone totally unequipped for the situation that he puts himself in. Nearing 40, he's a mother's boy, a lovelorn bachelor, and a boring, distracted teacher. He finds meaning in his own life through his investigation but his conclusions are often a degree away from the truth, a pattern of incompetence with devastating results. Whereas Owl’s lead, Bellodi, investigates that story’s murder as it is his professional duty, Laurana approaches this murder like a hobbyist and faces the consequence for his apolitical curiosity. As is the case with many of Sciascia's other stories, justice is elusive but To Each His Own settles on a punchline so mean and so pithy that it may boost my own estimation of the book over its more famous sibling.

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Secret Rendezvous - Kobo Abe (1979)

Translator: Juliet Winters Carpenter 

The logline of every Kobo Abe book is arresting. Better known for his book The Woman in the Dunes, about a man trapped in a village forced to shovel sand alongside a woman he's residing with, Abe's books have a reputation as absurd, provocative and surreal, a Japanese Kafka for the post-war era. Secret Rendezvous, a geographically windy bureaucratic stress comedy, that draws from Borges as much as it does Kafka is about a man searching for his wife after an ambulance mysteriously abducts her in the dead hours of the night. Abe's trademark sense of unease is never stronger than it is here. If you're someone like me, who dislikes hospitals, the premise of the story is about as worst case Ontario as they come. 

Secret Rendezvous is a good example of Abe's style; he rarely gives out names, characters are defined by their jobs, physical attributes or other defining characteristics. Names aren't just not given, they're intentionally omitted. This all adds to the oppressive bureaucracy of his stories, a sensation compounded by characters with titles like Assistant Director and Chief of Security selling the protagonist obvious mis-truths with smiles. The book starts as an informal diary with its protagonist writing out the events of the previous twenty-four hours in third person, per the requests of the director. After describing the main character's physical attributes, the protagonist begins to recall a conversation they had with a horse - or a man who believes himself to be a horse. Abe is intentionally obtuse with this character and his presence is immediately unsettling, sending the reliability of the narrator's version of events into a tailspin. Between this and the gradual reveal that the third-person diary set-up is being imposed upon the protagonist, Abe sets the stage for a story that becomes exponentially more unsettling the deeper it goes.

Primarily promoted as a surrealist, Abe is underrated for how he implements dimensions of sexual paranoia that his influences and contemporaries shied away from. Sharing several details in common with a previous book, The Face of Another, including its triumvirate diary structure, Secret Rendezvous is also the most sexually explicit book Abe had written since Face. As the protagonist goes deeper into the hospital complex, it slowly emerges that the assistant director is conducting bizarre eugenic experiments on men and women and that the bureaucratic language being used was developed with the intent to disguise the inhumanity of these experiments. Through this paranoiac lens, Abe confronts a social pressure of acquiescence that enables and emboldens abuses of power. 

Not content to let his protagonist just be that, he indicts the main character in this cycle of power-sharing. At first, a confused third party and later a hapless victim, the protagonist gradually begins to assume the duties of the hospital security staff through a series of absurd and obscure encounters. His proximity to power gives him renewed confidence to find his wife, improve his self-image, and untangle the web of mystery in front of him but also continues to place him into morally compromising situations that further unconsciously integrate him into the hospital cult. Secret Rendezvous is cynical and at times downright cruel. Abe merges his trademark surrealism with the conspiracy thriller to horrifying results. If you have the stomach to get through its ending, it is a worthy and vicious read and an often overlooked piece of Abe's bibliography.

The Jewels of Aptor - Samuel R. Delany (1962)

Delany'd again, and so soon too. This will be the last Delany for this column, the Randomizer having dumped two of his books fairly close to each other. The Jewels of Aptor is his earliest book, published at the young age of twenty. As a result, it feels directly imitative of its influences. I enjoyed this substantially more than I did Towers of Toron, it feels slighter than his legend would indicate. You have to start somewhere and Delany started with a science fantasy that borrows liberally from adventure pulp and post-apocalyptic science fiction.

What's here is thoughtful and well constructed with Delany subverting the colonial & Ubermensch indulgences of the genre that we saw in A Princess of Mars and what coded the adventure story in the first half of the 20th century. The Jewels of Aptor's crew is made up of what were then non-standard protagonists; black men, women, and non-verbal teens. The faux-medieval setting and pirate narrative is an enjoyable misdirection before it settles into the post-apocalyptic adventure beats. Delany does good work describing the ruins of a futuristic city and gives space for this crumbling city to awe and overwhelm its characters before forcing them to flee from the vampiric inhabitants hunting them. One gets the sense that Delany's preternatural pacing skills stems from a childhood spent mainlining science fiction and fantasy novels. Aptor's clarity and speed is indicative of a maturity beyond what one might expect from a writer this young and whether it was Delany or a remorseless editor at ACE Books, it's a trim and rewarding adventure that feels larger than its 159 pages.

The Confession of a Child of the Century - Alfred de Musset (1836)

Translator: David Coward

Another strange pick-up from the aforementioned publisher's clearinghouse sale. I tried reading this years ago, maybe after a break-up, and put it down after about fifty pages because this sort of early 19th century romanticism was not my thing then and is still the sort of thing that I'm working toward appreciating. The people behind the book is generally more interesting than the book itself; Confession of a Child of the Century is an autobiographical novel from the point of view of French poet and Libertine Alfred de Musset detailing the failure of his first romantic relationship and his obsessive, self-destructive approach to his second romance. The second girlfriend, Brigitte, stands-in for George Sand, a writer and early feminist, whose popularity in France was far greater than de Musset's. It is that Sand remains popular today that ensures Confession's continued relevance - a twist of fate not dissimilar to what Ted Hughes and his work will face in the coming decades.

There's some humor and humility in de Musset's retelling of his own woes, those he presumes to be unique to his generation, and the book's heightened emotions. As someone with minimal familiarity with the style of Romantic literature, it often struck me as mawkish though never crude. Child of a Century is filled with evocative passages trying desperately to render the abstract into something tangible and despairing at the gap between skill and feasibility. It's a knowing dynamic that leans into de Musset's insecurity as poet and writer. This despair feeds into the protagonist's own misery over his inability to square his ardor with jealousy and barely sublimated rage. Hiding his name behind his literary stand-in Octave, de Musset drafts a blank canvas, one to be defaced and corrupted by other men in his social sphere, the post-Napoleon, post-Revolution malaise of the era, and his own particular miseries of ego. There's an ironic timelessness to Octave's winding polemics about how singularly dead-ended he feels. Generous readers might attest that de Musset is simply describing the alienation of modernity but even de Musset suggests that Octave, and by extension romanticism, is just immature. 

The accusations leveled against the book over the decades, that it is a self-pitying misogynistic ode to its author aren't without merit, though the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition, by David Coward, helpfully places it within the context of Romantic literature and the celebrity life of de Musset and Sand. Coward mounts a defense of the book that helps pitch it not just as something more palatable for contemporary readers but as a way to better understand the genesis of modern celebrity culture. The Confession of a Child of the Century functions as a barely fictionalized celebrity tell-all, one that politely obfuscates the realities of what was likely an abusive relationship fueled by alcohol and entitlement. 

Octave's insecurities and wrath are commonplace, especially in the realm of male tales of woe. I find that by reading these earlier books, formative or not, that familiar patterns of behavior reoccur far earlier than I'd previously supposed. de Musset writes about the alleged unique quality of his modern alienation and it sounds like a diatribe you'd spot, if not read, on a particularly mopey The Guardian column;

"The effect was a rejection of everything that exists in heaven and on earth. It could be termed disillusionment or, if you prefer, despair. It was as if humankind was in a coma and pronounced dead because it had no pulse. Just as the soldier who was once asked "What do you believe in?": answered "In myself.", so the entire youth of France, when the same question was put to them, replied "In nothing!""

de Musset is convinced that this sort of spiritual ambivalence is both unique and will be exclusive to his time speaking out to future generations that they'd best appreciate the Libertine's time in the desert. Have I got bad news for him!

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde & Other Tales of Terror (1886)

Editor: Robert Mighall

Among the reasons I embarked on this project was because I kept forgetting I owned certain books. There was no book I forgot I owned more than this collection of Robert Louis Stevenson horror stories. I generally enjoy most of these early, influential horror stories but I was ambivalent at best about Stevenson's stories. I grabbed it during that aforementioned sale but the Shelley, Stoker & Wells books took priority. All of those were better than Stevenson’s and while not totally without its rewards, this collection is only for those serious about gothic literature.

Upon starting, I was greeted by a nearly thirty page introduction that assumed intimate familiarity not just with the story itself (and recommended that I did not continue the intro if I were not) but the numerous film adaptations. I had to be honest with myself, I had never seen the 1930s Universal adaptation but I was familiar with the blaxploitation film, "Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (NSFW)", I knew about the infamous Nintendo game, and assumed that this would be enough to onboard me. Mighall thought otherwise and writes out a granular recounting of the story with thorough explanations of why Stevenson set his story where he did and how Jekyll and Hyde functions as a novel spin on the ascendant detective story. While I appreciate Mighall’s efforts to place the narrative geographically, explaining why Stevenson chose certain London streets and landmarks to set scenes, his reasons are not obscure. Too often I felt like I was flipping to the back pages to learn something I already knew. 

What I found more interesting were the other stories in the collection; The Body Snatcher and Olalla. The former incorporates the 19th century panic over graverobbing, a panic rooted in the grim reality that medical schools were paying folks cold hard cash for still-warm bodies. The Body Snatcher was fairly standard, a ghost story with inflections of social-moral rot caused by scientific curiosity and capitalistic avarice. It stands out to me because there’s a character named Todd McFarlane and it was fun to imagine the creator of Spawn as a grave robber. Sometimes the appeal of something is as simple as that. Olalla is a pre-Dracula vampire tale set in the Spanish countryside that is revealing in how Victorian era horror is used to mystify other cultures and justify suspicion and resentment of countryside residents, especially foreigners.

As I’m uncovering, nearly all pulp fiction coming from England that deals with the supernatural is usually cover for worries about non-white or non-Anglican people corrupting the pure Anglican English. Olalla is among the starker examples I’ve found about anti-Catholic anxieties, here depicted as a backwards, idolatrous religion belonging to simple country folk and their severe, masters. Yet, there’s a degree of admiration in Olalla that isn’t present in Stoker’s Dracula, a sort of envy (or maybe pity) for glory lost in the centuries since the Reformation. These suggest a greater fear that the divine glory that the Catholic Church lost could strike down the English just by proximity. That these countryside Catholics take on parasitical qualities in order to rejuvenate their own lives serves here as a political suggestion rather than taking on the erotic dimensions that Stoker popularized. Dracula suggests replacement by seduction, repeating fears about Eastern Europeans and Jews that we previously saw bandied about Italians in Where Angels Fear to Tread. Olalla mixes its fear of Catholicism with a celebration of the new urban, of the secular London, and casts the Spanish countryside as a place foreign, strange and intrinsically regressive.

Mighall’s framing of Stevenson as eminently interested in how the newly industrialized cities have changed the lives of their residents, heightened cultural contrasts with those in the countryside, and creating secular schisms gives needed context to these stories. I think Stevenson is a fine writer but there is a matter-of-fact flatness to them. Olalla has some beautiful descriptive passages about the fading glory of the old mountainside manor and his London-set stories have that eerie Victorian gaslight feeling set in but nothing in this collection transcends its genre and Mighall’s academic possession over the original texts makes for an undeniably informative but equally undeniably dry read.

Dark Laughter - Sherwood Anderson (1925)

Dire stuff, notoriously so. I went looking for a book that was written as a response to the American sexual revolution of the early 1920s and learned that Dark Laughter could fit the bill. Anderson's most famous work, Winesburg, Ohio, is an American Lit 101 standby, and one with a gossipy, townie texture that is genuinely American. My hope was that if he could transfer that demure sensationalism to a story about an American couple rolled by the era's liberalizing sexual politics, I'd find a book as thoughtful and quietly amusing as Winesburg. Anderson is good at writing insecurity. He imparts those general feelings of insignificance and malaise with a gentle pity and sees that insecurity as a national condition, an affliction at the pit of the nation's soul. Dark Laughter goes back on these ideas but in the time between Winesburg's publication and its publication, Anderson's self-satisfied sentimentalism curdled making him an ill fit for post-war literature. 

This is hardly a new observation. Dark Laughter's claim to infamy is that Ernest Hemingway found it so risible that he wrote his first novel, The Torrents of Spring, as a parody of it. The Torrents of Spring fractured the men's professional and personal relationship and caused no small amount of drama among peers like Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos. Despite being Anderson's only best seller during his lifetime and enjoying critical praise in its era, Dark Laughter hasn't been republished since 1960. In the decades following Anderson's death, it's been reappraised as his worst novel by no small margin; an obnoxious, racist, and self-absorbed Joyce mimic best ignored by all but Anderson and 1920s literature completionists. And me. 

It's understandable why Hemingway would have been so annoyed by Dark Laughter. Anderson feels completely out of his depth here. When compared to Fitzgerald or Hemingway's Lost Generation stories, Anderson feels quaint, like he's retelling a story he heard from more exciting people. His comprehension of the trauma of combat feel especially romanticized and fanciful like Anderson is theorizing what it might be like to see action in the war. While he did serve in Cuba during the Spanish American War, his combat experience was limited to that four month stint where his biographer alleged that he spent most of it sleeping around and reading books. 

Where Anderson finds the most success is in examining the interiors of his characters. The romantic melodrama that occupies the book's back half is ironic and salacious. The men are sensitives, fakers, bookish types, the classic Anderson male. Aline, his female protagonist, has some of the introspection you'd expect from a comedy of manners and Anderson applies some of his humanist paint to her. She’s defined as conflicted by her impulsive choice towards domesticity, one she embraced as one of the two lamest Americans in post-war Paris, the other being her dull but wealthy husband. I liked this dynamic because it felt like Anderson was hedging his bets; "I don't know what these young kids are up to so I'll just center around the ones who folded and went home." It draws out Anderson's best observations, helping him to temper his more experimental ambitions that otherwise sink the novel.

With only a passing familiarity with James Joyce, I'll have to take the word of those who have written about Dark Laughter before me and assume that Anderson is mimicking the style of Joyce's novels. Anderson is trying on a new hat here and compared to the straightforward didacticism that served him well in Winesburg, Ohio, Dark Laughter's metaphor driven prose and occasional lapses into poetry feel ill-suited for his style. Worse yet are Anderson's miserable attempts to incorporate black characters into the story as a sort of Greek chorus. Unambiguously racist from his first attempt, the continued incorporation is as distracting as it is confounding. His atavistic depiction of black men and women alike purports a natural and glorious inclination towards mysticism, sensuality and truth. It's genuinely strange and consistently off-putting. Even when the novel is succeeding at its comedy of manners, Anderson's leering, speculative racism is never more than a handful of pages away. 

When going back to older literature, I find it helpful to be able to compartmentalize. I'm not looking for the prose in these books to be adjusted. I understand fiction and art as ways to better comprehend the culture of the time it was created in - very rarely is the art producing culture. That sort of approach is helpful toward grappling with Dark Laughter but it must be said that it remains a generally unenjoyable book and a tedious read even when at its most mildly entertaining moments. Its ill reputation is well-earned. 

A Princess of Mars - Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)

Edgar Rice Burroughs' books are obsolete. I hate to dismiss a writer's entire body of work outright but between John Carter and Tarzan, it must be said that the world has largely moved on from his style of colonialist pulp action. This is not to say that there is nothing of note in Burroughs' books or that A Princess of Mars is without positive qualities but there are scant few things to recommend here to modern readers. For the historically curious, it’s a good book to know but the target audience ends there. I count myself among those curious about the history of genre fiction of all stripes and Burroughs is one of the most important figures in the construction of adventure and science fiction but after reading A Princess of Mars, I think I understand where the Burroughs appeal begins and ends. 

To get the good out of the way, Burroughs' fantastical vision of Mars is captivating. Disney's little-loved and even less seen adaptation of the book, John Carter, rendered Mars as we know it - dry. Why the fuck they opted to go for that interpretation is just step .1 in understanding why that project became among the costliest boondoggles in blockbuster history because Burroughs writes in detail about the planet's vivid colors and imperial largess. It's well-worn history now that the Barsoom series, of which Princess is the first installment, was mined by future authors for visual influence for series like Flash Gordon and Dune which in turn served as the basis for Star Wars and while you can definitely see glimpses of those stories in A Princess of Mars, Burroughs' boyish speculation about Mars is endearing and feels singular, even a century later.

Burroughs is also able to write action with incredible clarity. When Carter gets wrapped into one of many, many fights, the action is legible. Sword swings, feints, leaps and tackles all register with immediacy, unconcerned with adding more prose than is absolutely necessary. The action in A Princess of Mars feels elemental, there's no nonsense. John Carter is a good guy, valiant, pure of heart, unblemished. He is a hero, the very definition of one. Like many novels of its time, Princess started life as a serial in All-Story Magazine. I get the sense that the almost cinematic quality of the fight choreography went a long way toward endearing him with contemporary readers. If you picked up a copy of the magazine, even casually, there was a good chance that it would have been Burroughs' economy of language in the tensest moments that kept your attention as opposed to the purplish prose tales that buffeted his submissions. 

Yet, I firmly believe that Burroughs is outmoded and has been made obsolete by the century of science fiction and adventure stories that followed his works. The most obvious charge that can be leveled against his stories is that they're racist. This is not unique to Burroughs, as seen above with Sherwood Anderson, but the overtones of racial essentialism and the way it conflates the Martians with various Indigenous tribes is indicative of a rot embedded into the texture of American media. The book starts with John Carter, a veteran of the War Between the States (the book's words, not mine) prospecting out in Arizona and being forced to flee from a gang of Apaches; the parallels between this dramatic action and Carter then finding himself in a foreign land fleeing from a marauding band of natives with obscure ceremonial codes is as obvious as it is tiring. 

There is a degree of inhumanity that I expect from all pulp, especially fiction written by white people during the peak popularity of eugenics thought. A Princess of Mars is indicative of this style which has the effect of making its expression of clearly realized violence worrying when taken out of the abstract. No doubt, if one looks into western novels of the era, you will find similarly straightforward scenes of violence perpetrated explicitly on Apaches, Sioux and other native populations. The key to A Princess of Mars' relative longevity in the public space is that it abstracted this colonialist show of domination and is able to obscure its racist beliefs by setting its narrative off-world. No matter how many times John Carter leaps nearly nude thirty feet in the air, it all starts to become tiring - a historical curiosity but little more.

The Thin Man - Dashiell Hammett (1934)

Compared to James Cain or Raymond Chandler, Hammett's pulp feels the most self-effacing. Even Red Harvest, often considered Hammett's most violent story and among the bleakest crime fiction classics, has a pervasive dark humor hovering over its proceedings. In Red Harvest, the Continental Op is the protagonist in spite of his character. The barons in control of Personville are diabolical, the average resident is a coward and the Continental Op is able to work the town over in part because he's as immoral, if not moreso, than his opposition. He embodies essentially none of the positive heroic qualities you found in pulp archetypes, he's the inverse of John Carter. Red Harvest is a grotesque of a detective story, the Titus Andronicus of its genre. Hammett's humor may stem from his lived experience, having worked as a Pinkerton agent before undergoing a change in heart and turning his attention to left-wing politics and organizing. Cain and Chandler were both writing pulp as wish-fulfillment and while their works were occasionally critical of their various personal hang-ups (Chandler's The Long Goodbye in particular is a searing self-critique on the ruin of alcoholism), their detectives were serious business. These differences go a long way to help explain why Hammett's The Thin Man functions as a detective comedy more than anything else. 

The Thin Man focuses on retired private detective Nick Charles and his wife Nora who have come to New York City on vacation but find themselves roped into a murder investigation involving several of Charles' old work contacts. Nick and Nora, near newlyweds, have a ribald marriage and treat each other as equals. If you assume Hammett was working alone then Nora stands out as one of the most memorable female characters in any pulp detective story, though all readers should know that Hammett dedicated the book to his partner, fellow writer Lillian Hellman. Both functioning alcoholics, a deliberate middle finger at the failure of Prohibition, they banter over the case, their inside jokes and flirtations dominating scenes that would otherwise be about criminal intrigue and deductions. It makes for a novel light in drama and even lighter in action. There is an appeal to its lightness but there is a sense that Hammett himself is growing bored with the whole detective fiction thing. Sure enough, he'd never write another novel and future stories he wrote were all on commission before being blacklisted, including a follow-up film to The Thin Man. 

The Thin Man is often regarded as the weakest of Hammett's books because of its comedy and general indifference towards its drama. I find its passive approach to gumshoeing funny and novel. The difference between Nick and Nora's relationship and most of the relationships found in Chandler, Cain, MacDonald, and others' stories is stark with Nick Charles displaying genuine affection and confidence in Nora. These two are always smarter, more secure and more intoxicated than the other players. Their deductions come as easy and as naturally as their love. It’s by far the most endearing part of a detective novel that is irritated by its own mystery. Hammett opts to make his annoyance into Nick’s annoyance as well and his repeated protests against actually being courted to break the case feel like a glimpse into what was likely a popular refrain for poor Hammett in the years going forward.

Had a short conversation with Pete about part-one of a two part project, The Flying Grail. The Flying Grail Part One is available on Apple Music, Spotify, & YouTube Music

The Friends of Eddie Coyle - George V. Higgins (1971)

Both books had clearly been rained on before. The Vollmann had it worse, a phone book thick tome that still felt soft to the touch like a pulp-paper sponge. Eddie Coyle was what I'd call appropriately weathered. It looked musty, it smelled mustier, I'm almost convinced there is mold growing on the spine where the glue meets the page. For a pulp paperback, there can be no better condition. It sat on my shelf for months. I doubted my impulse purchase, something I'd picked up on pure recognition and kept because its ultimate fate would be the trash if someone didn't take mercy. When assembling the List, I thought this would prove just okay. I enjoy my Richard Starks and Jim Thompsons but if you look at my shelf, you'll notice they're absent. Grabbing Higgins seemed like a castaway wish. Not so. I finished it in under twenty-four hours, an admittedly unprecedented mad dash of attention pored over the damn thing.

Higgins’ lean prose and tight dialogue made the task easy. There’s no flowery language here, it’s a mean machine. Higgins is locked tight on Eddie’s dilemma. The situation is more complex than Eddie thinks it is, there’s an intricate sprawl to Eddie Coyle. Aside from its titular character, the perspective shifts to the story’s other operators. The most inline with Higgins' lived experience as Assistant U.S. Attorney is Dave Foley, an ATF agent trying to flip the gun runner Coyle as an informer. Foley is a genuine demon, a wolf in coyote’s clothing. There’s also Dillon, who Peter Boyle portrays in the film, the simpering, see-no-evil bartender that serves as secret interlocutor between Foley and Coyle. There’s also Jackie Brown, a younger small-timer who Coyle knows he can set up as a patsy. The cast of characters expands out from there but just about every character intersects with another by the story’s conclusion. It’s well-plotted and the snaking of character relationships makes it a page turner in every sense of the phrase.

Higgins sets up chapters like scenes in a play. Characters occupy static recurring locales - bars, cars, grocery stores, police precincts and trailer homes. They chat, do business and exit scene. Sometimes the scene goes terribly awry. There’s a heavy emphasis on dialogue, substantial portions of the book are dedicated to men trading off lines, seemingly waiting for the screen adaptation or courtroom recitation. That this was Higgins’ first novel makes sense. It is so stripped to its bare essentials, embarrassed by hints of emotion beyond the facts and motivations that it feels properly, oppressively macho. It’s an unmistakably Irish Catholic book, one that is textually indebted to Irish Americans acting as both *the* cops and *the* robbers in New England. When Higgins worked for the cops, he didn’t just work any old beat, he was in Massachusetts’ anti-organized crime division. Eddie Coyle is about identifying snakes in the grass and Higgins turns Massachusetts into Ilha da Queimada Grande.

The Towers of Toron - Samuel R. Delany (1964)

Published when he was 21, The Towers of Toron was the third book that legendary science fiction author Samuel "Chip" Delany ever published - the second book in his "Fall of Towers" trilogy. Delany's an author I've wanted to track down for some time, first learning about him through a discussion on his 1999 non-fiction Times Square Red, Times Square Blue - a blend of memoir and urban design essay detailing how Manhattan cast the LGBT community out. He’s better known for his science-fiction, being one of the new-wave’s most prominent and notorious authors. His legend in the scene is that his books are explicitly philosophical, often elaborate digressions about theories of language and sexuality more than they are straightforward narratives. One of his most popular books, Babel-17, was mostly a convenient way for him to talk about linguistic relativity and get paid for it. Even his smut is heady!

Some of these hallmarks are present in The Towers of Toron but the bulk of the book feels more in line with the culturally conscious pulp science fiction that presaged the new wave movement. For as much as I'd like to be able to talk about The Towers of Toron, it didn't leave much of an impression. When I purchased it, I knew it wouldn't be the ideal entry point for the author. But I thought, “hey that's okay, I'll track down his other stuff.” And then I decided to embark upon this challenge. It was doomed to fail. Jumping blind into book two of a trilogy is a bad idea and I spent roughly seventy pages playing catch-up to the events of the last book which Delany helpfully retells in conversations interspersed throughout. What is here is well written with some suggestions of the ambition, creativity and conscience of his later books but it is buried under a lot of talk of princes and gizmos and flames and walls.

The racial hierarchy on Toromon opens the book up as both a racial and queer allegory and Delany is able to repurpose the atavistic depictions of other cultures and races found in Burroughs or van Vogt as prescient culture commentary. It escapes me if Delany has intentionally deployed this as meta-commentary on a genre he appreciates and is well-versed in. The way he renders common othering tropes like height differentials and ESP as sympathetic leads me to believe that he was actively resisting the resting current of his contemporaries’ descriptive language. The final twist of the book wherein it is revealed that the war being fought on the margins of the civilization is actually a simulation and that those fighting it are actually in pods connected to a computer superstructure beat The Matrix to the punch by at least thirty five years. It still registers with a measure of dramatic urgency and clarity of vision that made sticking by the book feel justified. This was a poor place to jump in but Delany remains a fascinating character and this isn’t the last of his works you’ll see in Eliminate Down.

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The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem (2003)

Here we go, another logjam, Jonathan Lethem's bildungsroman The Fortress of Solitude. This one entered my collection through regular collection enabler Mike Pavese and to him, and him alone, I apologize for my negativity on this one. It is important to not to make criticism of Jonathan Lethem too personal or even reflective of his talents in a strictly professional way. He is doing enough of that himself - his most recent book "Brooklyn Crime Novel" is written almost as a postmortem on Fortress. From a 2023 article in The Nation; "It was only after he was able take in The Fortress of Solitude off-Broadway musical that he reconsidered. He began to imagine people who, in fact, “fucking hate” his celebrated novel and he decided “to method act that from the inside.” What if it was like a consensus? People were like, ‘That book was horseshit.’ …‘Well, I’m not a novelist, but I’m going to fix this. And I’m going to do it by any method I can, slapping on documentation, getting other people to talk, just whatever it takes to tell the story without the Dickensian glow.’” But it's worth looking back at Fortress to understand why its "Dickensian glow" as Lethem refers to it has worn so thin so quickly.

The Fortress of Solitude is divided into three sections; the first - Underberg - details the childhood of Dylan Ebdus in the third person with Ebdus acting as author stand-in. The second section, Liner Notes, is written by Ebdus for a compilation album of another character's songs. The third section, its most chronologically ambitious, is told in the first person and jumps from present day 1999 before floating back to fill in the missing sections of the characters' lives as young adults. Lethem renders the Brooklyn of his childhood, specifically Gowanus, with incredible detail. He is able to shape it to scale with the characters' memories. When Dylan is a child, his neighborhood seems enormous, labyrinthine, dangerous. As he grows into adolescence, the rest of New York City opens to him and Gowanus begins to feel smaller, less challenging, a mastered territory. Lethem probes at the differences in life experience between his stand-in, Dylan, and his black friend - Mingus Rude. For much of the novel's first half, Lethem's exploration of the schism between the opportunities offered to Dylan versus those offered to the cooler, older, idolized Mingus draw out striking observations on how the cool white kids of NYC were often liberally borrowing from their black neighbors, often out of respect or outright admiration but nevertheless borrowing, plagiarizing. The culpability of well-meaning white people in gentrification of both culture and land is at the core of Lethem's story.

Underberg's ending lays Lethem's weaknesses as storyteller on the table and color the remainder of the book both overly stylized and self-congratulatory. Borrowing liberally from Marvin Gaye's infamous death at the hands of his father, Lethem consigns Mingus Rude to prison with Dylan bearing witness but otherwise escaping unscathed. Not two pages later, Lethem name drops Marvin Gaye in Liner Notes. I dislike these conspicuous allusions to black tragedy. I take umbrage with Lethem restitching Gaye’s death as clothing for his characters while also using Dylan to profess his guilt over using familiarity with "cool" "black" signifiers like graffiti, drugs, and music history to attain liberation from his home neighborhood. There’s a psychologically complex profile that Lethem develops here and not one I'm completely unsympathetic toward. Much of American popular culture is sourced, uncredited from black communities and Lethem is making a sincere acknowledgement of that and grappling with the idea that up to this point in his life, he's exploited this social construction. But at 522 pages, The Fortress of Solitude continues this exploitation.

Lethem writes Dylan with genuine pathos and the character is rich with internal conflict and vulnerability. When the question of the character's bisexuality is posed, it doesn't feel gawking or insincere, it feels in line with how Dylan has observed interpersonal relationships and mutual attraction. His depth has the effect of drawing out how scripted the black characters are. They don't share that same depth. They exist as tokens of culture for Dylan to grow from and apologize to. When Mingus reciprocates Dylan’s kiss, it exists in the context that he has seen his addict father perform similar acts. For Dylan it can be passion, for Mingus it can only be a reprisal of trauma. The calculation that Lethem makes is that his sincerity will register with the reader and that the pessimism that codes the close of the book, that good intentions will not absolve you, will serve as a sufficient bulwark against critiques of shallow caricature. However, the style of literary fiction that The Fortress of Solitude practices has a habit of precociousness and this habit is all over Lethem's writing.

I was first acquainted with Lethem's writing through his 33 1/3rd of Talking Heads' Fear of Music. Among the more generally reviled volumes of the series, his examination of Fear of Music spends a not insignificant amount of time evading discussion on the songs to instead diagnose David Byrne with autism. It is one of the volumes of the series where it feels like the author is more proud of their research than they have anything to say. So goes The Fortress of Solitude. The conspicuous name-dropping spikes to deafening levels when Dylan enters adulthood where he works as a music journalist. This particular frustration is one that Lethem is intentionally eliciting. What is Dylan but a collection of his influences, repurposed and reconstituted into a form resembling a man? But this point is well worn by the book’s third act and the 2000s lit-fic tradition of self-righteousness wears out its welcome with each successive page. It's well-written, occasionally dazzling, but too obvious a stab for great American novel status. After The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem would continue writing but the consensus seems to be that if the literary world will remember a 2000s Jonathan, it'll be Franzen.

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Whores for Gloria - William Vollmann (1991)

Covering topics as far ranging as Japanese Noh theater, campaigns of settlement & displacement in North America, climate science, prostitution, and the history of human conflict, William Vollmann is one of the most prolific living American writers. Notorious for the length of each of his projects, the total sum of his bound-and-published writing coming in at roughly 17,589 pages, reading everything he’s written could take a person a lifetime. So here I am reading an appetizer, the 160 page Whores for Gloria, his shortest novel but one that is no less brilliant, grotesque and indicative of Vollmann's idiosyncratic style.

I first became aware of Vollman when my brother lent me his earliest short story collection, The Rainbow Stories, while I was in high school. At the time, those stories were the most difficult I'd ever read. The subject matter was often dark and distressing, the prose alternated between arcane and ultramodern, and the constant switching between the abstract and the literal was too much for my teenage brain to process. That said, it was extremely influential in my tastes and when I visited San Francisco as a teenager, I nearly dragged my sister to a reading of his at City Lights but lost my nerve not knowing what I'd be revealing about myself in doing so. Vollmann writes so candidly on society’s seedy underbelly that I blanched at the idea of someone inevitably rejecting his work or being made to feel uncomfortable by the uncompromising material.

What I found most striking about his stories was their empathy. Many of The Rainbow Stories are set in San Francisco, specifically the Tenderloin District. Not quite a Red Light district but not quite a slum, the Tenderloin is where San Francisco's addicts, drunks, homeless, sex workers, and other groups discarded by society gather. The implicit goal of the short story collection is to render its characters with a vibrancy and emotional depth that makes them seem more human than their street descriptors; "skinhead", "whore", "zombie." It's a noble cause and almost all of Vollmann’s later work, including Whores For Gloria, continues to wave the banner of his difficult, peculiar humanism.

The novella is told as a series of scattered vignettes with headings emphasizing key information; a narrator, story detail, or theme. Opening with a brief note that the man’s narrative is fictional but the stories told by the girls are sourced from real sex workers, Whores for Gloria immediately feels like a continuation of Vollmann’s Bay Area fiction. The composition of their vignettes feels as if you’re being spoken to and Vollmann relays these stories without turning the subjects into objects of pity. He creates space for the women to talk about clients, dreams, plans, their day-to-day.

What Vollmann excels at is making the abstract feel tangible. The Rainbow Stories assigned colors to emotion, inducing a synesthesia-like effect on his prose. That talent carries over here. The descriptions are vivid, often vulgar, sometimes beautiful, occasionally repellent. There are passages where he curtly describes assholes “bulging like sausage casings” but he regularly lapses into extended sequences that capture the gloss of nostalgic reverie; half-invented, half-remembered, fully intoxicating.

Whores for Gloria uses Jimmy as its askew lodestar. An alcoholic Vietnam veteran who flops around the Tenderloin using up his government paycheck on booze and cheap sex while obsessing over “Gloria”, we find him beginning to conduct physical and mental rituals to make his fantasy manifest. He asks prostitutes to tell him stories that he then weaves into the backstory of the fantasy Gloria’s life, he makes a gnarled wig out of one woman’s hair for other women to wear during sex, and he pleads with the ghost of the unfinished Gloria in his flophouse room. Meanwhile, his body decays from the effects of alcohol abuse and venereal disease, compounding his already fragile mental state. The decay is observed from all sides; we know how Jimmy sees Jimmy, we know how other Tenderloin residents see Jimmy, and we know how we see Jimmy. Some details remain elusive. There are suggestions that Gloria may have been a lover, a neighbor, a total stranger, or that these rituals might be Jimmy displacing his own femininity. Vollmann doesn’t dwell on this last hypothesis any more than he dwells on the other stories and ideas in the book. Like much else in the book, Jimmy’s memory of this is depicted with emphatic tenderness;

In the summer Gloria and her friend Shawna used to play in the rubber wading pool in the backyard and they would stay in there for hours pretending to be mermaids and calling each other mermaid names like Pearl and Crystal and Jimmy was jealous but Gloria said no you can’t be a mermaid and Jimmy said aw why not and Shawna said he can get in too I don’t care but Gloria said no he can’t because you have to be a girl to be a mermaid and anyhow we don’t have a third mermaid name to call him, so Jimmy had to run through the sprinkler and watch the rainbows in the arches of water that curved up into the air like silver ribs and they sprayed down on the newly cut grass that was so wet and made the bottoms of his feet green and Gloria laughed and said look at Jimmy running and Shawna said Jimmy can run so fast can’t he Pearl and Gloria said yes so fast Crystal and Jimmy was a still a little cross but Gloria said I want you to be a boy not a girl and anyway I like you best of all.

As I mentioned at the start of the column, I had a rule about having no more than two unfinished Vollmanns on my shelf. With this one down, I have one more remaining. It’s at least a few months out but we can all look forward to me tackling his most popular book, the surprise winner of the 2005 National Book Award, Europe Central. What this also means is that maybe I can go back to Lot 49 and get that waterlogged copy of Rising Up and Rising Down.

The Mezzanine - Nicholson Baker (1988)

I've always wanted to write in full detail about minutiae. It's one of my more favored preoccupations, really diving into the smallest, most granular details on functions and details the average person takes for granted. There's something in particular about American modernity that makes the impulse so compelling. We live in an attention economy, most marketing is put there to muscle its way into our senses. Even if we dislike the Progressive ads that play anywhere there’s empty space, the point is that we have witnessed them even if just for a second. We are sold an idea that we are to see as much as we can, experience as much as we can and consume conspicuously. That's the way the rich and fabulous Americans do it. In pursuing that ideal, we wage earners are asked to live big and drive wide. As we speed down the highway of daily living, a calculation is made that we have to ignore the small things and focus on our mission. Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine rejects that, instead using a dull moment in the mid-day commute as a means to ponder the rituals and signifiers that compose our daily routines.

As our narrator stands on the escalator, his mind wanders to the new shoelaces he purchased from CVS, and from here his observations cascade into deeper wells, leaking into crevices that freeze and crack like melted snow under asphalt. You get a sense of Baker as sensibly neurotic. His neuroses stem from his constant observations, his meticulous filing away of information, the more information he's given, the more stimulated he is. There's a developing crisis of modernity tucked away in Baker's observations though he does not put too fine a point on it. Despite his worries, he projects a sense of confidence, that this story, told in flashback, is about a man a world away from his present self. It seems to me that this distancing technique is too convenient for a book this formally ambitious.

His recounting of bathrooms struck a specific chord with me, as I think it would with any AMAB reader.

"The problem for me, a familiar problem, was that in this relative silence Don Vanci would hear the exact moment I began to urinate. More important, the fact that I had not yet begun to urinate was known to him as well. I had been standing at the urinal when he walked into the bathroom - I should be fully in progress by now. What was my problem?"

There's an intimacy with which he recounts the experience of using a urinal side-by-side with more senior members of his office and records their grunts, polite exchanges and how long they spend at their urinal. Given how often I'll seek out the most secluded bathroom just so I don't have to dance the dance, I appreciated Baker's hand-wringing concern. The night I finished the book, I even found myself in a bathroom peeing next to another man. The shyness struck. I tried Baker's method and pictured myself peeing on the other man's head - it did not work. My usual method of staring at my crumpled reflection in the metal of the urinal handle proved faithful. I'll save the aggressive peeing for more tortured men.

The most striking thing about The Mezzanine is its love of footnotes. Footnotes dot every chapter, some of them extending nearly the length of the chapter. As the book is concerned primarily with the little details, emphasis is placed on the parallel importance of both text and footnote. Both are amusing in similar fashions and trying to parse why Baker sanctioned some information for main text and others for footnotes remains a fun game. This writing strategy, which could strike a more hostile reader as too cute a gimmick, causes your eye to wander around the page. This is intentional and Baker is sure to tell you this. He writes at significant length about his love of footnotes, his distaste for style manuals advocating that writers not use them, and his frustration with the grade school way of Z-pattern reading. If the book’s form isn’t clear enough, the author leaves no doubt - reject tradition and embrace modernity.

More than other books I've read, The Mezzanine feels like it may lose its easy casualness soon. Its entire premise and Baker's casual tone relies on familiarity with many of the objects, places and spaces he writes about; Midtown Records, cigarette vending machines, powder dishwasher detergent. Some of these things are already gone, others are on their way out. For future readers, readers younger than me, the small appeal that Baker wove1 into the premise is missing. The Mezzanine is not intended to require thorough research and while I don't turn my nose at doing a little digging while reading, it was obviously not the author's intent to pile on obscurity after obscurity like Pynchon recounting the late night run for Z Channel. I think specifically of one object that I could not place, a Brasilia espresso machine, then chic and state of the art and now, an afterthought.

What's funny is that the entire reason I bought this book was because of its retro appeal. The artwork for the Vintage Contemporaries label received a glowing retrospective from Dan Kois last year and I so recognized and fell in love with the abstract, geometric designs of Lorraine Louie that I had to have some for myself. The first title Kois discussed was The Mezzanine and its cover fascinated me, the premise only magnified that interest. When I went looking, I found it immediately. And then I was Baader-Meinhof'd, I saw Nicholson Baker everywhere. Podcasts mentioned, scathingly, his 1993 book The Fermata about a pervert who can stop time. Every bookstore in Philadelphia seemingly has a copy of Vox. Authors I follow bandy his name as a sort of "in the know" name, a cult hero for modernist male writers. Bookforum just rolled out an article about Baker. My own brother sent me a list of books he was intending to read and lo and behold, The Mezzanine sat atop the list.

I think that The Mezzanine and Baker will enjoy a bump in popularity both because of its simple premise and because in its then-modernism, it is now retro. Baker may have assumed something like this might happen to his own writing which is why The Mezzanine regales its reader with anecdotes about obsolescence that Baker observed himself, like the milkman. It's a book about the inevitable passage of time, a band that keeps running and running. Like the escalator that its protagonist rides on, we have to get off eventually but it keeps going on & on & on.

The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea - Yukio Mishima (1963)

Editor: John Nathan (1966)

Sometimes knowing more about an author before going into a story can be a detriment. I agonized over my prior knowledge about Yukio Mishima before reading Sailor. I worried that the mythmaking around him would inform my interpretation of the book too much for me to derive unique or valuable insights from it. Mishima lived one of the most dynamic lives of any majorly popularly 20th century author. Emerging out of World War II with detailed, poetic explorations of death, masculinity, sexuality, and the materialistic culture developing in post-war Japan, his writing was a crossover hit seeing acclaim worldwide. At the peak of his powers, he was considered for the 1968 Nobel Prize in Literature. Before his death at age 45, he had over thirty published works, writing novels, poems, and plays, nine of which saw publication in the United States. He was a wunderkind, an undeniable talent.

As his cultural purchase grew, so did his bellicose nationalist rhetoric. As Japanese politics moved further left as the 1960s progressed, Mishima shifted ever more rightward. After a brief flirtation with public office, he instead joined up with the JSDF and started recruiting right-wing college students into a splinter militia unit. In 1970, he and several members of this militia attempted a coup. The stated goal of this coup was to restore Japan's military and to return the JSDF to the Emperor. The result of the coup was Mishima's suicide, committing seppuku. It is more likely that Mishima understood the coup as an elaborate suicide than a serious attempt at a military coup. He may have thought his death could radicalize others into action but there are more existing sources on the matter that put forth the idea that Mishima just wanted to die dramatically.

And that sort of despondent, fatalistic thinking is all over The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. Returning again to a translated book, this one by a twenty-four year old John Nathan, I had some worries about the accuracy of the translation though given this book's popularity - it was adapted into a 1976 film with Kris Kristofferson, I have to assume that it's quite fine. This is a book that is fully despairing, one that is threatened by humanist pleasure and softer notions of existence. For Mishima, its hard emotions and severity that matter and he's frightened by that notion about as much as the alternative. It's an incredible insight into a man whose interpersonal conflicts code so much of his writing. In near all his works, you get a sense that Mishima uses writing as a form of therapy whether he’s writing about the intractable pull of death, the sensuality of the male body or the binary purity of the Edo period - most of what Mishima writes can be transferred over into his personal life as well.

The conflict at the center of The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea is that Ryuji, a sailor who has sought a life of temperance and occasional sublimity aboard merchant marine vessels, wants to settle down. As he nears thirty, doubts form about his course in life and during a humid summer, he meets the widowed Fusako and her twelve year old son Noboru. Ryuji sees a promise of tranquility in Fusako's love and gradually begins to acquiesce to the idea of domestic bliss over the course of his next voyage. Fusako's son Noboru initially idolizes Ryuji, seeing the sailor like how young children see firefighters, but begins to conflate that idolization with a confused fetishization gained by watching his mother and the sailor have sex through a peephole.

“Assembled there were the moon and a feverish wind, the incited, naked flesh of a man and a woman, sweat, perfume, the scars of a life at sea, the dim memory of ports around the world, a cramped breathless peephole, a young boy’s iron heart - but these cards from a gypsy deck were scattered, prophesying nothing. The universal order at last achieved, thanks to the sudden, screaming horn, had revealed an ineluctable circle of life - the cards had paired: Noboru and mother - mother and man - man and sea - sea and Noboru…”

Noboru's voyeurism is introduced in the first chapter and gives readers the lowdown on how distressed this current crowd of Japanese youth are. Noboru's friends are no better, five smart boys led by a rich child known only by the moniker The Chief. The neighborhood parents dislike The Chief, believing that he's leading the boys down a bad path but the children defy their parents and hang out at various abandoned piers, construction sites and other sites formerly occupied either by Americans or bombed-away industry. The shadows of World War II and American occupation loom large over the book. The peep hole that Noboru uses to watch his mother at night was installed by the previous tenets of the house, American soldiers. Signs dot the Yokohama piers and hills denoting current and former sites of American ownership, parcels of land where the Japanese are forbidden entry regardless of its being used or not. Noboru's Yokohama is cold and hostile to its residents. Even during the summer, the parks are dirty and unclean, places for the homeless to congregate. In the ruins of the wartime, these children practice cruelty, trying to steel themselves into religious states of "absolute dispassion." Only by achieving this state can they observe the world objectively, only through this can they reject the humanist culture imposed on them by western cultures. Through these children, we begin to see Mishima's nationalist tendencies, specifically his anti-humanist philosophies, creak through.

Yet, this book catches Mishima at an interesting moment in his philosophical journey where he seems profusely uncomfortable with his epiphanies. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace crystalizes a period in his thinking where he was conflicted by the irresistible, analytic, simple perfection of reactionary thinking while also seeing the romance and consuming joy of love and purpose. The Fusako and Ryuji chapters are written with such ardor and provide an incredible contrast to Noboru's bleak, violent chapters that Mishima makes a cogent argument for rejecting Noboru's destructive, Oedipal compulsions. The Yokohama that Ryuji finds upon returning to shore feels safe, a welcoming reprieve from the dull realities of sea life. He has seen more of the world than Noboru, he knows the dangers that lurk outside of port. Noboru’s possessive nationalistic view is depicted as adolescent, romantic and impossible. The Ryuji sections feel like Mishima attempting to purge anxieties about his own descent into radicalization with his neighbors, most of whom did not share his politics. Was there a brighter side in passivity, in domesticity? Mishima wrestles with this idea as much as he wrestles with his idolization of decisive, severe action. Each of its primary characters feel like different lobes of Mishima's brain and they are each given space to mark out their own fates, leading to the book’s inevitable conclusion.

Running Dog - Don DeLillo (1978)

Although he’s a titan of modern literature, DeLillo's early works are often passed over. The big dogs; White Noise, Libra, and Underworld still curry the most favor among readers, academics and critics. DeLillo's 70s career, although his most prolific, is also his most uneven. DeLillo was not a major writer in the 1970s, not like he would become after White Noise, and his early works feel much more journeyman in form and style. Running Dog, allegedly written in four months feels like DeLillo rolling out the blueprint for his conspiratorial juggernaut Libra. Of his 70s work, I've read his first book, Americana, and now Running Dog. I like digging into his earlier work. As one of the defining American authors of the late 20th century, it is refreshing to see him work up to that reputation, to that level of quality.

Running Dog is decidedly minor - the premise, fun. Journalists, spies, art dealers, and politicians all scrambling to get their hands on a film reel - allegedly a pornographic film shot in the Führerbunker in the final days of the Third Reich. Such a salacious pitch was what drew me to this book over my other option at the time; The Body Artist. It exists past the paranoid Nixon milieu, instead it's more pragmatic in its paranoia. The spy games in this are worlds removed from even Graham Greene, more arch and comical than ever. That men are being killed over a supposed Hitler hardcore reel is a constant source of dry amusement for the book, if not for the reader. DeLillo is sharp enough that the proceedings don’t devolve into subterfuge slapstick, he let Prohías handle that, but as the book marched forth, it did feel like he was trying to hit a publisher’s requested page count. Much of what works in the book, especially its depictions of the aimless, violent professionals that staff our most “beloved” federal agencies is better worked out in his later books.

Running Dog’s reveal of what is on the film is effective and is worth the book’s circuitous chase. The film reel does have Hitler on it but there is no sex. Instead, it is a film of Hitler entertaining children in the bunker while dressed like The Tramp. The reveal is written in the comic cadence of the rest of the book but DeLillo weaponizes the drop from expectations to reality. He writes this out as uncomfortable gag, an experience so eerie and unpleasant that its viewers can feel oxygen leaving the room. If it were Hitler getting his holes filled, that’d have been more preferable, salable even! - but the dictator playing human? There’s just no market for that. It’s a great close to a novel that positions it away from being just another Gravity’s Rainbow hanger-on and helps it function as a stone in the greater DeLillo writing project.

The Bingo Palace - Louise Erdrich (1994)

I picked this up about a year ago in an effort to make a break into Native American literature, eyeing up classics of the category like N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn or James Welch's Winter in the Blood. Outside of the now disgraced Sherman Alexie, the most popular Native fiction author is Louise Erdrich. I was presented many options with her bibliography. I could start at the beginning with her 1984 novel Love Medicine, I could start with her most acclaimed novel 2011's The Round House or I could choose my own start point. I took door number three and chose to pick my own start; The Bingo Palace. And what a fool I was to do so! The Bingo Palace is book number four in the Love Medicine series - a continuing narrative of several Ojibwe families living on a reservation in North Dakota. While the books' narratives are self-contained, jumping in at book number four was a fool's errand and severely hampered my enjoyment of the book.

And let me tell you, I was coming in hot off of those past three books and The Bingo Palace stopped me dead in my tracks. After the first fifty pages I just did not want to pick up the damn thing. Part of it was the content of the book, I had felt totally disconnected from it - like I had been dropped into the middle of a conflict that I knew nothing about. The book opens with several pages going into the tangled ancestry of its lead character Lipsha Morrissey and with each successive chapter, more characters are introduced with less lead time. Had I done, I don't know, the bare minimum of research maybe I could have avoided this but I'll chalk it down as a learning experience. If there is something of value to be mined out of this situation, it is a renewed appreciation of the function of serialized narratives. I fully believe that if I had entered into The Bingo Palace as intended, the momentum would have carried me through the sections that I found banal and swept away the knots of confusion on the floor of my brain.

The pitch of the book is a classic love triangle; Lipsha loves Shawnee who is with Lyman, his uncle and half-brother. This wrinkle of relation kicks up some dust between Lipsha and Lyman. Lyman can never fully act as paternal substitute to the fatherless Lipsha nor can he act as brother. He becomes a hybrid figure of the two and a distant one at that. The circumstances of their birth insist that they must exist at arm’s length, united only by business and the woman between them. I found their relationship the most compelling since it was the one most directly tied to the gambling narrative that initially drew me to the book over Erdrich’s others. Although the two circle each other for a while, their relationship is kept at a low, respectable simmer throughout.

More explosive is the romance between Lipsha and Shawnee. It’s young, fraught with tension with Lipsha’s fiery, adolescent passion cooled by Shawnee’s realism. In the moments where the book is really moving along, when its emotions are really running hot are those when they’re together or freshly apart. Erdrich writes both characters with true sympathy, allowing Lipsha to lick his own emotional wounds and presenting Shawnee’s cold practicality as something in service of a better, richer life than the one she has currently. All of its characters are battling through some sort of despair and the result is a book that feels one-note until it concludes. There’s a good chance that the rest of the Love Medicine series gives these characters a richer texture and that The Bingo Palace is meant as a more somber installment but these are the hazards of doing no research and pulling books from the shelf. These are also the hazards of deciding to put all your books in a randomizer and reading them in that arbitrary order.

Translation by Sidney Monas (1968)

My copy of Crime and Punishment was my mom's, a 1968 trade paperback edition translated by Sidney Monas. It declares itself as Unabridged, sounds good to me! After graduating high school, I tried reading it in while on the road and thought it was funny and surprisingly modern. I could parse clear as day where some of my favorite works had sourced their influences from. Yet, I put it down within the first two-hundred pages. The book nagged at me though, I always wanted to pick it up and its decaying paperback cover mocked me on the shelf for years.

Until now! The primary reason I went with the permutation of Eliminate Down's mysterious Book List that I did - and it was the first randomization - was because it hit me with the most perfect line-up of books to start with. So far, we had The Fuck Up, The Instant Enemy, Stoner, Pitch Dark, Pattern Recognition and Crime and Punishment. That is, in order, a book I was reluctant to read, a book I knew would be premium pulp, a recently rehabilitated cult classic, two books by authors I knew I already liked, and a lengthy, stodgy Poe's Raven of a book that taunted me for a half-decade. Crime and Punishment would be my first hurdle, if I could clear that - and the following book - it'd be ten more books till I think "aw hell, why'd I get this." And I gotta say, Crime and Punishment went down relatively easy. It took me a while but it should be smooth waters for a moment and that's good because I'm behind schedule.

Given that Crime and Punishment is among the most widely read pieces of narrative fiction in modern history, I find writing about it a particularly daunting task. I assume this entire project to be a crash course in how to read, these monthly write-ups are just ungraded assignments that are specifically due, albeit to no penalty (besides self-critique) if they aren't. That said, I vehemently dislike the notion that when I write about something that I should just describe it and with a book as well trod as Crime and Punishment, it feels like a particular waste of everyone's time to draft a book report. A textual analysis of Crime and Punishment is something you do in a college class (or a particularly ambitious high school, not that my school's English program dared us with lengthy Russian literature) and I have a well-reasoned anxiety that any analysis I could develop would be about as novel as any hungover college freshman's.

Something that I kept thinking about while reading was the translation. Thinking about the impact a translator has on the interpretation of the original text is nothing new, translators think of it all the time, but I think readers often take for granted just how much influence a translator can impart on the experience of reading a book. Coincidentally, I was listening to the podcast SFUltra, a book podcast wherein a self-professed science fiction hater reads one-hundred science fiction novels he bought, and in his review of Vladimir Sorokin's recently republished and translated Blue Lard, he reignites the age-old argument of whether or not a translator could or should be considered a co-author. The argument for Sorokin and his translator, Max Lawton, is evident. Lawton and Sorokin live concurrently, eight of Sorokin's books are being translated by Lawton, and Lawton acts as interpreter for Sorokin at press events. It can be reasoned that without Lawton, Sorokin's material could be interpreted in totally different fashions.

The gaps in time between Sorokin's novel (pub. 1999) and translation (2024) and Dostoevsky's book (1866) and the translation I read (1968) are obviously hugely different and serves mostly to muddy an otherwise clean argument. I wouldn't consider Monas to be a co-author of Dostoevsky, however, Monas's translation does build off the translation work performed by others like Constance Garnett (1914) and David Margarshack (1951.) Garnett's is the most widely available, being public domain and Margarshack's was used by the Penguin Modern Classics label for about a half-century. Monas's translation seems to be a ruddy one. Having not read much Russian literature, I have little to compare it to but I thought it was occasionally labored but otherwise eminently readable. The general opinion on it is "yeah, it's fine." I wade into these unfamiliar waters because thinking about the differences translations could have sent my head spinning and given its age and legacy, Crime and Punishment is one of the best books an English reader can use to study the changes.

I’ve started to pick up various editions of Crime and Punishment so I can study how the translators interpreted the passages and how these translators either softened or hardened the material. I have not gone so far as to teach myself Russian Cyrillic but there should be a future Hyperfix wherein I dig deeper into the translations of this book. Look forward to it. In the mean time, if you haven’t already, read this book and make note of who translated it.

Where Angels Fear to Tread - E.M. Forster (1905)

After finishing Crime and Punishment, I was majorly dreading the randomizer's next pick, E.M. Forster's Where Angels Fear to Tread. Most of this had to do with its age and my general ignorance of the author. I have owned Where Angels Fear to Tread for about a decade now. I acquired it in a Penguin Classics inventory purge wherein a person could fill a bag of their books for $20.00. I did this four times and did not use the prescribed bag. I took in a lot of books that I knew I'd like (Mary Shelly's Frankenstein), books that I thought I might like (Heinrich Boll's The Lost Honor of Katarina Blum), and books that I knew I should like (Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus) I did not grab every book at my disposal. I did not grab Morrisey's Autobiography. This first taste of book hoarding at seventeen formed a backbone of western canon for my developing collection. I picked up a few books because I liked the name and cover, giving no thought to the plot details on the back jacket. Where Angels Fear to Tread was one of those. In college, I learned about A Passage to India during an early primer on Orientalism. A Passage to India was also written by E.M. Forster and was enormously popular in its day and into the following decades, receiving a film adaptation by David Lean in the 1980s. It also trafficked heavily in exoticized tropes that suggested an atavistic honor and primal sexuality in the Indian people. It was not until this year when I actually took it off the shelf that I connected Forster's two books.

Coming from Crime and Punishment, an oakenly dense book with sentences so solid you could use them to build furniture, I feared that this book would further slow me down. Furthermore, I feared that the drop in quality from the Dostoevsky to this British somebody would be too steep a decline. For this project, I have refused the idea that I skip a book for taste alone so I knew that if Where Angels Fear to Tread proved sticky, it could have gummed up the rate of the project even more than Crime and Punishment did. I am elated to say that it did not and that I found it to be an immensely enjoyable contrast. It likely functions best as an aperitif to a major piece of literature because, despite its Penguin Classics binding, Where Angels Fear to Tread is no major piece of literature.

Far be it from me, the person writing a monthly column about books from a self-professed and oft-repeated place of ignorance, to declare this book "not major" but this seems to be the attitude of this edition's editor, Oliver Stallybrass. The notes on the text express frustration with Forster's poor handle on human anatomy, his careless edits, and his illegible handwriting. Stallybrass writes about the book like he's stitched it back together after the horrible accident of its publication. It is refreshing to see pretension discarded with one of these classics, clear admissions that even if the author went on to write better things, they still started unhewn.

Where Angels Fear to Tread is a good stab at a crisis of manners tale, one that delightfully trots out comedy and melodrama in equal measure. The balance that Forster strikes is notable. His distaste for the preppy Herriton family is clear from page one, the de facto protagonists get it worst of all. They snipe at each other with cold, dry sarcastic remarks, their emotions are purely reactive, and their adherence to proper English tradition has ground down their empathy to a nub. The way in which Lilia, the widow who’s impulsive vacation kicks off the story, treats her new Italian husband Gino as an extension of that sojourn provides the novella’s hardiest theme. The English use the rest of the world as a canvas for self-actualization that they never achieve and in doing so, they degrade the quality of life for those in the spaces they occupy.

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Throughout the book, Forster indulges in tourist speculation, that mood of the colonial vacationer looms large. Although Forster resents his characters, he still imparts enough of himself and actual observations he made during a vacation to Italy into Philip, that the book functions as a valuable window into seeing how British aristocracy perceived anything outside England. There is some autocritique in his recounting, Philip’s passages are laced with acrid irony, though in his writing on the Italian Gino, Forster leans into the familiar atavistic tropes common to the era. He’s swarthy, overly emotional, sensual but brutish, and represents a sexual other to the demure English. Forster leans on similar othering techniques in A Passage to India wherein he gestures sincerely towards realized humanist portrayals of other cultures but his own Anglocentrism prevent him from fully accomplishing his goals and in fact, make prominent the most sulfuric indulgences of the era. Seeing these tendencies arise in his earliest story, one that’s set in mainland Europe, gives a modern reader a richer sense of how the pall of Pax Britannica cloaked even its most well-meaning writers.

The book remains very funny in spite of the dated spirit of its time. Phillip Herriton, the book’s primary protagonist, is a hapless stooge for his domineering mother but deludes himself into believing that he’s above his own family’s petty squabbles. This is in part because he has also been to Italy and believes that what he learned in Italy has imbued him with a richer sense of history and aesthetic than his family back home. Upon returning to Italy, the country begins to work its magic again, breaking him away from the demands of his family and opening his heart up to the possibility of love. A romance is teased with Lillia’s friend Caroline throughout the back half of the book and is ripped away with such clear comic force that it could be repurposed today and feel every bit as clever. Forster exploits his characters’ willful myopia, their chronic inability to explain their own feelings, to brilliant comic effect.

The Blue Hammer - Ross MacDonald (1977)

Back into the familiar arms of Ross MacDonald, we've got The Blue Hammer. I actually was trying to read this one not right away but the randomizer chose and so I read. The Blue Hammer is the last Lew Archer book MacDonald would write before developing Alzheimer's. I'd read five of the seventeen Lew Archer books and I faintly wish that I could have saved this final one for the last stretch though coming off of it, The Blue Hammer feels noticeably slighter than his other books and struggles to achieve the same political texture or pulp dynamism that animates his better novels. Throughout the 1970s, it was privately known that MacDonald was facing serious memory issues. According to biographer Tom Nolan, MacDonald's lapses in memory began in 1971 beginning with dates and gradually worsened as the decade went on. As hesitant as I was to echo a GoodReads review saying that the book's rambling tone is a faint sign of developing cognitive issues, I think the diagnosis is correct. The initial publication of the book included several amateur errors in continuity, something that would have been unthinkable in the Swiss Watch tight plots of his other novels.

Before reading The Blue Hammer, I lent it to a coworker. Emboldened by The Atlantic's recent listing of MacDonald's The Zebra Striped Hearse on their Great American Novels lists, I thought "hey, I'll share the wealth." As they were reading it, I asked if Archer was working for a rich family to find their troubled child and if it there was an implication that the child was using drugs. The answer to all three questions was "yes", with a corollary that drug use wasn't implied and that the daughter was explicitly smoking pot. MacDonald was nothing if not an innovator. Knowing that I had fallen into something familiar after two books where I was truly unsure what to expect gave me a shot of confidence and I blitzed through the book in a weekend. In this one, Archer is investigating a stolen painting which may have been painted by a missing painter, presumed dead. As bodies start to turn up, Archer gets the hunch that this "missing painter" story might not be the whole truth and sets out to link the missing painter to the deceased.

Reading The Blue Hammer made me think of Poodle Springs, the unfinished Phillip Marlowe manuscript Raymond Chandler left behind which Robert B. Parker "finished" at the request of the Chandler estate. Before Parker took over, Chandler had finished four chapters which see Marlowe living out rare domestic bliss before class differences and the pressures of his work drive a wedge into his new marriage. Those first four chapters are pretty good and seeing Marlowe married is a novel spin on the lonely detective character. But after those were written, Chandler died and the drafts sat around for twenty five years accruing a legend as they gathered dust. Parker hazards a guess at what Chandler would have written using notes and outlines but the back chunk of the book is a patchy chameleon job by a loyal, loving fan. It's not worth reading.

The Blue Hammer is assuredly written by MacDonald, albeit in decline, and suffers similarly for it. It has the beats of a Lew Archer novel, like how Poodle Springs has the beats of a Chandler novel, but the attention to detail is missing. Distressed frame houses, seedy motels and imperial cliffside California palaces still dot Archer's Southern California but there is no texture to these locales. They feel repurposed from previous novels. The Archer series is reliably repetitive but each of the books I've read were able to offer small commentaries on observed sea changes in the social fabric of Los Angeles. The Drowning Pool wove in details about the decline of Old Money power, The Instant Enemy expressed concern for how this developing metropolis was discarding and isolating its residents, and The Far Side of the Dollar explored the role psychiatry was developing in the burgeoning generational conflicts of the 1960s. The Blue Hammer is more concerned with Lew and how Lew is feeling. Short of some wallpaper details on decaying suburban infrastructure, the 1970s may as well have not happened.

MacDonald had wanted to wrap up the Lew Archer character going into The Blue Hammer and you can tell that he's making strides to do so here. This case is more personal for Archer as he falls in love with a journalist, a woman so dedicated to uncovering the truth that her passion echoes Archer's own Arthurian gallantry. She's lightly written, a fantastical, sexy woman inelegantly torn between idealized daughter figure and fated lover. What starts as a case on commission awkwardly bridges out into a bizarre pursuit for truth and historical justice. Throughout the book, his benefactors repeatedly chastise him for wasting their money but Archer rambles his way into them expending checks out to Tucson, paying for motel rooms and other oddball detours. It's a disjointed book, one that shows MacDonald in an unfortunate place of weakness in his career. One hopes that their favorite writers can go out strong, that their memory and other faculties will hold up to the last. The Blue Hammer, despite moments of strength like the surreal meeting with a business-minded cult leader in the Arizona desert, is a reminder that its the body of work that matters, not the final piece.

Pitch Dark - Renata Adler (1983)

Last year, I reviewed Renata Adler's Speedboat and it landed itself among my favorite books. I admired it for its narrative ambivalence, dry humor and seamless autofiction instincts. It made her second and final book, Pitch Dark, an essential read. In between reading Speedboat and Pitch Dark, I explored the Adler oeuvre. As a Manhattanite to-know, she maintains a significant cult reputation today. Her take-down of Pauline Kael is now receiving its third mention in this Substack. Finding her film criticism has proven to be more of a challenge, unfortunately she is not as well compiled as enemy of the people John Simon. Her other, most popular and divisive piece of writing is Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker. Having read some of it, it registered as too inside baseball and fundamentally over-concerned with its subject to a dull returns. Yet, I still think Adler is a fascinating writer with unique insights and offers rare challenges to her peers and paycheck writers. Her boosters do so because of her acerbic wit, her pointed, severe critiques and her clarity of purpose. She's an alternative Didion for the Didioned-out (which include Didion herself.) It's amusing then that both of her novels obfuscate that clarity, drawing out the emotional, material, and political contradictions that Adler - or her protagonists - must navigate in order to achieve that authority of experience and opinion.

I purchased Pitch Dark from Philadelphia's new Barnes and Noble location. Their previous Rittenhouse location was a landmark of my early Philadelphia transplant experience. Three floors of forest green carpeting, teakwood shelves and floors with a [maybe too] public bathroom, and an eternally malfunctioning escalator, it was an ideal bookstore as far as chain stores go. Despite assurances from press releases that I would enjoy this new Chestnut St. location, I found it an active assault on the senses. The polished white floor refracted light from the sun straight into my retinas, forcing me further into the store. Its open floor plan is constricted by too many too small tables holding nonfiction tomes, all of which were coming to "a screen near you", fiction stocked not by title but by color - like the layout designers were told they were designing a candy store, and rows of expensive vinyl reprints as if Philadelphia were lacking in claustrophobic, expensive record shops. The whole first floor activated my fight-or-flight response. I chose to fight. As I walked around, I glimpsed a twelve hundred page copy of The Power Broker six seconds away from disaster as it dangled off the side of a tiny table. Maybe if Hulu would greenlight a miniseries, it could move closer to the center.

The second floor housed the books they didn't want you to buy. It was where I found Pitch Black. The selection was good, the book buyer knows what they're doing. I went looking for T.H. White's The Once and Future King omnibus. It was there. I went looking for Cormac McCarthy's Child of God. It was also there, along with the rest of his books. He died a few weeks prior, I considered buying them out of a misplaced grief. I did not buy any of these books. I mostly frequent shops with cats, low prices, and twenty-eight copies of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom being used to support slacking shelves, I will not pay sticker price if I can help it. Still, I like marking visits to new locations with purchases. I am the one thing worse than a capitalist, a tourist. I justify it to myself, I feel like if I spend too much time in a store without buying something, the cashier will call me a thief. This anxiety may stem from childhood. There's a video game, The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, where you can steal items from the shopkeeper by walking around him enough times until he stops looking at the door. When you steal an item, the entire island knows about it. They all call you THIEF. If you reenter the shop, he kills you with a laser gun. When you restart, the islanders still call you THIEF. So I bought Pitch Dark. It sat on my shelf, unread, until this January. I have not reentered the Barnes and Noble since but I know if I do, no one will blast me with a laser gun.

Pitch Dark's reputation is less than Speedboat's. Speedboat was on David Foster Wallace's curriculum! That's a big endorsement, it's also why people are still talking about Speedboat. Pitch Dark was not and fewer people talk about it. It contemporary critical reception has rehabilitated it slightly but Speedboat still looms large. It's why I've said "Speedboat" five times so far in this paragraph and Pitch Dark twice. Pitch Dark is denser, stranger and more obtuse than its predecessor. Whereas the previous book was confident in its narrative lope, a drowsy stroll from anecdote to anecdote, there does seem to be a contiguous narrative in Pitch Dark. There are regular refrains that allude to a break-up, or a freeze, of an affair. Buttressing these refrains are anecdotes told by the protagonist, Kate Ennis, that hearken back to Adler's familiar sardonic style. Sometimes the anecdotes are replaced with a more traditional, longform story. One of the pull quotes cited on the back of the NYRB edition is Anne Tyler; "If you simply allow [Adler's fragments] to settle in their own patterns, flashing light where they will, you'll find Pitch Dark a bright kaleidoscope of a book." The operative phrase here is "If you simply allow" - a big ask of any reader and one that betrays the book's earned reputation as difficult, rangy and maybe, just maybe, less than Speedboat. Despite its short length, Pitch Dark is weighty and undecipherable at times. Occasionally, I wanted to level my displeasure at Adler. I thought that she had become too ponderous, the charm of her wit and her easy handle on post-modern literature to now serving as distractions from what was ultimately just a story about "a break-up."

That’s an ungenerous view, lazy even. Pitch Dark is more than just "about a break-up.” Pitch Dark is about reckoning with the staggering sacrifice we make as “selves” in order to acclimate to a highly public world. Throughout the first section, she repeats a refrain that it is now the “age of crime.” It’s a curious, seemingly reactionary thread that almost runs through the book unaddressed. Near the book’s conclusion, she begins to talk about the popularization of the byline as the turning point for the newspaper. She grieves that this moment was “supposed to be the era of investigative reporting” and “information retrieval.” She describes how there has been an uptick in stories about professionals faking their credentials and how it was never investigative journalists nor computers catching the criminals but the readers. Connective tissue between the two unrelated passages reveals itself.

“Sometime in the early sixties,, the paper began to put bylines on nearly all stories, by everyone. No one could have predicted where this would take us…From anonymous reporters, quoting, as a matter of the highest professionalism and with only the rarest exceptions, from named and specific sources, we moved gradually, then rapidly, to the reverse: named reporters, with famous bylines, quoting persons, sources, who remained anonymous.”

In essence what this did was train audiences to recognize the authority of the personality over the authority of the institution. If the newspaper was there to provide objective accountability then the introduction of the byline accidentally created incentive for vanity. If the newspaper writer becomes celebrity, then the accountability and utility of the newspaper declines. If the accountability of the newspaper declines, corruption flourishes. Adler writes about this trend without ever naming Watergate in particular but the scandal and its effect on the culture of journalism looms over the story she’s actually alluding to - Janet Cooke’s infamous, fabricated Pulitzer Prize winning story “Jimmy’s World” about a pseudonymous eight year old heroin addict. The publishing editor who submitted the story for a Pulitzer? Bob Woodward. As a mark of her trademark ambivalence, Adler relents albeit caustically; “…it had always been a tradition, first a frontier then an immigrant tradition, that there should be crannies of identity, that a man should be free to make up, in this free country, a new life and a new name.”

The Ireland chapter of Pitch Dark is the book's keystone. In this chapter, she ventures out to Castlebar, near Westport, on the recommendation of her friend, an ambassador who has a castle out there. She hopes that this excursion will be a reprieve from her troubles back in America. Under the vague paranoia of the Troubles, she sets off from Shannon Airport with an incredible sense of unease. This unease is magnified by the previous chapter's narrative murkiness. The reader is only aware of Kate's narration and Kate often trails off, blends the present and past, and is generally unreliable as friend, let alone narrator. She warns the reader that she committed a crime in Ireland, but we see in her retelling of anecdotes that a crime to her may not be a crime at all. Conspiracy flits through passing headlights and disappears just as quickly into the rural Irish night. Tracking the narrative proves more tedious than one wants. There’s a running undercurrent of defeatism throughout the book and in turn, it expects a pessimist’s attention to detail from its reader. It’s a challenging read unlike much else I’ve read and for that I can recommend it to the curious. It’s difficult to ascertain Adler’s goals having read her two novels, it’s clear that Adler sees tremendous value in anecdotes. There is validity to this approach, sometimes she writes a paragraph with more critical precision than some authors do in an entire book. Too often though, I found Pitch Dark stumbling blind.

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson (2003)

Twenty years into his career William Gibson found himself at a crossroads. Over two decades, his science-fiction writing - particularly his debut novel Neuromancer had practically invented a new style - cyberpunk. He wrote two direct sequels to Neuromancer and completed a second, separate trilogy that further established his reputation as the literature world's preeminent futurist. While he was typing away, others were adapting his ideas into albums, films and video games. His short stories Johnny Mnenomic and New Rose Hotel were adapted into movies, novels like Snow Crash iterated on Neuromancer’s trendiest bits, Billy Idol and Warren Zevon explicitly paid homage to Gibson with their albums “Cyberpunk” and “Transverse City” while tabletop and video games synthesized his ideas into their core identities. One seed from the Gibson tree germinated even more successfully than the others; the Wachowski sisters' The Matrix.

A veritable phenomenon, the runaway popularity of The Matrix forced a re-calibration. Twenty years in one genre is a longtime for any author and you can't be expected to reinvent the wheel every time, especially. While Gibson’s never directly cited “The Matrix” for this change in approach, the timing is suggestive. He’d made his mark, it was time to try something new. His first book of the new millennium would be about what it was like to live in that moment, it would be his first “contemporary” novel. Pattern Recognition is still identifiable as Gibson but is more prescient and thoughtful than his past “science fiction” books. Margaret Atwood and other genre writers have championed terms like speculative fiction to better separate their books from the Flash Gordons on the shelf but Gibson has always danced the tarantella with genre classifications and Pattern Recognition is his most daring performance. It is a deliberately reflexive, reverential and obsessively modern book. It impresses in its ability to be both about living in physical spaces hyper-mediated by abstracted marketing concepts and being about itself.

Pattern Recognition is about a freelance brand consultant, Cayce Pollard, a coolhunter known for her ability to pluck the most underground trends for her clients to repurpose. She also, curiously, has allergies to certain brand images like the Michelin Man which trigger panic attacks. Her hypersensitivity to branding is all over the book. References to Fruit of the Loom, Google, Buzz Rickson, The X-Files, Amtrak, Casio, Tom Cruise, Harajuku, Tommy Hilfiger, eBay and Rick Griffin dot the first two chapters and the names only keep spilling out. This is a twofold trick; their primary function is as textual evidence of her brand hypersensitivity. However, in pulling these names, there’s an implicit suggestion that the reader is also familiar with these names drawing us further into Cayce as audience surrogate. The reader must then think about how they know a Casio watch from a Timex and what the social distinction between Casio and Timex is. It’s a smart reconfiguration of Gibson’s tendency to use real brands in his novels. Neuromancer invoked brands like Hitachi and Mitsubushi to signify Japanese economic dominance, a divination of the future that has stuck with the genre ever since. Critics assessed this as an Orientalist choice, which it certainly was and continues to be, but here Gibson is directly addressing his own past usage of brands and images.

Pattern Recognition is the most Sausserian novel of Gibson’s that I’ve read. I’ve tried hitting against my head against the brick wall of semiotics theory a few times; how we read and interpret images and symbols is endlessly fascinating but semiotics is notoriously dense and disagreeable to casual study. Gibson makes it digestible and properly recreates the private thrill of learning the subtext of an image or brand. Pattern Recognition is a solid freshman primer on semiotics. Gibson’s primary concern here is how corporations and creatives manufacture new signs and repurpose old ones for capital and control. An early passage where Cayce clarifies that her name is pronounced "Case", not "Casey", was an amusing echo to Neuromancer's male protagonist named Case that doubly functioned as a reference to the way that Gibson & Neuromancer had built their own subtle brand. Here is the newest model of Gibson protagonist, Cayce or Case 2.0. This one's a girl.

When Cayce isn’t working, she’s hanging out on a website devoted to uncovering the meaning and the truth behind video clips being released by an unknown source. These video clips are entirely vague and the users of the forum impart their own meaning into them. Gibson talks about how tribes of interpretation gradually begin to form on the message board and how the user’s investigations begin to attract real world attention. The mystery behind these video clips is the animating force in Pattern Recognition and is more enticing than determining whether or not Cayce’s vanished father died in 9/11 or not. Like he did twenty years prior, Gibson is trying out ideas on how humans can use computers to better realize their own self. Here, the message board is thought to be a way to adjudicate truth and its ultimate conclusion does little to reassure the reader on the safety of the method. Pattern Recognition is highly paranoid novel, one deeply concerned about how the internet opens citizens to previously untold levels of corporate and public surveillance.

That said, a week or so out from reading Pattern Recognition, its positive qualities blur. Neuromancer is certainly a more scintillating read, alive with the possibilities of future computer technology, blissful in its ignorance to how it actually worked. Pattern Recognition is more conservative, the work of a career author. Its conspiracies go spinning out into the ether as the narrative solidifies. It's a touch too long for what it has to say or rather, it begins to be more about its plot more than it is about its themes. I know that I’m saying this directly after writing about Pitch Dark’s opaque narrative and over-reliance on obfuscation but I felt that Gibson had a good handle on how to structure his more philosophical concerns into the narrative yet felt compelled to assemble something pleasing, dare I say, adaptable. Pattern Recognition is too neat and other speculative fiction titles like Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge pull off the dizzying razzle dazzle of the hyperreal better.

Welcome back to Hyperfix, the not quite weekly newsletter wherein I recommend something. Last year I attempted an all-encompassing approach and gave readers as wide a spread as I could, a weekly media charcuterie board. As it turns out, taking in that much media and then writing about it is not only exhausting, but tedious. While writing last year’s Hyperfix, I returned again and again to Renata Adler’s scathing article on Pauline Kael, The Perils of Pauline. For anyone interested in writing semi-regularly about media, her assessment on how Kael’s writing degraded comes as required reading. Adler posits that Kael fell victim to the rote monotony of keeping up a staff job with a public identity and regular deadlines, that she became a caricature of herself, one egged on by a cult of personality who jumped to her rhythm even when the quality of the critique was dimming. Her line about Kael’s tendency to always come at films, and just films, strongly seems especially damning;

And while I have neither the critical bones of Adler or Kael, nor have I written even a percentage as much as them, Adler’s takedown does demand a reassessment of goals. Why write about these things - why write about them weekly and send them out to people? Truthfully, there isn’t much of one except that I like doing it. But I wouldn’t want to think of my writing as actively atrophying and that’s, generally, what I felt was happening. Reviving it with a slower output and with a narrower focus will hopefully allow me to focus on other projects and give readers something specific to check out as opposed to be before where I suggested, on average, ten things a week with shotgun delicacy. My writing never looks like how I want it to look but having something on the canvas is a small reassurance. I thought about renaming the vertical to “The Shallow End”, for reasons that should be self evident, so if something comes across your inbox titled that one day and Hyperfix disappears, well, there you go.

What I'm Watching: Hal Hartley

Back in December, I found myself on the receiving end of a not altogether unpleasant sinus cold. Perfectly placed in the center of my winter break, it compelled me to stay home. I was well enough that I wasn't bed-bound but my capacity for labor was otherwise diminished enough that I decided it was TV time until morale improved. When I'm sick I have pronounced migraines which makes the idea of playing a video game or watching something loud particularly unappealing. What I usually do if I'm really sick is pop on a Simpsons DVD and turn my back to the television, my brain perfectly recreating scenes as the audio plays. Thusly, many of my sick days constitute my happiest childhood and adult memories. This time, I wanted to invest my time off wisely, I wanted to watch something new.  In my search for something amiably room-tone, I remembered that Criterion Channel had added a ton of Hal Hartley movies months prior. I always wanted to watch Trust and figured this would be as good a time as any. When I checked, it turned it that Criterion had added every Hal Hartley film to their system so I started at the beginning - The Unbelievable Truth. I had a lot of time on my hands, I figured I could knock out two of his movies. I knocked out seven. 

The Unbelievable Truth starts out with a man dressed in black on a highway, cold blue sky and verdant greens against it. Bold, heavily spaced white text on black background gives us our production credits. The man is picked up by a passing Chevy S-10 Blazer. Lines are transactional, exchanged like stage dialogue. "Are you a priest?" "No. I'm a mechanic." becomes a familiar refrain within four minutes. After a few cars, he arrives in New York City. It cuts. We're now in a girl's bedroom. Her wall is mostly pink with floral prints, pastel greens and whites. She's in bed wearing a gray shirt, reading a fake book, "The End of the World' by Ned Rifle. When she exhales, we hear the sound of the atomic bomb going off. Directly above her head is a hand-drawn poster of the $1.00 bill and several black-and-white wartime photos, including one of a mushroom cloud. She goes to the kitchen, her family talks at her from offscreen. It sounds like they're talking to her through a fishbowl. Two separate instrumental tracks play over these scenes; the man's has a driving baseline, a propulsive energy. The girl's is a light two-note track that gradually goes louder until it can’t be ignored. Within six and a half minutes, you know everything you need to know about these two. 

And by the time those minutes are up, you'll probably know if Hal Hartley is a good fit for you. There's no mistaking his style, even in his first feature. His archetypes stay consistent; his protagonists are brooding, erudite, handsome loner men and mysterious, pretty and precocious women. Their friends, if they have them, are gregarious and pushy - providing stimuli to the halted protagonists. Their parents are often working class and just don’t understand. These characters all talk like they're destined to be quoted. Characters pontificate like they're philosophy-poetry double majors and not mechanics. Lines hang in the air awkwardly, a staccato rhythm threading his dialogues. If all of this sounds like it could be a student film, that's not far off. The music guides the emotions of the scene and when he gets the budgets, you get 90s college radio hit after hit. The contents of nearly every Hal Hartley movie are also the contents of the most pretentious student films but when Hartley does it, the material soars. Hartley's writing ability pairs well with his troupe of actors, many of whom you'll see across multiple of his movies. His movies are all self-consciously cool yet watching them you get the sense that Hartley is both trying to be cool and also that he is somehow, impossibly, reflexively cool.

Over the following week, I watched Trust, Surviving Desire, Simple Men, Amateur and Flirt. Then I took a break. Henry Fool left Criterion in the interim so I skipped a beat and watched his next project, The Book of Life. Trust and Amateur remain his most enduring films, they were the talk of video store employees when they came out in the 1990s and their chicness has retained its value through the years. Playing "spot the guy" is like a drinking game with Hartley so I'll make note of the actors to know. Trust stars two of his most iconic collaborators, Adrienne Shelly and Martin Donovan. Their handsome tragicomic romance exudes the dispossessed cool of the burgeoning decade. Martin Donovan's hair is immaculately center-parted, Hartley's self-composed music flares up with a new shoegaze influence, and Adrienne Shelly cuts through Hartley's talky script with her sharp performance as a teenage exile trying to find a new identity in the enclosed Long Island suburbs.

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Simple Men, presently my favorite of all of these, leans hard on the cool button, practically falling face first onto it with an abrupt dance number set to Sonic Youth's “Kool Thing.” This impromptu dance number is the oft-cited highlight in contemporary discussions of Simple Men and for good reason. 

The dance, itself a conscious reference to Godard's "Bande à part", is maybe the best distillation of Hartley's brand of conscious cool. There's an unreality to the jump cut, the performance of coolness is made apparent by the contained nature of the scene. Soundtracking to Sonic Youth, one of the most self-consciously cool bands in existence almost strikes me as Hartley overplaying his hand but having Donovan and Bill Sage lumber behind Elina Löwensohn with their meandering dancing grounds the scene, making it as naturalistic as it is bizarre. My favorite moment in the sequence is when Robert John Burke and Karen Sillas enter into frame. You’ve got the first trio moving to the right, moving out of focus while this duo comes into focus. The duo dances (if you can call that dancing…) as the trio slides back into frame from right-to-left. Hartley begins tracking the trio again, the camera’s focus return from them away from the duo, letting them have their private moment while Sage and Donovan compete over Löwensohn.

For such a moment of pronounced artificiality, it actually serves creates interior space for its characters. Hartley's coolness is self-conscious, heavily stylized and obvious but there's a restraint to it. Simple Men’s dance is one long take. Its characters slam their feet down, shake their fists in the air and slide back and forth like they’re wearing steel-toed boots. It’s a weighty, surreal internalization of the romantic drama that’s been developing throughout the movie and “Kool Thing’s” loudness absorbs it, synthesizes it and shoots it back out at us. Compare this scene with Pulp Fiction’s tribute to Bande à part a year later. This scene is also surreal in its way. Set in a 50s retro bar, dancing to Chuck Berry’s “You Never Can Tell”, its oddness and energy is pronounced by furious cross-cuts and a sudden explosion of energy between the two characters. It’s a good scene, but it’s functional - it externalizes a tension between characters Mia and Vincent, which provdes the viewer with a new narrative plank regarding their relationship. Simple Men does not do this. Its dance is for texture, to thicken its emotions. Simple Men’s narrative is as evasive as it is melancholy, it’s the opposite of functional.

That both Hartley and Tarantino reference Bande à part early in their careers does not escape me. If anything it only confirms Hartley as an unlikely tastemaker and that not only have his tastes endured but he also set the plate. His 1994 film Amateur is the best example of this. Set in a pre-Friends New York City, the movie is drenched in dyed black alt-chic. Amateur's soundtrack, to read it off, is incredible. It's a who's who of 1990s college radio favorites; The Jesus Lizard, PJ Harvey, Pavement, Red House Painters and Yo La Tengo to name a few. In the cast, you've got Isabella Huppert playing off Hartley standbys Donovan and Löwensohn, with brief walk-on roles from Michael Imperioli, Holt McCallany, Parker Posey and Tim Blake Nelson. Buffeting all this retrospective cool is an oddball indie crime drama that seems to be Hartley's most direct flirtation with mainstream affection. Even so, it's still peculiarly Hartley. Any forward momentum is cut up by its languid A-plot/B-plot structure. Characters talk around each other even as they’re talking directly to each other. Ironically, Amateur is more frustrating than his previous films because it’s trying to be more traditional but Hartley’s instincts and methods do not gel with convention.

Fresh off of Amateur, Hartley indulges his long-standing experimental tendencies with Flirt - a triptych film that repurposes the same script across three different vignettes set in Berlin, New York City and Tokyo. It's an intriguing experiment and the results are reliably good. Proving that Hartley's impeccable taste extends past fashion, film and alternative rock, there is a truly inexplicable article of clothing in the film's Tokyo segment - the very rare, highly coveted MOTHER 2 Sukajan jacket. While watching, I racked my brain over how they could have found this jacket. This jacket was only given out to members of MOTHER 2's development team and the likelihood that the costume department found it in a secondhand shop, while not impossible, seemed low. While I have no proof that this is the case (my email to Hartley remains unanswered), the special thanks to then Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi in the credits tells me that if not Hartley, then someone in the movie had played MOTHER 2 and enjoyed it enough to request the jacket be lent to them for shooting thus preserving the game's legacy in pure amber for someone [read: me] to rediscover twenty eight years later. 

Although my overview of Hartley's films has mostly touched on the superficial aesthetic aspects that I find fascinating, his films are of serious quality. Owing to this being a reconfiguration of a newsletter, I wanted to focus on why I find Hartley's output, adolescent and morose as it is, invigorating. As an independent director who shoots small and shoots local, the passion and grit of he and his collaborators is noticeable. Unlike many of his fellow 90s indie compatriots notably Linklater, Soderbergh and Kevin Smith, Hartley never parlayed his success into studio directing gigs. The closest he came to "selling out" was directing a few episodes of Amazon's Red Oaks, a 2015-2017 Amazon TV show you probably forgot about. But Red Oaks was no bad to place to be - every episode had someone behind the camera; Gregg Araki, David Gordon Green, Amy Heckerling, Nisha Ganatra, and Andrew Fleming all took turns. If that's "selling out" for Hartley, he did it right.

Since Hartley's tastes coincided so closely with mine, his films rekindled some snuffed passions. Since January, I haven't been able to turn the Sonic Youth playlist off. I'm back to looking at pictures of roadside America in between answering emails and revisiting 90s alt rock albums I glided over to relisten to Wowee Zowee for the 2000th time. I've taken the plunge on a staggered rewatch of Homicide: Life on the Street and encountering Adrienne Shelly and Robert John Burke and Edie Falco when I least expect it. Within days, Hartley's films became a familiar comfort. I'm shocked that I've gone without them for this long. I'd hate to think that other people who think like me are also going without them. The entire collection will be removed from Criterion at the end of February so if you are interested, move now or else acquiring them legally will cost…a lot more money than you'd think. 

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Other Recommendations:

Film:

• May December (2023 - Todd Haynes): Snubbed by Oscar but what else would you expect. Todd Haynes delivers a smoke-the-whole-pack stressful movie that is simultaneously an indictment of America’s obsession with true-crime, a knotty character drama about how abuse and suppression spreads through a community, a crash course in the dramatic value of camp technique, and sickeningly funny. This is the Sickos Haha Yes Pick for Film of the Year 2023. If you like May December, make you sure you check out the screenwriters’ short film - Bev, about a serial killer’s son attending a trust fall workshop.

Music:

• End of the Century (1980 - Ramones): I know I said in the last paragraph that I was listening to the 90s alt rock albums that I missed and if I gave you access to my last.fm, you’d know that to be mostly true but if you aren’t already a fan of the Ramones/Phil Spector co-production “End of the Century”, make some time. It was saddled with an unfairly sour reputation for most of its life, especially since Joey and Johnny both hated it. Time has been kind to it, with its incredible production bringing out the secret Beach Boys quality in the band’s music that was always lurking underneath the punk exterior.

Games:

• Streets of Rage 4 (2020 - DotEmu): As is the case with all my most anticipated games, I arrived at this one about three and a half years after it released. It’s a great revision on the old series and a worthwhile stab at a revival. Most of my enjoyment was derived out of the roguelike DLC though - a Danger Room type beat where you punch and punch till you can’t punch any more. The new emphasis on 100-hit long combo strings is more satisfying than anything I’d have come up with. It’s a totally different project from the excellent 2011 fan sequel Streets of Rage Remake and I’m happy to report that the two exist in harmony with each other, complementing each other’s vision.

My horde is comparatively smaller but reading is also a more time-consuming task than listening to an album. Like Modell's column, these won't be critical assessments of each book or formal reviews but will allow me to provide a personal history of each book, blog brief thoughts on them and hopefully allow me to determine which are worthwhile fixtures in my library and which I can drop. Not every book I own is on the list; I was able to log sixty two books from memory which seemed like enough for one year. I then put these books into a randomizer and was lucky enough to receive a balanced, welcoming spread. It felt like fate and so I decided to make an event of it and broadcast it. Follow me over the course of 2024 as I try to wipe the slate clean so I can make it dirty again. 

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*Exceptions made for gifts, rare finds, any remaining Lew Archer books and the eventual republication of Christopher Zeischegg's The Magician.

**To ensure that the library is still receiving ever-valuable circulations, I've shifted over to comic books which aren't too much of a distraction. 

The Fuck-Up - Arthur Nersesian (1997)

I received this from regular book collecting enabler Mike Pavese (keep 'em coming) in 2021 when he was parting with chunks of his horde. The first ever release by soon-to-be hot indie publishing house Akashic Books, my edition is instead through Pocket Books. The bad boy cred on this one is real. It says MTV on the spine and you can slip it into the inside pocket of your jacket, maybe you cut that pocket yourself. It sits smaller on the shelf than nearly all my other books and with its blend of browns and greys with THE FUCK-UP printed across it in bold beige lettering, it always pops. I was unaware of Nersesian before picking this up and the comparisons to Irvine Welsh and Bret Easton Ellis piqued my interest. Yet, I always felt that something else took precedence, something else that I knew more about, something that would be a sure thing. So, I was thrilled when the randomizer spat out The Fuck-Up as the first book for Eliminate Down. It was an auspicious sign that the randomizer chose a book that I had wavered on reading so many times.

Fortunately, I got a head start on this project in the final three weeks of 2023 so I made short work of this one through December. Set in the filthy streets of 1980s New York, this is a story about an unnamed slacker protagonist as he slums his way up and down the social ladder. The main character is affable, smart but characteristically unmotivated and cynical. The Welsh comparisons felt appropriate since he shares a lot in common with Trainspotting's Renton but he feels comparatively edgeless. Renton does heroin and fucks and cheats while this palpably more pleasant protagonist makes up white lies, has mostly normal sex and fumbles around until he can find a somewhat cozy living situation. There's an intentional lack of agency in his character but it isn't supplemented by anything distinct. There are stretches of The Fuck-Up that feel dully autobiographical. What would be a series of interesting barside anecdotes are flattened by an adherence to traditional narrative arcs.

Where I thought Nersesian was most successful was in the romantic depiction of Ed Koch-era Manhattan and Brooklyn. He writes about the setting with serious passion. you get a sense of the noise, density and squalor of the city but it doesn't feel overly negative. The story is told as one sustained flashback and that framing sets this depiction of New York City as nostalgic, an ode to maturing in a dirtier city whose edges were now being dulled by Giuliani's militaristic policing policies which were designed to attract tourists and the rich while repelling the less economically desirable, like our protagonist (nevermind that he's a bohemian arts goon that flourishes in the city). It is touching in its way and made me think of the ways in which Jim Kenney's Philadelphia is reminiscent of Koch's New York City. It's really, mostly, the subway. Nersesian writes about those rickety rails with contempt and disgust. They are ramshackle steel tins that accumulate mysterious puddles, aggressive transients and strange smells. Given the ubiquity of the 1980s NYC subway aesthetic and my own experiences on Philadelphia's derelict subways. I had a pretty solid hold on what Nersesian was describing. I considered that maybe a current Philadelphian could write something like this in ten or fifteen years, maybe they’re writing it now. Someone living in Brooklyn right now could not write this story. I’ve been there recently and those trains are far too clean.

The Instant Enemy - Ross MacDonald (1968)

I love Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer books. Essentially Phillip Marlowe fanfiction, MacDonald writes extremely entertaining detective pulp fiction and while every book has a similar structure, they are reliably sordid and possess a sociological dimension that puts them above other Chandler imitators. I will pick up a Lew Archer book whenever I find a new one. The Instant Enemy was a mass market paperback I found for the low, low price of $2.95 at one of my local haunts. It was with a bunch of other Archer books (that I purchased) and yes, they will appear throughout this feature. This series represents the closest thing Eliminate Down has to a Polaris - a guiding star that I can keep returning to. 

The Instant Enemy begins the way all of these books start. Archer is called in by an upper middle class family to investigate the disappearance of a family member - this time their daughter who has run away with a hotheaded young mechanic. Archer's investigation gradually uncovers linkages to the family's employer, scions of Texan oil money who moved west to California. The story gradually finds commonalities between the landed gentry and the Inland Empire dirt farmers who have been cast off to the tenement houses and nursing homes of Southern California. The Instant Enemy is grim and despite the series’ reputation for grounded psychodrama, the proceedings go totally off the rails. Born in 1915 and presumably chronically uncool, MacDonald writes about marijuana and LSD with era-apropos breathless panic. These are mysterious mood-altering substances that could makes a good girls go bad and drive troubled boys to madness. Drugs are a recurring sign of the times in MacDonald's books though the influence of drugs mostly exists at the fringes of each book's proceedings. They are center stage in The Instant Enemy but disguise more sordid, more timeless sins of the father. 

The Instant Enemy is one of the later books in the Lew Archer series and as the books went on, his character evolved from Marlowe mimic to a proto Jake Gittis. Like the best detectives, he's a fumbler but not a fool. He takes his hits on the chin, often literally, and the story's dramatic tension is heightened because he's obligated to be one step behind. What these Archer books do so well is lay out the tapestry of mysteries that run in the background of its characters' lives. Archer's job is to uncover the truth behind lies deployed to sustain mysteries. There's a reason that Los Angeles, with its promises of land for everyone, is the setting of so much detective fiction. It's a town of projected success, a town built on bluffs and retrofitted to function. The detective, with their disposition toward truth, is a classic underdog hero in this setting. What MacDonald does so well in The Instant Enemy is show the detective's role in the city and by extension, the genre. The following passage, lifted from a moment after a client offers to give him enough money to set him up for life, is the book's most electrifying;

Hell, I could even retire. The possibility jarred me. I had to admit to myself that I lived for nights like these, moving across the city’s great broken body, making connections among its millions of cells. I had a crazy wish or fantasy that some day before I died, if I made all the right neural connections, the city would come all the way alive. Like the Bride of Frankenstein.

Since I was two books ahead entering 2024, I treated myself to a book not on the list; I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon." Since it's not part of the list, I won't be going into particular detail. Going into it, I knew a fair amount about Zevon and in fact, chunks of his Wikipedia page, as well as other biographical information you can find about him is sourced from this book. I knew Zevon was also a huge MacDonald fan, even dedicating his 1980 album Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School to Ken Millar (MacDonald, a pen name.) What I did not realize was that Zevon and MacDonald had significant correspondence for a brief time, with MacDonald even sitting in on Zevon's first intervention. This was a relationship that likely dissipated when Zevon fell off the wagon and MacDonald developed early onset Alzheimer's. A mildly upsetting truth of history but an interesting and subtle link between my interests nonetheless. Listening to Zevon's lyrics, one definitely gets a taste of his influences and if Lawyers, Guns and Money is Graham Greene, then Excitable Boy is Ross MacDonald.

Stoner - John Williams (1965)

Stoner enjoys a reputation as a book for those "in the know." Still, its mainstream notoriety ranks below fellow masculine IYKYK picks like White Noise and Infinite Jest. Mostly ignored upon release, Stoner received glowing praise by a small but vocal contingent of writers, professors and book reviewers. The New York Review of Books republished it, along with Williams' other books, in 2012. Concurrently, The New York Times and The New Yorker published articles celebrating it as a lost classic of 1960s American literature. It was this praise, along with it being among the first books in a library tag for "depressing" that made me interested. I spotted it at a local fire trap bookstore and picked it up, mostly as a dignified cover for the other book I was buying, a sleazy dime store paperback about Tokyo sex tourism; "The Japanese believe sex is fun and anything goes - with anyone - any time!"

Despite my initial interest, I let Stoner sit on my shelf for a few months. Days before buying it, I saw something about it that caused me no small consternation. I saw 4chan's /lit/ board's crowdsourced list choosing their top 100 Books. First, allow me to dispel any sort of 4chan mythmaking. Its large, anonymous user base is mostly composed of men ages 18-45 and is untrustworthy for the same exact reasons that any sort of homogeneous dataset would be untrustworthy. This list, which had a perilously small sample size (many books had only four votes), listed Stoner at #7 overall with thirty votes total. This was worrying, not because their other picks were poor, but because it suggested that Stoner was a "guy's book." As you may expect - or as you'll see, I've read a lot of "guy's books" and I was quietly hoping that Stoner would not be of that ilk. It is. It very, very, very much is. And the dissonance between my thoughts on what the book is doing versus how the book is lies not on Williams but on its suffocating critical excavation. 

My hope here is to defuse any potential overenthusiasm for what is assuredly a well-written, often tragic and crushing novel that yet seizes small victories where it can find them. It is an excellent blend of the campus novel and a novel of manners. Over and over again its small, repressed agonies reminded me of Edith Wharton. A section in the back half, wherein protagonist William Stoner falls into a star-crossed romance with a younger woman is so reminiscent of Ethan Frome that one expects a sled to materialize by their bedside as the story approaches wintertime. Because of Williams' evident admiration for Wharton's novels and the depths of their inevitable tragedy, he is able to mold "Stoner" into something that pays fealty to the literary tradition it respects while also feeling contemporary, flush with modern concerns about finding meaning in a slightly lived life. Its interior observations are thoughtful and detailed; the following passage about Stoner renovating his study is a highlight; 

As he worked on the room, and as it began slowly to take a shape, he realized that for many years, unknown to himself, he had an image locked somewhere within him like a shamed secret, an image that was ostensibly of a place but which was actually of himself. So it was himself that he was attempting to define as he worked on his study. As he sanded the old boards for his bookcases, and saw the surface roughnesses disappear the gray weathering flake away to the essential wood and finally to a rich purity of grain and texture– as he repaired his furniture and arranged it in the room, it was himself that he was slowly shaping, it was himself that he was putting into a kind of order, it was himself that he was making possible.

While reading, I found myself repeatedly surprised by the total passivity of William Stoner. Initially, it makes sense with this being the story of a young hayseed going to college but the passivity lingers and gradually, the supporting cast become such constant demons that its protagonist loses some of his alleged stoic depth. I found myself agreeing with Elaine Showalter's critique of Stoner that Williams writes Stoner as far too much of a blameless martyr; a quiet, hardworking man besieged by irrational harpies and hunchbacked, limping, lying professors and students. Stoner's endless trials reminded me of the episodes of King of the Hill where Hank runs into a foil whose advice obviously runs counter to Hank's folksy common-sense and the viewer is subjected to a twenty-two minute walk around the track until Hank gets to be right. Now, I like a lot of those episodes of King of the Hill and I like Stoner but both texts have a tendency to essentialize their protagonist's righteousness. 

Whereas Wharton's books have protagonists whose own ethical and moral oversights or failings prove their tragic undoing, William Stoner is stoic and passive because that is all that he can muster under the threat of batty women and 1940s DEI initiatives. Its reactionary tendencies allude to Williams' own professional discomfort and its publication in 1965 suggests specific animosity toward the contemporary wave of feminist liberation in particular. Again, this isn't to say that Stoner is a poor book but instead that the breathless critical reappraisal of it elides the book's baser instincts. Stoner's modern boosters upsell it, skirting past its touchier portrayals with weak assessments like Tim Kreider's obsequious "The book’s antagonists are its most problematic aspect…This marking of evil with deformity strikes a twenty-first century reader as heavy-handed, not to mention un-p.c., like something out of fairy tales or “Dick Tracy.” But, unlike the villains of melodrama, these characters truly live."

What I found most interesting were comments that Williams made in a 1985 interview with Brian Wooley cited in the introduction to the 2013 NYROB edition; “Williams complains about the changes in the teaching of literature and the attitude to the text “as if a novel or poem is something be studied and understood rather than experienced.” Wooley then suggests playfully, “It’s to be exegeted, in other words.” “Yes. As if it were a kind of puzzle.” “And literature is written to be entertaining?” Wooley suggests again. “Absolutely. My God, to read without joy is stupid.” What’s intrigiuing here, beyond Williams’ exasperation, is that Williams is observing a transformation in the assessment of his craft from practical to anthropological. In Kreider’s praise, we can see how a lightly applied anthropological assessment weakens one’s thoughts. Because he enjoys the book so much but still feels the need to critique its cheaper tropes, he disguises his pleasure with light flagellation and invents a mistruth about the internal depths of its antagonists. Kreider’s criticism reads mealymouthed and insincere and his praise feels well out of proportion to the work.

Stoner is good. I would recommend it. It's a melodrama and trades in the rigid biases that melodrama often does. Don't make melodrama a dirty word, it's part and parcel to the appeal of fiction. A book can trade in reactionary discourse and still function as a worthwhile critical character study and champions of these books should be willing to broker that proposition. There are small joys to be found in encountering bad behavior in controlled settings, like fiction. My criticism of Stoner is not that Williams uses stereotype but this his stereotypes abut a protagonist and a setting that are so well realized that their comparative cheapness dilutes the story’s sophisticated understanding of what it means to live.

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Itinerary:

• Blood Meridian (1985 - Cormac McCarthy)

• Heartworn Highways (1976 - James Szalapski)

• Return to Seoul (2022 - Davy Chou)

There exist many editions of Cormac McCarthy's seminal hyperbrutal Western Blood Meridian. Some of them are absolutely hideous. Look at this 2010 China Press atrocity. There are eighteen words on the cover. The average syllable count on the cover is four. The cover has more syllables on it than an average sentence in the book. And the font! It's like the jacket designer was doing a cross-promo with Lee Jeans. For reasons beyond all human comprehension, most of McCarthy's books have been republished with this aesthetically spiteful design. Aside from the edition of "As I Lay Dying" that prominently features James Franco on the cover, I cannot think of a book I would want in my house less. So, I was pretty happy when I found this snazzy 1986 Ecco Press edition at a local used bookstore for cheap. 

The dark red-oranges and deep black of this edition are a better fit for the book's fatalistic mood. Blood Meridian is a notorious volume, having worked up a reputation for being singularly nasty and violent but with a prose style equally singular. It uses archaic, period-accurate language. McCarthy’s sentences are curt and vivid. Dialogue is not denoted by quotes and is dropped sporadically and with purpose. It is a distinctive style that draws out deeper, meaner truths about the rawness of the violence present in pulp Westerns. At the beginning of each chapter, a sequence of events is laid out in brief and the text that follows reads almost like a military dossier. As you follow The Kid and the group of scalp hunters he joins as they lay waste to civilians and combatants across the US-Mexico border, you feel like you are reading a secret history, like you've pulled a file from President Taylor's desk. McCarthy's ability to synthesize his comprehensive research commands respect. At a certain point in the book, I realized that I could map out the Glanton Gang's warpath on Google Maps, an attention to detail that made what was recounted on the page all the more real. 

Blood Meridian requires some outside research for those (like me) uninitiated on some of the finer points of the Mexican-American War and the Texas Revolution. As I learned more about this period, my research was curiously bookended by the 1976 outlaw country cinema-verite road-doc "Heartworn Highways."

Focusing on folks of the era like David Allan Coe, Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, you get a good sense of the sort of musical culture that was developing in Texas. This outlaw country fashion was adapted into a larger cultural obsession with truckers but Heartworn Highways catches this trend in its adolescent stage. The footage that's most striking is of Townes Van Zandt's farm. Now, it's Townes Van Zandt so he's gonna look cool but you'll never be prepared for him hanging with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, a can of Coke in the other, and a rifle tucked under his shoulder. Around him is what looks like a remote countryside farm - and maybe in 1975, it was. Looking into it, I found that what was rumored to be his land was maybe fifteen minutes outside of downtown Austin in Clarksville. It had been redeveloped into suburban homes pretty soon after Heartworn Highways and something about the inexorable march of time really got to me in conjunction with reading "Blood Meridian." It's not that Van Zandt or Guy Clark and any of the others were natives of Texas, they existed as third or fourth generation colonizers to a land that folks like Glanton fought for but the passion and spirit they communicated feels rooted in real connection to community and land.

All the while, SXSW 2023 exists in my periphery. This year, they showed off the new Evil Dead movie "Evil Dead Rise", the third revival of this venerated cult series in the past ten years." "Evil Dead" has nothing to do with Austin or Texas but the preeminent Texas horror series has more to do with Eastern Europe these days than Texas so maybe the state’s taking auditions. Ten years ago, there were so many articles about how fresh and interesting SXSW was and how Austin was the place to be. Anymore, it seems that there are more articles* about how Austin’s vibrant culture has been destroyed and scattered to the wind in the past decade. The story of Austin’s gentrification is certainly more complex than the “SXSW killed Austin” but this storm of various Texas tales draws out an impression that real-estate developers and the Richard Florida creative class are this century's Glanton Gang. Their tactics have changed, they no longer take scalps, but the results are all the same. They come in offering their services as saviors and proceed to soak in the spoils of those that came before, forcibly remove their gracious hosts, and scorch the soil beneath their feet.  

As much as we'd like to think that this is an issue we can quarantine in the United States, it is not as Cambodian filmmaker Davy Chou deftly illustrates in "Return to Seoul."

This film follows Freddie, a Korean woman adopted by French parents, who impulsively returns to her birth country as a young adult. Freddie is a classically dispossessed protagonist but her troubles feel modern. Freddie's primary cultural identity is ex-pat. She grew up absorbing French notions about masculinity, femininity and the role of the West in the global hegemony. But she never feels fully French and seemingly discards her French parents with callous disregard when she moves to Seoul. Yet in Seoul, she doesn't feel attached to the culture or the people. She never learns to read Korean, her friends are usually other ex-pats or speak to her primarily in English or French. She stays but she always feels an invader. Eventually, she begins to work for a weapons company as their liaison to South Korea, their "Trojan Horse." Freddie's dopey French boyfriend proudly, drunkenly declares to her birth father that she is working to protect South Korea from the aggressive North Korea. The viewer never learns if this is something she expressed to her boyfriend privately or if it's her boyfriend's stupid European projection.

There's a sharkish motion to Freddie's path in life. She's always floating between new friends, new boyfriends and new locations, if she stops moving, she will die. Many of her choices seem like blind grabs for control, a subtle response to having been lifted from her homeland unaware decades prior. Her choices in life, however self-destructive they might seem, continuously result in higher pay and more prestige. The more personal attachments she severs, the more successful she becomes. Ultimately, her work - and the work of all people alienated from their communities - is that of selfish destruction. Her presence doesn’t jack the rent up, but there’s an insidious creeping modernity at her core. Where she goes, a flattening follows. In Freddie's case, she is able to justify her war profiteering because she thinks she's giving back to her homeland but because she has no connection to the land she’s occupying, the only value she can bring is a threat of violence. She doesn't set out to be an occupier or a shark but provocation is the only way she can manufacture purpose.

That self-serving wanderlust is also what animates The Kid in Blood Meridian. He doesn't hold a grudge against the Apaches from page one nor does he care two licks about Texas but his dispossession from his surroundings draws him to destruction. Despite the genre name, the outlaw men in Heartworn Highways seem to have sincere connections with their neighbors, connections forged through playing music. Even David Allan Coe, the least Texan and the most outlaw, is forging a positive connections with his audiences as he travels, winning over a crowd of convicts and rallying them against the prison guards. These are more generative moments of inspiration, moments that allow for something to grow out of it as opposed to what is seen in Blood Meridian, Return to Seoul or at the Evil Dead Rise screening.

*This excellent article, written by Wilhelmina Delco, comes from the Texas Observer, a progressive print publication. This week it was announced that they would be closing after 68 years. Thankfully, they will be able to remain open due to an incredible outpouring of support from fundraisers.

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Other Recommendations:

X-Files Corner:

• Max (S4E18 - Dir. Kim Manners): It’s back! It’s been about two months since I last watched X-Files and leaving off right before a big two-parter proved to be the right move because I was immediately sucked in. Focusing on the disappearance of a season one character, Max Fenig, this two-parter does it right. The first episode, Tempus Fugit, is moody mystery - all set-up and conspiracy. Which military guys can you trust, which can you not, that sort of thing. Episode two, Max, cranks up the action with a major, terrifying action setpiece wherein the the airlock on a plane is blown up and passengers are sucked out of the plane screaming, pleading, tugging on chair arms and grasping wildly in cold air. It’s a real achievement that network television could pull off a scenario like that. It’s grim, unforgettable stuff. Also, it was announced that Ryan Coogler might be producing a relaunch of the series? If it stops them from wheeling Duchovny and Anderson out again, sure, whatever.

Games:

• Kirby’s Dream Land 2 (1995 - HAL Laboratory): Finally, something light to cut the grimness of everything else I covered. I’m having a blast with the Nintendo Switch Online service. Dream Land 2 has been on my list to play for a while but I always put off. Having played it, I don’t know why I ever put it off for so long. It’s such an achievement for the GameBoy! Kirby games aren’t particularly complicated but Dream Land 2 is such a radical upgrade from the original that its existance on the same hardware feels like dark magic. Bigger, better graphics, more complex levels, it even adds in the iconic Ability system from Kirby’s NES outing. It really does feel like a full NES game compressed onto a GameBoy cartridge. Massively impressive stuff. And it added Rick! Look at him! He’s a giant hamster that Kirby can ride, that’s adorable!

  

A fun hypothetical to give out to people is to ask them what their “Ice Station Zebra” would be. It usually requires some explanation - that reclusive billionaire maniac Howard Hughes compulsively watched films on repeat and that his favorite was the 1968 spy thriller “Ice Station Zebra.” As with many stories of late-in-life Hughes, “allegedly” is the operative word but he is said to have watched “Ice Station Zebra” at least 150 times. The sordid stories of Hughes sitting naked, pissing in bottles and stewing in his own juices for weeks on end while he watched movies still loom large over his illustrious career as an innovator and American icon. There’s a shattered idealism to his life trajectory that is appealing, fascinating, and cautionary. In one understanding, Hughes achieves the American dream and then sits on his hoard while his mind plummets into the abyss, all the while watching movies in his home theater on the top floor of a casino hotel in a desert oasis city that he helped to build. Too often I find myself thinking, “What would I be watching if I were Howard Hughes?”

The question is sort of misleading as it’s not to be taken 100% literally. In this scenario, I have Hughes’ endless wealth, his Mormon secret service, and a presumably opioid-induced resistance to bedsores. I’m still naked in this scenario but that’s more a detail for me than for you. I also have more movies to pick from than Hughes did. My psychoses, although plenty, are thankfully not Hughes’. This opens up my choices significantly. Really, when you ask the question as I posed it, the answer could only be “Ice Station Zebra” because Hughes is such a powerful personality that his personality could and would supplant yours. With all that established, let’s continue.

Four possibilities emerge - in alphabetical order; The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Drive My Car, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, and Targets. I enjoy and think highly of all these movies but pointedly, none of them are “Robocop.” One of these days, I will explain why this is a major factor but suffice it to say that since “Robocop’s” release in 1987, all films past, present and future have had to wrestle with one major question “Why am I watching this and not “Robocop?”” Most films cannot answer back. However, I believe these films can. And while Hughes did watch a variety of excellent films; “The Sting”, “Goldfinger” and his own “The Outlaw” among them - his favorite was “Ice Station Zebra”, a film largely regarded as middling if pleasant.

My primary theory about Hughes’ obsession over “Ice Station Zebra” was that it was a paranoid Cold War thriller whose high anxiety was matched by its splendor on 70mm film. The enormity of the film took over Hughes and overwhelmed him, displacing his anxieties and paranoia with its own for 148 minutes. Shot by Daniel L. Fapp (don’t laugh), it’s a serious looker and Hughes had the bank to convert his penthouse into a screening room so he was viewing it as intended. This was, of course, after being dissatisfied with the dozens of television broadcasts of the film that he had arranged through KLAS-TV, a CBS affiliate that he bought so he could choose what played at what times. Hughes ended up buying the 70mm print and blasted up the audio so loud that employees complained about the noise disturbance. He played “Ice Station Zebra” so that it would envelop him and momentarily distract him from the Hell he had designed for himself.

First on the list is Andrew Dominik’s 2007 Western “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” At 160 minutes, it’s even longer than Ice Station Zebra. This mouthful of a film is based on the 1983 historical novel by Ron Hansen and fits many of the classic criteria for a film to obsess over. The thematic scope of the story is vast - it examines the death of one America and the creation of another, and with it the simultaneous creation of modern celebrity - a necrotizing spirit that promises immortality through death. Dominik’s movie suggests that Robert Ford’s murder of Jesse James ended an era of spectacular violence in America and by Ford’s later appearances at sideshows and dime museums reenacting the murder, recasts the violence of that era as spectacle. This understanding of American celebrity as uniquely death-driven fits in with my broader understanding of the United States as a country engineered by European insecurity and base fears of death and irrelevancy. For this confirmation bias, it fits snugly as an “Ice Station Zebra” equivalent.

Second on the list is Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 drama “Drive My Car.” I recommended this movie a few weeks back on Hyperfix and my enthusiasm for it has not diminished. In Hyperfix, I wrote ““Drive My Car” is a soothing watch that is explicitly about processing grief without allowing itself the indulgence of wallowing in it.” It’s this soothing quality that makes it an answer for the “Ice Station Zebra” question. “Drive My Car” is not placatory in the way genre films are, you’ll notice that the other picks are genre films. “Drive My Car” is instead melancholy and stubborn but graceful in how it presents these negative attributes to its audience. From the moment the title drops, the viewer understands in so few words that the challenge that lies at the heart of its main character, grieving theater director Yusuke Kafuku, is to relearn how to give up control. This voluntary abdication of absolute authority allows Kafuku to process his grief and develop new personal relationships. “Drive My Car” doesn’t couch this advice in trendy language, as if modernity has found a new cure to ailing anhedonics. It understands depression, grief, and powerlessness as troubles as old as time and the fixes aren’t band-aids and they aren’t cure-alls either. They’re methods and they only work with a measure of personal development.

So, why choose this film about personal development in my casino cocoon of self-delusion? I think it might be one of the few movies that could break me out of that holding pattern, the rare film that could give a man the power to re-enter the world a healthy, productive, and social person. I like the potential of that, it sounds nice. There’s a variable factor here where I can alter my own destiny away from Hughes’, becoming my own person and not just another millionaire recluse. Yet, I feel a substantial risk from the allure of the film’s beautiful photography. The seaside vistas of Hiroshima and the desolate winter of the Hokkaido scenes call to me like a vacation brochure while Hiroshima’s clean, sleek modernity promises a sort of ideal remove for an agoraphobe. There is a significant chance, given the presumed level of mania, that “Drive My Car” would compel me inside to a sort of Japanophilic reverie. And once I’ve fallen into that trap, I’m just watching a movie about incremental progress while not budging an inch and that’s the saddest fate of all.

Third is Robert Altman’s 1970 Western “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” The second western on this list, I’ve selected McCabe because it provides three simple comforts; firstly, it’s directed by Robert Altman. As much as I profess to like “Nashville” and for as much as I like to spread the gospel of “Dr. T and The Women”, the simple truth is that the texture of “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” is beyond the comforts of those films and even others like the velvety “California Split.” Secondly, the Leonard Cohen soundtrack - “The Stranger Song”, “Sisters of Mercy” and “Winter Lady” would be an excellent melancholy sonic complement to my distressed mental state. Lastly, Warren Beatty’s enormous fur coat (is it bear? buffalo? scottish highland cow? sound off below) looks plush, warm and beyond cozy. Even in the frigid British Columbia winters, you could be warm in this snug, stylish get up. Sitting naked on the 48th floor of a casino hotel, I’m presuming what I’ll want is the feeling of wearing something while wearing nothing at all (nothing at all….nothing at alll.)

Westerns are an excellent pick to watch in the throes of derangement because the best of them are lovingly textured. You could get lost in the costuming and set design - picturing yourself as a rootin’ tootin’ cocksure desperado, a woman of ill repute but pure of heart, or as a lonely heartbroken cowhand rendered small under the stars. “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” excels at making you feel like all three. It is a story about the promise of finding real community in the world and how the capitalist machine wields power to seize and destroy. Watching the townsfolk build up Presbyterian Church only to have its major centers of community destroyed or subjugated into despondent vice dens is an apt telling of what happens to so many places of community and culture around the world. Take a look at Austin or San Francisco, both beautiful, lively cities utterly ravaged by an ascendant class of business operators who saw community and decided they wanted in. There’s a resentment built into “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” and in my casino penthouse, I would wear that resentment like McCabe’s fur coat.

Finally, we come to Peter Bogdanovich’s 1968 thriller “Targets.” The shortest film on this list at 90 minutes, this one might drive me completely mad within a day. I could watch this film three times in the time it would take me to finish “Drive My Car” once. Cross-cutting between two plots, one about a retiring horror actor and another about a young Vietnam veteran modeled on Charles Whitman, the climax of “Targets” is one of the most distressing depictions of violence ever committed to film. It’s not in what it shows but in the reactions of the drive-in patrons scrambling to escape sniper fire - and then finally the film’s promise that someone can step in to save the day. Fifty-odd years removed from it, we know that’s not the case. Mass shootings can’t have heroes, that’s only in the movies. “Targets” is a movie, it has a hero, but the threat of violence still feels real. In 1968 Bogdanovich made what is, to this day, the best call to action for gun control and mental health awareness in a film.

I like “Targets” not only for its incisive and perpetually relevant social commentary but for how it depicts Los Angeles. With Laszlo Kovacs behind the camera, you get a naturalistic view of Los Angeles in its legendary ‘67 period. Viewers get a look at the Reseda Drive-In, the oil tankers that sit alongside the LA Freeway, and a downtown in the midst of a massive physical transformation. Meanwhile the film’s primary plot, of an old time horror actor, played by Boris Karloff, hanging up his cloak for good, gives a sense of the incipient cultural change occurring in Hollywood. Actors like Boris Karloff were stepping away or being phased out as the industry desperately sought out the next big thing. This examination of generational shifts is of unending fascination to me and is something that I think cause me a not insignificant amount of distress if I had it playing on loop while tucked away from society.

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Of these four movies, my “Ice Station Zebra” would be “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” What really draws me to it over the others is that it is the best film to hang out in. “Assassination of Jesse James” is in too self-important a tenor, its majesty is there and holds some cultural truth to it but I fear that I’d grow bored of it and turn to a book instead. “Drive My Car” is the most pleasant but is too insular, too quiet. An entire day of “Targets” viewings would be maybe the single worst thing I could possibly do to my mental health. “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” is then the Goldilocks pick. What really sells it for me is the film’s mood - by turns raucous and celebratory and then melancholic and tragic - Altman’s movie shows the viewer the joys of community and then tears it away from them. It’s an excellent story and one that would resonate over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over while I’m sequestered away from the whole of humanity atop my penthouse perch.

What I'm Listening To: 3 Feet High and Rising

When music streaming services first broke out on the scene, there were a few major outliers in streaming catalogs. The Beatles were perhaps the largest, the streaming rights were held up until December 2015. Other bands, like King Crimson, waged a long campaign against digital music - citing, among other things, the loss of audio fidelity that comes with streamed audio. Some acts swore off certain streaming sites, like Joanna Newsom, or were sworn to exclusivity deals like Prince's short partnership with Tidal. As comprehensive as these services seem at first glance, there are gaps throughout their catalogs. And no gap was more crater-like than De La Soul's seminal 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising. That all changed on March 3rd 2023 when 3 Feet High and Rising along with much of De La Soul’s discography was finally added to streaming. Another white whale, beached.

Three Feet High's bonafides have been proven time and again. A regular feature on "Best Albums of the 1980s" and "All Time" lists, inducted into the Library of Congress in 2010, and an influence on artists like DJ Shadow, 3 Feet High and Rising is one of the most essential albums of the past forty years for historical purposes as well as just being a damn good album. It was never obscure, it was basically a hit since release but its second life on the internet was restricted due to the particulars of copyright law. Their original contract specifically cited that the samples were to be used on "vinyl and cassette" meaning that the licenses for the many, many, many, many samples had to be cleared again. In the interim, fans had to buy the physical media (the horror!), share files online or listen to one of the transfers on YouTube. 

YouTube was how I first listened to Three Feet High and Rising in 2014. Checking it out after seeing it on some "Best Albums" list that has since faded into my and the internet's memory, I threw it on while staying out at my aunt and uncle's house in San Francisco. I really enjoyed it, listened to it a few more times and let it sit in my Foobar database. Then I lost that computer and all that music and forgot about it. My roommate had it on vinyl so I put that on a few times but in both of these situations I was locked to a location. I could have put in on my Sansa MP3 player (and I really should have, looking back) but I did not. So, listening to it outside while I was doing my errands was revelatory. It’s unreal how good the mixing and sampling is - the only thing that comes close is Paul’s Boutique and even then, what’s being done on 3 Feet High is more energetic, more experimental and because it’s been away for so long, fresher.

In an effort to not be the millionth white guy to talk about how 3 Feet Rising “changed everything”, I’ll leave it at that. I honestly could not tell you how impactful it was or was not outside of its being massively popular. Consider this write-up a public service announcement that you can now listen to it without pirating it.

What I'm Playing: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

My first time playing Ocarina of Time was the messy Gamecube port. My memory is slightly hazy but I either abandoned it to play Twilight Princess or my file was deleted. Either way, I did not actually sit down and play the entire game until 2009 when I bought a copy for the Nintendo 64. Later, I purchased the 3DS remake. Playing it now on Nintendo Switch's (questionable) emulator service, I am reminded again not only how great Ocarina of Time actually is, but how cozy these Nintendo 64 titles are. It's partially an overflow of nostalgia but the design of these games trend toward making memorable, habitable environments that feel lived in. I alluded to it last week in my Goldeneye 007 mention but these early days of 3D game design had developers creating expansive worlds for players to explore and this experimental phase led to quirky aberrations that made for a distinctive play experience. Ocarina of Time, as finely tuned as it is, is still filled with a pioneer spirit and holds up remarkably well. 

The Legend of Zelda is probably my favorite video game series when it comes down to the raw numbers. I’ve played most of them and I’ve liked a majority of them and Ocarina of Time ranks in my top five. Replaying it, I was worried that it might feel old and dated after Breath of the Wild. I especially worried about the lack of the jump button and the linearity. But within the hour, I was hooked all over again. Like most players, I agree that the beginning of Ocarina of Time is nothing compared to the rest of the game. Trudging through the game’s opening area, Kokiri Forest, can be a real slog especially since its mostly people telling you how to press the A button. But the game’s atmosphere is so good, the music and big blocky polygons so efficient at creating a fairy tale atmosphere that I never felt like the game was nagging at me or wasting my time. It is quite the accomplishment that Nintendo can make a game with as much onboarding as Ocarina of Time feel so natural.

The first dungeon, The Great Deku Tree, is a simple exercise in what to expect from the rest of the game. You climb up a huge tree, unlock a few doors, light some torches, kill some bugs, leap down a big pit and break a spider’s web and suddenly, you’re at the base of the tree. Keep exploring a little more and then there’s a big scary boss that goes down really, really easily. I love that the dungeon is built into nature, that it isn’t a temple or a cave. It’s a nice shake-up from what was seen in previous Zelda titles and it plants an idea that every location in Hyrule can be explored. Does it execute this idea? No, it would take nineteen years but there is a shocking amount of things you can interact with.

When players today first step out into Hyrule Field, they may be taken aback by how sparse and small it is. When I was a kid, I did think it was much larger and I did find the peahats and the skullchildren who pop up at night much, much more threatening but I still appreciate the overworld as a way to ground the action and make Ocarina of Time feel enormous. The bulk of Ocarina of Time’s action takes place in its towns and in the different regions - River, Lake, Mountain, Desert, Castle Town, and Forest. There are tons of NPCs to talk to, some of them have quests for you to complete while others simply like to talk. The quests are fun with rewards that have a tangible effect on your journey, like when you get a bottle for finding a bunch of Cuccoos (Zelda’s version of a chicken for those not in the know), but I love hearing what the people of Hyrule have to say. They are total freaks - anxious or cocky or goofy or bored, a tapestry of emotions are represented. One thing about a lot of open world games today is that you don’t get a good sense of the world inhabitants, many of them are just quest givers or background fluff but in Ocarina of Time - and in some future Zelda titles as well - even the NPCs who don’t activate quests add as much as those with actual utility. This emphasis on immersive writing, combined with the game’s technical competency and masterful dungeon designs is why Ocarina of Time endures to this day. I’d recommend the 3DS version over any of the other ones but given that it’s more widely available elsewhere, I’d really recommend you get it any which way you can.

Other Recommendations:

Movies:

• Mr. Arkadin (1955 - Orson Welles): No stranger to post-production boondoggles, even Welles could not have expect “Mr. Arkadin” to exist in so many forms. With four versions to pick from, it can be tough to know where to start. Most Welles fans have sworn off its initial release, known as “Confidential Report", with many preferring either the 1962 “Corinth” version discovered by a young Peter Bogdanovich or the 2006 Criterion edit that approximates Welles’ original vision. For this, I watched Corinth version. Like any Welles movie, it feels about fifteen years ahead of its contemporaries. Based on the Harry Lime radio dramas that Welles loved so much, it follows an American smuggler hired by the rich and mysterious Gregory Arkadin to look into his past. Welles understood that people use movies as a way to travel without paying - and since he also sought to travel without paying - he expensed the movie’s many location changes on his investors. It’s an excellent showing of post-war Europe, capturing countries whose people are unable to pursue bourgeoisie pleasures unless they’re rich, criminal or both.

• One Week (1920 - Buster Keaton & Edward F. Cline): Criterion Channel is hosting a ton of Buster Keaton shorts this month and while you can theoretically watch these just about anywhere, the Criterion Channel gives them that marketing pomp to draw the viewer's eye towards them. Also, I was looking for something short to watch before work. In many ways, One Week is the only movie that ever needed to be made. It's hysterically funny, has some genuinely alarming stunts (one with a swinging piano that made me shout), and has a comedic rhythm far and above what we see today. Nerds like to debate who was better - Keaton or Chaplin (or Lloyd if you like getting wedgied) but I think a truce can be reached that these men are more talented than any living entertainer today. The closing gag, which I won't spoil, is so good you'll howl. At 22 minutes long, your time is best spent watching this. Nothing could top it, not even half an episode of the Bill Cosby "Columbo" derivative "The Cosby Mysteries." 

Writing: 

• Swan Boy (2018 to Present - Branson Reese): Are you reading “Swan Boy”, the [mostly] daily webcomic by Branson Reese? You should be. It’s consistently funny and off-putting, great non-sequiter stuff. The last two weeks have seen two different multi-comic stories that are just goofy fun, it’s great to see the comic’s ambitions ramping up while keeping the vibe just the same. Recently received a shoutout by Steve Albini and that guy is picky! This one’s my favorite strip, reminds me of Achewood.

Music: 

• The Time of the Foxgloves (2021 - Michael Hurley): Michael Hurley is a living folk legend who writes songs that feel like they’ve been around since the beginning of time. “The Time of the Foxgloves” is about two years old now but feels like it could be seventy years old. His cover of Louvin Brothers’ duet “Alabama” is not to be missed. If you aren’t already familiar with Michael Hurley, there are few better points of entry. I’d give Wolfways a listen too, if you liked Deadwood, you might find a familiar song in there. He also does the artwork for his albums! Check out Armchair Boogie’s!

Games: 

• Mass Effect: Legendary Edition (2021 - BioWare/Electronic Arts): Bongo Shepard saved the galaxy! Or briefly and bravely fought back an incursion. Ultimately, I am extremely impressed by Mass Effect. I’d always regarded it with wary suspicion but its quests, characters and universe are all really engaging. Keeping in mind the numerous improvements made in the 2021 remake, it’s still pretty clear that the reputation of the original game was no gas. When it comes to role-playing games, I’m usually pretty bad at staying in character but the game has enough dialogue options and is good enough at faking open ended-ness that I was able to create what I felt was a consistent enough character. That character? 47 year old intergalactic supercop human supremacist who looked like Louis CK. Weirdly enough though, I never went full Renegade…and I was trying! I wanted that trophy!