“City of Glass” (1985)

The New York Trilogy
Under the Novels tab up there: For some years I have been working my way through a couple of lists of the 100 greatest English-language novels published in the 20th century. The first is the result of a 1998 survey of various literary hoity-toities by the Modern Library publishing empire. It’s somewhat predictable (Ulysses #1) but nonetheless has steered me to some great novels I might not have got to otherwise. The second is from Larry McCaffery, a literature professor now retired from San Diego University. I found his list on the internet early this century. McCaffery is more rooted in strains of the second half of the 20th century, unafraid of postmodernism and such, and he’s a little less predictable (Ulysses #2, after Pale Fire, the refreshing judgment that drew me to his list). These two lists share perhaps two dozen titles. Getting to the point, McCaffery’s list includes Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy, published in 1987, and lists the three titles separately (“City of Glass,” “Ghosts,” and “The Locked Room”) although really they are closer to novellas than novels. “City of Glass” and “The Locked Room” top out around 120 pages each and “Ghosts” is even shorter. But I am following McCaffery’s lead and treating them separately, though I think Auster may have intended the three together to be taken as a single novel. But what do I know? They were published separately originally and only have a certain playfully mordant noir wit and the New York City setting in common. Is a trilogy of mostly unconnected novellas any less valid? I’m not even sure how to answer that. I can say all three are fun and a pleasure to read, though somewhat arch with their conceits.

I actually encountered “City of Glass” first in the 1994 graphic novel treatment by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, which I picked up on the strength of illustrator Mazzucchelli’s name. Mazzucchelli also provided his impressive work to some Batman and Daredevil comics written by Frank Miller. The “City of Glass” graphic novel is worth chasing down. I like the noirish tones of the story, but it is also very busy being literary and postmodern. There’s a character here named Paul Auster, for example. The narrator is a one-time rising literary star who turned to detective fiction for money and then to detective work for some kind of spiritual solace. His name is William Wilson. This ham-handed reach for an Edgar Allan Poe reference is somewhat mitigated when the narrator, a fan of the New York Mets, reminds us it’s also the proper name of centerfielder Mookie Wilson. “City of Glass” may be a bit of a lampoon of detective fiction, but it is affectionate about it even as it ropes in further literary references to Don Quixote, the biblical Tower of Babel, and more. I put up with the grandstanding because Auster is actually a beguiling and even engrossing writer. This is good stuff. The notes of absurdity are never far and the paragraphs are often big blocks of text. But Auster’s style is easy and lucid. In 2006 Lucy Sante, author of Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, wrote an introduction for The New York Trilogy. It’s not hard to see how it would appeal to her. “City of Glass” is based in a number of crucial ways on the geography of Manhattan. I don’t know it well myself so tended to glaze over the specific landmarks given. But “City of Glass” is an intriguing start to whatever Auster is up to here and the graphic novel is equally as good as this original text. Both are worth a shot.

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy
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Morvern Callar (2002)

UK / Canada, 97 minutes

Director: Lynne Ramsay

Writers: Lynne Ramsay, Liana Dognini, Alan Warner
Photography: Alwin H. Kuchler

Music: Can, Aphex Twin, Ween, Stereolab, Lee Hazlewood

Editor: Lucia Zucchetti

Cast: Samantha Morton, Kathleen McDermott, Raife Patrick Burchell, Dan Cadan, James Wilson, El Carrette, Linda McGuire

In the strange alienated Scottish setting of this picture Morvern Callar is the name of a person, a young woman. Morvern Callar is a character study. As it starts, Morvern (Samantha Morton) has come home on Christmas Eve or maybe the night of Christmas Day to find her husband dead of suicide, with a note he left her on the computer. We have reason to believe it’s her husband because they live together and she wears a ring. He was an aspiring writer and left her a manuscript and instructions for approaching publishers. Another character at one point refers to him affectionately as “our Dostoevsky.” We see that Morvern is wearing a ring, but as the movie goes along, and she spends most of her time with her best friend, Lanna (Kathleen McDermott, who is excellent), it seems more like it must have been a casual boyfriend / girlfriend relationship, and not of long duration. But it’s never certain.

In many ways Morvern Callar is a movie about grief and how differently people can experience it. Morvern seems to be a case of extreme denial and we keep waiting for it to break and bring her back to a reality we understand, but that’s not the way this movie goes. Much of it for us is about just watching—in amazement, in disbelief, in shock—and at that mesmerizing level it is very good in the expert hands of director and cowriter Lynne Ramsay (You Were Never Really Here, We Need to Talk About Kevin), who takes her time making movies or perhaps is delayed getting funding for pictures that are powerful and easy to admire but not a lot of fun to watch. Morvern Callar reminds me of Terence Malick’s Badlands, traveling the strange psychological pathways of underclass youth, who just don’t know any better. It’s kind of sickening but you can’t take your eyes off it.

“New Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1984)

[spoilers] This story is, of course, outlandish and beggars belief—well, that’s Clive Barker for you. What I like is the bold way it takes on the Edgar Allan Poe original, itself outlandish and beggaring belief. Barker is having some fun with Poe and his ridiculous ideas. Namely, the “Ourang-Outang” villain of Poe’s story along with other elements of it. It’s one of a few places where Poe is found inventing the detective story with his Parisian investigator, C. Auguste Dupin, a plain forerunner of Sherlock Holmes, but with even more ridiculous examples of those good old breathtaking and unbelievable feats of logic and deduction. Arthur Conan Doyle would prove more skillful at it. Sometimes you almost don’t notice how silly the amazing deductions can be. As in the original Poe, mysterious and violent murders have occurred in Paris. They turn out to be the work of a cleverly disguised primate. Poe may have been proceeding from the ignorance of the times when he was writing (circa 1841), but Barker has to know better in 1984. We all loved Koko the gorilla, who may or may not have been able to communicate with sign language, but no ape is going to shave and dress up in human garb, walk with mincing steps, and go on killing sprees. Come on. Barker bristles with imaginative weird ideas and tosses them with gore. There’s gore aplenty here, as usual, be warned—in both Rue Morgue stories, for that matter. This Ourang-Outang, or whatever it is—Barker just calls it an ape—uses a razor to kill. What’s the beef? Inhibitions of civilization, or just everyday psychopathy (ape style)? Who knows? We should never forget that Barker came originally from the theater (now he paints, writes, and directs movies too). He is over-the-top theatrical for exactly that reason. He writes VERY BIG as well as long. He’s literate and knows his chosen field, or is learning it in these Books of Blood stories as he writes. If “Skins of Our Fathers” (also in Vol. 2) reminded me of H.P. Lovecraft, “New Murders” is obviously riffing on Poe. Barker is certainly aware of his salient traditions. He's having fun but also acknowledging his sources. He basically writes the same story here that Poe did, copying the master as it were. Barker tips this in many ways, including by making his main character a descendant of one of the principals in Poe’s original. This one’s just for the fun of it. For best effect, read the two “Rue Morgue” stories together.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 2 kindle)
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New Year memo

Happy new year to everyone except Donald Trump and MAGAs although it may be a happy new year for them despite anything I say. Thanks, voters! It’s hard to know what to say. The less said the better maybe, but watching will be more critical than ever. I seriously doubt grocery prices return to 2019 levels as promised, for example. Another devastating pandemic is more likely at this point. But I’m over here, keeping my little blog, cold comfort perhaps, too often feeling like embers of boomer view flaring up in a random breeze. I’m facing retirement this year so we’ll see how that goes. I’m not planning much different for the blog in 2025. I liked doing a couple of albums a month last year so much I’m going to try to keep it up, albeit with no countdown involved. That’s on Saturdays. Sundays are books and (increasingly, it seems) stories. Last Sundays I’m surveying the short fiction published in book form by J.D. Salinger, which is amazingly meager, only nine stories and four novellas (plus one novel, The Catcher in the Rye). I saw a 2013 documentary this year on Salinger, who died in 2010. The doc and people in a position to know (one would think) were then promising a handful or so of books of posthumous material, including a memoir of his unusually harrowing World War II experience, more Glass family stories, and other tantalizing stuff. WHERE ARE THEY? That’s my only question. Mondays are for recent movies, Thursdays for horror stories, and Fridays for classic movies of various repute. Critics like the darnedest things and so does the mass audience. Last, for your list-consuming pleasure, my list of Beatles albums ranked. YMMV—even your sense of what is and is not a Beatles album. Stay safe out there, folks.

Beatles albums ranked
UK editions, except as noted. The Past Masters collections, released in 1988, gather material not released on Beatles albums.

1. Rubber Soul (US, 1965)
2. Help! (1965)
3. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
4. Abbey Road (1969)
5. Past Masters, Vol. 2 (1965-1970)
6. Magical Mystery Tour (US, 1967)
7. Revolver (1966)
8. Past Masters, Vol. 1 (1962-1965)
9. Beatles for Sale (1964)
10. Please Please Me (1963)
11. With the Beatles (1963)
12. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
13. The Beatles (“White Album,” 1968)
14. Let It Be (1970)
15. Yellow Submarine (1969)

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. (2023)

It’s possible that you need to know Judith Blume’s 1970 YA novel of the same name to fully appreciate this movie. I never read it but at least I remember it was a popular sensation in high school. And I have seen another picture by director and screenwriter Kelly Fremon Craig, The Edge of Seventeen from 2016, which is approximately as good. It’s 1970 here and sixth-grader Margaret Simon (Abby Ryder Fortson) is experiencing personal challenges. Her family has just moved from New York City to the suburbs of New Jersey where she has to make all new friends. She also happens to be enduring some ongoing religious issues. Her father Herb (a strangely miscast Benny Safdie) is Jewish, her mother Barbara (an excellent Rachel McAdams) was raised by blood-of-Jesus evangelicals from Ohio who disowned her when she married a Jew. In fact, Margaret has never met her grandparents on that side. As a result, Margaret’s parents have decided to leave all personal religious choices to Margaret herself. Also, her teacher has assigned her to do a study of religion for a year-long project. Margaret is definitely curious about religion, which leads to lots of conversations / prayers she has with God (as per the title). Her Christian grandparents do make an appearance, and also, maybe, something of an effort, but that piece of the story is left open-ended by movie’s end. Mostly Margaret hangs around in a clique of three other girls her age, all of them worried about starting their periods and growing their breasts (behind closed doors in their bedrooms they fly off into exercises of “We must, we must, we must increase our bust”). They worry a lot about attracting boys, starting by liking some of the worst, not knowing any better. Are You There God? is indeed a tender coming-of-age story, and heck, maybe I should go back and read the novel. I loved this movie. It’s funny and warm and often touching. It’s rated PG-13, with lots of Disneyesque family feels. I had to wince a few times, and some of the plot threads are not resolved entirely convincingly. But Are You There God? is a nice place to stop and smell the roses. Fortson is terrific as Margaret and McAdams is also great. And the picture is full of tart little life lessons for Margaret that won’t hurt any of the rest of us to relearn. The mission of this feel-good movie is to make you and your loved ones feel good. Mission accomplished.

“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936)

This story by Ernest Hemingway takes place on an African safari, which is not promising. Then it gets into Hemingway’s moralizing about courage and integrity, which is even less so. It doesn’t help, reading the story nowadays, that big game hunting has become something much more painfully perverse, especially if the game is animals in dwindling populations. But this story somehow still works with its shocking scenes and revelations. It’s a hunting party of three: a rich fool, his wife, and their guide. The guide is the obvious Hemingway hero and/or stand-in, stoic and judgmental and above it all by right of his own excellence. The rich fool, who is paying for all this, has already committed the act that brands him a coward before the story begins, earlier that day. He turned and ran from an approaching lion. The guide had to bring it down and it turned into a messy kill. Some of us might be more inclined to call turning around and running away prudent, and a lot of us think they shouldn’t even have been there in the first place, even in 1936. Take the coward thing as given, it leads to severe humiliations for the rich guy. He and his wife are not getting along. She takes the opportunity of his shame to sneak into the guide’s tent for a few hours that night. The infidelity is so blatant I’m not sure you can even call it deception. These two events may (or may not) seem unlikely if you think about them but they work in the story, casting an awful pall. The story finishes on a third terrible event, just as extreme and unlikely, as the rich guy is charged by an African buffalo the next day. There has been an incident that morning in which his cowardice was redeemed. But, apparently, it’s just some illusion, as ultimately true nature cannot forgive him, or something. Or his wife, who gets him in the head trying for the buffalo (or was she?). I don’t know. It worked for me at the same time I was moaning and groaning about all these hypermasculine rites and rules and all the immutability of it. It does get tiresome. But this story is done pretty well and worked for me in spite of all that. It’s moving in a number of ways. And I don’t mind the arrogant contempt the guide has for the rich couple, who remind me of Tom and Daisy Buchanan from The Great Gatsby. No doubt unconscious on Hemingway’s part.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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Aliens (1986)

UK / USA, 137 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Writers: James Cameron, David Giler, Walter Hill, Dan O’Bannon, Ronald Shusett

Photography: Adrian Biddle

Music: James Horner

Editor: Ray Lovejoy

Cast: Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Michael Biehn, Paul Reiser, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, William Hope, Jenette Goldstein

Now that it’s Christmas week and all time has stopped making sense, consider catching up on one or two or three of your favorite movie series. In the case of the Alien franchise, do as I say not as I do, because I haven’t even seen Alien: Romulus yet (soon!) or any of the TV treatments or Predator crossovers. The first two—Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986)—are classics that are worth multiple looks and basically after that you are on your own, except remember: Christmas week is a generous time for mediocre movies so don’t hesitate to go for three or more movies a day. On the other hand, no one will blame you if you don’t get far past this one. Aliens is rather a different movie from Alien but it’s nearly as good in its own way. Where Alien is a monster horror picture with trappings of science fiction and lots of suspense, Aliens is more science fiction action / adventure with trappings of horror and also lots of suspense. Aliens also has Sigourney Weaver and wholesome girl power all over it—even on the alien side. What’s not to like?

Now that you mention it, and speaking as someone dedicated to not liking sequels, yes, there are things not to like about Aliens: director and cowriter James Cameron, the unctuous sitcom star Paul Reiser (albeit six years before Mad About You), a generally slow start, an overly militarist mindset (albeit 15 years before 9/11), and even some noticeable cribbing from Steven Spielberg’s style. Aliens rationalizes all the shock of the Alien revelations into a systematic universe with a known sequence of so-called “xenomorph” malevolence: the face-hugger, the chest-buster, the blood that is an incredibly corrosive acid. In many ways this alien life form is the perfect terrifying monster. Except—is it my imagination or are they a little inconsistent about the whole alien-blood-is-acid thing? Sometimes it seems much less corrosive than others.

“Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952)

This may or may not be Philip K. Dick’s first published genre story—some say yes, others say it’s “Roog” (which also features an animal for those keeping score at home). “Beyond Lies the Wub” is very simple and in many ways playful, although the twist may fairly be called chilling. Certainly it works. The story opens on a scene like the biblical Noah’s ark story, with animals on Mars being led aboard a spaceship. A lot of the crew, such as the first mate, appear to be unhappy about something. They seem to disapprove of the work, or possibly have problems with the captain. One of the crew comes aboard with a “wub,” which is described as a 400-pound pig. The captain says he’d like to eat it, at which point the wub speaks up with perfect English—indeed, polished and intelligent. He says he would prefer not to be eaten. No one else really wants to eat it either, especially once they realize it is sentient, with a detectable personality. In typical Phildickian fashion, these things just happen and no one is particularly fazed. Not even Peterson, who has jurisdiction of the wub and has been carrying on a running conversation with it about cultural matters (specifically, at the moment in the story, Odysseus). We are instinctively on the side of the wub—it has been humanized, so to speak—but alas. The captain gives the orders and the wub is butchered and roasted. At the dinner table the story’s twist occurs and it surprised me, though you might guess it if you think about it enough. “Beyond Lies the Wub” is an early story for Dick but already has many of his hallmarks: the effortless reach for universal Western cultural markers like Odysseus, the whimsy and “soft,” almost magical science. Given: there are animals on Mars, including pigs, and they are sentient and intelligent (and have unique powers too). Take it or leave it. I notice on ISFDB that this story has an unusually high number of rankings, with a fairly high aggregated score of 8.22. Ten “Beyond Lies the Wub” fans can’t be wrong. The story is worth tracking down for all followers of the Phildick.

The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick Volume 1
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1. Jimi Hendrix Experience, Electric Ladyland (1968)

[2010 review here, 2011 review of “All Along the Watchtower” here, 2011 review of “Rainy Day, Dream Away” here]

Jimi Hendrix never reached full musical maturity, with scads of impressive flashes of brilliance but still showing streaks of goofy amateur playfulness, based on intuition and/or being stoned, that did not come off. It’s serve-to-taste with a lot of his posthumous material. I don’t care for swaths of it, but I love what I love very much. I was interested to learn in Wikipedia that Electric Ladyland was considered a failure by many contemporary critics. Robert Christgau was all over it, in Stereo Review, but both Melody Maker in the UK and Rolling Stone in the US found it flawed, if not exactly fatally so. I admit I had to circle this album for many years before it became as important to me as it has. It’s the second-best rock album by my lights after only Highway 61 Revisited. It is obviously well within the vinyl era, which I claim as explanation for my persistent orientation to it, interpreting it by sides. My now irrelevant view was / is that any good to great album—especially a multi-LP package—must have at least one side that is perfect or close to it. Electric Ladyland has that—side 3—but it also has a sequencing dialogue going on between the various sides that is intuitively suggestive if never quite articulate.

Side 4 presents a suite that responds to one song each from the other sides, and for good measure throws in a hit song, “All Along the Watchtower.” that is arguably the greatest Bob Dylan cover ever recorded. The 15-minute “Voodoo Chile” on side 1 is answered by the five-minute “Voodoo Child (Slight Return).” (The copy editor in me winces at spelling it like the South American country the first time and then just spelling it straight from the dictionary the second. If you’re going for dialect, have you ever heard of an apostrophe?! Chalk it up to the freewheeling.) “Rainy Day, Dream Away”—the sordid tale on side 3 of life in the Pacific Northwest—is answered by “Still Raining, Still Dreaming.” And—I know this is a stretcher—“Burning of the Midnight Lamp” on side 2 is answered by “House Burning Down.” (As an interesting and pointless aside, even a year ago most versions of Electric Ladyland on youtube omitted “House Burning Down”—algorithms, apparently, disapproving of arson.) All three of these tracks on side 4 are even better and more amazing than the tracks they respond to. Side 4, thus, is eccentric but also near perfect.

“An Exciting Christmas Eve” (1883)

This story by Arthur Conan Doyle was written when he was about 24 and does not alas have very much to do with Christmas or the Christmas spirit. I’m not sure why it is set in the season, except that might have made it more marketable in publishing circles of the time. The plot is ludicrous and, contra the title, not so exciting. But Doyle is good enough, even at young age, to make it suspenseful and it is often enjoyable in spite of its various weaknesses. The first-person narrator, Herr Doktor Otto von Spee of Berlin, is a chemist who specializes in explosives. The Franco-Prussian War of 1871-1872 is raging along. Foreign spies or undercover agents (presumably French) want information from him about bombs, so they kidnap him to get it. In a way it makes sense in 1883 for an explosives expert to be heroic like von Spee is here. That might have changed after about World War I and it does seem strange here. Nobody ever thought much of the Unabomber, for example. In the end a lot of the problems in this story may be more about the inexperience of Doyle. The kidnapping of von Spee is not handled well and in general the story assumes we are more keenly interested in bombs than we might be and that we already know what things like “guncotton” are. I suspect the explosions here would be likely to kill people. Von Spee notably survives a big one. Basically, the story describes von Spee’s expertise and bona fides, then he is kidnapped and told he must train bomb-makers with his knowledge, and then he figures out a way to escape. You really have to lean into your suspension of disbelief if this story is going to work for you, especially with this premise. But even as a young writer still coming up, Doyle has a knack for making his stories entertaining and engaging. Just don’t expect this one to work well if you’re including it in some kind of Christmas ritual. Yes, I do think Christmas is a good time for ghost stories. But this story is not really that.

Chillers for Christmas, ed. Richard Dalby (out of print)
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