“Reflections” (1974)

Angela Carter is a dense prose stylist. This story, formally a kind of M.C. Escher exercise, gets to strange places. The first-person narrator is taking a walk in the woods—his voice feels to me more like a woman, but he is a young man. He hears the singing of a bird, then the singing of a woman. His reverie is interrupted when he trips on something, which turns out to be a seashell. “A shell so far from the sea!” It’s very big and also the pattern of whorls on it goes the wrong way, our first clue that we are inside some mirror world. The singing young woman has a gun and shoots at him. She sics her “enormous black dog” on him. She forces him at gunpoint to an ”ancient brick house” surrounded by a magnificent walled garden. Wikipedia, via ISFDB, summarizes: “A boy goes on a Through the Looking-Glass-like adventure into a bizarre, reversed world. He encounters an elderly woman who is actually a hermaphrodite, and is raped by a girl in a forest before ultimately escaping.” That’s about it all right. The girl’s name is Anna, a palindrome. Everything in this world is reversed or reversible. Perhaps the androgyne represents a kind of balance between the two worlds. Here’s a typical Carter sentence, during the rape of the narrator: “I shouted and swore but the shell grotto in which she ravished me did not reverberate and I only emitted gobs of light.” What would the reverse look like, one wonders. By this time our guy is aware he is in a mirror world. He takes Anna’s gun and shoots her. He knows where the mirror portal is and intends to escape. The androgyne, I should mention because I’m sure it means something, if not everything, seems to spend all their time knitting prodigiously. Attempting to put it all together, the story has much the feel of dreams in the retelling (and rereading by fragments). Carter is one to read almost like poetry, slowly and carefully, savoring and pondering its raw ways. It’s at least as weird as, and maybe even better than, the Lewis Carroll tale. I know that’s saying something but also I have always found the classic Carroll tales slightly oversold.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
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If Morning Ever Comes (1964)

Anne Tyler’s first novel was published when she was 22, which is impressive in itself. She had not yet discovered Baltimore—this is set in North Caroliina, where she was raised. Many of the elements we associate with Tyler are here, but not yet quite in focus. It’s about a big family of misfits and emotionally wounded. Some tend toward the isolated eccentric brooders she would later sharpen to a fine edge. Others are the natural healers and binding elements of families, dysfunctional by nature but, again, not quite as sharply drawn. In fact, many of her characters here tend toward more undifferentiated blends of these two favored Tyler types. The Hawkes family is big—six girls and one boy, Ben Joe. Ben Joe (not to be confused with banjo) is 25 and has just started law school at Columbia, but he worries about his family living in the small town of Sandhill, North Carolina. It’s November and he skips a week of school to take the train down to visit them. Various antics ensue. His older sister left her husband in Kansas and has shown up in Sandhill with her baby. Their father was a doctor who kept a mistress and died of a heart attack at her place. Their mother is bitter and depressed. Their grandmother is kooky. Tyler would get much better with kooky characters. The other five sisters have some distinguishing traits—two are twins, Jenny is on the road to becoming isolated and eccentric—but they’re more like a blob of sisters. It’s a very short novel, which is part of the problem. Tyler has a good reason for the family to be big but there’s little time to detail them all. I read this in my first flush of infatuation with Tyler (ca. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant and The Accidental Tourist) and was disappointed. I was better prepared for it this time and enjoyed it for what it is, a pretty good novel by a young writer with lots of potential and limited life experience. Tyler got better with seasoning but she was always a natural at novels, learning the craft early. If Morning Ever Comes is strictly for Tyler completists. It’s not her best by a fair shot but it’s not her worst either. Don’t ask me what her worst is. I like them all even if just a little.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Women Talking (2022)

Star-studded Women Talking has a kind of twist on the familiar “based on a true story” cliche of a lot of topical movies. It is based on a novel, Women Talking by Miriam Toews, which in turn is based on real events—or, as Toews puts it, is “an imagined response to real events.” Those real events took place in a conservative Bolivian Mennonite community and have been dubbed the “Bolivian Mennonite gas-facilitated rapes.” These rapes took place between 2005 and 2009 and involved a group of men who sprayed a sedative intended for animals into the windows of houses, later taking advantage of the passed-out women, girls, and children. Their confirmed victims numbered 151. The movie is pretty much as the title advertises. These women or their loved ones have been assaulted. Lately a man has been caught at it, which has finally explained all the incidents of women waking to clear physical evidence of an assault (including pregnancies) but no memory of it. Now they are meeting clandestinely—Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Frances McDormand, Judith Ivey, Emily Mitchell, and more—to decide what to do next. They formally vote on their three choices: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. The first is eliminated and the debate circles around the latter two. It’s mostly talking, but there are many uncomfortable flashbacks. Sarah Polley directs and cowrites (I realized later I had confused her with Sarah Paulson). It’s Polley’s fourth feature and her first in 10 years. While it is easy to make conservative religious groups like Mennonites out to be rife with such problems, blaming it on sexual repression, that’s partly because these things predictably happen over and over. Does anyone still think celibacy is a good idea for Catholic priests? Has anyone noticed that Southern Baptists are presently laboring under a major such crisis? Look it up. The strength of this movie is its focus literally on women talking—talking out the issues, the violence of men, their attachments to men, the difficulty of starting a new community, the line to draw for bringing their sons. They finally settle on under age 15—me, I’d go a little lower. The picture is somewhat plodding and talky, but that’s also the intention. I have a hard time sympathizing with people who can’t quit the religion that is actively harming them—Stockholm syndrome, anyone?—but I also believe everyone is entitled to their own beliefs. Groups like those in this movie challenge me on the latter point, but I think the picture is worth seeing for its distinctly feminist and/or even feminine approach to conflict resolution.

“Indian Camp” (1924)

This story brings us to the somewhat confusing welter of the In Our Time collection featuring Nick Adams, with its multiple versions and quasi-sense of being more than just a collection of short stories, on the order of some kind of interconnected cycle. My version (from the Finca Vigia Complete edition) is prefaced by a single paragraph labeled “Chapter 1” with a war scene. One of these vignettes shows up between every story. I’m more prone to take the stories as standalones and the vignettes as unrelated prose poetry flourishes. “Indian Camp” is very short and very good. It’s the first appearance of Nick Adams, seen here in Michigan as a kid. He is accompanying his father, a doctor, on a late-night call. The occasion is a problem childbirth for a Native American woman. The baby is coming out feet first and ultimately the doctor has to perform a caesarean using a jackknife and no anesthetic. The husband, meanwhile, in the upper bunk, has killed himself by slashing his own throat. He’s not discovered until after the birth. There’s blood everywhere. The brutality here surprised me, but what is perhaps more surprising is that little about it feels overdone. It comes close, and some might disagree. The suicide was particularly gruesome. The doctor hurries Nick out of the cabin, sorry now that he brought him. In general, the story is racist toward Native Americans, but more by way of ignorance than hate. Certainly Nick is getting a life lesson out of this—about life and death, about men and women, about whites and minorities and the realities of poverty. It’s Nick’s point of view through the story. Much of the focus is on the father and son relationship as the father provides a stream of soothing explanations about the situation, at least until the point when it becomes clear what he has to do. We learn about the jackknife in a conversational aside later. Hemingway’s self-serious tone works well here. The best Hemingway—even including some of the vignettes—bears a sense of dismay and devastation, as if captured at the moment innocence is shattered. He often seems to prize stoicism above all else in the face of calamity, but it’s apparent he’s trying to protect the side of himself that believes in the goodness of humanity and life. As must we all. At the same time, a more cynical side of him appears to believe everything is worth nothing, and thus the basic internal conflict of Hemingway. He is just starting to discover it in these Nick Adams stories from In Our Time, which can be gripping, vital, and immediate. The suicide here may be a slightly false note, reaching too far to make an impact, but it’s not hard for me to believe these events could have all happened just this way. The story is shocking but poignant and altogether done well.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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20. Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow (1967) – “Somebody to Love,” “White Rabbit”

[2010 review of “White Rabbit” here.]

In high school daze we all seemed to have Jefferson Airplane albums and among us we had close to a complete collection. I owned After Bathing at Baxter’s and Crown of Creation—also Volunteers, which I never cared much for. Someone even had Bless Its Pointed Little Head, and a few had Surrealistic Pillow, which even then seemed to be considered best by the general consensus. I admit I spent most of my life doubting that until I arrived at this project and put in some time listening systematically. I loved Creation and Baxter’s, and I still swear by them, but what they don’t have are the songs “Somebody to Love” and “White Rabbit.” They are a certain ne plus ultra of psychedelic pop chart artistry. Yes, the turn to Ravel’s Bolero in “White Rabbit” is arch but the drama is carried off well. It burns and scratches and builds like a drug trip. Grace Slick never sounded better; she wrote it and she sings the hell out of it. Both are under three minutes. “White Rabbit” is closer to two and a half. It was the only song that could have worked in the bathtub scene in Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (the book, not the movie). It’s a sensible way to die, if you have to die—at the climax of “White Rabbit.” I would even listen to arguments that everything you want to hear in psychedelic music is captured in “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love.” But in other news, Surrealistic Pillow otherwise has merely the quixotic and typical virtues and problems associated with a band with multiple songwriters with multiple agendas. Grace Slick wrote “White Rabbit.” Her former brother-in-law Darby Slick wrote “Somebody to Love” when they were both in the Great Society, a forerunner to Jefferson Airplane. Marty Balin is involved in five songs on Surrealistic Pillow, Paul Kantner in two, Jorma Kaukonen two, and Skip Spence chips in one. They’re not bad, sincere ballads mixed up with various folky strains and goofs, but the songs on Crown of Creation are better. There is also, on a 2003 reissue of Surrealistic Pillow, a very nice six-minute blues workup written by Kaukonen, “In the Morning,” which is not to be missed and would have been a good album closer on the original release.

The Terminator (1984)

UK / USA, 107 minutes

Director: James Cameron

Writers: James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd, William Wisher

Photography: Adam Greenberg

Music: Brad Fiedel, Tryanglz

Editor: Mark Goldblatt

Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn, Linda Hamilton, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen, Bill Paxton, Earl Boen, Bess Motta

It had been a long time since I’d seen a Terminator movie—and, full disclosure, I’ve only seen the first two (of six, not counting TV, video games, action figures, and other treatments)—so I wasn’t entirely sure what I would be getting into these 40 years later. As I recall, the first sequel, from 1991, was the better picture. And sure enough, this 1984 original puts an impossibly young Arnold Schwarzenegger into a thriller milieu that is at least 80% 1980s cheese. Even the projected dystopian future of 2029, a wrecked war zone with deadly purple rays and other high-tech war gadgetry going pew-pew-pew, seemed faintly rinky-dink. Meanwhile, in 1984, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and her big-hair best friend Ginger (Bess Motta) are grooving to walkmans and the relatively newfound portability of music. Can’t stop, won’t stop—which means they don’t always hear the dangers coming down. Let’s not even get into the rockin’ soundtrack by Tryanglz, whoever that is. Was 1984 the most ‘80s year of all? I know there’s a theory it was the best year all-time in pop music. Tryanglz is not evidence for it.

In spite of the many dated aspects, The Terminator remains relatively good entertainment (even if the sequel might be better). It has an intriguing science fiction / time travel premise, based on the oldest chestnut in the books, about going back in time to kill your grandfather. But that means—I couldn’t be alive—to kill him—he never died—so I was born, but— Don’t think about it too much because the paradoxes will make your brain hurt. Oh, wait, it’s a whole franchise later now, and the many zigs have profoundly zagged. The fact of the matter is that The Terminator is closer to Beverly Hills Cop and The French Connection, in terms of what it is, than to heady science fiction like Blade Runner or 2001. What it is is lots of gunplay, lots of car chases, and a light dusting of sci-fi. Action, baby. As a movie, The Terminator notably loves guns to the point of fetish. Everyone has different models of automatic weapons and shotguns, sawed-off and otherwise, with fancy laser attachments and such. Later there will be pipe bombs. Let the ordnance fly!

“The Events at Poroth Farm” (1972)

My first foray into T.E.D. Klein is this long story which Klein reworked with variations and later developed into a novel, The Ceremonies. Often classified as cosmic horror, and thus duly under influence of H.P. Lovecraft (perhaps even making a bid for place in the Cthulhu universe), it also has some of the smooth smarty-pants style of Ray Russell in his gothic mode. “The Events at Poroth Farm” is presented as an affidavit that incorporates a summer’s worth of journal entries, when our narrator repaired to the deep New Jersey countryside to study. So it also takes a classic epistolary approach of horror. Our guy is some kind of academic specializing in early gothic and horror literature. Among other things he can’t stop talking about what he is reading, and I can’t stop jotting down the titles: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe (1794), The Monk by Matthew Gregory (1796), Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (1820), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Arthur Machen’s “White People” (1904), The Lost Traveller by Ruthven Todd (1943), and many more. You should see the reading list you get just from this story. The narrator is renting an outbuilding at a remote farm owned by a couple who belong to a Mennonite sect. The couple, Sarr and Deborah Poroth, are religious but they are often surprisingly more sophisticated than might be expected. They like to drink, though they know the church frowns on it. Meanwhile, our guy is phobic about insects and especially spiders, attacking them with strong toxic chemicals. The mildew keeps climbing the exterior of his building. Giant white moths flap at his screens, obscured by ivy. The Poroth couple are in their 30s, with no children, but they love cats and have seven of them. This also seemed to me to mark them as more urban. They both also attended college. It’s an ANTI-Lovecraft story in one way because his beloved cats, particularly a specific one, are the source of all the evil that transpires. But it’s not the cat, it’s the god-like being passing through the cat and inhabiting others as well. Klein manages it pretty well, with a slow but inexorable build-up of terrible things and tension. This is so good I’m almost afraid to look at the rewrites. It also appears to be Klein’s first publication, an auspicious start. He didn’t write a lot and he generally favored long stories. I’m looking forward to reading more.

A Century of Horror 1970-1979, ed. David Drake
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“A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” (1974)

This story by Philip K. Dick is the last story in The Dark Descent. So I finished it, huzzah! Editor David G. Hartwell often reached beyond horror in the oversize anthology—sometimes to a fault, e.g., Faulkner, Turgenev—so ending on Dick is not a big surprise. He argues for science fiction horror writing: “Bodies of work from such writers as Dick and [Gene] Wolfe and [Thomas] Disch ... demand the broadening of the older definitions of horror literature, and require discarding criteria based on content in favor of the effect itself.” I think a Dick story from the ‘50s, “The Hanging Stranger,” makes an even stronger case for him as a horror writer, but there’s no reason this can’t be a “both/and” situation, at least in principle. “Tempunauts” is a time travel story that takes the Apollo moon mission as a model. A crew of three “tempunauts” has been hurled 100 years into the future in a launch attended by media frenzy. But, in fact, something went wrong and they traveled into the future only a few days. They soon learn they perished on their return from the future. These various paradoxes somehow mean they have thrown themselves and possibly the world or even universe into a closed time loop that is eternal. A successful reentry would break the loop. I’m not sure I understand how they know these things, even that they are in a loop at all. The reentry has failed and we come to learn it’s the result of sabotage by one of the tempunauts in order to (per Wikipedia) “find resolution in death and close the time-loop, freezing all of humanity, and possibly the whole universe, in endless repetition of a single week.” At one time, when I was a kid, time travel was my favorite SF idiom, but these days honestly the paradoxes can just put me on overload. I like Dick’s storytelling skills but the ambiguities here are a bit arch for science fiction, let alone horror. It seems to be an irrational act on the part of the tempunaut. He learns they die because of the reentry and that it’s because of sabotage and he even speculates a closed time loop may exist. But he has a choice not to sabotage the return and does so anyway. The problem I had was that it wasn’t entirely clear while I was reading. I thought that’s what was going on, but it seemed perverse and unmotivated. It’s a chilling enough idea, like horror should be, but it’s also at way too many removes for me. So the anthology ends on a curiosity, but there’s still another edited by Hartwell and nearly as big, Foundations of Fear. Look forward to getting into that.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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Altered Reality (2024)

In Altered Reality, the reality that is altered is only the movie’s artificial reality, a tongue-in-cheek noir melodrama thriller, with time travel and “Jack” (Lance Henriksen), who is kind of a science fiction ghost, living outside time as we understand it. For him it’s a flat circle. I think that’s how Billy Pilgrim tried to describe it too? Jack is likewise unstuck in time (not the movie’s term). Then there are the noir folks, starting with the Cook family, Oliver (Charles Agron) and Caroline (Alyona Khmara) and a young daughter who disappears tout de suite. Tragic. There’s a whole drippy sentimental thing about how the Cook family goes to a park called Spring Manor twice a year. That’s where Jack hangs out and Oliver often goes looking for him when he’s there. Jack is like an old family friend to Oliver. Oliver doesn’t understand why Jack doesn’t age. Spring Manor is where the daughter disappeared. There’s also Oliver’s business manager, Cooper Mason (Tobin Bell), and the femme fatale he picks up—or more like picks him up—Alex Parker (Krista Dane King). She is a very sexy and terrible person. I liked the gently mocking tone enough to stick around but I was honestly expecting something a lot more trippy given the title, something more like Brainstorm maybe. I kept waiting for the reality to alter, but the only things that changed were history as per certain time travel story rules, though admittedly it’s an impressive plot point. Henriksen is great as a grizzled seen-it-all eternal being—hits all the right notes. Agron is good too playing tormented good-guy Oliver with a certain gullibility. I spent part of his scenes wondering if that was actually his forehead or a prosthetic. He is a great genius, you see. The details are there to be discovered—the picture has some neat surprises. I definitely got some Alfred Hitchcock vibe circa Vertigo out of this. The music by Andrew Morgan Smith seemed to be going for something like that or even Psycho in some of the duller patches. The movie is not boring—the dull patches are like the dull patches in many noirs. They occupy space. Sometimes they add to the suspense. You sit there and watch. I cannot recommend Altered Reality whole-heartedly but it’s an interesting curiosity, somewhat reminiscent of Choose Me.

“The Stolen White Elephant” (1882)

Mark Twain sets his sights on cliches of detective fiction, even before Sherlock Holmes was around to explain everything. “The Stolen White Elephant” is obvious and probably longer than it needs to be, but I think it still works. Humor pieces are so hit and miss, among the hardest to do, that you can’t ever guarantee anything for anyone about them. Perhaps I should be less critical of the various miscues because he can also be pretty good at this. The case involves a white elephant that is a gift from Siam to Queen Victoria. The storyteller accompanied the elephant on the voyage, which for some reason requires a layover in New York. The elephant is put up in New Jersey but stolen in due order. Thus begins the investigation and the parody. First, a detailed description of the elephant is required by police investigators. It’s not enough that the elephant is white and an elephant. One of their questions, for example, is “Parents living?” A team of detectives descends on the case, all with many different theories. The side of the barn where the elephant was kept has been destroyed, but none of the detectives think that’s how the elephant was taken. Most of them, in fact, think the broken-down wall is a ruse intended to distract them. And so forth. They refuse to believe anything credible but eventually find the carcass of the beast. And yet, even still, some of them stay on the case. One tracks footprints across the North American continent into Canada. He’s still working the case as the story ends, reporting in from the road. So that’s how it goes. Twain is once again mocking literature, but this time it’s mystery fiction instead of Romantic literature, his usual hobbyhorse. He is prolix about it. It’s another era and a much slower pace. And he’s obvious, for example with the cretinous police demanding a detailed description of a white elephant. But this piece does go on a long time. Every good comic element is protracted and tortured within an inch. I’d still call it a good one. Twain’s voice carries it when nothing else does. He often stays in character well and the jokes land because it can all be so deadpan. Worth remembering for any dips into Twain you may be contemplating.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
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