Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2009)

From 1976 until 2002 Joseph Frank published the five (large) volumes of his biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky. As he explains in the preface to this (large) single-volume abridged version, he looked to Leon Edel’s similarly massive biography of Henry James (four large volumes), which was whittled down to a single book (large, of course). Frank thought that was a pretty good idea and brought in editor Mary Petrusewicz for the condensing work. It would take them seven more years, but I found the single volume particularly useful and worthwhile, given I had only limited interest in plowing through the original five. It connects a lot of dots that might be missed simply reading through Dostoevsky’s beyond-impressive work as a whole. Perhaps most crucially it covers the 10 years from 1849 to 1859, when Dostoevsky was charged and convicted of treasonous activity, imprisoned, forced to endure a mock execution, and exiled to Siberia. He was imprisoned there for four years, after which it took him another six years to make it back to Russia, Petersburg, and Moscow. Understanding what happened in that period is almost staggering to contemplate—he lost 10 years of writing in his late 20s and 30s, the best years for many writers. It is crucial to understanding his work, both before and especially after, when he produced most of his masterpieces. Frank also provides excellent literary context and analysis for all Dostoevsky’s work. My takes were not always the same as his, but he’s the expert here, not me, and his analyses were always illuminating. Even this abridged version is still quite a honker—nearly 1,000 pages in print and closer to 1,500 in the kindle pagination (however that is calculated). But this biography was essential as I made my way through Dostoevsky’s work, lucid and informative. Even with its imposing length I would recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest in the great Russian novelist. Dostoevsky wrote great tales, but in many ways his life story rivals them.

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

Turn On the Bright Lights (2002)

I remember liking this first album from NYC-based Interpol pretty well, but lately I’ve been distracted trying to ID the various influences I may or may not be hearing as they hit me: Bauhaus, Catherine Wheel, Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Simple Minds. Wikipedia has more suggestions which seem apt now that you mention it: the Chameleons, Siouxsie & the Banshees. So “derivative” feels like a reasonably fair point to make. “Pretentious” might be another. Not to be harsh about it, but when you open your album (and apparently lots of show) with a song called “Untitled,” well, really? That’s all you could think of? Other clues suggest Turn On the Bright Lights is intended as some sort of concept LP. Calling track 2 “Obstacle 1” and track 7 “Obstacle 2,” for example (two different songs as far as I can tell), suggest that larger cryptic undercurrent patterns are at work here. The sequencing pairs up two 3LA (three-letter acronym) titles, one of which is “NYC,” a genial blast of slo-mo drone. The other is “PDA”—is that really personal digital assistant? Public display of affection? Pathological demand avoidance? Hard to tell. I suspect the larger concept has something to do with the big city, home at that time to a host of semi-related acts, including the Strokes, the National, and others. Another track seems to speak to the New York fixation, the overly titled “Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down,” which breaks down into calls for “Stella!,” a certifiable New Yorkism ever since A Streetcar Named Desire. Note also that the title, Turn On the Bright Lights, is often associated with Broadway (and/or Warner Brothers classic animation)—and embedded right there in “NYC.” I’m not entirely saying all this like they’re bad things (nor that I’m proud to have cracked some code, because I’m sure I’m overthinking it). Eventually, it’s true, with closer dedicated study, the album grew on me again. It’s often dense and heavy and if you let it it can weigh you right down like the heaviest comforter on a cold three-dog night. Bliss and ecstasies all at once. I bet Interpol was a great live act on good nights. Not sure I’m venturing any further than I originally did into their complicated catalog with personnel changes and associated acts. But still, ultimately, a pleasure finally to just play loud and let it come to me.

A Prophet (2009)

Un prophete, France / Italy, 155 minutes

Director: Jacques Audiard

Writers: Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard, Abdel Raouf Dafri, Nicolas Peufaillit

Photography: Stephane Fontaine

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Juliette Welfling

Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Hichem Yacoubi, Reda Kateb, Slimane Dazi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Leïla Bekhti, Jean-Emmanuel Pagni, Frédéric Graziani, Alaa Oumouzoune

I must admit I originally took the title of this epic prison movie a little too literally. I knew it involved an Arab in a European prison and I worried it was about some bearded chin-stroking holy man enlightening other inmates (or failing to), heading down some solemn religious line. The running time was the final detail that put me off it. But it turns out A Prophet is one of those long movies I’m happy to see, immersive, intense and kinetic, sending us to places where time does not exist. The camera is restless, roving, often handheld in these tight claustrophobic prison spaces. Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena serves up a performance that is masterful and unforgettable, inhabiting a majority of these scenes and virtually carrying the picture by himself, though he is amply supported, notably by Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciano, the Corsican center of power in the suffocating French prison setting.

A Prophet also counts as both a coming-of-age and an immigrant picture, as the Muslim El Djebena is 19 when he is convicted of unspecified crimes and sentenced to six years in an adult prison, after spending what sounds like much of his adolescence in juvenile facilities. El Djebena, arriving at prison, has obviously been beaten recently. One wound on his face is recent and ultimately leaves a scar. He is self-possessed and wary, stalking through his days as a loner. Prison life is hard. Early on he is a victim when he is pushed around for his shoes, which are taken off his feet. When the prisoner Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi) attempts to pick him up, offering hash for oral sex, the outline of El Djebena’s new life starts to come into focus.

“The Specialist’s Hat” (1998)

Kelly Link won a World Fantasy Award for this story. It’s a little too whimsical for me but not bad. The main characters are Claire and Samantha, 10-year-old identical twins who play a verbal game called Dead. “When you’re Dead ... you don’t have to brush your teeth.” “When you’re Dead ... you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.” So on and so forth. They’re staying in a haunted house once occupied by a minor poet who their father is studying, even though he doesn’t like the poet’s work. Their mother died almost a year earlier. They compulsively measure and count things. It seems fanciful, but it paints the strange scene and setting quickly, a little bit comical and perhaps even a little bit something to envy. Staying in a ginormous haunted house to study the papers of a minor poet you don’t like has its appeals as a lifestyle. There’s also an unnamed babysitter on hand who is somehow unsettling. Specifics of the very large house follow, called Eight Chimneys because that’s what it has, with fireplaces big enough to stand in. They keep things intriguingly odd. Ten-year-old identical twins playing a game called Dead are, of course, unsettling too. The babysitter distracts with what she says and what she knows. Along the way the language can sparkle. Snatches of strange poetry, perhaps the minor poet’s work, interrupt the narrative. The story dances around the points of any haunting, teasing us with evocative details. Ominous notes attend the babysitter, “whose name neither twin quite caught.... The reason that Claire and Samantha have a babysitter is that their father met a woman in the woods.” I love how loaded and deceptively simple it all is. No one can reach the babysitter but she always shows up on time, enters the house, and goes to the room the twins are in. The babysitter tells them about “the Specialist” as if he or it is both real and unreal. The Specialist’s hat itself is a strange and unnerving object: “There are holes in the black thing and it whistles mournfully as she spins it.... ‘That doesn’t look like a hat,’ says Claire.” As it turns out, it bites. A lot going on underneath the surface of this one.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Earth, Wind & Fire, “Reasons” (1975)

[listen up!]

I was doing my much belated due diligence recently, checking up on Earth, Wind & Fire, an act I too long neglected. That’s the Way of the World is something like their fifth or sixth album but it’s where the (multiple) hits started (plus don’t forget the worthy deep cuts): “Shining Star,” a #1 hit I admit I heard enough on the radio and in some telephone company ad, the glistening title song (#12) much better than I remembered, and then this beauty, never a Hot 100 hit but it did appear on the Adult R&B chart. I was surprised—I knew “Reasons” as well as the other two, and not because it has become an unlikely staple at wedding celebrations (unlikely because if you listen to the words it’s about a one-night stand). That doesn’t explain why it seems so familiar because I don’t make it to that many weddings. The leisurely five-minute “Reasons” insinuates with fluttering horns and electric piano and Philip Bailey’s haunting, darting, lovely falsetto. But what I really love is one of those moments I’m starting to think only the best pop songs can deliver, heard in snatches on the radio (or somewhere) that stop me cold—in this case the lurching, battling rhythms that hit when the singers start going “la-la-la-la-la” around 1:15. It gets even better about a minute later when strings take the “la-la” melody line and the song sails on pure intuition, a robot out on the dancefloor reeling and careening at deliberate tempo. I can’t get enough of it. Cover versions by Miki Howard, the Manhattans, Maxi Priest (smooth reggae), Musiq Soulchild, and Nelson Rangell (lite jazz) only remind how good is the EWF original. Stick with this—and no live versions need apply either.

The Girl With the Needle (2024)

I’ve never thought of myself as too particularly squeamish—hey, I look at horror movies and true-crime documentaries all the time—but this Danish picture and period piece, shot in black & white and set shortly after World War I in Copenhagen, seems designed only to make viewers uncomfortable. Male viewers, that is, which might be the source of my troubles. The needle in the title is a knitting needle which “the girl,” a factory worker named Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) and a full-grown woman, uses to attempt to abort her pregnancy in a public bathhouse. It doesn’t work, and later we get a harrowing birth scene. Still later, we get some breast-feeding scenes that range close to perverse. They were all hard for me to watch. At the bathhouse another woman there, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), comes to Karoline’s aid. She tells her that, for a fee, she will take Karoline’s baby after it is born and find it a good home. Sonne is good as the hapless Karoline, but Dyrholm is reasonably the star of this show, or maybe I was just remembering her riveting, convincing performance as the singer Nico in the 2017 picture Nico, 1988 (make it a double feature if you must look at this one). I thought The Girl With the Needle tries too hard to merely shock. Well over halfway through this picture, I still had no idea where it was going, and that was not in a good way. The last words in the picture provide a vital clue: “Inspired by true events.” Any time I see that in a movie—more often placed at the opening—I know how to set my expectations. A lot of it will be unbelievable and, just so, most of The Girl With the Needle is hard to believe. There are good scenes here—notably the confrontation between Karoline and the mother (Benedikte Hansen) of her lover and would-be spouse Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup). This matriarch brings in a doctor to verify Karoline’s pregnancy (yes indeed, another uncomfortable scene) and then proceeds to shatter any illusions harbored by Karoline and her son. Jørgen is left weeping and unable to make eye contact with Karoline. But all the extremes about this story and this movie—I didn’t even get to Karoline’s husband, a war casualty—seem to exist purely in a context of unending miserablism. It left me cold. YMMV.

Double Star (1956)

I’m pretty sure Robert Heinlein remains a divisive figure among science fiction readers. Certainly I agree to the extent he injects his various conservative political ideas into his work. But he’s also reliably a very good storyteller, as this very short novel shows (under 150 pages). Yes, it’s on the preposterous side and has crazy ideas, but it’s so readable it’s not hard to knock off in a day. It’s set in the far future when the solar system has largely been colonized and settled. There’s still hope for Venus in 1956 and many planets are crawling with their own life forms. Martians, for example, look like trees. Our main guy and first-person narrator is an actor. The art of the theater is one place where Heinlein has a lot of strange ideas, but never mind. For complex political reasons the actor is called on to impersonate a high-level functionary who has been kidnapped, which would be no excuse for missing some ceremonies. There’s a lot here about the art and science of performance, sprinkled with “method” ideas and chin-pulling theory. Maybe an actual actor could speak better to it, but it struck me as a bunch of bloviating. Nevertheless, the story moves quickly and doesn’t leave us much time for doubting its assertions. Double Star is the first novel in the second volume of the Library of America’s American Science Fiction set of nine SF novels from the ‘50s, a big rollicking start. I don’t think I’d heard of Double Star before, but it won Heinlein his first Hugo. You can do worse in science fiction than go with award winners. Although the solar system setup is rife with science fiction gadgets and technology, this novel is mostly about politics, with a lot of complicated parliamentary procedures driving the action. Heinlein, happily, wastes little time on lectures and asides, but is obviously into the machinations of power—I thought that side of it was dullish. He is prone to some lecturing about acting here. The ideas are interesting but a little bit trite. No matter—Double Star is short, moves fast, and simply rushes past its flaws. It’s entertaining, as Heinlein often is for me, though I generally prefer his stuff before the 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land. After that one you’re on your own.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Green Border (2023)

[2025 review here]

Zielona granica, Poland / France / Czech Republic / Belgium, 152 minutes

Director: Agnieszka Holland

Writers: Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz, Agnieszka Holland

Photography: Tomasz Naumiuk

Music: Frédéric Vercheval

Editor: Pavel Hrdlicka

Cast: Jalal Altawil, Behi Djanati Atai, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Monika Frajczyk, Piotr Stramowski, Jaśmina Polak, Marta Stalmierska, Maciej Stuhr, Magdalena Popławska, Joely Mbundu, Taim Ajjan, Talia Ajjan

The green border in director and cowriter Agnieszka Holland’s blockbuster, sickening war movie, shot in black and white, is the swampy forested region on either side of the border between Belarus and Poland. A family of Syrian refugees is making their way to Sweden, seeking asylum in the EU. They travel by air to Minsk in Belarus, on the flight picking up Afghani refugee Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), an older woman who is seeking a new home in Poland (rather than wait, as she says, for the Taliban regime to resume power). Belarus is where the problems start for them. They encounter corrupt, sadistic, and/or indifferent officials in the border patrols, thieves, bad weather, and more. Poland unofficially does not allow passage for refugees. Both Poland and Belarus have “pushback” policies, which means Leila and the family are repeatedly herded across the border, back and forth, over and over, between the two countries. Making progress is all but impossible, dependent on luck more than anything.

The family is notably vulnerable. A grandfather in poor health (Mohamad Al Rashi) is the family patriarch, a traditional Muslim who trusts in Allah and rolls out the prayer mat even in the depths of the forest. His grandson Bashir (Jalal Altawil) is more savvy to the world, more embittered, carrying a cell phone that is their lifeline along with powerpacks to keep it charged. His wife Amina (Dalia Naous) and three young children are total innocents who must trust Bashir (and Allah) to get where they are going. The youngest is an infant still being breastfed. Leila has a cell phone too and seems to be the most skilled at using it. She and the oldest boy Nur (Taim Ajjan) make a connection that will turn out to be fatal.

Link Wray, “Rumble” (1958)

[listen up!]

Link Wray’s “Rumble” was a few years late to be the first rock ‘n’ roll record, but it was the first something. Shoegaze, possibly, or dream-pop? Sonic Youth might have studied it closely. It’s an obvious influence on David Lynch’s musical projects. Jimmy Page cites it as a primary influence. So does Jack White, even U2’s The Edge. “Rumble” hits like a steamroller, dense with mass. In its own way it is very ur, even (or perhaps especially) as it stalled out at #16 in 1958. It should have been #1 for weeks and rivaled “Rock Around the Clock.” But the world may not have been entirely ready for it, though its influence now runs to the horizons. Others (notably Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Les Paul) had been exploring the tonal dynamics of the electric guitar, but no one previously treated it like a hot tub where you go take a soak. The best way to listen to “Rumble” is loud, of course, with eyes closed for maximal impact. Wray is in love with his ginormous chords and so am I. Reverb all over the place. His plectrum brushes the chords so slowly and methodically you can almost hear each string. The song plays slow and logy, hypnotic and seductive. Having established a mood so immersive it has your full attention (in a song that lasts only 2:26), Wray proceeds to begin abusing his instrument, whaling away on single strings and incidentally pointing the way to thrash, potentially yet one more innovation of this tune. We have heard it everywhere since 1958, all over oldies radio and in movies like Pulp Fiction, Independence Day, Blow, the original pilot for The Sopranos, the Japanese cult classic Wild Zero, and many more. It never gets old. I’m a little amazed it didn’t turn up in one of David Lynch’s pictures.

What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? (1992)

I’m embarrassed to note it took me so long to get to this interesting music history, by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, that a 30th anniversary edition has already been out for a few years. That’s the version I’m pointing to below. It’s probably even better than this original, adding forewords by Billy Vera and Dave Marsh, whose bio here asserts he is the dean of rock criticism, an interesting choice of words. As per the question in the title, the book is a densely researched list of 50 songs that are candidates for the honor, from “Blues, Part 2” by Jazz at the Philharmonic (1944) to “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley (1956). All the ones I might have nominated are here: “That’s All Right” by Big Boy Crudup and Elvis Presley, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris & His All Stars, “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston With His Delta Cats, “Sixty Minute Man” by the Dominoes, “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Big Joe Turner, “Work With Me, Annie” by the Royals and the Midnighters, “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, and 41 more, including the correct answer (according to me) “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets. Each song is profiled in great detail, with chart positions, when and where recorded, release dates, interesting anecdotes, and more. Along the way a lot of industry currents are discussed, such as the stories of cover versions, the abuse of independent labels by the majors even as the indies marched on to further heights, and many of the interconnections between musicians, producers, and songwriters. Some of these songs I barely knew, such as “Blues, Part 2,” Arthur Smith’s “Guitar Boogie,” or Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man.” All were a pleasure to hear, even if I think some are barely rock ‘n’ roll. “Blues, Part 2,” for example, sounds much closer to me to free jazz, thanks to the wild, iconic tenor sax play by Illinois Jacquet. Maybe in some ways it prefigures the Stooges’ Fun House? It’s not on my streaming service, but I found it on youtube, posted by someone inspired by this book (likely 2nd ed.). It’s not just book and library research here. Dawson and Propes spoke to dozens of people involved with these records, including artists, producers, distributors, and many other industry figures. I was sad to reach “Heartbreak Hotel” because I cared less about answering the primary question and just wanted to keep hearing the stories of how great rock ‘n’ roll records came to be.

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