"The Use of Force" (1938)

Read story by William Carlos Williams online.

William Carlos Williams is someone I know better as a poet. But he was also a doctor, a pediatrician, and wrote short stories. This very short story, the last in the collection edited by Robert Penn Warren, is about four printed pages, and it often feels terse and abrupt. It's told first-person by a doctor who has been called to examine a sick girl in her home. The story takes place during a diphtheria outbreak, which is the concern of all present, including the girl. But she refuses to cooperate. She's afraid she's seriously sick and irrationally believes if she's not diagnosed she can't be sick, or won't have to endure treatments, or something. The family is poor and they've preferred to believe the girl's story that nothing is wrong. But they know better now and have finally called the doctor. I'm not a parent, but the scene reminds me of what can happen in veterinarian offices. The patients are there for their own good but there's no way to explain that to them. At some point, the use of force may be required. It's always a tricky moment. That's why it's the title of this story. In this case the doctor needs to examine the girl's throat and she refuses to open her mouth. We all know there are ways to force a person's mouth open. It can be done but it requires effort. There's a moment in the contest—say, sticking with what I know, getting a cat actually out of the box in the vet's office—when you realize you are violently imposing your own will on another with brute advantage, and it's momentarily a little sickening. This story is about that moment exactly. Any faults of the parents, any innate goodness of the physician—even the fact that the girl turns out indeed to have diphtheria—do little to eliminate the unpleasantness of the violence we witness. A reader on the Goodreads site (Jenna) captures the essence of this story very well: "Upon first reading this, the doctor seems like he's trying to diagnose a stubborn child with Diphtheria. The second time reading this it seems comparable to a rape. Seriously." This story is as strangely powerful as any of Williams's poetry. Remarkable.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Isle of Dogs (2018)

Director Wes Anderson offers up a strange dystopian Japanese future for his latest, which is also his second stop-motion animation picture after 2009's Fantastic Mr. Fox. Doing the cartoon thing seems to bring something out of Anderson that I like in spite of my general misgivings about him. As usual these days—Anderson looking more and more like a candidate to replace Woody Allen and keep some casting director in steady work—the roster alone is a fireworks display of star talent. And remember, we're only talking about voice talent here: Bob Balaban, Bryan Cranston, Greta Gerwig, Jeff Goldblum, Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Keitel, Frances McDormand, Bill Murray, Edward Norton, Yoko Ono, Liev Schreiber, and many more famous names. To tell the truth, I didn't always recognize their voices and actually I prefer it that way in animated pictures (happier, for example, to be unaware that Chief was Cranston). But you still have to be impressed with all that talent in one place. Someone somewhere pointed out that Isle of Dogs is phonetically equivalent to saying "I love dogs," which twists my brain a little but it's helpful to know because the realities in this movie are harsh as well as ironically whimsical. This is one case where "a dog's life" looks as sad and hard as it's supposed to. In fact, in the future of this movie, the entire species has been exiled from Japanese society to a place called Trash Island, which is where the garbage goes from the Japanese archipelago (the map views didn't look like the Japan we know so I presume they're filling the ocean with garbage and building on it or something like that). Trash Island looks a lot like Wall-E. There I said it. Are there problems in this movie? Yes, there are problems in this movie. The cultural appropriation of Japan and Japanese culture is bold and not politically correct but for those reasons it is also annoying and can seem a little thick-headed. But I love dogs. Who doesn't love dogs? And these dogs are quite adorable—Chief, Spots (Schreiber), Rex (Norton), King (Balaban), Boss (Murray), and Duke (Goldblum) are making lives the best they can in the trash. There's a really great chemistry between them, a kind of free-flowing Tarantino-like camaraderie reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs, where they talk things over with ease, crack wise, and carry on. The plot is unnecessarily byzantine and Anderson has some strange ways of moving the story along, such as Japanese without subtitles. But it all sort of fits, I think. And it's funny—I was the only one in the theater the day I saw it and I still laughed. I'm no authority, because I generally don't like Anderson movies that much, but I liked Isle of Dogs and look forward to seeing it again someday down the line.

Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850)

So far, among the slave narratives I've read, Sojourner Truth may be second only to Frederick Douglass as a significant historical figure. But her narrative is very different from Douglass's and the others. Most of them are first-person straightforward (more or less) recountings of life events. This has no other name connected to it than Truth's, no "with" or "as told to" or anything to indicate who is writing. A cryptic headnote indicates she never saw a proof of the manuscript before it was published. There are many obvious omissions. It's the first slave narrative I've read by a woman and I suspect certain delicacies are the reason for some of the gaps. Besides involving a woman, this one is also different because she was a slave in the North, owned in New York before that state changed its laws in the 1820s. At first I thought the focus was again going to be on the tragedy of families torn apart. After the New York laws change, Truth sues her former master for custody of her son, a landmark case. She also became an abolitionist and Christian preacher, taking her wonderfully evocative name in her 40s (she lived most of her life as Isabella "Bell" Baumfree). As the 19th century went along, more and more of these narratives served a kind of propaganda purpose. It's perhaps more obvious here because it's handled so clumsily. Then her story is followed by a densely worded 15-page appendix—with a byline, Theodore D. Wald—that thunders about the evils of slavery, helpfully elucidating some points of Truth's biography, but mostly preaching loudly to the already convinced. Or that's my sense of it anyway. By 1850, when this was published, polarization around the issue was well calcified, and mostly people only talked futilely past each other. I remember when this kind of entrenched division was harder to understand, but we are more and more living it again. In many cases in many ways it seems fair to call the situation a Cold Civil War. Therefore, the appendix has some reflexive interest in seeing the arguments against slavery made when there were still arguments being made for it. If we've truly moved past that, I guess we've seen some progress.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

Revival (2015)

Disclaimer: These days I subscribe to a streaming service and often miss out on formerly one of my favorite things about albums, the cover art. I wanted to write about recovering child star Selena Gomez for reasons not related to the cover, I promise you—or at least not directly related, because I didn't know it. The image does fit with her in-construction persona, as sexy but vulnerable, knowing but naïve, bold but tentative, child in a woman's body, all that. I did know her role in Spring Breakers, as the good Christian girl yearning to be free and terrified at the same time of her own impulses, an awkwardly fascinating turn which also fits. And then I liked her song "Same Old Love," her biggest hit yet with "Good for You" (also on Revival). I've noted divergence about "best" Selena Gomez songs (among those who even deem it worth considering)—preferences for "Bad Liar," or her collaboration with Kygo, "It Ain't Me," or others. But I liked the achy exasperation and soulful strutting of "Same Old Love." She's fed up and so committed to it she allows herself a little swear word. That led me sideways to the album, by which time I was ready for some of the testy touchy prizes, such as they are, "Sober" and the two "Me &" songs. "Sober" takes dead aim at the persona and hits the mark square. "You don't know how to love me when you're sober," she heaves up (followed immediately by a Girl Scout troop shouting "Hey!"). She goes on, "I know I should leave, I know I should, should, should / But your love's too good, your love's too good, good, good."

It's probably worth noting that Gomez only receives partial songwriting credit on some of these songs. This is an album by other songwriters, and by various production teams too. "Sober" is the only song here by Chloe Angelides, who has also written for Jason Derulo, Ciara, and others. The Norwegian production team Stargate worked on that one. The Swedish Mattman & Robin handled "Me & the Rhythm." The American Rock Mafia did "Me & My Girls." The producers also get songwriting credit, sometimes primary. Most of these songs have four or five songwriters and some more than that, so it's really a jumble figuring out who's in charge around here. Maybe that's why it feels like there's a lack of unity across the album. Selena Gomez herself does a lot to hold it together, but there's also a sense she's not really in control—the persona again, which even so often feels too constructed and hollow for comfort. My favorites veer toward electronica-driven grooves inflected by new wave pop melodies. "Me & the Rhythm" makes me jump around. "Me & My Girls" puts me in mind of Kid Creole doing a spaghetti western soundtrack for a girl power movie—specific! I never get tired of the way they sing "Hey!" on "Sober." I'm not saying it doesn't mean anything that two of the four best songs here start with the word "Me"—the child star syndrome again or something. Nor can I claim some of these experiments in style and form don't go flat on their faces. The album's opening seconds almost torpedo the whole thing. And there are other problems. The self-pity is never far and sometimes all the way up to your chin ("Camouflage," say, which still has its merits, like another swear word). At this point she sometimes seems dangerously close to the Katy Perry treatment. Yet there is still something about her I like quite a bit.

The Red Shoes (1948)

UK, 134 minutes
Directors: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger
Writers: Hans Christian Andersen, Emeric Pressburger, Keith Winter, Michael Powell
Photography: Jack Cardiff
Music: Brian Easdale
Editor: Reginald Mills
Cast: Anton Walbrook, Moira Shearer, Marius Goring, Robert Helpmann, Albert Bassermann, Leonide Massine, Ludmilla Tcherina, Esmond Knight

I love the swooning romantic pulse of The Red Shoes by the Archers (codirectors and cowriters Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger). It's magical, of course—a technicolor movie full of special effects based on a ballet based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale—but it bears a dark and keen edge as well. While the narrative frets over questions of art, love, and sacrifice, perhaps its most germane features are that it was designed by a painter, cast with professional ballet dancers, and dreamily hops about Europe, from London to Paris to Monte Carlo, like there had never just been two great wars and a major economic depression. Mostly it stays indoors within the world of theater and make-believe.

The gist of the fairy tale is that the red shoes are tools of Satan, the color being the giveaway by which he may be known. They tempt a young girl with their handsome fashionable charm and then, once she puts them on, cause her to dance without surcease until she falls down dead (no obvious relation to They Shoot Horses, Don't They?). The Japanese horror version from 2005 is more true to the Andersen story, which does not include even one artist but rather mostly just goodly humble church people. In turn, there are none of those here. Or, if there are, their house of worship is more like the backstage rehearsal space and the holy sacrament of art, Art, ART. In fact, the real star of The Red Shoes is not the young girl, but a character Andersen never conceived at all: the svengali impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who is the veritable Jesus, Buddha, and Rasputin of art.

The Fire Engine That Disappeared (1969)

The fifth Martin Beck novel in the Story of Crime series by Swedish authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö uses a fairly spectacular crime as its focus, though much of the narrative is spent developing the sideline characters supporting police investigator Beck. Lennart Kollberg, in particular, gets a lot of attention here, as well as Gunvald Larsson. Both are large men with tempers, often unlikable (especially Kollberg). But they are still good at their jobs. The case at hand involves an arson of a fourplex apartment building that results in three deaths. I thought the crime was unnecessarily busy with detail—among other things, one of the victims actually committed suicide the night of the arson, which complicates the picture. In fact, the fire is not even considered arson at first, and there's some business about authorities going to a misreported address on the night of the blaze. It all hangs together more or less by story's end but by that point also seems extraneous. Typically enough, for reasons of its fiction market or maybe the times, it can mire down some with obligatory-feeling subplots of the ongoing sexual liberation of the time and place, Sweden in the '60s. The dry straightforward style occasionally verges on the merely uninteresting. And it's not always clear what these characters are doing as they work the case. Who is this Kollberg and why does he rage so much and make himself so unpleasant? It's useful to remember, again, that this is classic police procedural storytelling written in the '60s by a poet and a journalist who are involved with one another. While it doesn't really explain the attraction to police and crime fiction in the first place, it does explain much else: the precision of the language (even in translation), the continuing reliance on irreducible facts, and the way sex, love, and social pressures complicate and drive crime—indeed most human behavior. In the larger series, with The Fire Engine That Disappeared, an increasingly critical eye is turned on police bureaucracy and politics even as '60s turmoil seems to increase exponentially with each passing year. With its episodic focus on crime and law enforcement in Stockholm, The Story of Crime will turn out to be even more the story of an era.

In case it's not at the library.

The Laughing Policeman (1968)

Jonathan Franzen wrote an introduction for this novel in 2009, declaring it his favorite in the Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. Franzen says he likes the bad weather of Stockholm in descending winter and he also enjoys detective Beck's chronic cold. Beck is also grouchier than we have seen him before. The crime at hand is again sensational, this time a mass murder. Someone got on a bus and mowed down eight passengers and the driver with a submachine gun. There are not many helpful clues, but among the dead is one of their own, detective Ake Stenstrom. No one has any idea what he was doing on that bus. There are again signs of Ed McBain's influence in the approach the police take to solving the crime, based on a theory that there was one intended victim and the rest were killed to cover that up, making it look like the work of a madman. This unlikely hunch was also the basis of McBain's Lady, Lady I Did It. Maybe such things happen in cases of mass murder, but I suspect not often. Also, the character of Stenstrom has a lot in common with the 87th Precinct detective Bert Kling—they are both young and capable, but still trying to prove themselves, and they are both also particularly good at trailing people. Of course, Stenstrom dies whereas Kling loses girlfriends consecutively, a critical difference. I read all this as sincere respect for McBain even though Sjöwall and Wahlöö are the better and more interesting writers. The theory of the camouflaged victim is not pursued by all the Swedish investigators. Many have their own pet theories they are chasing down. The crime is reminiscent of the movie Speed or a bus accident that actually happened in Seattle in the late '90s. It's sensational again, but already across the series there's a sense of deliberation about the cases: a sex murder (Roseanna), a notorious celebrity (The Man Who Went Up in Smoke), a serial killer (The Man on the Balcony), and now a mass murder. Sjöwall and Wahlöö obviously understood the necessity for the lurid in crime fiction—it's in practically every one of their books—yet they always feel fully in control of the material (unlike McBain and way too many others) and use it to make specific points about justice, society, and other large themes. Martin Beck is also being slowly developed into a fully rounded and complex character, but again this is in the service of larger themes. Beck's marriage has never been good and he has many problems with militaristic police attitudes and bureaucracy. There's a sense of things moving forward and coming together in the larger series.

In case it's not at the library.

The Man on the Balcony (1967)

As police procedurals go, I tend to be more attracted to the routine and mundane—I still think Adam-12 is one of the best. But for obvious commercial reasons, and perhaps because police famously "see everything," they're often at least as lurid as true-crime. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, the Swedish writing partners behind the Martin Beck series, were hardly immune. The first novel featured a sexualized serial killer. This third is essentially the same, except the victims are young girls around 10 years old. So even more lurid. At the same time, the cast of characters around Beck and the context of his job are starting to deepen and grow larger. And the one thing you can say about Sjöwall and Wahlöö is that their language is never sensational. It is flat nearly to a fault—flatter than Hemingway, though perhaps not Jack Webb. I suppose it could be partly the translation. But they respect rules of the genre scrupulously—it feels like the way police who are serious go about investigating and solving crimes. The Man on the Balcony was written before the Zodiac killer started up in California, though quite soon after the Boston Strangler, and it is good at painting a portrait of a large city, Stockholm in this case, seized by panic as an invisible monster roams among them. There are nods and winks to Ed McBain, such as an alliterated pair of patrolmen partners, Kristiansson and Kvant (different police roles but same narrative purpose as McBain's Monoghan and Monroe). But there's much more gravity to these Martin Beck stories. It's partly the loss of McBain's sunny optimistic American voice as opposed to the more sophisticated and dour European judgments of Sjöwall and Wahlöö. Remember, pretty much all McBain did—as McBain, Evan Hunter, and under other aliases (none of them his actual name, Salvatore Lombino)—was write popular fiction and screenplays. Per Wahlöö was a journalist and wrote other novels of his own. Maj Sjöwall was a translator and poet. They were also life partners for 13 years and self-declared Marxists. Not surprisingly, they represent an interesting wrinkle on the form. As usual, the police are presented as at least well-meaning and generally competent, but here they are also specifically functionaries of the state—the beneficent but not always competent state. The ambivalent attitude toward the police even as the work of some of them is valorized is a pretty neat trick. The Man on the Balcony is very sharply done, quick and to the point, yet thorough. It's just I could just do with a little less child rapist. They get better.

In case it's not at the library.

The Man Who Went Up in Smoke (1966)

The second Martin Beck novel takes a different tack from the first, in terms of the character of the victim. It's still based on established investigative technique, etc. But whereas the victim in Roseanna was a perhaps troubled but fundamentally innocent person, here it's someone who is a bit of a rat, a drunkard, a womanizer, and worse, as we come to find out. Alf Mattson is also a talented journalist. When he disappears on assignment in Hungary, Beck is called in to work the case unofficially. I'm not sure I understand this "unofficial" point. Hungary was rather different in 1966. The Cold War was on and it was in the Soviet sphere—maybe that explains it. At any rate, Beck goes there and pokes around a bit, accomplishing nothing. When he finally contacts the Budapest police, at first unwillingly, then the case slowly starts to crack open. Mattson had traveled to Hungary on assignment. He'd reported from there before, but this time he disappeared almost as soon as he arrived and nothing was heard from him since. This case gets a bit complicated as both the crime and investigation require a lot of subterfuge, with passport and visa manipulation, black market activities, and generally a high level of paranoia. Authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were not as good at spy stories, so this suffers a little in that regard. But it's police technique that solves it: a close analysis of descriptions of the victim's clothes compared with what was found in his abandoned traveling case and his closet at home in Stockholm. The most interesting point is the description of Budapest and Hungarian life, which of course in many ways is no different from Swedish life. I'm sure that was much of the intended point then, but it's lost a little in these post-Cold War times when it's harder to remember how real the divisions were. Only 10 years before publication of this novel Soviet tanks had rolled through Hungary asserting Soviet authority. Martin Beck's dour yet dogged personality is developed further, and we start to see a little more of the complex and interesting characters around him, such as Lennart Kollberg. As in Roseanna, Beck befriends a police investigator beyond Stockholm, who similarly just wants to use established technique to haul in the bad guys. It's a short novel too, perfect for an easy day.

In case it's not at the library.

Roseanna (1965)

According to the introduction by Henning Mankell for the 2006 reprint of the first novel in the Martin Beck police procedural series The Story of Crime, authors Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö were heavily influenced by Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels. I actually hadn't known that when I set out to read through them again, beyond a general understanding that McBain is a milestone figure in the subgenre, perhaps even second only to Jack Webb. The Martin Beck novels—there are only 10, compared to 55 87th Precinct books—are better in nearly every way, more literate, more circumspect, and more carefully written (which is obvious even in translation from Swedish). More classy, as McBain might say. Or maybe that's the European glow to an American rube such as myself, but let me point out some facts about Sjöwall and Wahlöö. They were a couple during the collaboration, which ended with Wahlöö's death in 1975, and they also wrote and published separately. Wahlöö was a journalist with a bent toward social justice. Sjöwall was a poet and translator. These elements were alchemically blended to produce a foundation for what is called "Nordic noir," a kind of procedural tradition veering decidedly toward the dark, which includes Mankell, Stieg Larsson, and a raft of other books and movies too. This first novel, Roseanna, is very basic police procedural fundamentals, as if establishing bona fides. The nude body of a dead young woman is dredged from a Swedish resort lake. She hasn't been dead long, but no one matching her description has been reported missing. Investigating police detective Martin Beck and his colleagues have almost nothing to go on. They must put together the case painstakingly, one minuscule piece at a time. They use police routines, to quote Ed McBain, "based on established investigative technique." Certain familiar elements of those routines are carefully injected: the casual brutality of crime, detectives who become personally invested in solving crimes, the ways resources are deployed to track down detail. Written in the '60s, at the dawn of the imperial age of serial killers in pop culture, it's either well-researched on the behavior of serial killers or has spectacularly good instincts. It doesn't try to do any more than it has to. It's compact and dense with a momentum all its own. Don't hesitate. Start here.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Wedding" (1982)

Story by Joy Williams not available online.

This Joy Williams story left me a little cold. It seemed too typical of a certain post-Carver mold, both in terms of its focus on vaguely underclass losers and its self-conscious minimalist aesthetics. The two characters who marry in this story, Elizabeth and Sam, are full-grown adults with previous failed relationships. She is 30 and has a 5-year-old daughter. He seems a little older, in his 40s, married three times. He's also likely an alcoholic. It feels like a marriage they are both settling for, don't exactly want, though Elizabeth campaigns for it and Sam goes along, popping the question not long after his third divorce has become final. Formally the story is on the order of a shattered narrative, with line breaks and new scenes every few paragraphs. The narrator is third-person mostly omniscient, mostly looking from Elizabeth's view. It seems to be about exercising the quixotic nature of the search for love as it existed in the early '80s. Except for certain details of ambience (such as prevailing technology) it could happen 100 years ago or 100 years from now. What seems unique might only be the itinerant nature of so many people's love lives, set free within this still relatively new liberated era of marrying for love and pleasure. In that context, in many ways the story focuses on the trauma of divorce. Both Elizabeth and Sam actively want to be married. That's the primary objective—that sense of security that comes from being cocooned with someone, fortified against the world somehow. But it seems unlikely this marriage will last either. They don't seem to know each other very well. Obviously neither means any harm. They are just two confused people, with a 5-year-old in tow. They feel hollow, without centers. I suspect that's the point. And it might have felt fresh or compelling in the early '80s, but now feels like we've been over the ground a few thousand times, like Vietnam.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

Ready Player One (2018)

There may be enough to like on the surface of Steven Spielberg's immersive foray into video and role-play gaming to make it a good movie, but mostly it felt empty to me, though it's always likable and often entertaining and even spirited. It is high science fiction concept, set in a bleak dystopic future, and majority visual attack, roaring at you with swirling, bobbing CGI that makes your head spin. It features a commodified virtual gaming reality that offers a Matrix-like escape for citizens of the post-apocalyptic world of 2045 (exact nature of apocalypse unspecified). The structure of the movie, naturally, mimics the structure of a video game. Fire up the gear, enter the game, and take a challenge to win a key which unlocks a clue to the next challenge, delivering another key, clue, and challenge. In this particular game (backstory provided), three keys will make you rich beyond your dreams. So rich that an evil corporation has thrown heavy resources and dirty tricks experts into winning, putting their evil corporate thumb on the scales to disadvantage our scrappy Scooby-Doo heroes jacking in from these future slums, which look like auto graveyards. Ready Player One riffs not just on the pell-mell boom and crash of fast-moving animated action—what do you think those challenges are about?—but it's also decked out with the frippery of a dense and constant stream of pop culture references: Rush posters, Back to the Future music, the Iron Giant itself, Freddy Krueger, Alien biology tropes, King Kong and Pong and the Batmobile and topics in the history of video gaming. That's approximately 0.1% of what you will experience in brief flashes. It had to be a licensing nightmare getting it all straightened out. And you're going to need a remote to pause some of these images and study the detail—hang on, that home product has to be almost here by now. It all feels more like a series of stunts than anything thought through very far. For example, one thing that definitely drags it down is the supersaturated nostalgia pop soundtrack, which always feels obvious no matter how much I might like the song (and I don't even like them all): "Jump" by Van Halen, "Take on Me" by a-ha, "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees, "You Make My Dreams" by Hall & Oates, "Blue Monday" by New Order, and so on. They feel shoved in mechanically, with little sense for making the music connect and work with the narrative or visuals. It may be surprising, but Spielberg has spent most of his career working with John Williams. He doesn't show the least pop music soundtracking skill here. It's almost shocking since he is otherwise such a captain of pop culture. There's a reasonably inspired sequence in which the action enters the movie The Shining—the sets and locations and characters from that movie—which gives another opportunity (with A.I. Artificial Intelligence) to witness and ponder the unusual affinity between Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick. Like the weather everywhere, if you don't like what's going on in this movie wait a few minutes. Maybe you'll like the next place it frenetically zaps to. I was hoping for a little more, probably because it's Spielberg, but the best video game movie I've seen so far is still Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.

The Golden Bowl (1904)

Henry James's last novel is one of those books I suspect many people read (or don't but say they did) for the sake of saying they have. I know I might have! It is an often overwhelming thicket of delicate nuance, most often dwelling inside its characters and their complex relations. Maggie Verver has married the Prince, a charming Italian fellow. She is the only daughter of her widowed father, the industrial baron and art collector Adam Verver (not to be confused with Adam West). Something about the family that verves together—swerves together? Lerves together? Adam and Maggie (now the Princess) are close, but she knows her marriage threatens their intimacy, and she fears he will be sad and alone now, like the father at the end of Late Spring. So she works with a woman improbably named Fanny Assingham to find him someone. That turns out to be an American woman of about the Princess's age named Charlotte Stang. By amazing coincidence, or not, Charlotte has a history with the Prince, which is rekindled after Charlotte's marriage to Adam. It's quite a predicament when the Princess figures out what is going on. But stop for a second to consider the situation in terms of James's familiar themes. Here, starkly, are European elites preying on American naifs. But it's not quite so simple. The Ververs are not that naif. They hold the cards of wealth and know it, and the Prince knows it too, and they know he does. Within these interior machinations, it's often a matter of what each one thinks or believes, which of course James keeps ambiguous (now a valued corporate trait). There's also the matter of the cloudy areas of who knows what and when do they know it. But it's all so cunningly conceived for balance you almost feel like you could put The Golden Bowl on top of a garden stake and it would just sit there spinning. If the Prince and Charlotte behave licentiously—and they do, think about it—I'm not sure the Ververs end up that much ahead of them morally. No one is talking about incest, only a kind of American clannishness that is not hard to recognize. For all the difficulty of James's language, and it often requires patience, it seems in the service of something subtle but real. The best scenes are when combinations of the four interact. The title conceit, a real object in a pawnshop, is obtuse, and as a plot device jarring, a blaring circus in the middle of all these restrained beiges and grays. But he had to call the book something. For the dedicated only, as you may have suspected.

"interlocutor" count = 6 / 518 pages (includes "interlocutress")

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)

The Soft Bulletin (1999)

If Wikipedia is to be believed, this ninth album from the Flaming Lips is their masterpiece. Dig a little deeper and you find the people making the claim are Amazon verified purchasers, but whatever. That's Wikipedia for you! The Soft Bulletin and the album that followed were also the high point of the trio's fame, for those inclined to embrace or reject on that basis. That puts them basically on the rise here. But I wish someone would make a case for this album, which always seems to come up short for me. Actually, I'll say that one song at a time listened to closely can be rewarding—that makes it workable anyway in a multi-CD shuffle type of mode. (Maybe in that regard it merits the comparisons to Pet Sounds, which I sometimes suspect have more to do with the theremin.) The moody brood of "What Is the Light?" and the soothing swamp of "The Observer." The plangent tender sadness of "The Spiderbite Song." The screaming glories of "The Gash." The aching throb of "Race for the Prize," the album opener and one of the two singles. The Peter Mokran mix of the other single, "Waitin' for a Superman," which hums with a bracing natural sweetness. Natural sweetness, in fact, is one of the band's enduring and greatest strengths. All this points to what I love most about the album that came next and my favorite by them, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, a one-of-a-kind that proceeds out of children's fantasies but remarkably with almost no cloying sentimentalities. Just the weirdness and the goodness—and so beautiful. I think my problem with the Flaming Lips might be that they're good at things which don't naturally coexist. They have a penchant for psychedelicized studio wonkery, with harsh edges that scrape at your head, which famously produced Zaireeka, a 4-CD album in which all four discs are intended to be played simultaneously. They have a reputation as a great live act—I'm sorry I never saw them in the '90s. They're not afraid of noise. And yet they can write the sweetest pop confections. In the songwriting they appear to act as a unit as all songs are credited equally to the band's three principles, Wayne Coyne, Steven Drozd, and Michael Ivins. Or maybe my problem is that drummer Drozd's playing is so intrusive, too loud and ornate and too often into the middle of everything. Obviously this is as intended—a feature not a bug. So I'll take my bad with my good. Maybe it bolsters the rock bona fides to have all that random booming and stamping going on, or something, but it's wearying. I'm sticking with Yoshimi.

Blow-Up (1966)

UK / Italy / USA, 111 minutes
Director: Michelangelo Antonioni
Writers: Michelangelo Antonioni, Julio Cortazar, Tonino Guerra, Edward Bond
Photography: Carlo Di Palma
Music: Herbie Hancock, Yardbirds, Lovin' Spoonful
Editor: Frank Clarke
Cast: David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave, John Castle, Veruschka von Lehndorff, Sarah Miles, Yardbirds

Somehow it always seems to slip my mind that Blow-Up—the front end of a great double feature with Blow Out—is a movie by director Michelangelo Antonioni. All the evidence is there in the strange way it moves and refrains from meaning, of course, notably at the ending, yet Blow-Up is so steeped in the "Swinging London" version of the day-glo '60s that it seems qualitatively set apart from his earlier monochrome exercises such as L'Avventura and L'Eclisse. In fact, Blow-Up would pair equally with any movie that takes on the '60s as we understand them now—Midnight Cowboy, for example, or Repulsion. The Yardbirds famously show up in a can't-miss cameo, even if they are only called on to ape the Who.

But the maddening elusive ambiguities, along with the wondrously strange and beautiful imagery, are there as they always are in an Antonioni picture. In Blow-Up, as one example of his meticulous aesthetic, Antonioni relied on a strict color palette that required some repainting—including of roadways— to get things to the right shades and hues. Between Blow-Up and L'Avventura, the most obvious trait in common is Antonioni's misleading approach to mystery. His ideas about mystery are more on the lines of philosophy—e.g., what is the meaning of this existence we are in?—and less about whodunits and capers. Yet both pictures focus on crimes (or at least a reasonable likelihood of crimes) which by intent are then never resolved. If that's your thing, come and get it.

"Train" (1972)

Story by Joy Williams not available online.

Like first sentences, single-word titles are a bit of an art form in their own right. In this series, we've seen a few different ways to do it: "Akhnilo" (made-up word), "Cathedral" (portentous image), "Charles" (character), "Departures" (poignant image), "Helping" (multifaceted), "Moonwalk" (historical specific), and so on. Joy Williams's choice, for the last story in the collection edited by Tobias Wolff, is pretty good, more or less in the multifaceted vein. In the first place, the events in this story take place on a train ride from D.C. to Florida. In the second place, adults are modeling behavior for children to learn from. The two main characters are 10-year-old girls, Danica and Jane. Danica has spent the summer with Jane and Jane's family while Danica's mother takes the time to sell her house and prepare for a second marriage. It's September now and the train is bearing them all home—Danica, Jane, and Jane's parents. Danica and Jane are at a stage where they are a little tired of one another, while each still recognizes the other is all she has. The summer is ending and both have trepidations about the immediate future. Meanwhile, Jane's parents are your basic awful couple, full of sarcasm and bile toward one another, which they cheerfully broadcast at will to both girls. Late in the story Danica asks Jane's father, "Do you think Jane and I will be friends forever?" He responds, "Definitely not. Jane will not have friends. Jane will have husbands, enemies, and lawyers." He then goes on, "I'm glad you enjoyed your summer, Dan, and I hope you're enjoying your childhood. When you grow up, a shadow falls. Everything's sunny and then this big goddamn wing or something passes overhead." Note the momentary lapse into Salinger in this key passage, perhaps the most important in the story. Jane's father is probably right about Jane's future, as this story is particularly good at etching the characters of the two girls. As for the bickering adult couple, their fighting seemed more comical than sad. Their putdowns are too often too witty, and so is much of their behavior—they have to be entertaining each other at least a little. When Jane's mother passes a note to Danica for Jane's father, for example, he eats it without reading it. They just don't seem that embittered. There's not the feeling of two people clawing each other apart, as seen in fractured family tales elsewhere. I'm saying that like it's a bad thing, I know. It actually feels like relief that there might be some hope for this relationship. I'm just not sure that's what was intended—which maybe dates it some.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

Violence (1992)

Richard Bausch's fifth novel has a slightly misleading title and is flawed in many small ways, yet it's also haunting and hard to put down. Charles Connally is married and his wife Carol is pregnant. It's her first child, but her second marriage, though both are in their 20s. Charles is still an undergraduate in college, a late starter, and they have problems related to anxiety about the baby and money. On a trip to Chicago to visit Charles's mother—Carol is meeting her for the first time, prompted by the pregnancy—they fight and worry. Charles's mother's apartment is not big enough so they are staying in a motel. One night, after quarreling with Carol, Charles goes out for a walk and wanders into a convenience store that becomes the scene of an out-of-control armed robbery. Four people die. Charles survives, helps save one person in the incident, and becomes a media hero. This is the only overt violence in the novel, but Carol and especially Charles also have violence lurking in their pasts. I think Bausch is attempting to portray violence as intrinsic to life in small ways and large. People not treating each other well is a kind of violence. So is a baby, in a way, intruding on the life of its parents. A lot of the details here struck me as overdetermined—Carol's background and the strange life of her parents, Carol's own history, even some of the people involved in the robbery. Yet Bausch's aging college student and struggling young marriage also feel on the mark, etched from experience, which makes the story absorbing and affecting. I don't exactly like many of these characters yet at the same time I kind of love them. I don't actually have this feeling of love often for fictional characters, so I hold Violence in a certain regard. Both times I've read it I've come away thinking it's got something, though it's distractingly easy to recognize and note the flaws—the self-involvement, the many small points that register wrong, the unnecessarily provocative title. The last time we saw Richard Bausch he was cutting down an 800-page novel to the size of a short story. There's no question of what he's able to do with sentences and paragraphs. Even when it maunders on in self-pity I think Violence remains insanely readable. I love it.

In case it's not at the library.

"Daddy Garbage" (1981)

Story by John Edgar Wideman not available online.

John Edgar Wideman's story has a few tricks up its sleeve. It's not clear who the third-person narrator is or what he's up to exactly. He starts with a street scene in hot summer with a woman buying sweet ices for her kids. Then it becomes a kind of reminiscence, which is yet aware of the present. The first trick is Daddy Garbage himself—he's a dog, dead in the story's present, who belonged to Lemuel Strayhorn, the purveyor of ices. In the reminiscence, the dog finds a box in a garbage can. It's the dead of winter. You think this story is going to be about the dog. But inside the box is the corpse of a baby. The story is mostly about what Strayhorn does, which is not that extraordinary. He finds a friend to help him, who analyzes the situation: "If you go to the police they find some reason to put you in jail. Hospital got no room for the sick let alone the dead. Undertaker, he's gon want money from somebody before he touch it. The church. Them church peoples got troubles enough of they own to cry about. And they be asking as many questions as the police." They decide to bury it in a nearby potter's field, and out of respect they decide to bury it six feet deep. With the ground frozen and only a short shovel, it's a lot of work. They spend much of the night at it, and when it's done one of them says some words over the grave. Daddy Garbage hardly figures in the story at all, but perhaps because we know he's dead now he casts a long shadow over these events somehow. I like how simple and straightforward this story seems to be, with its poignant details. I like how so much is supported by these details, such as the dog's name. Or the presumption no one will ever claim the body—that speaks volumes. The lighthearted tone enables enough distance from the events to make them almost bearable. These characters never descend into hysteria, even though we as readers might be tempted to do so because the elements of the story are so painful. In fact, their stoic acceptance of what they encounter almost makes it worse. It conveys what they know, what they live with, and what they do about it in starkest terms. The easygoing banter becomes one of the warmest aspects of the whole thing—a relief. Remarkable story.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff