"Where I'm Calling From" (1982)

Here we find Raymond Carver moving into the recovery phase of his writing (and life), acknowledging not only the realities of alcoholism but possibilities for the road back. He seems to understand the pitfalls well. This story is set in a treatment center ("drying-out facility"), with the first-person narrator there for a second round of rehab. Carver captures the best features of 12-step recovery while avoiding most of the worst. He notices without comment, for example, the coffee and sugar cookies. On the inevitable war stories he notes, "We'd all done things just as bad and crazy, so, sure, that's why we laughed." In fact, this story is mostly about their storytelling, specifically between the first-person narrator and another patient. They tell stories about broken relationships and bad mistakes. I feel sorry for these tellers more often than repulsed (which is often my reaction when 12-steppers start winding up into their stories). But they are still damaged and thus unsafe people. I appreciate the distance of only reading about them. Carver is so blunt and straightforward about these disasters that he is disarming. I don't think I'd care to meet either of these characters but their stories are absorbing and poignant. "Where I'm calling from" in this story is the treatment center—the narrator needs to talk to both his wife and his girlfriend but doesn't seem to be able to reach them. Carver was obviously fond of the story and its title, including it in Cathedral as well as in his last collection, which bears its name. Perhaps it represents his sense of both connection and distance, both at once. The treatment center is a place of connection, but many there are wounded and deeply flawed. Carver also parachutes Jack London into all this, name-checking both The Call of the Wild and "To Build a Fire," the latter given an interesting synopsis by the narrator. The story feels a bit mechanical but I think it works too. What's best is how the Carver voice carries on as usual even in a treatment center, a place that more often in fiction is overdone or underdone or done awkwardly, too piously. There is nothing like that here, and it is finally a great meditation on wreckage.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

Pontypool (2008)

Canada, 93 minutes

Director: Bruce McDonald

Writer: Tony Burgess

Photography: Miroslaw Baszak

Music: Claude Foisy

Editor: Jeremiah Munce

Cast: Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly, Rick Roberts, Hrant Alianak

In most of the zombie movies from the George Romero era (since Night of the Living Dead in 1968), foundational explanations have tended toward viruses, environmental toxins including radiation, and/or other pathogens. Pontypool—which I never think of as a zombie movie, even though I have to admit they're all over the place in the last third—runs instead with an exceedingly high-concept twist, claiming that the virus is carried by and communicable through language and meaning. It's trippy stuff, especially in our slightly more informed pandemic era, and it's not the only place this movie shows a willingness to go wide.

It's basically a one-set piece, virtually all of it taking place in the broadcasting studio of a radio station in the fictional small town of Pontypool in Ontario, Canada. Stephen McHattie is Grant Mazzy, a washed-up talk-radio shock jock who has landed in this outpost. It's Valentine's Day, when folks in the northlands are exhausted by winter and starting to show snappish cabin fever symptoms. We know it's a cold bleak exterior out there, but we never see much of it. From inside this church basement radio station, we learn that some kind of bizarre outbreak has begun in Pontypool, with incidents of random and extreme violence as yet unexplained. Mazzy and his producer Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle) and crew work with the scanty updates coming in from the wires and other reports to try to make sense of what's going on for themselves and their listeners and us.

"It's a GOOD Life" (1953)

Technically, the title of Jerome Bixby's remarkable story is "It's a Good Life," but I can't italicize blog headers so caps will have to do for this otherwise flawless tale of excruciating despair. It was published first as science fiction and is still claimed as such (and now as the "weird" as well) but really it's more accurate to call it horror. For one thing, it's often quite scary, even now, and it's also at pains to be creepy and ooky. I like the way Bixby keeps associating purple with Anthony, the monster 3-year-old with "a bright, wet, purple gaze." I like how there's no hope for anything rational with him for years, until Anthony is older and understands more. In the time of this story, he is merely an infant's id, with strange deadly powers. He is telepathic and able to change reality at will. In fact, the small Ohio town where it takes place (don't the best ones always take place in small Ohio towns?) no longer appears to be connected to planet Earth. Or perhaps Anthony destroyed planet Earth and the town is all that's left. It exists now next to "nothingness." Anthony the tot is not so much evil—though he might be evil—but more an infant struggling with his development and prone to infantile rages. But he also has these powers. He's shown doing things like playing with a rat in the basement and then growing bored and making the rat eat itself alive. He can just do things like that. He likes music but he doesn't like singing, instantly destroying anyone he hears doing so. The townsfolk have to learn by trial and error what Anthony likes and doesn't like. There's a graveyard in the corner of the cornfield where the results are buried. Anthony sends lots of things and people directly there. He's a lot like any 3-year-old, which is the profound hook to this story. When does a human start to become civilized? Age 3 is still pretty early. Anthony is already a loner, operating a kind of nature preserve, where he communes with the swamp creatures and makes life better for them. Basically Anthony has all the powers of the Old Testament God, which is also what is so terrifying about the story—its insidious familiarity. How do you make this God happy anyway? He is a jealous God, doesn't He say so Himself? But I digress. I read this story when I was a kid and it was one of a handful that got under my skin and kept me up late at night a lot and made me sweat from helplessness remembering them in the daylight. I see now why—it's just really well done, bleak, unrelenting, disturbing, shocking, ever-deepening. It was even my favorite episode when it became part of the Twilight Zone movie in the '80s—and the 1961 TV original with Billy Mumy and Cloris Leachman is not bad either. The Simpsons did a treatment of it too. But anyway, that's the situation—the dwindling population of humans is intent on placating Anthony until he comes to reason, which could be 20 years or never. He can read their minds so they have to keep their thoughts pure, which isn't easy as you can imagine. They mumble a lot. It seems to help. They keep everything upbeat. The story is desolate, strange and disorienting. Anyone acquainted with a 3-year-old is sure to get the horror of this little masterpiece right away.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents Stories for Late at Night, ed. Robert Arthur (out of print)
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

"To Speak Is a Sin" (1993)

[listen]

I put this song on a mixtape once for a woman I liked. Yes, I did. It's my favorite on the album (or more accurately competes with "Liberation" and "Dreaming of the Queen" for the honor). She said it reminded her of Al Stewart, which I hadn't noticed before but she was right. Lucky for me I count him and "Year of the Cat" and Past, Present and Future as good things. I understand this song is often interpreted as the PSBs' AIDS era statement song, and I certainly can hear that when I listen closely to the words. "I always thought it was about sad old lonely homosexuals not daring to talk to anyone attractive in a bar," Chris Lowe said in conversation for notes to the Further Listening edition of Very. Tennant: "Yes, that's pretty much it. And also, when you go into a gay bar ... it's all done by looks and gestures.... We always used to like tragic gay bars." Lowe: "Everyone's too flaming happy now. Obviously it's great that people are happy, but a whole culture has kind of disappeared." I can't speak to any of that. I have never connected to this song exactly that way. To me it's just exquisitely sad, full of nameless regrets and longing, opening at will into appallingly beautiful spaces. It can melt me. Tennant remembers it as "a very slight song" and it is actually one of their first, written in the early '80s. "To Speak Is a Sin" may be simple but it is potent. It seems to be always falling down a little, slipping away, relinquishing. There's a sense of letting go but a much keener one of loss. It feels like you have descended into a place that is at once both comforting and frightening. The burden here is sadness and it is a heavy load. I bear it but it's the one song on the album it took me longest to feel so deeply. It sneaked up on me instead of clobbering me the way "Liberation" and "Dreaming of the Queen" did. In the totality of the album, here at the proximate midpoint of the whole Very Relentless package, "To Speak Is a Sin" serves as a bittersweet respite, a slowing down, a meditation. It details the textures of Very in another way, this swirling dreamboat parade float moving down the line. The way Al Stewart did it too, though perhaps never quite with all this lush depth.

Life (2010)

Keith Richards's memoir is approximately what you expect—entertaining, full of itself, and about gossipy enough. He explores his relationship with Mick Jagger in some depth at various points but never comes up with much that's satisfying (we still can't get no). He addresses all kinds of areas where we appreciate learning more, or anything, such as the roles of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, Andrew Loog Oldham, or the Beatles, verifying or debunking old rumors. Oldham did force Jagger and Richards to start writing songs. I don't know what's more amazing—that they turned out to be so good at it, or that it was never their idea and someone had to make them do it. Richards makes it clear he doesn't buy the idea that the Rolling Stones were "really" Brian Jones's band. It's convincing to the extent that the catalog of originals by itself makes a case for the Stones being what they appear to be—Mick's and Keith's band. Richards also goes into his legendary drug use, which is more generally the "OK boomer" portion of the book. I ended up being more interested in him as a craftsman and artist. He calls "Jumping Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" the best of the Stones, which I agree with, noting they have an amazing amount of good material in different eras. As with most memoirs and bios we're pretty much there for the middle—the beginning (grade school) and end (post-1980, off all highs) tend to drag. The drug tales and all the exotic travel and homes grow tiresome too—maybe Robin Leach narrates these parts of the audio book? I appreciated learning that a legendary change of blood to escape addiction and/or drug tests was only a legend after all. Never happened. I did wonder—the rich, after all, are different from you and me. Which reminds me, another reason I like Richards is he's one of the minority of Brits who declined a knighthood when offered, unlike Sir Mick and Sir Rod and a good many other Sir rebel rockers. He shares that choice with David Bowie, who Richards otherwise makes fun of and reminds me why I have a hard time liking him. Richards is a strange mix of working-class and rich-most-of-his-life, with his deepest commitment to rock 'n' roll and the blues as a sound that is made on a guitar. I could do without the outlaw drug stories, but I loved his recipe for bangers and mash. He's just that kind of guy.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Breaking the Waves (1996)

Denmark / Sweden / France / Netherlands / Norway / Iceland / Spain / UK, 159 minutes

Director: Lars von Trier

Writers: Lars von Trier, Peter Asmussen, David Pirie

Photography: Robby Muller

Music: Lars von Trier K-tel Collection

Editor: Anders Refn

Cast: Emily Watson, Stellan Skarsgard, Katrin Cartlidge, Adrian Rawlins, Sandra Voe, Jean-Marc Barr, Jonathan Hackett, Udo Kier

Breaking the Waves is laid out like a big fat 19th-century novel with parts and sections and chapters. It's set in the early 1970s, proclaimed both by the heavy sideburns on many of the men and by the soundtrack with Jethro Tull, Mott the Hoople, Procol Harum, Roxy Music, Rod Stewart, T. Rex, and others. It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and Emily Watson even got an Oscar nomination. It's director Lars von Trier's fourth feature-length movie, and possibly the one most responsible for setting his reputation as a transgressive bad boy of cinema, though later films have tended toward ever more fixated transgressions.

The challenges to propriety here are related to religion, mental illness, and gender roles—three of von Trier's favorite themes. Emily Watson is Bess McNeill, a young woman who lives in a small cloistered religious community in Scotland. The church is harsh and Calvinist. If you die unredeemed the funeral service includes reminders that you are now burning in hell. In Calvinism, as I understand it, only God knows whether you are redeemed, so the safe assumption seems to be that you aren't and it's appropriate to point that out as you are buried. Bess may or may not be mentally ill or developmentally challenged. It's hard to tell when the church has this much control over a person's life.

"Canavan's Back Yard" (1958)

Joseph Payne Brennan's story is a fairy woods variation that works pretty well, predicated on a scary witch's curse, one Goodie Larkins from the witch-burning days of Salem, Massachusetts. This story is set in Connecticut but it's all New England, yes? First this backyard fascinates you, changing moods and altering perception almost like a psychedelic drug. It's just an ugly tangle of overgrown grass and brambles but both Canavan and the first-person narrator are caught gazing at it missing in action for lengths of time. When you go out to explore it you get lost, of course. Here it reminded me quite a bit of Algernon Blackwood's anti-Euclidean patch of woods in the story "Ancient Lights." "Canavan's Back Yard" is ludicrously tagged on ISFDB as a werewolf story because some sort of semi-visible ravening beast seems to be back there. Also, if you linger back there too long you apparently become a beast. These are nice details but not so necessary. My favorite part is the fascination. Brennan has a nice way of describing the uncanny shifts in perception. It starts with an overwhelming wave of emotional desolation, a really great detail, and then: "After I had stood looking out at it for a few minutes, I experienced the odd sensation that its perspectives were subtly altering.... I became convinced that it continued for an interminable distance and that if I entered it, I might walk for miles and miles before I came to the end." A backyard in a tract home in New Haven, Connecticut! The story is simple and straightforward. Canavan is a secondhand book dealer who emigrated from London and set up shop in a rental home on the outskirts of the city. The first-person narrator is his friend and neighbor who drops by frequently. After a time, he starts finding Canavan standing at a window looking out at the backyard and then it starts getting hard to get his attention. Gradually the focus of the story moves from the window of the house into the backyard and all the things that happen there. It's totally ridiculous but it's in a tradition and it's pulled off with a straight face, with some of the psychic and physical dislocations of The Blair Witch Project. I love that it is set in Connecticut. Careful that you don't ever get crosswise of Goodie Larkins.

When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Story not available online.

Army of the Dead (2021)

Things on which I am agnostic: Las Vegas, Elvis Presley, Zack Snyder, zombies. They are all reasonably charged with excess and putting them all together certainly leads to the reasonable expectation of an excess of excess. I don't appreciate any of them simply for existing—Elvis comes closest to that, and he doesn't have that much to do with Army of the Dead. He's more like window dressing to signify Vegas, him and that song. For that matter, Vegas is not really Vegas. It is a pile of rubble in this movie with a wall built around it to keep the zombies in. On the 4th of July in this movie the president is going to drop a nuclear bomb on it, wiping out pesky zombies once and for all. Great stores of cash still exist inside vaults within the old "Lost Wages" party town in the desert and a team of experts is dispatched in to retrieve as much of it as they can before the nuke hits. Army of the Dead is thus basically a heist or caper movie, is what I'm trying to say here, even within its context of intentional ludicrous excess. I happen to disapprove of tarting up the zombie mythos with things like fast zombies, but Army of the Dead has it all: fast zombies, slow zombies, even a zombie hierarchy, which looks a bit insectile with its obedience to and worship of a brainy queen with her various lieges. You still have to get them in the head. That seems to be the constant in zombie movies. I admit I appreciated the choreography of some of these fast zombie fights—the fast zombies seem to have their own way of fighting, always protecting the head. Army of the Dead is a long picture at two and a half hours but it gets down to business with few delays, spins out a number of interesting narrative threads, and generally does not overstay its welcome, allowing for repulsion factors. As for Snyder I've only seen 300 and Watchmen—I know, not even the Dawn of the Dead remake. Both 300 and Watchmen, I thought, were basically on the mediocre side of average all things considered. By reputation Snyder has done worse. I got a kick out of a lot of the parts of Army of the Dead, which is really all you can ask of today's tentpole popcorn movies, right? P.S. I also watched it at home.

Haunted (1994)

I keep meaning to address the subject of duds in story collections and anthologies. I'm so used to finding them in every one I read that I almost suspect it might be a matter of mood and/or just comes with the territory. This is the first collection I've read by Joyce Carol Oates, and it seemed to me almost perfect—nearly every story very good or better, and some, such as the title story, among the best I know. Two other collections of hers I've looked at since don't come close so maybe I had something like beginner's luck here. It does have weaker pieces, and at least one ("The Model") that doesn't seem like horror at all. Oates is very good at writing short stories and seems well aware of the range offered by horror. She includes an afterword specifically on horror that spells it out, as if she is explicitly committing to it. It feels like she can effortlessly access the fears all women know and live with and incorporate them naturally into her stories. They feature ghosts, monsters, haunted houses, serial killers, maybe even a vampire or werewolf or two. But behind all of it are the anxieties of being a woman in this society—taken for granted, fearful of violence, and struggling to be enough. It's not just sexual assault (a given in the worlds of these stories) but all the unfair and conflicting expectations to be strong, nurturing, submissive, and successful, along with the fears of failing to live up to any of these expectations. You can learn a tremendous amount from these stories, I suspect, about what it's like being a woman at the turn of the 21st century. Best of the best here include the title story, which deftly serves up a stew of simmering anxiety from haunted house to serial killer to irrational gnawing guilt and shame, followed by "The Doll," a munge of self-imposed you-can-do-it-all ambition with classic doll story elements done exceptionally well. I also liked seeing Oates dedicate the collection to editor-at-large Ellen Datlow, who I'm just coming to know via her vast production of anthologies over the past 30 years or so. Haunted is remarkably good, not least because the stories, each one, are so consistently so good.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" (1953)

In a way this story by Robert Aickman is dated now because it relies so much on telephone technology without features we take for granted today, such as caller ID, which alone may have destroyed hundreds of horror story premises not to mention criminal stalking activities. On the other hand Aickman's story is a nice reminder of how mysterious this connection to the outside world could feel, exploited so well in the 1948 picture Sorry, Wrong Number. And exploited so well here too. It's probably a ghost story but also reminds me in key ways of Hanns Heinz Evers's story "The Spider." Edmund St. Jude is housesitting for his girlfriend while she recuperates from TB. Already this is "strange," the term Aickman preferred for his stories. What is he doing with his place in the meanwhile? Her apartment has a telephone, which is common by 1953, but not so common that it wouldn't be unusual not to have one. Edmund here would prefer not to have one, but it's a lot of trouble to remove so he lives with it. Is it haunted or is it glitchy? First it rings a lot and won't stop until he answers it. Then the caller waits for him to say "Hello?" three times and hangs up. There's not much to be done about it. He has more strange adventures with the phone when he tries to call out. Eventually he wanders into strange conversations at the other end of the line with a woman he doesn't know. He is strangely drawn to her and soon they are declaring their love for one another. But she won't give him a number to call. He can only wait for her to call. She says he can't see her but she won't say why. It briefly enters into the early internet / late landline period when people spent hours on the phone with strangers in phone-based relationships. If this story is dated in one way, it's prescient in another. Meanwhile Edmund is so preoccupied he's letting his life go to hell. He makes a living as a translator but loses interest in his work and starts to get fired from jobs. Then he starts to get wrong-number calls for an extension 281 at a "Chromium Supergloss Corporation." He's also ignoring letters from his girlfriend now, letting them pile up. "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" (which words never occur in the story by the way) is a meditation on all the spaces a ghost might occupy in telephone technology. The woman on the phone is more or less a ghost in this story, but not exactly, much as the woman across the way in "The Spider" is a vampire, but not exactly. "Your Tiny Hand Is Frozen" is sadder but it has a cold core—maybe that's the point of the title. Looking it up, it appears to have something to do with the opera La boheme. Strange stuff indeed from early in the career of one of the best story writers of his time.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.

The Troubled Man (2009)

Most of the Kurt Wallander novels by Henning Mankell (the originals in Swedish) came out like clockwork in the '90s, but the last two straggled in at five-year intervals. The one before this is short (An Event in Autumn, technically a Linda Wallander novel), and the one before that, The Pyramid, was a collection of stories. Perhaps the last handful feel like Mankell might have been just slightly (or more) bored with the project. There's some of that here, perhaps inevitably, and there's some series tidying-up that feels mechanical. But it's a fairly big novel with a fairly big case, once again charged with international and historical issues, perhaps most notably with reverberations of the Cold War. By their size, complexity, and pace, the majority of Mankell's novels feel more like political thrillers than detective stories or police procedurals. There's really not much genre innovation to them, except using genre as scaffolding for larger political and social ideas. In that way, Mankell does an admirable wrap on the whole series with The Troubled Man. The case is mysterious enough to offer gratification in the resolution. It's hard to miss that Wallander and Mankell are saying a lot of goodbyes here. Wallander's ex-wife Mona (Linda's mother) shows up for the first time since Faceless Killers, I believe, the first novel in the series. Wallander's one-time girlfriend after the divorce, the Latvian Baiba Liepa, has a dramatic sequence too. Rydberg, who died in Faceless Killers, still haunts Wallander's thoughts as his mentor. Other threads from the series are dropped entirely, such as coworkers who seemed to have a future in it and some other storylines. Mankell's writing actually ranged widely beyond detective fiction, including plays, screenplays, and YA literature. He was certainly much more than a narrow genre writer. You always sense that, and his decisions are easy to trust. Sometimes he feels almost protective of Wallander's privacy, the main reason, given more than once, for withholding information. Other things here, some of the resolutions and problems that plague Wallander, feel mechanical. Here, for example, he is 60, still diabetic and battling his weight, but now he also has onset Alzheimer's. It scares me silly in a way, of course, but also feels like it's emerging unconsciously from Mankell's own anxieties and one-more-thing worries. Still, all around, it's a generous finish to a worthwhile series, the whole thing a classic of Nordic noir.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Falling Down (1993)

USA / France / UK, 113 minutes

Director: Joel Schumacher

Writer: Ebbe Roe Smith

Photography: Andrzej Bartkowiak

Music: James Newton Howard

Editor: Paul Hirsch

Cast: Michael Douglas, Robert Duvall, Barbara Hershey, Rachel Ticotin, Tuesday Weld, Frederic Forrest, Lois Smith, Raymond J. Barry

It was hard for me to get a bead on this movie when it was new. I didn't understand who it was speaking for or what it wanted to tell us. Now, in what we regard hopefully as our tentative springtime in America post-Trump era ("Alexa, what's a quote for optimism?"), a lot of things about it make more sense, such as all the "replacement theory" ideas embedded in the dialogue that I never recognized previously. Such a mix of evocative elements: Michael Douglas remains the original and possibly greatest yuppie boomer scum of all time (Wall Street, Fatal Attraction, plus I think The Game is a criminally overlooked exercise in this vein). Douglas has said he considers his performance in Falling Down to be his best, and his dad agreed too. Financing for Falling Down came from abroad as well as Hollywood—I don't know what that means, except it seems slightly early for globalism. Filming had to be stopped in spring 1992 when riots erupted in Los Angeles around the verdict in the first trial for police charged with assaulting Rodney King. Last but not least, director Joel Schumacher remains mostly a cipher for me, generally better early, as with The Lost Boys and Flatliners. But I like his taste for the sensational even if it often seems addled.

So here we are: Michael Douglas's Bill Foster wears a short-sleeved white shirt with a striped tie and clip. He carries a snappy little square attache case. His glasses are horn-rimmed. His haircut is crewcut. He works as an engineer in the defense industry in Southern California—his vanity license plate says "D-FENS." The movie starts on a bad traffic jam, a typical big city freeway crawl (see also the opening of Office Space), from which Foster finally walks away in frustration, wandering off into the "Los Angeles gangland" in search of change for a payphone. That's when all the trouble starts. Foster tells himself and others he is going home, meaning to the house where he used to live with his ex-wife and family. It's his daughter's birthday. Later we find out he has been living with his mother and lost his job a month earlier.

"Uncle Einar" (1947)

I'm infatuated with this story by Ray Bradbury, which puts him more squarely in the realm of horror than science fiction where I usually slot him. It was published first in a Bradbury collection called Dark Carnival and later in a more famous one called The October Country and it's part of Bradbury's "Elliott Family" series. The Elliotts are a kind of Addams family—kooky, altogether ooky oddballs with strange powers. It's gentle, of course, the way Bradbury does. Besides the Addams family, the Elliotts also feel like some precursor to the X-Men with their mutant gifts and outsider status. Most of the Elliott family has more subtle powers, with mental abilities like telepathy and telekinesis. Uncle Einar's is harder to hide from the world: he has a giant pair of green wings growing on his back and he can fly. I imagine his wings as more like dinosaur wings than bird or moth, leathery and tendoned. He can't really go among humans at all and he must do most of his flying at night when he won't be seen. He also has a kind of radar that enables him to sense objects in his way as he flies around in the dark. But a terrible accident occurs one night. Something goes wrong and he collides with a high-tension tower and takes a massive jolt of electricity that knocks him out. Fortunately he lands on a farm operated by Brunilla Wexley, a single woman who will become his wife. Bradbury plainly has a lot of feeling for Uncle Einar and imbues him with much humanity—his love of flying, his sadness at being grounded, his love for his wife and eventually their children, and finally the solution they work out so he can fly safely again. At the same time, as benign as we know Uncle Einar is, it's not hard to imagine how scary it would be to see him flying at night. That's a neat trick on Bradbury's part. It's all quite vivid. I have a clear sense of Uncle Einar and Brunilla too, and like them both. I should say it's also the only Elliott Family story I've read that I like much—in general the concept is typically too cute and wholesome by half, though some of the powers are certainly interesting. This Elliott Family story comes a bit later than the first batch and in many ways feels like Uncle Einar might have been a character who nagged at Bradbury and importuned him to tell his story. It feels like a Sherwood Anderson story too with its candid treatment of socially determined grotesques and their experience of being marginalized. In fact, a lot of Bradbury stories feel like they have sources in Anderson. This is one of the best.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
Read story online.

Tenet (2020)

Of course I had to look up reviewers and websites I read regularly when I am confused before I could even think of trying to make sense of Christopher Nolan's giant headfuck valentine to action movies, one of the larger cultural artifacts lost in the pandemic, although likely that is temporary. A 70-mm version made the rounds last summer, but I suspect we still have to wait until after next year before it might be safe enough to see movies with crowds again so it will likely be back. I went ahead and looked at it on TV. I thought of James Bond while watching it and so did Tim Brayton at Alternate Ending, Steven Rubio at Steven Rubio's Online Life, and Brian Tellerico at RogerEbert.com. Start with that. I'm not a big fan of Bond movies but it's fair to say with Tenet that "ultimately its pleasures are the pleasures of the chase followed by the fistfight, interspersed with scenes of craftily sneaking into secure locations." That's Brayton, who by the way argues even the high concept of the movie is lucid. Everyone seems to agree on the rousing action scenes, as abstracted as they are minus lucid narrative context, but the view that this movie makes sense is more a minority one—I was lost most of the time, and Rubio and Tallerico seemed nearly as befuddled as me, not to mention hordes of commenters on the internet. The concept of Tenet (please note how it reads the same backward and forward) rests on a technology that can reverse entropy (I know: yeah, right), enabling access to a timestream that moves from future to past, instead of only past to future as we all normally experience it. What that means for the movie in practical terms is that in the big action sequences with helicopters some things are moving forward and some are moving backward (most obviously, lots of un-explosions). Nailing down the conflict in this story is a problem I'm not sure Tenet ever solves. We're told we are under attack from the future, with some chatter about the time-travel grandfather paradox, but I didn't catch much explanation beyond that so I will have to leave it at that. I'm not ready yet to resort to YouTube. Between Nolan's big budget and the amazing fat soundtrack by Ludwig Goransson there's plenty to gape at and it is often somehow even thrilling. But the ongoing lack of narrative clarity combined with the long running time was wearying. Will it make more sense another time? Maybe when the pandemic is over I can go see it in full theatrical glory and then adjourn for coffee and pie and a long conversation. I resent movies that require multiple viewings as basically incompetent on their face, but there's also a few I've grown ever more fond of after second and third and more viewings (In the Mood for Love, Mulholland Dr., and Yi Yi, for example). Jury's still out on this one, and not just for me. I already know it expects us to work hard.

Dhalgren (1975)

It was good to finally get to this monster after much of a lifetime circling it. It's both maddening and seductive—deliberately obtuse yet surprisingly lucid. Full of strange surprises and effects. Rampantly sexual. I usually had a good sense of what was going on—spoiler, it's all weird. I have a natural suspicion of large novels (or even short stories) that begin midsentence, and I did bog down midway and it became harder to keep going, but mostly it's a pretty good ride. The setting is a city in the Midwest, Bellona, that has been destroyed by something never explained. Not only are there inconveniences of no radio, TV, or telephones, but also basic physics of time and visual perception don't seem to be particularly reliable. The main character cannot remember his name. Clues indicate it's likely William Dhalgren. He's known among the postapocalyptic survivors as the Kid, or Kidd, or just Kid. He wanders into the city—the only way in or out is a walk across a bridge over a river—and then has strange adventures. Among other things, he fancies himself a poet after he finds a partially filled notebook. Many passages of the novel, including much of the last section, are transcriptions from the notebook. Another theme is in the title of the second-last section, "Palimpsest" (dictionary definition: "a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain"). In the '90s the novel was used as the basis for an online real-time texting destination (or "MOO," as it was called), which fit Dhalgren's whole aesthetic well. The novel is intensely textual, with bizarre interpolations of multiple sources all the way. I'm not sure you could even do a kindle version of the last section. You might be able to do a movie, with some of the memorable images and ideas it has—a second moon, a sun that threatens to swallow the sky for one day (and one day only), a gangster rig that turns into giant holographic images of dragons and other creatures. The gang is casually called "scorpions." More than anything they remind me of '80s DIY hardcore punk-rockers even though the novel came first. Maybe Jamaican rockers. Dhalgren has an amazing amount of gay and polyamorous sex for 1975 SF but it's just woven in. It might still be ahead of its time, or have finally just arrived at it.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

Jo Jo Gunne (1972)

It's tempting to make big statements about Jo Jo Gunne and the romance of rock 'n' roll and all the things that should have been, commercially and otherwise. Lost now, like David Essex's "Rock On," residue from an era. I think I might have been the only person in high school who liked this album, and I was defensive enough about it that I liked it loudly and A LOT. But I haven't listened to it much in the years since, and even on this exercise didn't have the heart to look into the follow-up albums (Bite Down Hard '73 and Jumpin' the Gunne '74), especially once I realized only five of the nine songs on this debut still sound good, and some of them only in patches. Even the Wikipedia article is a little hard on them, with a vague tone of disapproval: "The fact that there was no breakout single failed to generate interest and sales for the band," it remonstrates of the later albums. "The group did not maintain the commercial momentum of their first release. They broke up in 1974." But Jo Jo Gunne, band and album named self-consciously for a lackluster Chuck Berry song about a monkey, can kick pretty hard when it does kick, saturated with a ridiculous bawdy lusty dated sexism that almost feels innocent now. They rose from the ashes of the heavy '60s-inflected band Spirit with a '70s sound equal parts glam in the tradition of Slade and old-fashioned CCR rock 'n' roll gumbo, with a sense for what might be coming in terms of pub-rock. Jo Jo Gunne should have been on Midnight Special every week. They should have been the house band the way Paul Revere & the Raiders were on Where the Action Is. The album opener "Run Run Run" reached #27 on the singles chart in June 1972 but it's not even the best song here. That is more like the epic workup of "Academy Award," five minutes of off-rhythm guitar chords and squealing flourishes, preening sexism, and a shivery-good buildup, name-checking Hedy Lamarr as it goes (inventor of Wi-Fi, unknown in 1972). I'm also fond of the good parts in "Shake That Fat," "I Make Love," and "99 Days," proud strutting cock-rock exercises when they aren't mired in dull parts. Not sure what you do with songs like that or albums like Jo Jo Gunne—there's some real inspiration here, stuff that hits home and still sounds fresh and good. But it's going on 50 years old now and often sounds it. Approach with caution. In addition, play loud.

Vivre Sa Vie (1962)

Film en douze tableaux, France, 85 minutes
Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Writers: Marcel Sacotte, Jean-Luc Godard

Photography: Raoul Coutard

Music: Michel Legrand

Editors: Jean-Luc Godard, Agnes Guillemot

Cast: Anna Karina, Sady Rebbot, Andre S. Labarthe, Guylaine Schlumberger

In the opening titles Vivre Sa Vie is "dedicated to B movies." It's not the first time director and cowriter Jean-Luc Godard has done it, certainly in spirit, and it's a good reminder that we are entering Jean-Luc Godard-world, where fantasy and reality are all mixed up "playfully" (and/or for reasons of budget). Reality is generally a form of fantasy (notably when machine guns and gangsters appear) but it can also be text and factual information. I learned on IMDb that the script for Vivre Sa Vie is a single page, listing the 12 episodic scenarios, and the players improvised the dialogue from there. Cultural referents include Emile Zola, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Jules and Jim playing a nearby theater (because why not?!).

Confoundingly, Godard's story of a middle-class woman who becomes a prostitute acknowledges but does not satisfy the impulse to project pathos on the story. Nana—yes, that's a big fat Zola shoutout, and she's played by JLG's beautiful wife for five years, Anna Karina—Nana is an obvious if cartoonish victim, eventually (spoiler) gunned down in the streets, in a convenient random meaningless plot development, slaughtered by two-bit movie actors in trench coats for a suitably reflexive existential-type playful bleak ending. Having executed such neat FIN we can ask what Godard may really be doing here, aside from fooling around with movie equipment.