"Old Acquaintance" (1941)

It was nice to run across another story I like by John Collier, whose Fancies and Goodnights collection has been consistently disappointing for me since "Witch's Money." It's a good way to do a ghost story, placing it in the context of a loveless marriage that is finally ending after 20 years when the wife dies. A backstory comes swirling in about the friendship of the husband, wife, and a second man, Robert. They partied a lot, in the modern parlance. Their time was the Roaring '20s. The woman chose between them but came to regret her choice. Judging from the behavior we see of her husband it's not hard to understand why. She dies in their hotel room. He decides not to let anyone know until later. He is actually elated about the death and wants to hide it as an impropriety. He had nothing to do with her fatal illness. But he's happy it happened and she is finally gone. This all takes place in Paris—further artifact of the Jazz Age. Our guy goes to a modest café for a drink, where he is astonished to find his wife, "apparently in the best of health." She doesn't have much to say to him but she's pounding down drinks and seem equable enough. Then they run into Robert and it's like old times again. It's amazing and it barely makes sense, but they carouse the night away. The story was probably even more poignant in 1941, when Paris was occupied, but it's still pretty poignant even so. Then our guy passes out and does not wake until the next morning, when he is alone. His wife's body is gone from the hotel room. The concierge tells him his wife can't be dead because she saw her, adding (for a second time in the story), "but Madame was from Angers. You know the proverb." I wish I did! Internet searches just give me stuff about anger management. Anyway, our guy, still seemingly obtuse, seems to think Robert has something to do with this strange situation. He decides to report it to the police but on the way there he sees his wife and Robert again in a cab, "locked in each other's arms, scandalously drunk, and quite oblivious of his existence." He jumps in another cab and orders it to follow them. When his cab finally catches up to it it's just an elderly gentleman, "probably an ambassador," who gets out of the cab. Our guy soon learns that Robert died less than three months earlier. So that's that—they're ghosts now. I like the feeling of the reunion with Robert. Again, there is a lot of nostalgia and sense of lost opportunities that drive this story. I like the treatment of the husband too. He's a terrible person, revealed in a number of ways subtle and overt, but he seems to have little awareness himself of how awful he is.

John Collier, Fancies and Goodnights
Story not available online.

"Liberation" (1993)

[listen ... earlier thoughts here]

Silky smooth and all sweet sentiment, "Liberation" probably has to be accounted my favorite song on Very and on my short list of favorite Pet Shop Boys songs too. One of my habits listening to the album included playing it in sequence order but stopping to play this song over a few times before continuing on the daily rounds. I couldn't help myself. It captures exactly the sense of being in love, or maybe just peculiarly my own sense. It felt uncanny the way it could and still can strike a nerve of memory and sensation that rarely dims, although I finally learned I can play it too much. I like the scene depicted in the lyrics: "All the way back home at midnight / You were sleeping on my shoulder ... Take my hand / Don't think of complications." I like the shuffling tempo and light disco touches of the aural setting, the way it soars into the bridge on an aching keyboard/string reprisal of the themes. And I love the idea of the morass of helpless love as liberation. So confounding! Neil Tennant, in notes for the Further Listening package, says the song is "about how, in a way, a relationship is trapping you, but it makes you feel free." That was basically my life situation in 1993, which no doubt accounts for everything, my susceptibility to a song I've seen named by others as the worst on the album. Wrong! Still, "Liberation" was only the fourth of five singles from Very and never did that much, reaching #8 in Finland, #14 in the UK, and missing the charts altogether in the US. Chris Lowe, for his part, seems to see little more in it than its similarities to "Being Boring," from their previous album Behavior (please don't make me actually choose between these two albums). And Tennant has little more to say either, other than that it came together quite easily, with few struggles. He notes some similarities to musical themes in Prokofiev's ballet Romeo and Juliet and that's a wrap. "There's nothing more to say about it really," he says.

"What Dreams May Come" (1988)

I like this story by Brad Strickland quite a bit. I thought of Robert Aickman, who often turns to the dream aether and is not above carnival settings either. The story trucks in a lot of tried and true elements of dreamland that often devolve into cliché. Why did this one work on me? Is it really a matter of mood? I don't think so, but that's one of those general things I would like to figure out. A man is standing at a roller-coaster ride waiting for his daughter and her friend. Another man approaches him and they have a bizarre conversation. "Do you dream?" the strange man says. "Dream of pleasant things?" The father has a compulsion to talk to him about dreams. They talk briefly and it feels portentous, especially when the stranger touches him, taking his shoulder briefly. The father appears to be divorced, or separated from his wife, though they are both still involved as parents. Then it's August, the following month, when the father's terrible dreams begin. In the dream he finds himself committing a despicable crime. The next day he feels sick when he learns the friend of his daughter at the roller-coaster has been murdered in her bed by an intruder. The crime sounds like his dream, but he was in another city at the time. It couldn't have been him. And so it goes. He keeps having bad dreams and they keep happening in real life and it's always impossible for him to have done them. A lot of stuff is handled just right in this story, such as the touch on the shoulder in the original encounter. In a careful throwaway aside, we learn the man who touched him probably committed suicide some time after. Thus the horrible way forward appears to be that you can pass the curse on to another, but you're never entirely free of it psychologically, something like the ruling conceit in the movie It Follows. I love how simple this story is: bad dreams. That's it. Yet so dreadful are they that the only rational response may be suicide. In the haunted father's interior dialogue, he imagines he is responsible for the murders even though it is impossible. He imagines it is a demon inside him that escapes at night. That might be it too, but the genius of this story is that it really doesn't matter what it is. Simply that it exists, whatever it is, is the terrible thing.

The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII, ed. Karl Edward Wagner (out of print)
Story not available online.

The Double Life of Veronique (1991)

La double vie de Véronique, France / Poland / Norway, 98 minutes

Director: Krzysztof Kieslowski

Writers: Krzysztof Kieslowski, Krzysztof Piesiewicz

Photography: Slawomir Idziak

Music: Zbigniew Preisner

Editor: Jacques Witta

Cast: Irene Jacob, Halina Gryglaszewska, Kalina Jedrusik, Aleksandr Bardini, Wladyslaw Kowalski, Jerzy Gudejko, Philippe Volter

The Double Life of Veronique is ultimately a bit of a puzzle box movie, but I was so smitten with it when I saw it for the first time 10 years ago that I ranked it #3 for 1991 (after Dogfight and Hearts of Darkness, see here). I thought then it could become my favorite for 1991, perhaps because it's so beloved by critics, but a recent revisit did not make me as high. I felt compelled to dive into DVD extras to get a handle on it, even reading the Jonathan Romney essay, "Through the Looking Glass," written circa 2006. I was happy to find him arguing, amidst all the rapture, that it "endure[s] as a spellbinding experience, as well as a perplexing one." Romney also quotes another critic, Nigel Andrews, who wrote: "I believe we are being hypnotized in The Double Life of Veronique.... How else to explain the ability of a French-Polish film with a nonsensical plot premise ... to enthrall and enchant us like no European film in recent history?"

The nonsensical plot premise is more or less a doppelganger story, but it spans great unknowable distances. There are two of her: Weronika in Poland, and Veronique in France, both played with zest and charisma by Irene Jacob, a glowing presence. Both of their lives are wrapped up in music one way or another and there are other parallels. Veronique actually happens to take a photo of Weronika on a trip to central Europe but never notices the photo until many years later. When one of them dies the other feels a powerful unexplained sadness. Director and cowriter Krzysztof Kieslowski tries to explain by saying the picture "was difficult ... because it deals with things you can't name. If you do, they seem trivial and stupid"—and just so with plot summaries.

Joker (2019)

I skipped this originally for all the predictable reasons. It's a superhero movie, another more or less dark and gritty Batman movie—actually, better to call this one a Gotham City movie, as Bruce Wayne is barely in it. It is a "standalone," you see, an "Imaginary Story" in the grand old DC tradition. And it sets Joaquin Phoenix, noted gourmand of scenery, free to excessive displays of mental illness. These things did not appeal, and the reviews seemed mostly bad too. But I found one true heart beating for it on youtube (Sarah Hawkinson at the PossessedbyHorror channel, a regular stop) and decided to give it a try. I really don't know director Todd Phillips, who is famous for the Hangover movies and other gross-out teen comedies (Road Trip, Old School), none of which I've seen beyond The Hangover, on which I was meh. Immediately it made Joker look to me like a bid for being taken seriously in today's supersaturated comic book movie environment (compare Logan, which I haven't seen but has a similar marketing vibe). I basically enjoyed Joker, mostly for Phoenix's performance. One of the DC approaches to their movies seems to be "interpretive"—different players get their at-bats with the same character. Marvel does some of that but seems more to be more about buying up every player they can to be specific heroes. Anyway, how many Jokers do I know? Jack Nicholson, Cesar Romero. I have yet to see Jared Leto. Heath Ledger remains King Kong here, but I must say Phoenix makes a decent bid and comes in an easy second with his compulsive laughing disorder bit and a lot of quirks mainlined out of Travis Bickle. The main knock on this movie, and it's a fair one, is how completely derivative it is of Martin Scorsese movies, The King of Comedy most of all. Robert De Niro even kind of reprises Rupert Pupkin as a successful Johnny Carson. Taxi Driver is definitely in here as well. Joker also uses the narrative strategy of Frank Miller's original 1986 Dark Knight graphic novel, where the city is in crisis and self-serious urgent newscasts carry a lot of the exposition. Might as well say American Psycho (novel AND movie) gets its time in Joker too. Plus Juggalos, of course. These lifts arguably show a lot of studied good taste or acumen on the part of Phillips but not very much originality, and in many ways they fight with Phoenix's attempts to craft an original Joker. I get the feeling Phillips and Phoenix may not have been entirely working together. Phoenix carries the threat of Nicolas Cage levels of excess, but he is still an awesome talent and I think the script could have benefited from following his instincts more. But if Joker never entirely gets out of its own way it is never any less than entertaining either, with some neat twists and a lot of artful if extreme violence when the violence parts come. Phoenix makes the Joker haunting by the laughing disorder alone. The story delivers the rest, and it's not bad, if excessively familiar.

See DoestheDogDie report.

Nova Express (1964)

This short novel by William S. Burroughs is approximately where things start to get weird, at least in terms of any supposed trilogy. It's confusing enough The Soft Machine was more like a sequel to Naked Lunch (whatever that means exactly). Now there's no agreement about what's next in the Nova trilogy (alternately called the Cut-Up trilogy). Most sources designate this the second, but Burroughs himself said the order didn't matter—didn't exist. Well, Nova Express was published second anyway and that's good enough for me, but note that some claim The Ticket That Exploded is second. As part of the "Nova" trilogy it makes more sense to me for Nova Express with its title to be either first or third. I guess that's another reason to make it second. To make matters more complicated, revisions to all three novels (and more) have occurred since my 1980s Grove Press mass market paperback. Do I dare hope for some—any—clarity in those "restored text" versions? I just wanted to read an old paperback before getting rid of it. The method of cut-up reportedly used for Nova Express is described as "fold-in." That makes me think it's a put-on based on the old Mad magazine feature by Al Jaffee, which started the same year Nova Express was published. It's also possible that Burroughs or some assistant literally folded pages in from his massive Word Hoard manuscript. Why not? Overall, I don't think it works as well as the cut-up in Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, which does not work that well except randomly in shards. But who's to say? Also, thinking of a later book, Exterminator!, there is a thin line in Burroughs between novel and short story collection. Nova Express improved for me when I started thinking of it as a collection of stories, though only the last of them, "PAY COLOR," stood out particularly. There is more science fiction concept here—something about viruses. As a result, Nova Express got a nomination for a Nebula award, which is kind of amazing all things considered. It's possible I could have got more out of this, but my engagement with Burroughs tends to happen in the immediacy at the granular level of the sentences and their nouns and verbs. Trying to get your arms around anything bigger, even paragraphs let alone true narrative threads (as opposed to rhythmic devices), feels a little like a fool's errand. I still see this title getting coughed up on lists of best SF, but beyond maybe 20 pages of good sentences scattered toward the front and back, you could fool me.

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

New York (1989)

Judging from Wikipedia and possibly faulty memory, the conventional wisdom on Lou Reed's 15th solo album is that the lyrics are brilliant and the accompanying music pro forma at best. "Reed's straightforward rock and roll sound on this album was unusual for the time and along with other releases such as Graham Parker's The Mona Lisa's Sister presaged a back-to-basics turn in mainstream rock music," the Wiki article notes, going on, "Conversely, the lyrics through the 14 songs are profuse and carefully woven, making New York Reed's most overtly conceptual album since the early 1970s." Strange comparisons abound—maybe someone with another view needs to chip in some further insights. The article also mentions John Cougar Mellencamp, of all people, scoffing that "it sounds like it was produced by an eighth grader," adding, "but I like it." While quick and dirty roundups of internet opinion don't seem to deride the music as much, they use the word "literary" much more frequently than I am used to seeing in album writeups. It is the continuing, dominating theme of reviews.

And it's basically the opposite of my own reaction, notably on the lyrics. For me, New York suffers a problem that is similar to Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A." If you listen carefully to the Springsteen song, it is sensitive and thoughtful on the plight of Vietnam veterans returning to the US. However, if you don't listen carefully, it sounds enough like jingoism that GOP politicians have had to be warned for years with cease-and-desist notices to keep it out of their rallies. In a similar way there are lots of lines and bits in New York that jump out at me as get-off-my-lawn stuff with all the easy carping: hitting with "the statue of bigotry" (which my brain keeps insisting is a mispronunciation, "Statue of Libitree," for some unclear effect, maybe dialect?), reaching for Moby-Dick gravitas on "Last Great American Whale" and finishing it with the old "stick a fork in them" gag, and just generally ripe with insights like "Spittin' in the wind comes back at ya twice as hard." The album closer, "Dime Store Mystery," seems to want to have a pie and coffee discussion about the movie The Last Temptation of Christ. The main track that lost me was "Dirty Blvd.," which was more or less the signifying "hit" of the album and which sounds to me—again on loose listening—like an old person complaining about young people and This City Has Gone to Hell.

Portrait of Jennie (1948)

USA, 86 minutes

Director: William Dieterle

Writers: Robert Nathan, Paul Osborn, Peter Berneis, Leonardo Bercovici, David O. Selznick, Ben Hecht

Photography: Joseph H. August, Lee Garmes

Music: Claude Debussy, Dimitri Tiomkin

Editors: William Morgan, Gerard Wilson

Cast: Jennifer Jones, Joseph Cotten, Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, David Wayne, Cecil Kellaway, Florence Bates, Felix Bressart

My Halliwell's film guide lights up like a pinball machine for this peculiar fantasy romance exercise about ghosts of New York, with an effusive three-star judgment: "A splendid example of the higher Hollywood lunacy: a silly story with pretensions about life and death and time and art, presented with superb persuasiveness by a first-class team of actors and technicians." And I have to admit I enjoy it too, for many of the same reasons. Joseph Cotten is one of the best players of his generation. Released in 1948, the supporting cast of Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Felix Bressart, and others effectively hark to gauzy past prewar days of cinema. And Jennifer Jones is suitably ethereal (though oddly reminiscent to me of Debra Winger or Karen Allen). In the big finish, Portrait of Jennie even takes a page from the silent era, subtly tinting the frames with increasing color, pushing toward a big final shot in technicolor that feels bigger than it can possibly be.

In fact, producer David O. Selznick stamps B - I - G all over this even before we get to the stylized main titles, which I suspect explains a lot of the lunacy—Selznick the misty romanticist tycoon. Cotten plays the starving artist Eben Adams, who is down to his last dollar. As he wanders the city trying to hawk his work he enters Central Park near the end of the day, where he meets a young girl named Jennie Appleton. It's Jennifer Jones and in these early scenes we're intended to believe she's quite young, no older than 12, which is mostly accomplished by positioning the camera above her. She sings him a strange and beautiful song, tells strange stories, says things that don't make sense. She does some goo-goo da-da bits in her delivery, asking Eben to wait for her to grow up. Eben sees she doesn't seem to understand the math of aging.

"The Distributor" (1958)

Tooling around the internet, I see this Richard Matheson story absolutely exalted by some. Heck, I found it originally in the My Favorite Horror Story anthology as the choice of F. Paul Wilson (The Keep), who provides an excitable foreword and afterword. I also found a Goodreads reviewer who puts it among the five best short stories ever written. But I think I'm closer to another Goodreads reviewer who praised it as more like black comedy. It's chilling, of course, but it's also farcical. A man moves into a neighborhood and sets out to engineer discord among his new neighbors. To their faces he is generous and sympathetic, but he's actually busy with lots of specific projects. He mails them poison pen letters, tears up their gardens at night, paints obscenities on their doors. The story is shot through with bolts of ugly racism. Some of these neighbors are not so nice, having affairs or might be. Most have secrets of some kind. Our main guy manipulates them, harasses them with unwanted deliveries, reports them to the police, drugs them, takes pictures, blackmails them. In typical Matheson form these things just happen; he reports them. This guy is amazingly efficient in his work, artifact of Matheson's straightforward and unadorned delivery, not to mention the complexity of the schemes. The story has so many characters it's hard to keep them straight as each plunges into their own downfall. Matheson simply keeps reporting the outrageous events and moving them along. Wilson sees Matheson's flat writing style as the key to what makes the story work so well: "All horror fiction I'd read until then pulsed with vibrant emotion—rage, hate, fear, lust for revenge. 'The Distributor' has none of that," he writes. "And that's what makes it so horrifying." Matheson's story does have a certain amount of power but, contrary to Wilson, I think it's less prescient and more rote about how bad things happen, suggesting it's all a little Pavlovian (and maybe it is!). There's a case for this story chipping in its part to documenting our great American unraveling since approximately 1958. Our "distributor" guy sort of stands in for the great rightwing termite machine, which never sleeps and is always working to sow division and hatred.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin B. Greenberg
Story not available online.

Rules of Prey (1989)

I mostly enjoyed this police procedural thriller by John Sandford, another mass market paperback I had lying around, but I'm not about to start on the whole freaking series. They have been coming literally every year since this and I'm not even kidding: Shadow Prey, Eyes of Prey, Silent Prey, Winter Prey, Night Prey, Mind Prey, all the way to #31 in 2021, Ocean Prey, with #32 Righteous Prey scheduled for later this year. When you're on brand, stick with it. Ride this horse home. And why not? Sandford is good. It's standard thriller fare, with a rogue police investigator, a brilliantly methodical serial killer, and beautiful women of various body types. But Sandford—already a Pulitzer-winning journalist in the '80s as John Camp—is aces at putting one of these together. It'll keep you up all night, on the edge of your seat, page-turner, etc. I picked it up originally mostly for the scenery—it's set in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. The scenery is not bad, reminded me of home, but there could have been more. It made me think of reading J.A. Jance's hardboiled detective novels for the Seattle scenery. The scenery in Jance is better, but Sandford is better at writing a thriller. Rules of Prey is more focused on the case at hand, which is all neatly put together. The sexism along the way is as rote as it is ripe. You might like to think this kind of stuff didn't sell in 1989 but you would be wrong evidently. Our rogue investigator and star of the series Lucas Davenport is an inveterate wick dipper among his many other familiar manly attributes. The gals all eat it up in this hothouse fantasy. OK, is what it is, etc. I have more problem with the "copaganda" side, which dogs all police procedurals up to and including The Wire and beyond. Yes, a serial killer as heinous as this one—"maddog" by name, lowercase, which I like not least because it is "goddam" spelled backwards—does not particularly "deserve to live." Maybe yes, maybe no, but no matter how we feel about that, a cop has no right to decide the issue, as Davenport does here (oops, was that really a spoiler?), with many readers no doubt cheering along, including me to some degree. I mean, this is a real bad guy. But it's still playing for the cheap seats, no matter how skillfully the rest is put together, and that makes it copaganda and so does the incidental rapiness. If you can overlook those aspects, I can see where Sandford and the Prey series could become addictive.

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

Silent Light (2007)

Stellet Licht, Mexico / France / Netherlands / Germany, 136 minutes

Director/writer: Carlos Reygadas

Photography: Alexis Zabe

Music: Jacques Brel

Editor: Natalia Lopez

Cast: Cornelio Wall, Miriam Toews, Maria Pankratz, Peter Wall, Elizabeth Fehr, Jacobo Klassen

[Spoilers?] A reviewer at IMDb, Serge Bosque, issued a warning about Silent Light back in 2007: "if you intend to see this movie in a theatre: it is very likely that some people will become uncomfortable and leave, keep talking, protest etc., which makes it even more difficult to watch it with serenity so renting it as a DVD may be a more suitable option." I will note the movie is presently available to stream on Vudu (with ads), but the caution is probably appropriate, and never mind for the moment about covid. The problem is not mayhem and gore, but the practical opposite. Silent Light is radiantly beautiful and slow, over two hours long, with long, long takes and limited dialogue. I know from experience people in theaters can have a real problem with that.

If I have any problem with Silent Light it is more its obvious source as a kind of remake of Danish filmmaker Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1955 movie Ordet. The two movies happen to share a lot of plot points: a large and isolated family working a farm, a conservative religious sect (or cult, depending on your view), plodding faith and various questions about that faith, and most notably the death and subsequent resurrection of a family matriarch, rendered with an absolute minimum of special effects. Is that a spoiler? I'm still not sure how it's supposed to work with art movies. The resurrection just happens, somehow, in both Ordet and Silent Light. These scenes veer close to a feeling of playacting. Resurrection from the dead is certainly a narrative twist—but is the twist itself the mere point of all this? If so, sincere apologies. But even before that climax you have to already be thinking of Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Bresson, Andrei Tarkovsky, and other filmmakers who take their religious ecstasies slow and apocalyptic.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

I had high hopes for this picture by director and cowriter Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World), even after I started noticing the mixed reviews. These reviews were not only mixed, but they also tended toward extremes of love or hate. Well, I didn't hate Last Night in Soho myself, but I have to count it as underwhelming and ultimately a disappointment. The story is about a girl from the English sticks, Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), who dreams of moving to London and becoming a fashion designer. She is infatuated with 1960s "Swinging London," but perhaps not surprisingly, Repulsion style, she finds the big city a cold and frightening place when she gets there. She ends up in a peculiar rooming-house and at night has strange and vivid dreams. She finds herself back in 1960s London, inhabiting the body of Sandie (Anna Taylor-Joy), who is trying to make it as a singer but has acquired a sleazy manager who is pressing her into prostitution. It's all glamorous and tawdry and harrowing and then Eloise wakes up. Her alarm clock sounds just like mine and was very annoying. I was happy to see her smash it finally. During the day Eloise shows talent in her fashion design studies but is up against catty and unfriendly fellow students. Eventually, as the detailed explanations start to emerge (and everything is explained in detail), it turns into a kind of formal ghost story that is not particularly interesting. But it does tie everything together, which might be what people like about it so much. I think more likely it's the fantasy depiction of Swinging London. It surprised me I couldn't work up a plausible nostalgia, even with authentic London-based hits of the era crowding the soundtrack (the Who, Cilla Black, Walker Brothers, etc.). The cast is impressive: I've seen good and bad from the widely exposed McKenzie (Leave No Trace and Lost Girls, respectively). Taylor-Joy doesn't have a lot to do except look '60s-gorgeous, which is a shame in a way because she has showed how much she has in both The Queen's Gambit and The VVitch, excellent in such different ways. Diana Rigg as the colorful landlady of Eloise's rooming-house is excellent and a wonderful surprise. I didn't even realize it was her until the credits ran. But these various parts, however good, did not add up to much of a whole for me. Approach with caution, bearing in mind you may love it wildly.

See DoestheDogDie report.

Ball the Wall (1989)

This collection of pieces and excerpts by Nik Cohn seems just slightly ahead of its time from its subtitle, Nik Cohn in the Age of Rock, as few were prepared to see "the Age of Rock" as finite in 1989, or anyway I wasn't, more fool me. Cohn always did seem to be living a few years ahead of the rest of us—in some ways so far ahead of his time his parents haven't even met yet, as the old joke goes. Cohn is also an outrageous fabricator and this collection includes perhaps his greatest in "Another Saturday Night," published originally in New York magazine in 1976 as "Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night" and going on to serve as the basis for the movie Saturday Night Fever. Cohn made the whole thing up. He was living in the US by then (probably New York) but the story was based on his experience clubbing in London in the '60s. I struggled with most of the fiction here (explicitly fiction, that is) but I think that is more about the general inadequacy of novel excerpts, which are rarely satisfying as they are neither stories nor novels. The longest excerpt as such is from the formally nonfiction Rock From the Beginning (under the original Little Richard shout title, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom). There's some shrewd editing here to sharpen the pieces from that book and they are worth looking at even if you already know it. Elsewise, he has a great term for early '70s pop in "Pepsi," along with a great example in the B.J. Thomas "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" interlude in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. "Pepsi" is perfect for the early '70s. Cohn's British origins and age give him a particularly interesting view on "pop" specifically, a somewhat more old-fashioned view of it that transcended music and included fashion and arty movies and sports figures too. And I think no one else could go to New York in the '70s and decide to write about the street drag-racing and stock-car circuit there. There's an interesting long piece here about fashion too, "Today There Are No Gentlemen," which sorts out the clothing styles and how it all worked with the Mods and Rockers, basically Cohn's home turf (fictional or otherwise). Pretty good collection!

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