“The Thing in the Cellar” (1932)

This very short story by David H. Keller (formally “M.D.” on ISFDB), published originally in Weird Tales, is almost primitively simple. It did not particularly work on me, but comments at one site where it’s reprinted agreed it was the scariest story they had ever read when they were kids (perhaps a version of my experience with George Hitchcock’s “An Invitation to the Hunt”). I love how simple the elements of this story are. The house and the house’s foundation do not fit—the foundation is much older and larger. The door in the kitchen to the cellar is also much older than the rest of the house and more appropriate for an exterior door, as if for protection. A young family lives there. The parents use the cellar and have never felt anything strange about it except the usual creepy stuff about dark cellars and cobwebs and such. Another nice detail is that there’s ancient junk down there that has never been cleaned out. Their son is terrified by it and has been ever since he was a baby. It’s taken as usual childhood fears but an unusually strong and intense case of them. The parents worry he is too morbid and seek professional help. The person they consult suggests forcing the issue by nailing the cellar door open and making the kid stay in the kitchen with the open door. Another professional they consult that same day is alarmed and says that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. So they hurry to the kitchen, but—well, you should read the story for yourself to see if you think the finish is as predictable as I do. Now yes sure there are problems here, such as the convenience of the second opinion leading to further discoveries. But the second opinion is still effective because it confirms our own uneasy sense that the kid is on to something and the first advice was bad. At the same time, absolutely no evidence beyond this boy’s overwhelming fear is ever offered. The parents hear and see nothing. The kid never describes what he’s afraid of. That’s so good—just don’t explain it at all. The story doesn’t particularly work on me. Perhaps I was too old when I read it. But I can see it has worked on others and I think I can see why. Kids are notorious for being carried away by their imaginations and in many ways this one never has a chance. The cruelty of the proposed treatment is good too. I can see why it could all pack a vicious punch.

Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Suspiria (1977)

Italy, 92 minutes

Director: Dario Argento

Writers: Dario Argento, Daria Nicolodi, Thomas De Quincey

Photography: Luciano Tovoli

Music: Dario Argento, Goblin

Editor: Franco Fraticelli

Cast: Jessica Harper, Alida Valli, Joan Bennett, Stefania Casini, Udo Kier, Dario Argento

My hot take on the original Suspiria is that it’s chiefly designed as sensation, as experience—it’s always very good at exactly that. Bright colors and strange and disorienting lighting strategies abound. It’s scored by the Italian progressive rock band Goblin, who pound away or make disquieting noise at will. It’s a classic (if slightly later) Italian giallo but the cast includes Americans in leading roles. Jessica Harper (Phantom of the Paradise, Minority Report) was fresh off the Woody Allen movie Love and Death, and flinty Joan Bennett (Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window), at 67, was a certifiable grande dame of Hollywood. The picture even gives 19th-century reprobate Thomas De Quincey, author of the 1821 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, a writing credit—not for Opium-Eater but for a collection of hallucinatory prose poem essays, Suspiria de Profundis, specifically the one about Levana, the Roman goddess of childbirth.

As with much of the work of Italian director and cowriter Dario Argento, the plot barely matters in Suspiria because it so quickly and so often goes afield of logic or sense. Harper is Suzy Bannion, a young ballet dancer who has left the US to study at a prestigious dance academy in Freiburg, Germany. As it happens, the prestigious dance academy is actually a front for an ancient coven of witches, or something. Suzy knows things are not right there because on her arrival, near midnight of a stormy, rainy night, she witnesses a young woman flee out the front door into the nearby woods while the woman on the house intercom is telling Suzy to go away. Fortunately, Suzy asked the surly taxi driver to wait for her so at least she has a ride back into town.

“The Asian Shore” (1970)

With short stories generally, and with horror stories specifically, it can sometimes seem like a long time between good ones. This long story by Thomas M. Disch is a good one. It appears in The Dark Descent, where editor David G. Hartwell argues for it as horror versus science fiction—it was published originally in a science fiction magazine. Yes, correct. I don’t see how this could remotely be considered SF, but it is a great story of dread and perhaps the best doppelganger story I’ve seen yet. A man whose marriage is ending moves to a remote part of Turkey, at a threshold across a river from the Asian shore. He is there ostensibly to study architecture, but he doesn’t seem to be studying very hard though he is obviously erudite and knowledgeable. He notices a woman following him around when he’s out. She comes to his door in the evenings, knocking on it, tapping the windows, calling the name Yavuz. He often sees her around the city and tries to avoid her. He also sees a young boy in many places, sometimes with the woman. He takes pictures when he is out, he’s there to study architecture, remember, but when he has them developed he is given photos he did not take. The woman and the boy are in them. It appears our academic is somehow being slowly swallowed into another life. It is happening beyond his control, and though he is bewildered he seems to accept it, even to embrace it. The story is well-told, beautiful and mysterious, taking its time but never less than interesting. On the internet I found people articulating theories of science fiction for it—fair enough, focusing on clues about various arbitrary constraints. But I think it is more effectively taken as an unexplainable doppelganger tale, which is mostly a precinct of horror as Hartwell argues. It’s also the best part of the story for me, the sense that our man is somehow being absorbed by his doppelganger. My complaint about many of this type of story—e.g., Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson”—is I don’t entirely understand where the anxieties come from. Someone looks like you or has your name—what of it? Do you know how many Jeff Pikes there are out there? Perhaps my imagination has been stunted in this realm. I don’t particularly feel it. What may be working best for me in this story is the isolated and extremely foreign setting, which Disch leans into hard. Our guy is comfortable with other languages, but not Turkish—he explains why with technical linguistic terms. He had me at Turkish. Already I could feel the isolation and alienation. I have never been anywhere where English is not spoken, partly for fear of being unable to communicate, a key aspect of this story. The appearances and reappearances of the woman and the boy work here. Again, this story is really told well, building to its climax with great skill.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Story not available online.

People Try to Pet Tigers Sometimes... (2023)

True-crime youtuber Matt Orchard kicks off his 20-minute meditation on animal / human relations with a warning: “The following video contains visuals and especially audio of people in extreme pain, as well as other content that some may find disturbing.” It’s certainly true but he doesn’t warn—probably can’t—that many could find themselves literally laughing at the agonizing cries of pain, which are repeated for effect. Sure enough, the screams are the next thing we hear from a 911 call coming from a zoo in Florida. It’s amazing, in a way, that this victim even had the wherewithal to make the call. Orchard has previously made his feelings known about “Florida Man” incidents, and here we are again. The tale is about not one but two cases at Florida zoos in recent years where employees who are not responsible for animal care in any way decided it would be fun, or something, to go pet a tiger. These big cats are so adorable, after all—like Hobbes in the cartoon, or something. Orchard reminds us, however, that tigers are apex predators and generally more likely to show aggression than affection to random humans who hop safety fences and stick their arms through the wires of their fences for a little skritch-skritch. The worst visual details here are pixelated away but details about how the teeth inside a tiger’s mouth work are made quite clear. Your imagination gets some workout from this. Sadly, one of the tigers must be put down as the only solution to save a fool’s forearm. Orchard’s disgust with these two is palpable but, as he says, in the end most of us are going to have to side with the human in the immediate situation. It doesn’t help the endangered tigers any, whose dwindling numbers on the planet only make the situation worse. Zoo employees are seen crying over the incident and you may not be far from it either. We never hear from either of the fools—but what could they possibly say that wouldn’t make us think twice about who to shoot in the clinch? All you can do, Orchard implies, is run that agonizing audio a few times repetitively and let it become the cruel and savage joke that it and most “Florida Man” incidents are.

The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881)

This low-key charming and very odd novel by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis came to my attention, perhaps appropriately enough, via circuitous and random circumstances, i.e., booktube. It is confounding in many little ways—labeled archly as a memoir, it is a novel. Published in 1881, it is strikingly modern. As a “memoir” (better use the scare quotes) it is further archly written from beyond the grave (a phrase everyone uses in regard to it and I’m not about to do any differently). Emphasizing the point, it is dedicated “To the Worm Who Gnawed the Cold Flesh of My Corpse”—meaning, as someone more astute than me mentioned somewhere, no one mattered very much to him in his life. It is about 240 pages long, with 160 chapters. I like this kind of approach as much as the next guy—hello, Moby-Dick, hello, Cat’s Cradle, hello, As I Lay Dying—but I must say they can be a little exhausting, with all the stopping and going, and I never seemed to settle in for long reading sessions with this. It took me a week when it should have taken two or three days max. Still, I enjoyed it and think I might like to try it again. John Barth and Donald Barthelme claim it as an influence, along with a host of Latin American writers. In 2011 fucking Woody Allen claimed it as one of his five favorite books. This many-chaptered tale starts with the death of Brás Cubas, lightly hitting the surreal tone that is maintained throughout. There is a 16th-century historical figure with that name, who is also a Brazilian colonialist, but the novel appears to be set in the 18th century if not the 19th. Perhaps he's a kind of wastrel descendant. Certainly he is privileged and his family is wealthy. From the death we take “the greatest leap in this story” to his birth and childhood. There is nothing remarkable in his life and Cubas never really distinguishes himself either. It is mostly concerned with his comically inept romantic life. He falls in love with a prostitute when he is a teen, which results in being sent abroad by his family for an education. His father intends him to marry a woman named Virgilia. They’re not much into each other and she marries another. Later they meet again and fall in love and carry on an affair for years. Brás Cubas is a bit of a wastrel, as I say, but he is charming and a pleasure to read and in all ways this is just a fun one—as novel, as memoir, and as landmark of Latin American literature.

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

Living With War (2006)

I think it’s arguable that Living With War is the best album by Neil Young in the decade of the 2000s but note also it’s his 27th album and fifth decade of making albums, introducing an element of faint praise to this assessment. Not surprisingly, there is a certain level of sameness and familiarity to the tunes in this set, all written by Young except the closing chestnut, “America the Beautiful.” The latter is there partly as the US center-left forces with which Young has always more or less been aligned attempted (vainly, I’m sorry to say) to reclaim ideas like patriotism, self-sacrifice, and love of country from belligerent rightwing forces, even as the folly of the second Iraq war was setting in as conventional wisdom. The other reason the patriotic hymn is there is because the 100-voice choir brought in for this album just sounds so damn good. Young looked to the rush job of “Ohio” in 1970 for inspiration, writing and recording Living With War in nine days. Does it work? Well, they are Neil Young songs, marked by his usual points of melody and charging power. You might not think so scanning the track list, but it’s perfectly possible (and recommended!) to sing along with or at least head-bob to songs like “Living With War,” “Shock and Awe,” and “Let’s Impeach the President” (for lying). Listen to the album a few times and you may likely find yourself singing along against your will. Another point that sets this album apart is the 100-voice choir. Album-closer “America the Beautiful” is where it chiefly gets the spotlight, but it appears on most of these tracks, lending the material a wonderful luster and certain level of celestial awe (no shock). Countering this display of beauty—already countered to some degree by the angry political themes—is an occasional trumpet (played by Tommy Bray), which sounds homely and barely competent yet fits the mood perfectly, playing like a soldier in bandages. It is surprising and apt and satisfying the way Neutral Milk Hotel’s cornet can be. Earlier in the decade, I worried that Young’s tribute to the heroic passengers of flight United 93 on 9/11, “Let’s Roll,” veered dangerously close to a lot of the volcanic jingoism that proceeded out of that day until 2006 and well beyond. But Living With War clarifies any ambiguities of Young with regard to the militarism that followed 9/11. In the era of Donald Trump Living With War already sounds depressingly quaint. But it’s still a pretty good Neil Young album.

Stranger Than Paradise (1984)

USA / West Germany, 89 minutes

Director: Jim Jarmusch

Writers: Jim Jarmusch, John Lurie

Photography: Tom DiCillo

Music: John Lurie, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Editors: Jim Jarmusch, Melody London

Cast: John Lurie, Eszter Balint, Richard Edson, Cecilia Stark, Tom DiCillo

It’s probably fair to call director and cowriter Jim Jarmusch an acquired taste but Stranger Than Paradise might be as good a place as any to start acquiring it. The picture has obvious affinities with and aspirations toward the work of director Jean-Luc Godard—slow, playful, quirky, mannered, pulpy in cerebral ways, low-budget, self-conscious cinema shot in a black and white that looks like it sat in the sun too long (leftover filmstock donated by Wim Wenders reportedly). The plot involves a threesome of hipsters—Willie (John Lurie), his Hungarian cousin Eva (Eszter Balint), and his best friend Eddie (Richard Edson). As the picture opens Willie hears from his Aunt Lotte (Cecilia Stark) in Cleveland that Eva, coming for a visit, will need to stay with him longer than one night because something has come up and she can’t put her up for another 10 days.

Willie lives in a small dirty apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In the first part of the picture, “The New World,” Willie and Eva make do with the situation. He snaps at her a lot and isn’t much of a host. They watch his tiny TV—football, which he tries to explain to her and she says is stupid, and late-night science fiction movies. They smoke a lot of Chesterfields. Willie’s style is porkpie hats indoors. He likes to sit with Eddie drinking beers and not talking. Eva wants to vacuum the place. He tells her in America vacuuming is called “choking the alligator.” She doesn’t believe him. The movie proceeds in a series of scenes with blackouts, skipping ahead in time randomly and without notice. Wikipedia notes these scenes are all single long takes but I should note I never particularly noticed the lack of cuts.

“It Only Comes Out at Night” (1976)

This mood piece by Dennis Etchison, who mostly wrote canny little mood pieces in the form of short stories, comes with his typically nice assortment of elements. One of his strong suits is evocative settings. In 1976, perhaps, roadside rest areas had not yet quite won their subsequent quasi-irrational reputation as hunting grounds for serial killers and other miscreants. They were safe places, more or less, part of President Eisenhower’s ambitious interstate freeway system—“see the USA in your Chevrolet” and all that. Here they are made more suggestive of danger, an unpleasantly effective view. Etchison piles on the nighttime scene with insidious strange details, proceeding to unnerve simply by noticing them. Our couple is traveling across the Mojave by night to beat the heat. He drives. She spends most of the story sleeping in the backseat. When he pulls up for a break, he notices all the cars parked at the rest area appear to be empty. His first assumption is the people must by lying down in them sleeping. But he sees no bodies when he surreptitiously examines them more closely, and the cars are covered with thick films of dust and other evidence they have been there for a long time. It makes no sense. Abandoned cars at a rest area would be cleared out long before they got this dusty. And we don’t miss that whatever gets back in their car in the backseat is never definitively identified as his wife. Again and again, the story draws away from telling us anything definitive, all the way to the end. It’s almost too subtle and improbable. The menace is not clear, yet it is palpably felt. It appears to be supernatural, which elevates it above rote serial killer fare. But like the more recent Terrifier movies somehow it might be both serial killer and supernatural. Etchison’s reticence to spell anything out only contributes more to the suffocating unease of the drift of our thoughts. “It” may only come out at night but, while we know the story takes place at night, we never learn at all what “it” is. Perhaps the rest area itself is visible only at night, luring in these unsuspecting travelers. There’s something desperate about them, certainly about our couple, who talk like they are looking for a motel but seem even more intent on moving down the road no matter what. For all the ambiguities of the story Etchison writes with a chiseled precision and the story has a disquieting and almost violent lack of tidy resolution.

Dennis Etchison, Talking in the Dark
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.

Winterkill (1984)

Craig Lesley’s first novel is a pretty good modern Western tale. I’m not sure there are that many of them anymore. Maybe it’s an obvious comparison, but it reminded me of Larry McMurtry, both in its low-key, unpretentious approach and in its interest in the lives of contemporary Westerners. It involves a middle-aged Native American man hanging on to a career on the rodeo circuit. When his ex-wife dies he reaches out to his 17-year-old son to finish raising him. There are interesting scenes from the rodeo life, which is a hard one, especially for a Native American. Danny is Nez Perce and we get a lot of interesting detail and lore about them, and an equally interesting sense of the Native American context more generally, with representatives of many tribal nations as well as the white world beyond them. Jack, the son, is a bit of a stock character. He’s rebellious like a teen but actually I expected a little more conflict between them, with the baggage from the divorce and so on. The narrative moves from Danny’s rodeo life to some cowboy scenes with Danny and Jack, and finally to a semi-mystical elk hunting trip. Lesley’s prose is always straightforward and plainspoken. He refuses to cater to white interpretations of Native American spirituality but keeps things within range of the known and plausible. I have found—somewhat to my surprise—that I very much enjoy fiction that involves outdoors adventures and this is a pretty good example. It’s best when the action is outdoors. But it’s also a sensitive and believable view of underclass life. We see problems like drinking, philandering, and questionable money management. They are not overly dramatic, just facts in these people’s lives. Winterkill never manages high levels of intensity, considering all it has going on, but it’s never less than interesting. The scenes in the hunt are strange, poignant, and evocative. In general, the novel is closer to a “slow burn” kind of story. Events feel even a little humdrum, but the story drew me on almost effortlessly. Although it ends on a sad note, Winterkill is always comforting somehow, full of intriguing, likable people. Pick it up for your outdoors shelf.

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

“The Bloody Chamber” (1979)

I’m not always sure exactly what Angela Carter stories are about beyond their overt connections to various fairy tales and folk legends, but I can always feel the depths of the currents they spring from and her voice worrying the surfaces with dense, terse language that is practically dazzling in its totality. The fairy tale thing is too reductive, of course, as this quote from her suggests: “My intention was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of [The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories] said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories.” That’s important to keep in mind, but it’s equally important to know the source material, which a Wikipedia article helpfully provides in summaries of the stories (I had to do some brushing up). “The Bloody Chamber,” one of her longer stories, is based on the centuries-old French folk tale about a man named Bluebeard, who is among the worst husbands of all time. I’d seen the name around but had the idea he was a Jolly Roger type of pirate, but that’s Blackbeard. Bluebeard is a rich guy who tortures his wives to death. As a folk tale it has many variations, making Carter’s fever dream as close to authoritative as any. The story is told by the latest and fourth wife of a certain Marquis. She is 17. A lot is made by the Marquis of her virginity. In general, there is a lot of sexual tension with violent undertones here and an interesting, shocking appearance of the c-word. The tale often feels ripe to bursting. The Marquis gives her a choker made of rubies, for example: “His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like an extraordinarily precious slit throat.” She goes on: “After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos who’d escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound.” It’s not a “modern” retelling—written in the 1970s, it is set explicitly in the 19th century. In that way it is like what Ray Russell did with his “gothic” stories. “The Bloody Chamber” goes to dark if improbable places after the Marquis is called away on business during the honeymoon. He hands over all the keys to his mansion to his child bride, including the key for one room she is admonished not to enter. You can guess what happens. But maybe you can’t guess what she finds. Or maybe you can.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Beast in View (1955)

This very short novel by Margaret Millar won an Edgar Award in 1956 for Best Novel, but I’m really not so sure and even have some impulse to argue with various internet reviewers who also think it’s great. For one thing, it’s full of the usual outdated midcentury ideas such as a woman’s life is over if she reaches the age of 30 without being married and having kids. It’s easy to take potshots at stuff like this, but it’s hard to avoid the temptation here. Another complaint was that people in this story were hearing from old friends on the phone but never recognizing their voice. It’s possible that can be explained away by the reveal at the end, but it doesn’t help the issue before that. Probably the worst thing to contemporary sensibilities is the treatment of a gay man, presented as more like mentally ill. The reveal of his sexuality is apparently meant to explain all his erratic behavior, except it doesn’t really. Nevertheless, Beast in View won one of the most prestigious awards for mystery/suspense fiction. It’s also included in the Library of America two-volume series of suspense novels by women crime writers. I can’t explain it, and for that matter have to say I didn’t find most of the eight suspense novels in the series that good, although one or two (notably Mischief) are great. This is one of the weakest. There are also some mumbo-jumbo plot devices here about multiple personality disorders, which were not understood well in 1955. But they made handy devices in more novels than just this one. Seems like Jim Thompson turned to them frequently as well. This is the second novel by Millar I’ve read—maybe I’m not getting to the best because neither one did much for me. I’m more surprised actually that these LOA choices are coming up so short because its American Noir series is often stellar and has no duds. Millar was married to hardboiled detective writer Ross Macdonald (aka Kenneth Millar) and won a lot of praise in her own right, more reason for surprise she has been disappointing so far. I didn’t think the characters or situations here were much believable. It’s possible Beast in View is better than a lot of mystery/suspense stuff written by men in the ‘50s but I still didn’t think it was very good. It may not be bad as a document of bad takes from the era, but that’s about its only utility as far as I can see.

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

Get Out (2017)

[First review here.]

USA / Japan, 104 minutes

Director/writer: Jordan Peele

Photography: Toby Oliver

Music: Michael Abels, Childish Gambino

Editor: Gregory Plotkin

Cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, LaKeith Stanfield, Betty Gabriel, Marcus Henderson, Stephen Root, Lil Rel Howery

[spoilers] The making of Get Out spanned the transition from the Obama to the Trump era in the US, which affected Get Out directly in terms of the way it ended. The streaming version available via Amazon Prime includes an alternate ending with explanatory voiceover from director and writer Jordan Peele, turning to horror movies after a lifetime of comedy. This career shift may not be as radical as, say, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who transitioned from comedy into national wartime leader. But it’s pretty radical, especially given that Peele’s horror movies are not just there for the sensations—though they are generally quite good at sensations—but also as a forum to discuss and enlighten contemporary and ancient racial issues. Get Out is consciously “woke” before that term was coopted and distorted by rightwing dullards. Indeed, Peele chose the Childish Gambino song “Redbone” to play with the titles at the beginning of the movie in part because the song’s chorus urges us to “stay woke.”

Get Out is also funny, with a premise that is sitcom gold: Black boyfriend Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) is being taken Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner style by his white girlfriend Rose Armitage (Allison Williams) to meet her family in a distant, affluent New York suburb. Chris has his concerns about how they will take him as a Black man, but Rose tells him not to worry. They’re not racist. They would have voted for Obama for a third term if they could have, which her father Dean Armitage (Bradley Whitford), a neurosurgeon, later confirms word for word. But once there we see Chris had good reason for concern. The white family is awkwardly welcoming but can’t help constantly revealing their unconscious racism, of which the Obama comment is a great example. But there are more disturbing undercurrents as well, more than Chris or any of us might have expected, such as Black servants who are hostile and zombie-like by turns. There’s often an uneasy sense of just how isolated this place is.

“The Wine-Dark Sea” (1966)

My introduction to Robert Aickman: I impulsively picked up the collection for which this is the title story because I kept noticing Aickman’s name coming up. The story is reasonably representative of him, certainly in its rather longer length of about 50 pages. It reminded me quite a bit of John Fowles’s novel The Magus, also set among the islands of Greece. The Magus was published in 1965, so conceivably it was of some direct influence here. Both seem to feel they can hear the footfalls of ancient Olympian gods beyond the mist of the modern-day Greek islands. “The Wine-Dark Sea” is the story of a man, Grigg, who steals a boat to visit a small island off the coast of a much larger island where he is vacationing. Grigg is drawn to the small island first by the strange and unexplained hostility of the people living on the larger island. No one will take him there and no one will really explain why. They won’t even rent him a boat if that’s where he’s going. So he steals one—later he’s told he would be “torn to pieces” if he tried to return it. On the island are three beautiful women—Lek, Tal, and Vin—who tell him they are sorceresses. They bear an equally hostile attitude toward “Greeks,” though they often seem to be talking more about the ancient variety. There’s a lot of interesting undercurrent to all this, mixing in elements of ancient mythology, not just sirens but gods and alchemies of earth, fire, air, and water. It resolves in apocalyptic fashion, with a stupefying revelation of what lies beneath the island, and with just enough explanation to make it almost perfectly, mysteriously resonant. Until then the horror, the weird, the strange, such as it is, is barely there, but something nags at you. The story casts a spell, reminding me in some ways of experiences on LambdaMOO, the one-time online collaborative creative space, gentle, daffy, but with hard edges glinting out of the murk that might slice you. “The Wine-Dark Sea,” intimations of Homer and all, is ultimately a kind of tragedy, but so removed we can’t entirely feel it. It works slowly, at the deeper levels I’ve come to know of Aickman. It’s a great way to start with him.

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

The History of the Minnesota Vikings (2023)

I was happy as could be to see Dorktown taking on the woeful tale of the Minnesota Vikings. Woeful, that is, as perceived by most, including me, and as debunked by Dorktown with their usual veracity and mind-numbing statistical detail. The Vikings are the football team tarred for going on 50 years with the label of “can’t win the big one.” (Later joined by the Buffalo Bills. Both teams have made four trips to the Super Bowl only to be turned away in defeat. The Bills did it in four consecutive years. The Vikings did it in four of the first 11 Super Bowls. It’s the reason I have been hoping last year and this for a Bills-Vikings matchup—someone would have to win.) But wait, Dorktown principals Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein are here to set the record straight as only they can. They say early it would take them seven hours to tell all the Vikings stories—in the end, it’s closer to 10 spread across seven episodes going decade by decade (the team’s glorious ‘70s get two). And they probably didn’t tell all the stories. Perhaps Dorktown’s most salient point about the Vikings is that their winning percentage across the Super Bowl era is stellar, one of the best, bettered only by the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers, with the New England Patriots starting to nip at their heels. It’s a record of remarkable consistency and high level of play, not able to win the big one notwithstanding. Full disclosure, though I grew up with them—the first episode covering the ‘60s brought back some memories of home so intensely it made me cry—I was never much of a fan. In my hippie years, and still, to some extent (if indeed my hippie years are over), I was opposed to organized sports generally and football specifically. I can’t claim to be a Vikings fan but at least I can tell you, in case you didn’t know, that Prince’s obsession with the color purple is because of this football team.

Bois declares, in a summary statement, “Only one team can call themselves the Minnesota Vikings, the carvers of the runes, the great American storytellers.” I’m not sure exactly what he means by that but there are hours and hours of great stories here, some of which fans may have gratefully forgotten. I guarantee you’ll be surprised by how many there are, and while many are quite painful, even vicariously, they are often inspirational in some way too. Defensive tackle Alan Page, for example, played for the Vikings 11 years, finished law school, became an attorney, became a judge, and, in 1993, became a justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court. Quarterback Fran Tarkenton saw into the future and created a style of quarterback play that ultimately caught on, even if decades later. He’s also, by happenstance and grit determination, now one of the richest men who ever played the game. Two postseason victories—one in 1980, the other in 2018—are certifiable miracles, the moments we are looking for when we look at sports. I love how much Jon Bois loves Bud Grant, who made an argument shortly before his death earlier this year about what makes football unique. The ball is not round and not always easy to handle—drop it, and no one knows what it’s going to do. It’s all luck. I’d say, with The History of the Minnesota Vikings, Dorktown has knocked another one out of the park, but that’s the wrong sports metaphor. Say they put it through the uprights (unlike, in the most unexpected ways imaginable, two Vikings kickers covered here). (Note to Dorktown: now do the Mets, please.)

Ace (2020)

Science journalist Angela Chen takes a dive into the “A” section of the ever-growing LGBTQIA+ coalition—asexuality. As a self-described asexual herself, she includes personal details of her own experience as well as numerous interviews with others on these complex spectrums. I found myself, as a perhaps out-of-touch fogey, quickly bewildered by the intersectionalities of romance, gender, sexuality, and more. Chen has also read widely in the literature of gender and related studies, pointing ways for further reading. As I should have expected, most of my understanding of asexuality was incomplete at best. Chen also talks about another wrinkle, related but distinct, which is a spectrum from romantic to aromantic. An asexual person may be romantic—that is, seeking a type of emotional fulfillment in others—and an aromantic person may be sexual. In fact, that’s exactly a stereotype of men’s sexuality. People are also situated on a straight / gay scale as well. It gets complicated, but Chen does a pretty good job of sorting it out. The personal stories were much more interesting for me than the theory. If I were younger, I might have been more interested in the theory; I was often intimidated by gender and sexuality in the past. Chen also examines issues of sexuality and asexuality among disabled people. I think the basic point here is the importance of self-awareness and honesty in clearly understanding one’s needs and desires. It’s all made more complicated, of course, by the values of society at large, which are often still both intolerant and at the same time crudely hypersexualized. Chen discusses the issues of asexuals being considered sex-negative, prudish, or even sick, physically and/or psychologically. In one of the most interesting sections, she makes a point of differentiating asexuals from incels, who define themselves as involuntarily celibate. She explodes one of the biggest myths about asexuals, which is that they are celibate as a rule. That’s not true at all, she says. Many have and acknowledge desires for intimacy, which they find in ways other than sex. Ace gave me a lot to think about in terms of sex and how centered it has been for me for a lot of my life, and how ubiquitous and constant social pressure is for just that. How harmful and wrong it is to pity people without partners. How many ways there are to partner with people. And more. Good stuff here.

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