“Afterward” (1910)

[spoilers] My first Edith Wharton horror story is in The Dark Descent and for once I don’t think editor David G. Hartwell was trying too hard to pump up the volume on literary credibility. Wharton is obviously good at this—far better than her mentor Henry James, who could rarely get out of his own way when it came to horror. I still need to take another look at “The Turn of the Screw.” At any rate, Wharton’s story does involve Americans living in Europe, or anyway England. Our young American couple rents a house in the English countryside that is reputed to be haunted. They joke about wanting to meet a ghost, but there’s an unusual twist to this one. It’s only later (“afterward”) that you understand the ghost or haunting. This is a strange, almost arch concept, not easily grasped, but the payoff is quite good. The couple seems like an ideal of American innocents, but shade soon begins to fall on the husband. We see he is worried about something and hiding it from his wife. We know we need to keep an eye on that. But mostly the Jamesian air holds sway of light banter, blue skies, and easy good fortune. Then Wharton springs a big surprise when the husband suddenly disappears and is never heard from again. She knocks us off balance as we are not prepared for the unexplained disappearance of a main character. The events of the day are detailed up to the point where peak annoyance has begun to turn to anxiety. The next section starts two weeks later, with a police investigation underway and the wife with a bad feeling. As the weeks and months elapse, she begins to remember things that are a little ghostly and only become more so as she gradually adds up clues and learns what her husband was involved in that enabled them to move to England and pursue their easy, carefree way of life. I’ve given away the main surprise of this story, but the surprise is not the point of it. Wharton is careful from the start to make her characters vividly felt, as normal or bland and humdrum as they may seem. While many things are explained, the ghost story aspect is not. It exists at the center of the story as a mystery that can’t be understood or penetrated even. And like all the folks in this story say, you only really get it afterward, as the inescapable futility of explanation becomes apparent. Very nicely done.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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“Amour Dure” (1887)

This long story by Vernon Lee is epistolary, presented as a series of diary entries by one Spiridion Trepka, starting in August 1885. I’m calling it a Christmas story because that is when—and that is how—it climaxes, with a finish that may fairly be called stunning. Trepka is a poor young Pole, an art historian with a burgeoning enough career to be able to travel to Italy on a modest grant to pursue his studies. He’s keenly aware of his native country’s relatively lower cultural position in the scheme of things. His research leads to his discovery of a historical figure (fictional, I’m pretty sure—I hope), Medea da Carpi. Her motto, emblazoned on her jewelry: “Amour Dure – Dure Amour.” “Hard love” seems the best and most apt translation. This story is long and very slow, especially in the first two-thirds, Part I, where we are brought along as Trepka discovers this woman in the historical literature, learns details of her appalling life, and falls in love with her. Spiridion, we hardly knew ye. Medea da Carpi’s story is riveting, a notorious woman emerging slowly from the mists of history and fragments of the documents Trepka examines. There’s a good payoff for all this in Part II. I love the complications of Medea da Carpi’s life, which is full of intrigue and seduction as she pushes herself into high social position purely by the power of a ruthless will. She betrays and murders or sees murdered a series of increasingly powerful lovers. It takes place in the 16th century or so, some 300 years before Trepka reassembles the story. But one day, now getting into December in the diary entries, Trepka receives a note signed by her. He recognizes her signature and handwriting from the documents. It’s a short note—she wants to meet him late at night at a church. Trepka had seen this church in town before and thought it abandoned and unused. But he finds a gathering and a service taking place when he gets there at the appointed time late at night. If you think this is heading for some bad end, you’re probably right. Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget, a prolific essayist and feminist as well as fiction writer. As with E. Nesbit and Margaret Bowen, it’s the gender-based rage and sense of oppression that fascinates me most in Lee’s horror stories. “Slow burn” is a reasonable enough way to describe “Amour Dure.” It required a fair amount of patience. The language is relatively straightforward, but the revelations are slippery to trace, only come into focus slowly, and then the story hits very hard.

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Trout Fishing in America (1967)

I have always thought of this slender Richard Brautigan volume as a novel proper, but Wikipedia calls it a novella, which is fair. It’s not even 200 pages in mass market size. It was written in 1961 but it has a decided summer of love twang—strange, funny, absurdist, deceptively light-hearted. I loved this stuff when I was 18 but sadly it has lost a lot of its charm. It's still a lively little read, remarkable for something with virtually no narrative thread. I liked Brautigan’s native confidence that he could write anything that entered his head and I loved his loopy indulgent metaphors and various flights. I’m still OK with them, but his biography does cast some pall over it now. He committed suicide at the age of 49 and by all reports was a miserable man. A lot of his attitudes toward women are already notably antiquated, not so much toxic as wince-worthy but sometimes toxic. Ultimately he is still daffy and gentle enough that I’m willing to give him a pass, being dead and all. I have some sense that In Watermelon Sugar may presently be his best-liked novel (and/or story collection and/or poetry collection), but Trout Fishing was always up there. In fact, insofar as Brautigan was ever taken seriously, Trout Fishing in America usually went to the head of the class. “Trout fishing in America” means many different things here, including places and people’s names, but one of them is trout fishing in America. Brautigan is plainly aware and enamored of Ernest Hemingway, and Mark Twain too, and he is working consciously in their traditions—combining the humor of Twain with Hemingway’s nouns-and-verbs rhythms and stoic low-energy depression. Brautigan also knows trout fishing the sporting activity, injecting it with veracity as needed into the ongoing surreal twists. Trout Fishing is dreamy and weird, sometimes petty and foolish, more often making things work on their own terms. I still like the spirit but rereading it all these years later did not do much for me. It’s just not as inspired as Brautigan seemed to think it was and many of his recurring poetic devices—such as a statue of Benjamin Franklin in San Francisco—are evocative but a little lame and underdeveloped. But he may be winning over new readers and that’s good to hear. I see him discussed on booktube. He lives on for Harry Styles who wrote a song about watermelon sugar and he lives on for the kid in 1994 who legally changed his name to Trout Fishing in America. For me, Brautigan is a sad figure with an elfin side that can win you over if you have a big enough heart, not that I always do. His humor can be sharp and precise. Worth a look.

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

It Happened One Night (1934)

USA, 105 minutes

Director: Frank Capra

Writers: Robert Riskin, Samual Hopkins Adams

Photography: Joseph Walker

Music: Howard Jackson

Editor: Gene Havlick

Cast: Clark Gable, Claudette Colbert, Walter Connolly, Roscoe Karns, Alan Hale, Ward Bond, Jameson Thomas, Arthur Hoyt, Frank Capra

Going on 90 years later, there is lots of trivia to discover about the sprightly It Happened One Night. Men’s undershirt sales reportedly fell after Clark Gable tears off his shirt in one scene and reveals a bare chest. The picture stands as an early marker of screwball comedy, arguably one of the most popular of all time as, among other things, It Happened One Night made a sweep at the Oscars that has only been matched since by One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Silence of the Lambs. My favorite piece of trivia is that Looney Tunes animator Friz Freleng wrote that the movie influenced the creation of Bugs Bunny. In one scene Clark Gable is eating carrots and talking fast and Roscoe Karns as a minor character on a Greyhound bus has a habit of calling people “Doc.” It may not be much but it’s an honest influence.

I think it's interesting to note that It Happened One Night is considered pre-Code, released just four months before the Hays Code went into effect policing the content of movies. Yes, the picture is somewhat candid about sexuality—candid for 1934, let’s say—but I’m always more shocked by Clark Gable’s roguish brand, before and after the Code. Only James Cagney was a worse role model. Peter Warne (Gable) is a vaguely corrupt, hard-drinking newspaperman who can tell a woman to shut up and make it stick. Warne tells his future father-in-law that his daughter Ellie (Claudette Colbert) needs “a guy that’d take a sock at her once a day, whether it’s coming to her or not.” This, of course, seals the deal with Ellie’s father. He's all for Warne now. Next stop, Peter and Ellie with a baby carriage.

Horror in the High Desert (2021)

SPOILERS, STOP READING AND WATCH THIS MOVIE IMMEDIATELY!!! I wandered into Horror in the High Desert on a bleary night’s trek about the internet, looking for something to look at. Nowadays I tend to default to true-crime content (“content,” we call it). With true-crime, even if the production values are down, which they are more often than not, many times the cases themselves make up for it in terms of interest values. I thought Horror in the High Desert was pretty good, but I have to admit it fooled me and that might have been exactly what made it work. When I checked in over at IMDb, I found a clear line of demarcation: those who knew ahead of time what they were getting into didn’t like it much (overall 5.4 with 3,400 ranking). Those fooled by it, like me, did tend to like it, writing reviews and rating it with an average closer to 8.0. Among other things it makes this a tricky review to write. In general, I’m more impatient than sympathetic with people who get mad about spoilers (especially things that are decades or centuries old), but at the same time I have to admit that some of my best movie/reading experiences are “unspoiled,” that is, entering them without a clue. LAST CHANCE STOP READING NOW! The fact is that this picture is not true-crime at all, but rather another found-footage horror. I had my qualms about the story as it unspooled, involving a hiker who disappeared. In retrospect it’s easy to see—now that I know—how a lot of it even verges on true-crime parody. Notably the interviews are off, a little too hysterical. But there’s a lot of cringy stuff all over true-crime anyway, and this story moves swiftly with alluring clues and mysteries. The last 20 minutes were as scary as anything I can remember seeing in a while. It’s also when I realized the picture is probably fiction, although I certainly enjoyed the round of terrors it provided in the moment and immediately after. But the bloom comes off the rose here pretty fast in terms of final judgment. It also puts me in a bit of a muddle. I truly enjoyed it, but immediately began to think less of it once I knew more. Would I have had the same reactions if I had understood what it was going in? Frankly, I’m not sure I would have even looked at it, nor have I even been tempted to go back and look at it again for a better sense of how it was done. How it was done is that I’ve been watching a lot of true-crime for some time and adjusted my expectations for that. The case isn’t even as interesting as a lot of disappearances. But it was good enough, it hooked me enough, and then it fooled me enough that it produced the kind of scares I like to get from horror movies. Surprise has a lot to do with it.

Masters of Doom (2003)

I learned a lot and remembered a lot in David Kushner’s account of the developers responsible for the video game sensation Doom (and Quake, among many others). I never played it much myself, mainly because I’m never good at any game based on hand-eye coordination. But I knew a lot of people who went for Doom hard. I even worked with a group who set up so-called “death match” bouts and went at it on their (slightly extended) lunch hour. I bought my first PC in 1988 and was a consumer of shareware, including games, and later went to work for Microsoft doing content chores. So I have been adjacent to a lot of the milieu described in this perfectly delightful book. But of course there was much more I didn’t know, starting with the term “Silicon Alamo” for a game creation nexus in Texas and Louisiana (compare “Silicon Valley” and “Silicon Alley”). Doom is most famously the origin of first-person shooter games, which among other things Joe Lieberman blamed for Columbine. In a way it's not hard to see how you get there. The basic goal of Doom is to kill everything you can, and the rich graphic environment leaned into that with shrieking on the soundtrack, gore, and a lot of splatter-type special effects. One of the game’s many innovations was the persistence of corpses, which had generally been cleaned up quickly in most games before it. The U.S. Marines picked up Doom for training purposes, whatever you might want to make of that. I think of these games, including Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty (which I also know only by reputation ... Kushner actually has another book that looks good about GTA)—think of them more as cathartic than anything, in addition to the fun and kick of any game. They may be triggers for unstable people, and we seem to have a lot of unstable people around the place nowadays, but that’s as far as I’m willing to go to condemn them. I also loved the way Kushner’s story goes deep into the strange, utopian world of shareware. I missed a lot of the origins of Doom there but was off on my own little gaming adventures, notably Hack aka The Amulet of Yendor. Masters of Doom is a great tour of computer gaming in the ‘90s. It’s appropriately fast-paced, readable, and highly entertaining. If you played Doom and/or Quake then you’re probably going to want to play them again. If you ever stopped.

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

Big Iron’s Honkey-Tonk Holidays (1997)

This anthology from the Big Iron label offers a festive mess of Texas, Xmas, and booze. Original tunes are mixed with a motley of holiday chestnuts, usually of the more lighthearted variety: “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Looked a Lot Like Daddy,” etc. Leading the way on the freewheeling irreverent front is “Alcoholidays” by the Sutcliffs, generally the first song that jumps out, with its memorable chorus of “Old Grand-Dad, Budweiser / It’s good to be drunk again.” True confession, they are sentiments I have lived in holiday seasons past. But the rollicking Honkey-Tonk Holidays is not all western swing mockery and drunkenness. The Sutcliffs may complain that “Little Drummer Boy” is giving them a headache, but Andy Owens & Druha Trava cover it later. There’s room for many points of view here, with sweet country (and/or “alt-country” if we must), a very nice blues or two, and traditional / religious stuff as well, driven by lovely arrangements with horns, a fiddle as needed, and lots of rockin’ good guitar. There’s even an Elvis impersonator to round things off. The Mutineers play “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” like a Halloween fright-fest, with the dark “oh-wee-oh wee-ohhh-oh” chant that signifies the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz at home in her castle safehold—it’s Santa Claus as Satan Claus. You better be good. Cowboys & Indians takes jolly St. Nick a more conventional way on “Santa, Santa,” pleading with him to bring his baby back. “I got cookies, milk, whatever you need.” “Christmas Made for Two” by Mark David Manders & Nuevo Tejas is just beautiful. And the Old 97’s—the only act here I even sort of know—demonstrate as countless others before them that it is virtually impossible to ruin the tender wartime ballad “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.” It always sounds good. I suppose you could give it the Roseanne Barr treatment, but please don’t. Honkey-Tonk Holidays is a terrific little Christmas set. I don’t even remember now how I came to acquire it, but I happen to know my brother owns a copy too and I assumed it was in the generally wide currency of things these days. When I came to write it up, however, I discovered how obscure it has become. Apologies! But you really have to hear it once if you can. Happy holidays all!

“A Visit to Santa Claus” (1957)

[spoilers?] The Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) sniffs at this story by Richard Matheson as “non-genre,” which, OK, fair enough. Call it a crime thriller story then. Either way it’s reasonably good for December, though it is soulless conte cruel in a way that Matheson and only a few others can do. It works quite well as suspense, though it trucks in the familiar midcentury trope of the homicidal marriage. This husband and wife have been together maybe 10 years, with a boy of 5, who still believes in Santa Claus. It’s December. They’re out shopping at a mall. They are tired. The kid won’t stop nagging them to see “Sanna Claus.” They have finished shopping and are at their car loading in purchases, when the husband decides he wants to humor the kid after all. They had been promising him he would see Santa on Tuesday. Now the husband says he’ll take the kid in, the wife can wait there, they won’t be long. It’s not hard to see something is off here. Why leave her waiting in the car on a cold winter night? As things unfold, we learn it's part of a nefarious plan. The husband has hired a hitman to kill his wife and this is when it’s going down. There’s a lot of business with the car keys—the wife wants them so she can pull the car up to get them when they come back out again. It’s a sensible plan, but the husband pretends he doesn’t hear her. When he drops the keys for the hitman to pick up the kid notices and calls it to his attention. Handing off the keys thus becomes a substantial part of the story, and it’s more and more apparent it’s all a harebrained scheme, hatched with a guy the husband met in a bar, and further confirmed when we learn the terms: $100 up front, $900 later. It’s not the way these things are done, as we know from movies and such—harder to say perhaps whether people were as sophisticated about murders for hire in 1957 as we are now. Matheson skillfully makes his own plot holes work for him, by making the scheme so painfully elaborate and amateurish. All kinds of complications keep coming along even as Matheson is revealing more about the plot. The kid is a perfect uncontrollable element. Yes, ISFDB, it has no supernatural or fantasy elements. It’s just an incident in December. But if it’s Matheson you can count on getting hooked and then getting a ride. This story goes to a bleak place, of course, with a twist of a twist of an ending, but that’s all just the usual drill. Get it on your kindle and read it at the food circus in your mall while taking a break from shopping.

The Best of Richard Matheson, ed. Victor LaValle
Story not available online.

Fools’ Gold (1958)

This novel by Dolores Hitchens is one of the best in the Women Crime Writers Library of America collections, second only to Charlotte Armstrong’s Mischief. Sadly, a lot of these short novels seemed way off the standards of the LOA’s American Noir series, which is essential. Fools’ Gold is the source novel for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 movie Band of Outsiders. It’s a movie worth seeing—Quentin Tarantino’s favorite Godard, I’ve heard—but not a good representation of the novel, a taut thriller that is all business about a heist going very, very wrong. The characters here are stock types but Hitchens somehow makes them lively, interesting, and believable. There is a hilarious sendup of Southern California Alcoholics Anonymous culture, apparently already in place in 1958—a mix of seeing the light of spiritual epiphany, on the one hand, and knocking elbows with the richies and celebs on the other. Skip is a cocky young dude of 21 who has learned via a girl he meets in a typing class, Karen, about a house where a man from Las Vegas is storing cash for some reason. Karen lives in it. She thinks there’s as much as a million dollars there. Skip’s plan is to waltz in and take it. Only Karen and an old woman, Mrs. Havermann, live there. Mrs. Havermann felt to me created with Miss Havisham in mind from Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations because they share many traits. Karen is Mrs. Havermann’s “ward” (whatever that means) and mistreated by her as a servant. Skip’s Uncle Willy—an ex-con who attends an AA meeting to establish an alibi and ultimately see the light—gets word of the job and brings in some serious heavies to help, like “Big Tom.” Hitchens’s bad guys are bad in many different ways. Skip is a manipulative weasel, for example. Big Tom is violent, physically powerful, and scary, like some of the worst in Elmore Leonard novels. Uncle Willy is shrewd but weak. Karen means well but she is naïve and easily manipulated. The story of the owner of the house and the cash, Stolz, basically spells doom for this caper but no one in this story figures it out until too late. That’s another thing I like about it. It’s mostly downbeat, but there is one very nice story of redemption. Fools’ Gold is well balanced in general, ranging from the suspense promised in the series title (and too rarely delivered on in the series) to some very funny scenes, rooted believably in these characters Hitchens has created, this great cast. Very good one at the very end of this series.

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

Uncut Gems (2019)

USA, 135 minutes

Directors: Benny Safdie, Josh Safdie

Writers: Ronald Bronstein, Josh Safdie, Benny Safdie

Photography: Darius Khondji

Music: Daniel Lopatin

Editors: Ronald Bronstein, Benny Safdie

Cast: Adam Sandler, Julia Fox, LaKeith Stanfield, Kevin Garnett, Idina Menzel, Eric Bogosian, Mike Francesca, Judd Hirsch, The Weeknd, Tilda Swinton, Natasha Lyonne

Adam Sandler appears to be one of those actors—Sylvester Stallone and John Travolta might be two others—who have a surprising amount of ability to perform when they are motivated but seem to be more often satisfied to run the paces of uninspired but potentially boffo payday productions. Every now and then something seems to get into them—some hunger for respect in their chosen craft, or maybe they just want an Oscar after all—and they take on roles that demand the best from them. By my admittedly biased and perhaps ignorant count (set me straight, please), Sandler has made two of them: the highly eccentric Punch-Drunk Love from 2002, and this relentless, over-the-top thriller directed and cowritten by the Safdie brothers Benny and Josh. Sandler is better-known (per IMDb) for the comedies Big Daddy (1999), Little Nicky (2000), The Waterboy (1998), and The Wedding Singer (1998). Due to mostly peer pressure, I have seen Shakes the Clown (1991), Happy Gilmore (1996), and Hubie Halloween (2020), all of which have their dim pleasures and may be best seen with someone already prone to like them. Shakes the Clown is the best and I don’t know if it’s a coincidence that I don’t remember Sandler in it.

As for the Safdie brothers, I was impressed enough with Uncut Gems to go back and check out the thriller Good Time (2017), which I thought was also pretty good. Uncut Gems bristles with kinetic energy and a stream of unfortunate events as New York City jewelry merchant and gambling addict Howard Ratner (Sandler) attempts to square all the various debts in his high-flying, heedless life, dealing with underworld creditors as well as his embittered estranged wife. He has a hot love affair going on the side with Julia (Julia Fox) but spends most of his time wheeling and dealing and trying to get down exotic parlay bets. A brief establishing sequence introduces us to a rock the size of a large russet potato, obtained illicitly from a mine in Ethiopia and massively embedded with opals. Then the picture starts on live footage from a colonoscopy camera, wends its way through a concert by The Weeknd, and finishes on a basketball game on TV—proving, once again, that gambling simply makes everything more intense. Here we see what is purported to be a live game 7 between the Boston Celtics featuring Kevin Garnett and the Philadelphia 76ers. There’s a lot riding on it, and we are content to spend most of the last 30 minutes or so of Uncut Gems watching this game with Ratner.

Priscilla (2023)

My moviegoing habits have changed since the pandemic and are still out of focus. I finally went back into theaters earlier this year. My first preference is this newfangled 10 a.m. Tuesday matinee at the multiplexes, although the choices are not as good as at the local art house. I’ve seen a bunch of morning movies with only one or two others in attendance or even by myself. So I was a little set back to find my 11 a.m. matinee of Sofia Coppola’s latest just simply packed. Yes, it was the opening week, but come on. They all looked like retired biker outlaws. I guess that figures, given it’s an Elvis Presley movie, based on Priscilla Presley’s outrageously entertaining 1985 memoir, Elvis and Me. These days the seating in my multiplexes is all assigned and I was thoroughly nonplussed to find one such outlaw and his chick taking seats right next to me and carrying on for the duration as if they were sitting in their living room. They would remember things like that RCA was Elvis’s major label after Sun. Save it for later! I was further nonplussed to recall that I still hadn’t seen Baz Luhrmann’s much-celebrated Elvis from a year or two ago. It seemed to me in this bad moment that I really should have looked at it before seeing Priscilla. But you can’t do everything and I made what I could of the picture at hand: Cailee Spaeny is effective playing the title role low-key, Jacob Elordi did not impress much as an Elvis impersonator, and in general it is faithful to the book but the book is better, for example in bringing out the bizarre sexual tensions of their early relationship. I chalk up the feeling of restrained veracity to Priscilla Presley’s role on the picture as an executive producer. Priscilla is worth seeing for Elvis and/or Sofia Coppola completists. It’s all a bit wooden, but, as always, Coppola’s soundtrack choices are intriguing and often startlingly appropriate, including the Ramones’ cover of “Baby, I Love You” under the titles, “Crimson and Clover” during the late ‘50s period, Brenda Lee’s “Sweet Nothin’s,” and a bunch of hip-hop that worked when you might think it wouldn’t. No word on that from the couple sitting next to me.

I couldn’t shake my self-accusatory mood of being a lazy underachiever, so I hurried home after the credits started to roll and took a look at Elvis online. Yes, my heart sank when I saw it was almost three hours long, but it turned out to be entertaining and a lot more lively than Priscilla. Of course, Priscilla has the advantage of being far closer to the truth. I have already filed director Baz Luhrmann under unrepentant fantasist, for better or worse—The Great Gatsby no, Moulin Rouge maybe, and in general he’s one of those “from the mind of” guys. Austin Butler as Elvis has been oversold, I think, but he is good and has a few moments where he is almost transcendent. Tom Hanks in prosthetics, I believe (or is it CGI?), plays Colonel Tom Parker as a simpering manipulative huckster—he’s not bad, but the script is. Elvis is more telling the story of Parker, not Elvis. And it’s basically just riffing on the legend and known facts: Elvis, under Parker’s management, blazed onto the scene in 1956 and got in trouble for his lewd stage moves. He was drafted and served his time. He spent much of the ‘60s making bad movies. He had a big comeback TV special in 1968 and then became a star in amber in Las Vegas. He took a lot of pharmaceuticals and eventually died from them. It's all dutifully here, but the motivations offered are insane, or at least depart from what I thought I knew. He’s explicitly forced into the Army to get him off the stage, for example. He is defiant toward Colonel Parker, notably in the TV special, whereas I’ve always heard he was absolutely deferential to Parker (he certainly is in Priscilla). I take it that these things “made narrative sense” to Luhrmann and his cowriters Sam Bromell and Craig Pearce because they aren’t the way I understand Elvis’s career or even his legend exactly. On the other hand, looking up the song “Trouble,” I see that it was indeed written in 1958 by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. But I’m pretty sure Elvis never used it to stir up a riot at a show in the South circa 1957 where he was closely watched by authorities. “Trouble” is more famous for being Elvis’s opening number on the TV special. But OK, fine, never mind. Elvis can be vastly entertaining even as it mangles my sense of history (which might be wrong?). Priscilla looks and feels closer to the truth, but it’s not as exciting. Still, it’s a great double feature, and I swear too that I saw them in the right order.

Poor Cedric’s Almanac (1952)

I had a blast revisiting this collection of column fragments by Cedric Adams, a Minneapolis-based journalist who also had a career on radio. Arthur Godfrey wrote an introduction and Bob Hope kicked in a postscript, so you can tell Adams had some profile in 1952, if you’ve never heard of him. It was a book my parents had that I took down off the shelf and read and loved when I was 9 or 10 or 11. It has a lot of the breezy gossip columnist style, with boldface type and such, but the topics are less about celebrities and more like a parade of what we now call factoids. Reading is more like browsing a strange collection of trivia. It’s culled from Adams’s column writing in the 1930s and 1940s and breaks down into topics like the weather, health, children, etc. The section labeled “S - E - X” is not once ever about s-e-x but only marriage and dating. I’m not exactly nostalgic for stuff this coy and chaste but I will say it’s refreshing. A lot of the nostalgia that is there comes from finding some of the items of my conventional wisdom which have stuck. For example, Adams writes that scientists have determined—scientists have determined lots of things here but nothing is sourced (it’s a chatty newspaper lifestyle column, Jake)—that humans respond more quickly to green lights than to reds and thus ideally they should be reversed in traffic lights. But of course it’s too late now or even in the 1940s. Absolutely trivial things like that have stayed with me all this time. If you are inclined to read it you should be prepared for a full blast of midcentury values, for better and worse. Race is utterly invisible, and gender is pretty much hopeless. Most of the advice for women is about housework. There is a syrupy father-and-son heart-to-heart thing that recurs frequently. It has a fair amount of Minneapolis and Minnesota detail and lore that appealed to me then and still. I think a lot of my appreciation for trivia may have started here. The publication date is 1952 but the material is older than that, extending back into the 1930s. Among other things it is familiar with WPA projects, so it’s even a little bit older than it appears. I instinctively reject most of Adams’s obviously well-intended advice and also have to admit to regular wincing. But I can’t deny Poor Cedric’s Almanac is very charming and a lot of fun.

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

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

USA, 14 minutes

Directors: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

Writer: Maya Deren

Photography: Alexander Hammid

Editor: Maya Deren

Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

I warmed up for writing about this 14-minute experimental film by looking at the 103-minute 2002 documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren. I had seen Meshes of the Afternoon previously, via youtube videos of varying quality with and without a soundtrack, and not had much patience for it. I particularly did not like the nun-like figure with a mirror for a face, which reminded me too much of Luis Bunuel and his work, notably Un Chien Andalou, although it is L'Age d'Or where he really starts getting carried away with nuns. And it’s not really exactly a nun here anyway, but never mind. In the Mirror covers all of Deren’s abbreviated career (she died in 1961 at the age of 44) and her six or so movies. Deren was another beneficiary of last year’s Sight & Sound poll, ultimately elevating Meshes of the Afternoon from #277 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? up to #99, though she does not appear again in the list of 1,000. I suspect other pictures by her may be better, but Meshes also has depths that are remarkable for a little 14-minute cinema play. In fairness, it is merely her very first film whereas especially the footage she shot in Haiti, clips seen in In the Mirror, looks more interesting to me. I thus still had some bias against Meshes of the Afternoon going in again. Then I had a hard time getting comfortable at first with the “intentional silence,” enforced by Deren with intentional markers of sound such as a record-player playing a record. But I came to like it for that, especially when I peeked in on a youtube version with music. Meshes is mostly a dream story, and the dream stories we have at night after all are mostly silent. Meshes is rooted in feminist anxiety, if I’m reading it right, but with its own internal logic as dream narrative more or less, with potent symbols and/or artifacts of the mundane day—the flower, the key, the knife.

It has the inexplicable physical forces and dislocations of dreams too when the dreamer within the dream (Deren) is blown down a staircase, and later when she is edited down and up the same staircase after an unsettling encounter. It is randomly erotic. There is a lot of clarity to how the scenes are staged and shot, and the use of repetition is skillful. Even so, for all the force of Deren’s vision, it often feels much like what it is, some fooling around with a motion-picture camera in the glintingly bright sunshine and etched shadows of California, albeit at the same time admittedly visionary somehow. I found the more I looked at Meshes the better it seemed to get. I have some trouble, I must admit, adjusting to such a purely visual experience as this little 14-minute workout delivers. All of Deren’s films are on youtube, as far as I could see, even a 52-minute 1985 documentary which appears to be the only way to see her Haiti footage. It’s called Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, put together by Cherel and Teiji Ito, finally released eight years later. Teiji Ito was Deren’s second husband, 18 years her junior, married when they were 43 and 25. The youtube video is typically frustrating, with burnt-in Spanish (Portuguese?) subtitles and footage obviously decayed by iterations of duplication. But Deren’s seeming rapport and intimacy with these Haitians gave her amazing access to some remarkable rituals and wonderful, mesmerizing music and dance, which generally come through fine. Voiceovers by John Genke and Joan Pape provide some useful information when they are not sounding like educational films for classrooms. Maya Deren—start with Meshes of the Afternoon, I suppose, fair enough, and then proceed.

“The Old Portrait” (1890)

I thought it was unusual to find this Hume Nisbet story in the Vampire Tales anthology for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the second Nisbet story in the volume. Not many other writers here—which includes most of the public domain greats—get that treatment, and it is a large volume. Then, even though both stories are dated incorrectly—both as 1900, whereas ISFDB has both as 1890—they are separated by other stories. I know this anthology was put together by a person or people taking advantage of the ease of scraping online public domain material, and probably doing it in a hurry, but generally they seem to know what they’re doing. Just so, both “The Old Portrait” and “The Vampire Maid” are pretty good. “The Old Portrait” is Nisbet’s first published story, per ISFDB, and the better of the two. Nisbet (not to be confused with E. Nesbit) may be worth seeking out further. “The Old Portrait” is very short, with a somewhat strained yet intriguing premise. Our first-person narrator has a hobby and keen interest in picture frames and framing, which is how we get to “the old portrait” he has acquired for the frame on a December day. Picture and frame are so dirty none of the details of the image or woodwork can be made out. On Christmas Eve, our guy goes to work gently with soap and hot water and eventually finds an image that “asserted its awful crudeness, vile drawing, and intense vulgarity.” Good thing he bought it just for the frame! But hark, it turns out the vile portrait of some publican and his jewelry was actually painted over something else, which in turn our guy goes to work industriously removing. After midnight, he finds the image of a woman, and then the image begins to hypnotize him. He describes the woman in increasing detail, in effusive and poetic terms. We can see even through this that she looks like a corpse. Well, after all, I suppose this is why we find it in an anthology called Vampire Tales (to be fair, it could also fit in Christmas-themed anthologies). These stories often involve things more accurately described as wannabe vampires. It gets to be part of their charm, and you have to classify this story as one such. The vampire lives inside the painting under a coat of paint and another of dirt. Even the ever-loving frame is now revealed as corrupt: “what had before looked like scrollwork of flowers and fruit were loathsome snake-like worms twined amongst charnel-house bones.” More developments: “I thought the frame was still on the easel with the canvas, but the woman had stepped from them and was approaching me with a floating motion.” This is another vampire story where (spoiler) the victim somehow lives to tell the tale. I like the way it takes on its vampire via the medium of painting and manages to pull it off.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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“The Tarn” (1923)

What I liked best about this story by Hugh Walpole were the descriptive passages and especially the way he used color: “October is a wonderful month in the English Lakes, golden, rich, and perfumed, slow suns moving through apricot-tinted skies to ruby evening glories; the shadows lie then thick about that beautiful country, in dark purple patches of silver gauze, in thick splotches of amber and grey.” I also like the theme of professional jealousy between two writers, or at least by our first-person narrator here for his friend of 20 years. While understandable on one level—the successful one is also shallow and obtuse—it’s bitchy and petty. But it makes the story more entertaining. I had already checked with the kindle dictionary but eventually the story gets around to telling us what a tarn is: “... a miniature lake, a pool of water lying in the lap of the hill. Very quiet, lovely, silent. Some of them are immensely deep.” I found this story in The Weird, where we can see that editors Ann and Jeff VanderMeer are drawn to the most elemental aspects of reality crumbling into irrational unknowability (Jeff VanderMeer also wrote the source novel for the movie Annihilation). Hey, who can’t get on board with that? The one excerpt that appears in the anthology, from Alfred Kubin’s 1908 novel The Other Side, holds visions of breakdown in biological systems and even at the level of molecular structure. Here it’s just water. Push a guy into the tarn to kill him (he can’t swim, it’s late, and the water is cold), then wait and see what happens in your dreams: “He sat up higher in bed, and then saw that down the wallpaper beneath the window water was undoubtedly trickling. He could see it lurch to the projecting wood of the sill, pause, and then slip, slither down the incline.” Water with malevolent agency, defying gravity—not bad! And supported nicely by Walpole’s effusive language. It’s just, alas, not at all believable. The story veers about from crystalline description to backbiting resentments and murder and into the soggy nightmare which may or may not have “really happened.” It’s hard to say and I feel a little whipsawed by it all. Walpole has some reputation but nothing of his has really knocked me out yet. In the end, this story is a little too fanciful for my taste, but it has its points. Maybe he’s got some better stuff somewhere.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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The World of Apu (1959)

Apur Sansar, India, 105 minutes
Director: Satyajit Ray

Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray

Photography: Subrata Mitra

Music: Ravi Shankar

Editor: Dulal Dutta

Cast: Soumitra Chatterjee, Sharmila Tagore, Alok Chakravarty, Swapan Mukherjee, Dhiresh, Majumdar, Sefalika Devi, Dhiren Ghosh

The first two movies in director and cowriter Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, Pather Panchali and Aparajito, were made consecutively in two years—Ray’s very first movies. Three years and a couple of other movies intervened before Ray finished this trilogy with The World of Apu. In that time Ray’s stature as a filmmaker grew, enabling more funding, perhaps attracting better players, and certainly simply getting better at making movies. All the Apu movies are based on autobiographical novels by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, but Ray had absorbed even more of his Western influences by 1959. The World of Apu, the best of them, thus has affinities with and even stands as equal to such monumental landmarks as Fellini’s La Strada or Truffaut’s 400 Blows, rich with life and wisdom. Where Ray may have leaned somewhat mechanically into Freudian conceits in Aparajito, in The World of Apu it is Shakespeare that he turns to, much more skillfully, for its greatest resonance.

Apu has lost all his family in the first two movies of the trilogy—older sister, father, and mother—and he is alone in the world now in The World of Apu. Poverty is all he has ever known, but whereas, in Aparajito, he pursues more practical studies in science and engineering as a way out, at the beginning of The World of Apu he is unable to finish his education because he has run out of money. His interests have shifted too, from engineering to more of the literary pursuits of his father. And he appears to be good—we see, as he is leaving school, an instructor encourage him to continue writing, and we also see that a story of his has been accepted for publication. His best friend Pulu (Swapan Mukherjee) believes in him too. But Apu is among the most luckless of all movie or literary characters and the worst is yet to come—but not until after the best.

The Creator (2023)

With artificial intelligence (AI) all the rage in popular culture at the moment, here’s a war movie, robots versus human beings, that has surprisingly little of interest to say about it. AI is basically the Nazis and commies of yore in this movie, “the enemy” enough to warrant the big guns. But is AI really evil? is basically as far as it goes in the big idea department. More to the point, there’s a lot of ordnance going off here. And for the feels, there’s a story about a fiercely loving military family torn apart by the requirements of duty and humanity. But the basic deal is the robots have created a super-weapon which the humans must destroy, unless the robots can destroy the humans’ super-weapon first. For once I’m leery of spoilers—I mean, it’s still a relatively new movie—so I’m not going to get much into plot details. Instead, I have to marvel at the way director and cowriter Gareth Edwards (Rogue One, the 2014 Godzilla) basically dodges any complexities of AI, reducing his tale mostly to standard warfare battles, explosions, and high tech. Kapow! Take that! Pew-pew-pew! It has a bit of a tricksy plot, but more in the spy story vein, as it’s not always easy to discern everyone’s motivations and loyalties (let alone what is going on from scene to scene). The plot does throw up some twists and turns but not in ways that seemed very interesting to me. I wanted to know more about this AI beyond simple domination and/or survival, the basic binaries we get in movies like The Creator. It’s skillfully enough done—looks good, blows up good, has some interesting ideas about what future warfare will look like. I’ve just never been very interested in war movies—well, I did like some of the nuance in the Vietnam War movies before they hardened into cliches. But once 9/11 and the “war on terror” was part of the national experience, I really haven’t been into them, acknowledging that the cinematic innovations of, say, The Hurt Locker, offer up some exception to the general rule that war movies are a lot of tedium. The Creator, for all its pretensions to vague religiosity and heavy science fiction “evolutionary” sophistication, is too basically a war movie. If you’re into it for that, it’s not bad?

“About Barbers” (1871)

This short piece by Mark Twain is another one that seems strange to call a short story or an essay. Humor piece will do, I guess, as implied by Twain’s title. I imagined it would be about overly talkative and/or obnoxious barbers, or perhaps some antics from patrons. It has some of those things, but more goes off in a sitcom direction. Our guy is there for a shave, maybe a haircut. The barbershop has three barbers. By coincidence, by the chance of letting someone else into the shop first as they arrive, he sees the worst of the three barbers will be his. He tries to switch this up by leaving for a 15-minute stroll, but alas, when he returns he sees that this worst barber will still be his. It’s a short piece, but Twain elaborates these scenes with a good deal of detail that verges on tedious. He also details the reading choices available to him as he waits. Finally he’s called to the chair and of course it’s the barber he was trying to avoid. Things go like this: “Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the other, when a dog-fight attracted his attention, and he ran to the window and stayed and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction.” As far as essay forms go, I like the ones that are “About” something specific or general or mundane or whatever. It suggests a meditative approach, but of course we have nothing like that here. Twain is merely riffing up anecdotes that happen to involve a barber or barbers. I mean, that’s OK too. Another essay form that I like is the much more difficult humor piece. I have laughed very hard at humor pieces by Woody Allen and Ian Frazier, and then been baffled by them on later rereading—or vice versa, puzzled the first time. I include Twain as someone worth trying on humor pieces. He has the instincts and sense of timing, and his stuff has worked for me / not worked for me that way. He’s worth a try. You never know. But you should be at least a little inclined to like it before you start, or don’t even bother.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
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Modern Times (2006)

All songs on this long, thoughtful, and satisfying Bob Dylan album are credited as written by Bob Dylan even though the titles include “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” which, you know—they’ve been done. But in some alchemical process I see starting with his early-‘90s cover albums, Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong, continuing (and peaking) with “Love and Theft”, and arguably finishing up here (or maybe Together Through Life, Tempest, or Rough and Rowdy Ways, none of which I know as well because they haven’t impressed me enough to go beyond a few casual listens), it feels less like some kind of plagiarism and much more like an artist who has entirely absorbed his sources and is capable of spitting them back out in new forms—these songs feel old and new all at once. Wikipedia scholars have been hard at work identifying those sources and pulling them out of the wonderful stew of Modern Times. Muddy Waters of course for “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Bing Crosby for “When the Deal Goes Down,” Sleepy John Estes, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Muddy Waters again for “Someday Baby” (not to mention his own “Maggie’s Farm”), and ... Ovid?! ... for specific lines of the lyrics. I wanted to say Dylan wrote his own words for the various blues / country standards, which justifies his authorship, but with Ovid now in the picture all bets are off, public domain or no. Amazingly, none of this gets in the way in terms of the pleasures of these 10 long songs. I’m not exactly sure how Dylan gets away with his thievery but he does and that’s a fact. Indeed, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” and “The Levee’s Gonna Break” are high points of a very good set. Much is result of a band nearly as well-versed in the standards and with whom he had been playing on tour for the year previous. A lot of what’s great here is this sympathetic, well-rehearsed band that is so clearly in synch with him. But Dylan remains the sun around which these planets whirl. Rock critic dean Robert Christgau gave the album a rare A+, which he also applied to “Love and Theft”. I’m still more a partisan for that one, along with Time Out of Mind, operating in another sphere entirely. But Modern Times is like your favorite easy chair. You can sit in its lap every day, often hearing new things and, even when you don’t, it’s practically pure comfort. Put it on and pull up a seat.

Aparajito (1956)

India, 110 minutes

Director: Satyajit Ray

Writers: Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, Satyajit Ray, Kanailal Basu

Photography: Subrata Mitra

Music: Ravi Shankar

Editor: Dulal Dutta

Cast: Pinaki Sengupta, Karuna Bannerjee, Kanu Bannerjee, Smaran Ghosal, Ramani Sengupta

It has been nearly 10 years since I last revisited Pather Panchali, the first movie in director and cowriter Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy, but I see that the second, Aparajito, picks up within days if not hours of Pather Panchali. The Apu trilogy is a long continuous story—it begins on the day of Apu’s birth and continues into his adulthood in the third and final installment, The World of Apu. Aparajito sees the greatest changes in Apu, necessitating two actors as he grows from a boy into an adolescent and then young man. After the death of Apu’s sister in Pather Panchali, the family, now only three, leaves their home village for the big city of Varanasi (called Benares in the movie). Apu’s father cobbles together income as he can. His ambition is to be a literary writer, creating plays, poetry, and fiction, but he also serves as a community priest and picks up agricultural work as he can. In Varanasi, earning money has become the first order of business to get his family back on its feet. Even providing adequate food is becoming a problem. Sometimes he must travel and be away from his family for significant parts of a year.

While making Pather Panchali, Ray reportedly had no idea of extending the story beyond that movie. But it proved so popular he was able to get funding within a year to make Aparajito. Both are based on popular autobiographical novels by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. For Aparajito, however, Ray took artistic liberties with the source story that proved unpopular in India even though these two movies in many ways established Ray’s stature internationally. I don’t know the novels and basically admire both movies equally, as well as The World of Apu. According to the critical survey at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? Aparajito has the lowest regard—no matter how movie trilogies may be structured, it does seem like the second is often judged the weakest, perhaps because it is a kind of bridge piece.

“A Confession Found in a Prison in the Time of Charles the Second” (1840)

This very short story by Charles Dickens is also found under a shorter title—"The Mother’s Eyes”—but the long title works better, I think, because it’s less a story and more what the title tells us, a confession, written on the eve of an execution. It seems to be Dickens trying to imagine his way into the homicidal mindset, with a scene a bit like Edgar Allan Poe’s in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” a story that came three years after this one. Not sure whether Poe knew this piece. This narrator is no raving lunatic, save perhaps when the bloodhounds show up and give his game away. But he is coldly fixated on his victim, his nephew, a young child. He does not get along with his brother, who has been more the fair-haired popular one in his family, but the two of them married sisters. He did not get along well with his sister-in-law either, who seemed to be deeply mistrustful of him. Both the brother and his wife die, however, and the surviving son comes to live with the narrator and his wife, at which point the narrator’s fixation worsens considerably. This is basically where the shorter title comes from, as reference is made to the resemblance between mother and son and the way the narrator may have caught either of them staring at him mistrustfully. Then he describes the murder, which is fully premeditated yet just as fully unexplained. I must say Dickens is quick and skillful injecting various horror elements and putting them to work. He has his part in inventing horror perhaps as much as anyone, as here we see a version of Jim Thompson’s Killer Inside Me. It’s even more believable because it’s not jokey. This killer also knows the difference between right and wrong. He’s just driven to do it. His explanations make no sense—some kind of past rift with the mother, the sister-in-law? What kind of rift? He has nothing to do with her death. But the lack of explanation only serves to make it more unsettling. Knowing when not to explain is no simple or easy skill. At the same time, in many ways in 1840 the short story itself was still being invented. So there’s also a sense that Dickens is just getting up a head of steam and trying stuff. I like the spirit of it. A confession found in a prison—it’s a great idea. I like the anonymity of the document too. The writer of this note knows he is going to his death the next day—knows it well. Accepts it. Doesn’t appear to have particular regrets, and still never explains why he did the crime. Very nice!

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Pavement’s Wowee Zowee (2010)

I realized again as I was reading this semi-memoirish 33-1/3 volume by novelist Bryan Charles that I’m not exactly a natural Pavement (and/or Stephen Malkmus) fan. I saw Pavement live around the time Wowee Zowee came out, in the mid-‘90s, and they were excellent—a great show. I hoped that would clarify the albums, which I had never connected with, but alas no. In memory Wowee Zowee was the one I finally got, but whatever I heard then was no longer there on more recent listening. Though his path to Wowee Zowee is somewhat convoluted and weird, Charles was a fan of Pavement from approximately Slanted and Enchanted on. If anything, Brighten the Corners (from 1997) is the one he has had the most intense infatuation with. Charles just assumes you get it or don’t, which I appreciated in a way because he’s really never trying to sell anyone on the band. He addresses the “slacker” image that has dogged Pavement and Malkmus since 1992. The truth is they were/are very hard-working. Great live shows like I saw do not happen by accident. Yet, at the same time, there is definitely something unkempt and underachieving about the surface of Pavement. “Slacker” actually captures the aesthetic perfectly for me, but I’m on the outside looking in here. I liked Charles’s eccentric and novelistic approach to this. He relies on his memories and impressions of his experience with the music and also on interviews with a dozen band, label, and other principals involved with the album (including the cover artist). All these conversations involve natural fans of Pavement, including individual band members. They all understand Pavement, often declare the music life-changing, and discuss it in ways that make it clear how much they love it. I learned some things I didn’t know—David Berman went way back with Malkmus, for one. I liked Charles’s style enough I may want to check out his novel (Grab on to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way, 2006) or memoir (There’s a Road Everywhere Except Where You Came From, 2010), wordy titles and all. For all his subdued, dare I say slacker, tone here, Charles obviously loves a long title. This treatment of Wowee Zowee is basically for Pavement fans only.

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

The Headless Woman (2008)

La mujer sin cabeza, Argentina / France / Italy / Spain, 87 minutes

Director/writer: Lucrecia Martel

Photography: Barbara Alvarez

Music: Roberta Ainstein

Editor: Miguel Schverdfinger

Cast: Maria Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Ines Efron, Cesar Bordon, Daniel Genoud, Guillermo Arengo, Maria Vaner

According to internet sources such as Google Translate, the original Spanish title for this movie, La mujer sin cabeza, does indeed appear to translate directly to “the headless woman,” although results suspiciously include links to information about showings of this movie, which made me think the phrase may be specifically idiomatic in some way. My very first thought was that it might be some kind of pun on the part of the translator for “the heedless woman,” as that is an obvious quality of the woman in question at the center of this picture, Vero (Maria Onetto). She is bourgeois, a professional dentist, middle-aged, well-coiffed, married with children and a lover, and appears to have a busy, somewhat empty social life. She appears to be numb, in short.

Early in the movie, on her way home from an elegant afternoon gathering, Vero’s cell phone rings in the car, she is momentarily distracted, and she runs over something. She sits in her car gathering herself, obviously shaken by the incident. But she never gets out of the car to investigate, does not really look at anything, not even in her rearview mirror. She only composes herself, taking deep breaths, and then drives on, jaw clenched basically for the rest of the movie. As she leaves the scene, we see the corpse of a dog on the road. But she has not seen it. And now, for the rest of the movie, she quietly falls apart in a self-controlled way that makes it very difficult to see she is falling apart at all, except for a worsening case of disaffection, which could simply be the modern condition, yes? She seems to me to be more exactly heedless than someone who has lost her head, momentarily or otherwise, because of a crisis. In her deeply controlled panic she is still rational enough to act as if the rules don’t apply to her if she can get away with it

Signs of a Psychopath (s1-6, 2020-2023)

Here’s a continuing series that seriously deserves all its content warnings because it can pack quite a punch. It’s a bit of a variation on the ubiquitous youtube true-crime videos based on police interrogation tapes. Usually those often very long episodes are focused on police interrogation techniques, to valorize or condemn them according to the video-maker’s own bent along with what’s on the tape. Signs of a Psychopath instead offers up 21-minute blasts of apprehended murderers who are variously still high on their work as they talk to police and the show describes their crimes. It is very chilling stuff and thus often gratifying to learn of their current status, usually incarcerated, sometimes dead of state execution or suicide. The show also includes a handful or more of long-faced forensic psychologists and such explaining the ins and outs of psychopathy. A few episodes are twice as long and tediously preachy about how to detect and stop psychopaths at large in the world (spoiler alert, it’s not easy). They’re not all the same, these miscreants. Some are cocky and jokey, others are dead-voiced (“so then I killed him too”). I don’t know what’s worse. They’re all quite disturbing. But once I found the show I streamed quickly through the rather short seasons, maybe six to 10 of these 21-minute bursts. Yes, it’s a freak show, I admit. They are the geeks and I am the gawker. And I get what I’m looking for—shock, followed by queasy outrage and ultimately despair. Good times! The crimes are heinous. Many fit the mold of classic serial killers—multiple murders, often with sexualized overtones. Others are more unusual, such as a nurse at a nursing home who killed a handful under her care for misbehaving in her judgment. One aspect of the show that sort of tells on what it’s trying to do is its disproportionate representation of women in this realm, which is overwhelmingly populated by men. —Still, ya know, gotta say, it’s pretty freaky, what these women do. And the men, of course. I think, actually, now that I think about it, it’s the cocky, jokey killers that seem worst to me. They dole out crumbs of teasing information to investigators trying to close cold cases, just for the attention, just for the lulz. One, giving the details on one of his crimes, makes a point of saying he knows more than he will ever tell about other murders, and shortly after that kills himself. Feel the despair.

Kim (1901)

I had a hard time with this Rudyard Kipling novel, considered by many to be his best work. The fact is I came to it already with problems about Kipling. He’s a colonialist by reputation and pretty much in fact. I’ve read a few of his ghost stories, which mostly strike me as stiff and ineffective. And his penchant for inserting poetry, his own and that of others, does not impress me. I’ve seen collections by him that pair stories with poems—an interesting idea in the abstract, perhaps, but generally it does not work for me. I was hoping at least for an engaging adventure story in Kim but alas not even that was working for me. I needed more context, which I might have sought ahead of time from Wikipedia or something. I recommend that for anyone approaching this novel. You can thank me later. It might have helped, for example, knowing what “the Great Game” means, a rivalry between the 19th-century British and Russian empires over influence in Central Asia, particularly Afghanistan. Another problem is the impression I got that Kipling did not understand the region well—roughly India, Pakistan (not yet a state in 1901), and Afghanistan. Nor did he (or very many Westerners, to be fair) seem to understand at all the array of religions and sects in the region, which included broad branches of Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists. It reminded me of Paul Bowles’s ignorance of Arabs in The Sheltering Sky, which at least is a much better novel. I admit my biases against Kipling, author of the poem “The White Man’s Burden.” But I was still open to the adventure story possibilities. But apparently not open enough because it turned out to be pretty much a forced-march hate read. Fortunately for me it’s a short novel. Our main guy, Kim, is an orphan loose in this part of the world. His impoverished Irish parents are dead. I read him as a mixed offspring, Irish soldier father and native mother, but no, per Wikipedia. He’s all white. He hooks up with a holy man—Buddhist, I think—in search of a holy river. Various adventures ensue. My bad attitude may have partially blinded me to the novel’s better qualities, but I never felt involved with the story or cared about anything going on. As I say, it probably would have helped if I had brushed up ahead of time on this “Great Game,” but I will also say it would have helped if Kipling knew more about what he was writing about in the region—the cultures, the religions, the conflicts. It’s surprising to me that this is considered a classic, let alone one appropriate for kids. I don’t think so!

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

“Green Tea” (1869)

This long story by Sheridan Le Fanu is considered among his best, in part because it’s in his rightly much-celebrated collection, In a Glass Darkly. Many of the stories feature the German psychic investigator / occult detective Martin Hesselius. “Green Tea” is first up and thus has a few things to do, introducing Hesselius and his case study approach. It’s good when it’s on the case under examination. But it’s hampered by awkward construction, hemming and hawing and dancing around the subject a lot. It takes too long to get to the good stuff, which may or may not be that good. A minister is haunted by a malevolent monkey only he can see, which randomly appears to him even in public, staring and glowering. Understandably, it unnerves him. The result is that the minister often freezes up and/or breaks down and can’t be trusted to do Sunday church services without incident. After introducing Hesselius and his case study approach, the story spends some time on some metaphysical / philosophical business about duality and materialism and such. The proto-theosophist Emanuel Swedenborg is a recurring reference. The influence on Lovecraft and the occult detective subgenre generally is obvious but with all the setup “Green Tea” can be slow going. Once the minister finally stops being evasive and we get to the monkey, however, it’s not bad. The clinical tone works well—it just needs to be quicker getting to the point (according to my impatient modern sensibility). It reminded me in some ways of Nathaniel Hawthorne, especially the tormented minister. As a 19th-century Irishman, Le Fanu occupies an interesting place, outside of the British mainstream but not Continental or American either. Some Irish writers register strongly as Irish (J.P. Donlevy, for example, or Joyce) but I never get much of that from Le Fanu. I like his case study approach, which often feels close to detective fiction or true-crime fare, especially when it gets down to accounts. As the first of the five stories in the collection, you have to grant “Green Tea” some leeway for its setup work. Doubtless that explains a lot of the throat-clearing. The stories in the collection get better as they go—the last, “Carmilla,” is the best, an essential vampire story.

Sheridan Le Fanu, In a Glass Darkly
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

“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.
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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.