“The Voice in the Night” (1907)

[spoilers] I like this story by William Hope Hodgson pretty well—certainly my favorite of his many seagoing stories I’ve read. It may be more squarely in the traditions of “weird” than horror but it’s still creepy and unsettling. In a way it’s kind of a “lost world” story. But what a horrible lost world. More than anything it’s a seagoing tale, specifically within that a “fog” or “doldrums” story, a Hodgson staple. There’s a ship, and it is stuck in still waters and haze, with no wind. In the night, after some time there, a voice is heard calling out of the darkness, begging for food. The man calling refuses to let himself be seen. It’s annoying behavior that makes it hard to hand off food. But they manage. Some time later, the next night or maybe a few more, the voice returns to explain himself and his partner. The story involves shipwreck and struggling to survive on an island infested with a gray fungus and nothing to eat. The story is just well done. I had a bad feeling about that fungus from the first it’s seen, but it’s mostly innocuous for quite a while. Then it’s a nuisance and finally a fearsome force. It’s all over everything and if you scrub it away it returns the next day. Then it starts infecting the castaways themselves, with the gray fungus appearing on patches of their skin. As food stores dwindle, however, they find that not only is the fungus edible but it’s also quite tasty, though it hastens the infection. Late in the story a humanoid shape is seen in the fungus, moving like a living person. Details like this reminded me of the movie Annihilation and were particularly effective. For once one of these old-fashioned framing devices works. There’s a fair amount of setup but the payoff is this amazing story related by a voice calling out of the darkness. Hodgson gives us a glimpse of the terror near the end, the lumbering humanoid mass of gray fungus, but otherwise keeps a light hand. It’s also a good idea to make the voice a married man. He and his wife are alone together in this, trying to keep each other alive. So it’s also an affecting love story. I don’t know that you can call this gray fungus supernatural—it’s plausible enough, in 1907, that such things could exist. It may be a stretch to make it delicious, and also that it may have psychic powers of attraction, but I’m even willing to accept those things here. Hodgson makes it all work.

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Evil Dead Rise (2023)

I finally caught up with the late installments in the Evil Dead franchise. Sam Raimi’s original trilogy worked itself into an inspired Three Stooges mode that remains utterly original and worth seeking out. But a lot of people forget how actually terrifying as a horror movie the first one was, even with the low-budget trappings, or that’s how it hit for me anyway in the early ‘80s one weekend with rented VCR and movies. The 2013 remake and this, what? sequel?—are true to the essentials of the 1981 original. The roving demon spirit is represented by impossibly fast tracking through landscape, there’s an evil book made of blood and human body parts, and the possessions begin when the field recording made by some anonymous paranormal researcher scientist is played. On the recording he says the words that summon the demon spirit to take possession and from then on it’s chaos. Also there’s usually a scene of an animated tree raping one of the young woman victims, in usually a mixed group of five. There to honor the original apparently. You never know where a tradition is going to come from. The 2013 remake, directed by Fede Alvarez (Alien: Romulus; Don’t Breathe), is perfectly competent but has few surprises and became a little monotonous for me in the last third. Evil Dead Rise switches things up while remaining true to the essentials. Perhaps its boldest move is to change the setting from the famous “cabin in the woods” to an urban landscape in Los Angeles. An earthquake unearths the Naturom Demonto (updated from the trilogy’s Necronomicon Ex-Mortis for reasons unclear, perhaps an effort to leave behind any suggestion of the H.P. Lovecraft universe). The cracked vault also yields up field recordings by the researcher. The kid making the discovery is a wannabe DJ. He knows what to do with recordings, which look like 78s but play differently. The possession target is a single mother with three kids. Her sister is visiting. They have a tense relationship. As usual in this franchise, it gets bloody and gruesome. Check all content warnings. The tree thing is replicated inside an elevator. True to the trope! Yes, there were scenes of grotesque violence that were hard to watch, usually short. But director and writer Lee Cronin also has a lot of nifty tricks up his sleeve and there are a surprising number of surprises. Definitely worth running down if you’re into the franchise.

“Eve’s Diary” (1905)

I must say I am mystified by Mark Twain’s relationship with religion. I understand he despised it. Perhaps that’s too strong. He returns to Bible themes all the time, sometimes mockingly, sometimes piously. He’s fascinated by Joan of Arc. Satan is a wonderful character in his unfinished Mysterious Stranger. Whole sections of the travel books are devoted, in hushed spiritual tones, to “the Holy Land.” Et cetera. Then there’s the question of comedy. Is it even funny? I’m not sure. I read “Eve’s Diary” somewhat under duress, also known as being in a bad mood for no particular reason. It did not change my mood. It seems to have feminist sympathies more than not, or at least Adam is something of a surly caveman lout. Eve is part flower child, part curious intelligent interesting person. The problem is more the situation itself. For example, they are naming things: “fire,” “smoke,” etc. It just seemed dumb, not funny. Dinosaurs are around—I liked that, it felt like one place where he is thumbing his nose at religion. I didn’t get the idea from nowhere that he’s hostile to religion. Adam and Eve have no sense of perspective, apparently. Eve thinks she can knock stars out of the sky by hitting them with clods of dirt. I don’t know what to make of some of it: “I found some tigers and nestled in among them and was most adorably comfortable, and their breath was sweet and pleasant, because they live on strawberries.” Say what? Most of all it feels like Twain is just not trying very hard, or worse—trying too hard plagued by writer’s block, which was possible. There’s a clumsy insertion of an Adam passage and a no-warning transition back to Eve. It hops about in time, though at least it is always moving forward and I guess a diary gives him license. I generally like Twain’s folksy voice, but it can grate. At least no racism I could detect here! That was a surprise for me in his earlier work. Racism is rarely a main feature but it's usually there. Here we have dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, a comic point that does wear well I must admit. Adam at Eve’s funeral acting like Dick Nixon at Pat’s was a jarring shift in tone, but I understand Twain lost his own wife the year before this story was written and published so that probably accounts for it. I wouldn’t call this one of his best.

Mark Twain, “Eve’s Diary” (Library of America)
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The King of Comedy (1982)

USA, 109 minutes

Director: Martin Scorsese

Writer: Paul D. Zimmerman

Photography: Fred Schuler

Music: Robbie Robertson, Ray Charles

Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker

Cast: Robert De Niro, Jerry Lewis, Diahnne Abbott, Sandra Bernhard, Ed Herlihy, Shelley Hack, Tony Randall, Martin Scorsese, Margo Winkler, Dr. Joyce Brothers

Director Martin Scorsese is famous for making great movies, but his best arguably fall into various types. This may be the last, for example, after Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, of his pictures featuring Robert De Niro as an unbalanced madman representing Social Decay. Another type is seen (at its best) in Goodfellas and Casino. The King of Comedy adroitly takes on celebrity culture and media criticism and does not feel 42 years old. One of the most surprising parts is that it was made decades before smartphones and social media, which now feel strangely missing from the action here. Another surprising and impressive part was snagging Jerry Lewis, who practically sold the movie on name recognition (to the limited extent it sold). He plays Jerry Langford, a late-night TV host modeled on Johnny Carson. And he is good, extremely low-key and self-contained. There’s no mugging or pratfalls, no loony voices. But you keep halfway expecting them, which creates an interesting tension.

Langford, like Johnny Carson, like any celebrity, has a lot of problems with fans and wannabes who won’t leave him alone. De Niro plays a wannabe named Rupert Pupkin. It’s an interesting role for De Niro because his signature rage is more subsumed under a slimy façade of someone who thinks he knows his way around show business. He wears natty suits with bold patterns and color schemes. He is soft-spoken and almost gentle. But the rage is there and so is the lunacy, once we get down to the basement of his mother’s place in New Jersey, where Pupkin lives. Everyone, including his mother (the bawling off-screen voice of Scorsese’s mother Catherine), plainly thinks he is a grating, pathetic loser. He wants to be famous and show everybody. The idea he comes up with to break through is to kidnap Langford and force him to let him do his standup in a prime spot on the show. In order to accomplish this Pupkin must enlist the aid of Sandra Bernhard as Masha, who proceeds to steal the whole show.

The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy (2016)

The best part of Paula Mejia’s 33-1/3 volume has to be her enthusiasm for the band and album. That’s always there in these little books to some degree, but often it is kind of sublimated into the research or something. She had no luck getting one of the Reid brothers (William) to talk to her at all. She may not have cast the interview net very wide, or gotten a lot of good quotes, because that stuff is minimal here. It’s organized by song titles from the album, not in sequencing order but riffing on the ideas associated with them. Like Geeta Dayal’s meditation on Brian Eno’s Another Green World, it is more discursive and (free-) associational. There are fewer personal details too. It might be dense—she cites a lot of academic sources along the way. Or it may have been my mood. I was reading it slowly, a chapter or two at a time, and thinking it might be one of the weaker ones. But then something kind of strange and perhaps alchemical happened. I played the album and it sounded fabulous. Better than ever. Now Psychocandy is an album I’ve had my infatuations with. I didn’t really catch up to it until the 1990s but I had an intense few months with it when I did. But returning to it later—even preparing to read this—was often disappointing. Too much noise, not enough sweets (more or less the shoegaze formula, which more or less the Jesus and Mary Chain may have invented) (although don’t forget Husker Du). A couple points by Mejia definitely helped. How, for one thing, did I miss those girl group drum patterns? Anyway, I don’t think an album under consideration has ever sounded so good while reading one of these 33-1/3 books. One of the regular blurbs that shows up with them talks about liner notes, which, full disclosure, I rarely read. But that’s what the experience of this book came to feel like for me. I’d read some of the text and return to the glorious album. I did learn about the literal riots of their shows in the ‘80s, which I hadn’t known. I think comparisons to the Velvet Underground and Sex Pistols go too far in a general way, though of course they’re not entirely overstated. And the riffing on psychopathy and candy seemed more obvious than insightful. I mean, you can find something to complain about in anything. I’m just a little shocked she somehow found a way to make the album sound better than ever.

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

4. Talking Heads, Fear of Music (1979)

[2007 review here, 2011 review of “Cities” here, 2012 review of “Animals” here, 2014 review of Jonathan Lethem 33-1/3 book here]

I was stoked to see that Wikipedia classifies this album as “psychedelic funk”—only after “new wave, postpunk, and art-rock,” but still. I thought I might be out on a limb stanning one of my all-time favorites since the day it was released, whatever category you want to put it in. But songs like “Mind,” “Memories Can’t Wait,” and of course “Drugs” make the sonic and lyrical case (and the band finishes the thought with supreme funk). What often confuses me about Fear of Music is the unexpected layer of humor wrapped into it. It may be most obvious in the hilariously bizarre “Animals,” which the raging singer cries “are laughing at us” when they “don’t even know what a joke is.” Yes, he’s talking about the extant nonhuman fauna on the planet at large. “They think they know what’s best,” he says. “They’re making a fool of us.” Further sins: “Shit on the ground ... see in the dark.” Other songs continue in similar veins, often named for nouns (“Mind,” “Air,” “Heaven,” “Electric Guitar”). We hear that “Air can hurt you too,” that heaven is a place where nothing happens, and that members of a jury at trial have rendered verdict. “Never listen to electric guitar,” they solemnly chant. “Someone controls electric guitar.” David Byrne’s lamentable inclinations to mock people he considers ignorant and/or beneath him can be discerned developing here. His main character, who wavers in some detail from song to song, remains recognizably a type of political crank prone to conspiracy theorizing. No doubt he is as worried about fluoridation as he is about the conspiracy of the air when the weather turns cold. Byrne’s impulse would continue with the album he made with Brian Eno in 1981, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, where a lot of the vocals are screeds tape-recorded from late-night religious stations on the AM band. It would be worse and most fully on display in the 1986 album and related movie True Stories. But these things are still more indeterminate on Fear of Music.

The most famous song from the album is likely “Life During Wartime,” which is more dystopic than psychedelic and seemed uniquely suited to the Cold War moment in the late ‘70s, on the eve of the conservatism that continues to metastasize into fascism, a hit in the UK but not the US. “Cities” is another song that’s not particularly mind-altering by intention, but I hope it remains relevant to people in their 20s and 30s trying to figure out where they want to live. Implicitly it recognizes that a better life can be consciously sought by starting with this vital choice. Preach. Most of the rest of the album is trippy one way or another. “Mind” reminds me a little of P.M. Dawn’s “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine,” in that the lyrical concerns are more on the order of pedestrian love troubles. “I need something to change your mind,” the singer wails plaintively. Then a walloping “MMMMMIIIIINNND,” reminds us where we got the idea this music is psychedelic. The strange, unlikely views of air, heaven, animals, and the electric guitar infect us with new ways of looking at them. The longest song on the album, at 5:10, is also the last. Called “Drugs” here, and “Electricity” in earlier versions, it presents a guy (likely the same paranoid-delusional we’ve seen in many of these songs) obviously tripping out on hallucinogens. Byrne reportedly got the unusual intensity of his vocal in this song by going outside and running around the block a few times at top speed, and then recording while he was still out of breath. The effect is stunningly accurate, full of the strange sights and sounds and feelings, the coincidences and the social anxieties, of the hallucinogenic at full effect. “I'm charged up ... I'm kinda wooden / I'm barely moving ... I study motion.” You know it when you hear it. Play loud.

“The Minister’s Black Veil” (1832)

This story by Nathaniel Hawthorne is more of a literary affair than horror, as the Wikipedia article I looked up can attest. “Hawthorne writes the story in an allegorical format, using a didactic tone,” etc. I should note the subtitle, “A Parable,” but it’s not an easy parable (or allegory) to understand. I think that’s what I like about it. One day the New England town Puritan minister shows up wearing a veil, two pieces of semitranslucent black cloth “[s]wathed about his forehead and hanging down over his face.” That’s it, basically, the whole story. He wears the veil for the rest of his life and never explains. Not even his fiancée can get a word out of him about it, and she’s the only person who can approach him. She breaks off the engagement. There are certain tantalizing clues. On the day he first appears wearing it, he conducts a funeral for a “young lady” in town. We don’t learn very much about her either. The minister is 30 when he begins wearing the veil, and he gets the usual threescore and 10 or so. It does seem profoundly symbolic, practically obliterating his face for others and occluding his own vision as well. Hawthorne notes more than once how it moves like curtains with his breath. The minister’s stoic absurd stubbornness is reminiscent of the scrivener Bartleby’s perverse refusal to work, in the story by Herman Melville, never explaining himself beyond that wonderful “I prefer not to.” Here the minister responds to queries much the same, though they are more simple demurrals. The story says he gets better at his job over the years, but that could also be just growing into it. So I guess I like this story the way I like “Bartleby.” There’s something powerful about the secrets these timid men keep—why they do what they do. What’s asked of them is not greatly inconveniencing in either case, the responses more like exasperating little character traits, which grow into more. I take the death of the young woman as significant, some kind of warmup for, or variation on, The Scarlet Letter. In that light, the black veil is cowardly in a way reminiscent of our old friend Arthur Dimmesdale but at the same time more forthright, if cryptic, in declaring his status as a sinner, if that’s what he’s doing. Of course, there may not be enough about the young woman to build even that much out of it. You could sit in a hundred classroom discussions or reading groups and probably still never get to the bottom of it. If horror is a grasp of the empty abyss, then maybe this is horror.

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Watcher (2022)

Watcher has a good premise and a good start, as our main character Julia (Maika Monroe) finds herself in Bucharest, Romania, with her husband Francis (Karl Glusman). Both were raised in the US and both have Romanian roots, but only Francis can speak the language, and he is there for a demanding job in marketing with long hours. Julia’s isolation is near complete, as she spends most of her time by herself in their excellent apartment, frustrated by the language every time she goes out. Then, actually almost right away, she notices a man in the building across the street, standing in his window. She gets the feeling he is looking at her. She gets the feeling he is following her. She thinks she sees him everywhere she goes. Maybe—we only catch glimpses of him if that. We see a couple of the events she reports to her husband and skeptical police. A man sits directly behind her in a movie theater in one, but we never get a good look at him. He might be some other creep. She might be overthinking the guy in the window (though we doubt that given that we know the chosen genre of our show). Her overworked husband starts to wonder about her. The police plainly think she’s a little kookoo. There are nice notes here of paranoid classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Rear Window. It’s never entirely clear whether it’s all not Julia’s imagination, though the movie gets noticeably more predetermined to an agenda as it goes, particularly in the last third. When Julia waves at the figure in the window and it waves back the picture is all in as a serial killer Psycho kind of show with some strange ins and outs and, ultimately, explaining every last blasted thing, complete with twists and turns that are not that unexpected. The first half is better, creepy and sneaky with uncertainty. We feel Julia’s isolation keenly. The language barrier is done really well. Director and cowriter Chloe Okuno never gives us subtitles for the Romanian and not many Romanians have even passing English. Monroe puts on a good show as someone who might be cracking up from culture shock. Then, well, you might as well stay for the end. It’s not a long movie.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998)

I had a lot of fun with this account of the “New Hollywood” movie industry in the 1970s. Author Peter Biskind had access to dozens of main players and people who knew them. There are so many characters quoted, in fact, that it can get to be hard sorting them out. Some, including Robert Altman and Steven Spielberg, later claimed indignantly that Biskind got it all wrong, which is possible. But I’m pretty sure a lot of these characters are fabulists themselves so take it all with due caution. It took me so long to get to the highly entertaining (and, yes, gossipy) Easy Riders, Raging Bulls that I found myself wondering which came first—the cemented-in legends of the New Hollywood, or this book. At any rate, the ‘70s was approximately my coming-of-age time and, from, say, 1968 on, I was a dedicated moviegoer. I had no idea I was living through such exciting times, though I noticed later how anemic Hollywood fare seemed to become in the ‘80s and later. I still think it’s fair to blame that on Jaws and Star Wars, but Biskind is not blind to that. The most puzzling story for me remains Francis Ford Coppola—responsible for some of the greatest movies ever made, and just as suddenly a nonfactor after the ‘70s. Go figure. I had forgotten about Peter Bogdanovich who, according to Biskind’s portrait, made a couple of good movies and then became as insufferable as the memorable character he played on The Sopranos. Biskind’s treatment of Dennis Hopper is hilarious—this utter incompetent who somehow drew the director credit for Easy Rider. I already knew the general history under consideration, but Easy Riders, Raging Bulls is packed with delicious details and anecdotes. There are some weird gaps. Biskind uses Oscars results as one of his metrics along with revenue figures, reviews, and general consensus. But Woody Allen is barely mentioned. That’s likely because Biskind couldn’t get him or his tribe to talk. But Woody Allen, however reprehensible he appears now (certainly no worse than Paul Schrader and other notable rats here!), is an obvious model of a film auteur, plus he won big in Hollywood for Annie Hall. Strange omission. But an always interesting and entertaining book.

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

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)

Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Phantom Ladies Over Paris, France, 193 minutes

Director: Jacques Rivette

Writers: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Jacques Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Henry James

Photography: Jacques Renard

Music: Jean-Marie Senia

Editor: Nicole Lubtchansky
Cast: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, Marie-France Pisier, Barbet Schroeder

Given the surreal rambles of Celine and Julie Go Boating, along with a release date not far past the 1960s, you have to wonder if psychedelic or something like it was the intention here. There are references here to Lewis Carroll and Alice’s adventures with big rabbits and clocks and such. Hard candies falling in the laps of Celine and Julie in dream-like situations (falling literally into their mouths) and provoking visions bears some suggestion of LSD, whose doses at one time were famous for coming on sugar cubes. Today’s viewers may be more likely to think of cannabis edibles, which were largely unheard of in 1974 as far as I know. That works too. I haven’t seen much by director and cowriter Jacques Rivette, but he seems to have some penchant for going long. La Belle Noiseuse (1991) is four hours, a pair of Joan of Arc pictures from 1994 run nearly five hours together, and of course the 1971 Out 1 famously goes nearly 13 hours.

Not until the very end of Celine and Julie is any kind of literal boating seen. The boating in the title is more like the boating found in the Beatles song “Tomorrow Never Knows”: “Turn off your mind relax and float down-stream / It is not dying.” There is a recurring title card in Celine and Julie that in a way tells the story of the whole movie: “But the next morning...” Black screens of a few seconds are used as transitions, sometimes the usual matter of “later that day,” but sometimes mere seconds or less, suggesting powerful epiphanies of some kind to the brain. From over here it looks like a pretty good time, as Celine (Juliet Berto) and Julie (Dominique Labourier) bop about on somewhat mystifying adventures in an alternate reality—looks like they’re having a great time. But merely watching it is not the same thing.

“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)

[spoilers] I have to admit Edgar Allan Poe can be a chore for me and here is a sterling example. The action, such as it is, is molecular, the language is dense and requires parsing—practically every sentence in every brick-wall monolith paragraph. Not much in this story makes sense except perhaps as some fever dream of the afterlife. Editor David G. Hartwell in The Dark Descent anthology sees the story as a foundational transition from haunted castle to haunted house, but that’s splitting hairs pretty fine considering this house feels like a castle or at least a mansion. The Ushers live in it, a brother and sister. Maybe I should use the scare quotes, “live” in it. The narrator was college chums with the brother. The chum has come in response to a strange, unexpected, and urgent letter from him. The sister is dying of disease unspecified, and in fact dies while the narrator is there. The narrator and brother transfer the body to some room in the basement. This being a Poe story, it’s little surprise that she is not actually dead but buried prematurely. Furthermore, the brother kinda sorta knew it (parsing the murk) when he enlisted the help interring her. The brother and narrator otherwise appear to spend most of their time reading aloud to one another from great works of fantasy (in the name-checking paragraph I recognized one of them, and suspect they’re all real) or reciting poetry and singing songs while whaling on a guitar. I should have stuck with that Netflix series a little longer to see how they treated these scenes but I was already struggling with the TV gloss. The story itself erupts into a poem of six stanzas at one point. Then the sister escapes her entombment and shows up just in time to die with her brother. The narrator discreetly departs the premises, at which point the house cracks in half and sinks into the lake it was built on. This is all accompanied by extensive excerpts from a fictional Romance tale involving Ethelred the knight. It’s no wonder Hammer Films (and Netflix) felt like they could do whatever they wanted with some of these stories (“The Pit and the Pendulum” another great example). I might have liked “Usher” more on previous readings, but not lately. It’s ridiculously extravagant with the collapsing house. Nothing with the sister makes sense. We find out later they are twins but that is not particularly helpful. It’s not like one of them ate the other in the womb. Yes, it is admirably thick with a good mood of dread and gothic atmosphere but that is almost all it is. Trade-offs: it can also be boring and impossible to believe. The language takes considerable getting used to and was slow, slow going for me. I do get a kick out of Poe’s obsession with premature burial. It shows up a lot in his stuff, like Mr. Mxyzptlk in the Superman comics. Me, my policy is not to think about being buried alive. Not always easy, I must admit.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
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“In Another Country” (1927)

After the longish “The Undefeated” in Ernest Hemingway’s second collection of stories, Men Without Women, most of the stories are short and even micro-sized. This one goes five pages. It’s a war story but set in a hospital, where our unnamed main character and first-person narrator is recovering from wounds. The war was obviously a horrific, traumatizing experience for Hemingway—in many ways these stories are about untreated PTSD. Perhaps hard to believe, but they are going on a century old and in many ways it shows. We just think of PTSD differently now—they didn’t think about it much then, with vaguely derisive terms for it like “shellshock.” Hemingway struggled with these mental and psychological problems in a time when people were not very sympathetic, considering them signs of weakness. He bought into that himself to some degree. Much of his work is marred by mawkish repressed self-pity. That said, this story is not one of the worst examples. I like the hospital scenes and the sense of both the war and the detachment from it in the hospital. First line, a good one: “In the fall the war was always there, but we did not go to it any more.” Perfect! However, the story, such as it is, involves another man getting treatment at the hospital. It turns out his wife died recently and unexpectedly. So it’s a heavy-handed irony. The husband survived a war wound but his wife died from pneumonia and/or the influenza pandemic no one ever seems to talk about in literature. The widower erupts randomly with the narrator, telling him he must never marry, and later apologizes for his outbursts. That’s when we learn about the death of the man’s wife. So, yes, losing a partner is a great tragedy—and often a good story. But it feels more like a device here and somewhat clumsy. The war is terrible and it’s not talked about particularly in those terms. The pandemic is terrible and not talked about at all. The wife’s death is understood as terrible but that’s only as far as it goes. No one is really dealing with anything here, which we are given to understand is the human condition. Maybe in 1927! Not now (I hope). In the past I liked this story more for its concision, and this “iceberg” sense there is much more under the surface than what we see. Now the repressed behavior annoys me more. At a certain point there is little to say about the tragedies of others. You can only witness them. But is that really what Hemingway is doing here?

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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5. P.M. Dawn, Of the Heart, of the Soul and of the Cross: The Utopian Experience (1991)

[2006 review here]

The “utopian experience” on this studio-groove and sample-heavy debut album by P.M. Dawn (aka rapper Prince Be and producer DJ Minutemix) is suffused with an unmistakable melancholy, which makes it a strange and more personal trip. A brief intro yields to a faceful at full force in this laidback landscape, with “Reality Used to Be a Friend of Mine” setting the tone. It’s more about heartbreak and mourning a time when reality was better, but the double-jointed words lead to the alternate realities lead to the heavenly visions lead to the utopian experience. “Chase the blues away,” Prince Be raps gently. “Take your mind off reality and leave her alone.” Exalted but frequently sad, as the next track “Paper Doll” points up with its sample of “Angola, Louisiana” by Gil-Scott Heron & Brian Jackson and a deepening sadness. It is gorgeous, delivered in bruised purple tones of unknown, secret agony. It also made it to #28 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1992 as a follow-on to the freak #1 “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” buried near the back of the album sequentially. “To Serenade a Rainbow,” with its whipcrack sample of Hugh Masakela, is more workmanlike than “Paper Doll,” which in this context may feel more upbeat (“Think I’m gonna fly away / I think I’m gonna fly away,” goes a refrain). It is still a declaration of love that somehow feels futile, and it is followed by “Comatose,” which takes some time getting up to speed and then proceeds like a slow-motion cartoon ambulance, with low-key samples of Sly & the Family Stone and Dr. John squawks and hollers. P.M. Dawn were connoisseurs of the vinyl crates for sure. The first half of this album resolves finally into the first single, “A Watcher’s Point of View (Don’t ‘Cha Think),” which embraces the Doobie Brothers. It goes like that all over this lovely set, occasionally escaping the gloom tinge but never getting too far from it. The biggest hit, of course, was “Set Adrift on Memory Bliss,” which made it to #1 for a glorious week, sampling Spandau Ballet’s “True” so boldly that it feels more like augmentation of the song than sample or cover. By this point in the album, track 9 of 13, we are deep inside the head of Prince Be and/or his fictional narrator. Our guy, in “Set Adrift,” is tripping exactly on hearing the Spandau Ballet song, which sets him spinning off on memory associations. I know how this goes—it’s a vivid experience that can still occur for me with pop music radio hits. Of the Heart, unwieldy long title and all, has always hit me as psychedelic, maybe just because the person at the center of it feels both real and disconnected from reality, set adrift in his own world. The lofty ambition of the title is absurd but sincere and thus affecting. The anguish is here but measured and precise, funneled into the flow of a larger utopian experience, which somehow feels all the more real for being so unreal, inside this guy’s head.

Terrifier (2016)

USA, 85 minutes

Director / writer / editor: Damien Leone

Photography: George Steuber

Music: Paul Wiley

Cast: David Howard Thornton, Jenna Kanell, Samantha Scaffidi, Catherine Corcoran, Pooya Mohseni, Matt McAllister

My lifelong general policy on sequels—don’t ever, ever bother with them—does not help very much with franchises nowadays, arguably including the whole 16 years and counting Marvel universe. The Terrifier franchise, a canny mix of bitterly sardonic humor and extreme violence, is a good example. It starts with a 20-minute short from 2011, also called Terrifier and also featuring Art the Clown (and also available in the 2013 All Hallows’ Eve anthology picture by director and writer Damien Leone). That short provides a good overture and stake in the ground for what’s to come. Or so I presume because, full disclosure, my gorge rose basically as far as I could stand with this one and I invoked my sequel rules out of fear of what I’ll find in Terrifier 2 (2022, which got good reviews from people who like it better) and Terrifier 3 (2024 and now playing in theaters).

Art the Clown is not exactly a mime, but he never speaks. He is more like Charles Chaplin, using mincing gestures and exaggerated facial expressions to communicate—and, mostly, in his case, to terrify. Which he does quite effectively. He is terrifying and gross and powerful. His unsettling appearance pitches in to the melee with thick black lines of makeup and that stupid cockeyed hat. There is some uncertainty for most of this picture about whether he is just another fictional serial killer in the movies wearing a costume or something perhaps more supernatural. There is no uncertainty about his brutality. One particular scene here, more or less the centerpiece of the picture even though it occurs relatively early, really merits content warnings. Pay attention to them and to your limits because this movie can be very unpleasant.

“The Saint” (1981)

There is no way I don’t like this story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, published originally in 1981 and translated into English in 1993. Part of me wants to register the wannabe literary note that crops up among horror anthology editors. I found this story in a Year’s Best anthology for 1994, which means by the logic of these things stories published in ’93. It’s edited by the durable team of Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. This particular story is a Windling pick. With that note registered, I must say with Windling (and Datlow too, no doubt) that Garcia Marquez is always a pure pleasure to read and I don’t know how this story doesn’t stand as horror or weird or fantasy at least, for which “magic realism” anyway might just be an alternate spelling. Setting aside the multiple frames and filters—that’s the literary part, of course—it’s about a guy who, because the cemetery is being moved, has to dig up the corpses of his wife, who died giving birth, and his daughter who died at age 7, 11 years earlier. He discovers his daughter’s body has not decomposed. His wife, by comparison, is “dust.” The flowers in his daughter’s hand that she was buried with are still alive and smell sweet. Also her body weighs nothing now. Lots of good details here. It is obviously a miracle, she deserves to be canonized as a saint, and, because the father has nothing else to live for, he packs it / her into a cello case and leaves Colombia for Rome to meet with the pope. The story is told by someone who met the Colombian in Rome while he (the narrator) was in film school—film school! In Rome! Everyone who sees the corpse of the daughter is impressed, but comically dozens of others are also in Rome seeking sainthood for their own non-decomposed corpses. As Garcia Marquez, or the film school narrator guy, describes it, most of the other corpses are more like mummified. This case—come on, the flowers are still alive. She weighs nothing. Go ahead, put her on a scale. The Colombian stays in Rome for 22 years, seeking audience with four different imaginary popes. The film school narrator guy left Rome long ago and is back for some reason and happens to run into the Colombian. The story is full of memories of Rome when they met, the strange case of the Colombian’s daughter, and just sort of all the wonder and pathos of life. Garcia Marquez is so good it’s no wonder horror editors want to claim him for fantasy literature. In many ways it is where he belongs, though his stories even more are about the sensory joys and mysteries of being alive and sentient.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Strange Pilgrims
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
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Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024)

Furiosa is a worthy addition to the Mad Max franchise, which now also includes comic books and graphic novels, video games, and soundtrack albums. For me, it’s also where the franchise veers close to becoming an exercise strictly for continuity freaks, the people who insist not only on seeing all the Marvel or Star Wars or whatever movies, but also in a specific prescribed order. Furiosa, fifth in the franchise, is a prequel to the previous, 2015 installment, Mad Max: Fury Road. I feel like I already know much more than I want to about such geographical points of interest as the Citadel, Gastown, the Bullet Farm, and the mysterious Green Place. Don’t get me wrong. I may sound tired and cynical, but there are plenty of stunts and much glorious action in Furiosa. It pairs well with popcorn. Tom Holkenborg’s score is as moody-good as he gave us in Fury Road. Furiosa attracted stars such as Anya Taylor-Joy (The Queen’s Gambit, The VVitch, Last Night in Soho) and Chris Hemsworth (Thor movies, Avengers movies, etc.). Tom Burke gets the designated Mel Gibson role. Furiosa is a young girl living in the all-women (mostly women?) Green Place who is kidnapped while out in the desert. It was important to Green Place people to keep their location secret. This young Furiosa (Alyla Browne) is captured and held for years by one Dementus (Hemsworth). Then she grows older and becomes the fierce and big-eyed Taylor-Joy. There are new vehicles here to enjoy and some impressive new stunts too, as I say. But it’s kind of the same old thing—racing down desert highways and fending off attacks. There’s usually a reason for going from one place to the other, but I kind of lost track of them here. The beauty of Fury Road is the simple clarity of it. Furiosa has complications that don’t bode well for the franchise. On the other hand, George Miller is the creator, director, and single indispensable figure in all this, and he's 79 now, even older than Donald Trump, so we’re not likely to get a lot more from him. It’s possible he will sell it off to Disney or something, but in that case probably only the continuity freaks will stick around for more. Here's my stack-ranking of the five Mad Max movies: 1) The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2, 1982), 2) Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), 3) Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga (2024), 4) Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), and 5) Mad Max (1979). Unusual franchise in that the first is the worst by far.

Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959)

This is one of a reported dozen or so non-science-fiction novels Philip K. Dick wrote in the 1950s. It’s the only one published in his lifetime and that was not until 1975, though it was written in 1959. It showcases the deceptive simplicity and clarity of his SF and genre work. He was often writing in a rush before the late 1960s, but his prose style tends toward the lucid, if pedestrian. It’s part of what makes the mind-bending stuff work. If Confessions of a Crap Artist is any indication, stripping away the high concept unfortunately doesn’t leave us with much, at least not in this misogynistic story of Bay Area / Northern California life among the effete, feckless, and philandering. Dick dresses it up with some fancy literary conceits, shifting point of view as well as first-person and third-person modes from chapter to chapter. The crap artist of the title is Jack Isidore, who starts and finishes the telling. He is a connoisseur of conspiracy theories and falls in with a group of UFO maniacs. He’s not the main character, though—that’s his sister Fay, a “bitch” as they say it here, entitled, demanding, generally horrible. She goes around demolishing lives. She married a guy for his money and pursues a younger man and breaks up his marriage. Trying for a female point of view is Dick’s first and main mistake. It feels more like someone’s idea of a woman (say, Philip K. Dick’s idea) than like a real woman. How many times had Dick been married and divorced in 1959? Twice—I looked it up. In fact, in 1959 he was going through his second divorce (of five). So, sure, the hate and miserabilism come from a real place. And it is touching in a way to see how badly Dick wanted literary cred. I think it may well continue into the VALIS books, which I haven’t managed to get through yet (soon!). As I’ve said before, I like the playful goofy SF Dick more than any other. His jousts with reality can produce surprisingly powerful effects. This sour little novel seemed very small compared to the best of his science fiction. The Man in the High Castle is marred by its attempts at literary sophistication, which paradoxically may explain why it is at least close to his most popular. It has grounding elements. Whereas in what I would call his best (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, others) he just lets the weird and wild ideas fly. And don’t get me wrong. I like The Man in the High Castle too. Sadly, there is nothing weird or wild or even very good about Confessions of a Crap Artist.

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

An Angel at My Table (1990)

UK / Australia / New Zealand / USA, 158 minutes

Director: Jane Campion

Writers: Janet Frame, Laura Jones

Photography: Stuart Dryburth

Music: Don McGlashan

Editor: Veronika Jenet

Cast: Kerry Fox, Alexia Keogh, Karen Fergusson, Iris Churn, Kevin J. Wilson, Melina Bernecker, Glynis Angell, Sarah Smuts-Kennedy, Colin McColl, David Letch

I saw this picture when it was new in 1990 and loved it so much that I bought a one-volume of the Janet Frame memoirs on which it is based. Typically enough, I have been toting it around ever since and still haven’t read it. But the movie, directed by Jane Campion (The Piano, Holy Smoke, The Power of the Dog), still looked pretty darned good to me. It was created originally as a TV miniseries with three parts of about 50 minutes each, suitable for one-hour programming. The three parts, presented here as a “trilogy,” touch on Frame’s childhood, teenage, and adult years (from her memoirs, respectively, To the Is-Land, An Angel at My Table, and The Envoy From Mirror City).

Frame was born in 1924 in New Zealand and grew up at a time and in a place where mental illness was poorly understood. She was withdrawn, introverted, and shy, lost in the fairy tales, poetry, and stories she started reading and writing from a young age. Eventually, as a young adult training to be a teacher, she had a breakdown when an inspector visited her classroom. One thing led to another and then she was diagnosed (incorrectly) as schizophrenic, given electroshock treatments into the 1950s when the treatment was not understood well but administered frequently, and spent some eight years in and out of institutions, often returning voluntarily. An Angel at My Table tells much the whole sad and alarming story (albeit one with a happy ending).

“In the Hills, the Cities” (1984)

[spoilers?] Full disclosure, I remain dubious about the Clive Barker project at large, but Stephen King’s clarion blurb, “I have seen the future of horror,” still resonates enough for a fulsome career by Barker, the painter, theatrical impresario, baker, chef, chief bottle washer, and short story writer. Or, at least, short story writer is how he started when he made it to horror lit, specifically with the six-volume Books of Blood collection, before going on to write a bunch of novels, series, screenplays, etc. The slightly cringy Books of Blood credo goes, “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red.” The general sense I struggle with is that I’m not sure Barker is a good short-story writer and I still believe short stories are the soul of horror literature. With some exceptions Barker’s stories tend to be uniformly long, minimum page count 30 and ranging up to near 100. No problem there—H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Aickman frequently went long too. But Barker’s stories are also just a little saggy. There’s a lot going on, including extreme violence (dubbed “splatterpunk”), but it tends to run monotonous for me. On the other hand, the things Barker dreams up are uniformly weird, unexpected, crazy, startling, and original. He’s not borrowing from old traditions, though he harks to them, sometime quite explicitly, but rather he is more shooting to create his own. This much-anthologized oddball from the first volume of the Books of Blood set is as good a place as any to start. It is set in the Soviet-era Yugoslavia—Serbia and Kosovo, I believe—and the two main characters, the “English gentlemen,” Mick and Judd, are a gay couple on a honeymoon type of road trip through central Europe. Barker is normalizing gays in this story, not sensationalizing them, or using them to add some element of horror, which is refreshing. They just are what they are—a couple who bickers passive-aggressively the way couples do on travels and then later enjoys makeup sex.

Eventually we arrive at the story’s main conceit, which is kind of hard to explain, let alone believe. Is it a spoiler to reveal the ideas? For centuries, two neighboring cities of “tens of thousands” have perfected a way of fighting in which they strap themselves together—men, women, and children, Barker emphasizes—into lumbering humanoid forms that do battle with each other in hand-to-hand (so to speak) combat, rock ‘em sock ‘em style. Useful illustrations can be found on the internet. Barker has someone explain: “Ropes to tie them all together, flawlessly. Sinews ... ligaments ... There was food in its belly ... there were pipes from the loins, to take away the waste. The best-sighted sat in the eye-sockets, the best-voiced in the mouth and throat. You wouldn’t believe the engineering.” He has that right. I don’t believe it. Yes, there are certain faint echoes of the movie The Wicker Man and of Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery.” But in general it seems beyond ridiculous to me and it’s just getting started. I was constantly distracted by the impossibility of it. The soles of the feet, consider, are made up of the biggest, heaviest men, who are smashed to pulp dead. Lots of people die even on the victorious side. Apparently it is considered an honor. Mick and Judd wander into this strange battle and find the remains of the defeated city with literally thousands of corpses. Barker is enthusiastic and gets carried away with the concept, piling on with detail (babies replicate teeth inside the mouth, stuff like that). But for me he is plainly overdrawing on his suspension of disbelief account. Good start, good middle, protracted from there—it’s no way to write a story (but what do you do anyway with ideas like this?). But you better not take my word for it. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer give “In the Hills, the Cities” their stamp of approval by including it in their estimable and valuable anthology The Weird. Barker himself picked it for Masters of Darkness, an anthology where that’s the concept, writers picking their own stories and explaining why. "In the Hills, the Cities" is all over the place. The implication is that it’s a masterpiece. My strained credulity could well be a minority view.

Clive Barker, Books of Blood, Vols. 1-6 (Vol. 1 kindle)
Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
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6. Primal Scream, Screamadelica (1991)

[2022 review here]

Hey, I am on vacation! (figuratively speaking)! But I wrote the long piece linked above just two years ago and it has approximately all I have to say about the classic, delectable psychedelic album by Primal Scream. See you next time for the start of the top 5! Yowza wowza, so on so forth.

“It Will Be Here Soon” (1979)

[spoilers] I’m still not sure what to make of Dennis Etchison. I can’t say I like all his stories a lot, but I can’t say I don’t like them either. I like the sense I get of a very careful writer, but he may be just too restrained, or subtle, for me. After what the movies did to horror in the ‘70s and ‘80s—including shifting the emphasis from short stories to novels, and never spare the gore—I certainly understand the impulse and maybe even the necessity for keeping the work quiet, emphasizing suggestion over excruciating detail. I like the title of this story, the sweeping blank affect of passive voice a certain trademark of Etchison’s. Compare “We Have All Been Here Before” and “You Can Go Now.” According to ISFDB, this story is part of a Jack Martin series—the first, in fact, so not many worries here about continuity issues. Jack is a grown man, in his 20s or 30s, visiting his quasi-estranged father. Jack feels guilty about neglecting him. It’s a familiar situation between parents and grown children. His father has developed an interest (and/or obsession) with listening closely to blank recording tape, thinking he finds strange voices and messages there. For Jack it’s something he didn’t know about his father, but in many ways it only makes him think the old man is a bit of deluded fool. On that point Jack seems likely to be right. The story seems to be mostly about the alienation between parents and children. In the end Jack is seen recording whispered nonsense syllables for his father to find—an act of kindness, on one level, perhaps, but obviously on another level belittling, manipulative, a cruel deception. The best-case scenario is that his father will think he has found something to support his strange ideas. He will be happy but he will be conned. I don’t see it very much as an act of kindness. His father and stepmother—really, the whole situation—reminded me some of the documentary 51 Birch Street, which is also about parents and grown children and even has a stepmother too, though a much happier person than the one here. That might be more about Jack’s attitude. I didn’t think this was one of Etchison’s better stories, but I’m also not sure I’m the person to judge.

Dennis Etchison, Talking in the Dark
Story not available online.

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

I Saw the TV Glow works in a slow and dreamy David Lynch key, heavy on the soundtrack and with music videos shoved in all part of the package. There are sinister horror undercurrents aplenty in this story of two fans of a ‘90s TV show called The Pink Opaque. We see scenes and hear plot points about the show, which is a little bit X-Files and a little bit Pete and Pete, with jolts of aimless meaninglessness for effect. The setup seems to be two girls on psychic adventures with monsters. In 1996, two youngsters, 7th-grader Owen (Ian Foreman and then Justice Smith) and 9th-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine) bond over the show, which runs on a USA Network-like cable channel on Saturday nights at 10:30 p.m. Owen has a home situation that makes it hard for him to look at it—there is a sad arc to his family over the years but we never get very much information, especially about his strict stepfather. Owen sneaks over to Maddy’s when he can to look at the show with Maddy and Maddy’s friend Amanda. Later Maddy makes videotapes of the show for Owen. It’s their favorite TV show ever. When both are in high school, Maddy wants to run away and she wants Owen to come with her, but he hangs back. Then Maddy disappears—police investigation, presumed dead. We don’t get much information about this either, but it sounds serious. When Maddy shows up eight years later Owen can’t believe it and begs her to tell him what happened, where she has been. She appears reluctant to say but finally admits it has something to do with the show. She has been living inside it or something. It seems unlikely but ever more unhinged plot developments suggest otherwise. It’s also possible she’s insane. I’m not sure it all adds up but I’m not sure that matters. I was interested in the first place because I’d found an earlier movie intriguing by director and writer Jane Schoenbrun, 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair. It’s fully steeped in the self-proclaimed dark corners of the internet such as “analog horror,” the topic of numerous youtube channels, and plays to them well. I Saw the TV Glow is attempting something similar with ‘90s cable entertainment shows and VHS swap-abouts, but with much more ambition than mere parody or mimicry. I’m not sure it’s such a fruitful direction, but I found at least this one to be engaging, mysterious, even cosmic and awe-inspiring in a way that is only slightly ironic.

Of Human Bondage (1915)

This long novel by W. Somerset Maugham is generally considered his masterpiece and it is indeed very good—as good as I remembered from first reading it over 40 years ago. It’s autobiographical but not really autobiography. Most people, including me, remember it as the story of the tragic, absurd relationship between first-person narrator Philip Carey and a waitress in a teashop named Mildred. The 1934 movie version, for example, stars Bette Davis and focuses exactly on that (Davis is perfect and the picture is worth seeing). I noticed, however, that Mildred does not show up until page 268 of a 607-page edition. It’s easy to see why she is so memorable—she is as terrible a person as you would ever care to meet. The first 267 pages are devoted to Philip’s life from the age of 9, when his mother dies and he is orphaned (his father died years earlier). This is true to Maugham’s life, as is being sent to live with his clergyman uncle and aunt. Philip has a clubfoot that makes him a target of ridicule for other kids growing up and even into adulthood. Maugham had a stutter that produced similar experiences. Philip tries first to become an accountant. Then he wants to be an artist and moves to Paris for two years to study. Ultimately he decides he doesn’t have the talent and gives it up. His uncle never approved of the artist plan and by the time Philip is 21 he is fed up with Philip’s inability to commit to a career. He wanted Philip to work in the church but by this point Philip has given up all faith in God and is an atheist. The magic here is Maugham’s ability to make it all so interesting. It is a strangely compulsively readable novel and pure pleasure all the way. There is somehow pleasure even in the agonies of Mildred. Most of us, men and women too, have likely had relationships like it, though perhaps not as abysmally intense. You may like to know now that he gets shut of Mildred and finds his way to a happy and satisfying end. Maugham actually was a doctor like Philip becomes, but he was also a prolific writer with a shelf-full or so of novels, plays, stories, and essays to his credit, which I understand are often nearly as enjoyable. I’m still not ready to take on The Razor’s Edge due to the terrible Bill Murray movie adaptation, though word of mouth claims the novel is actually good. I’ve got my eye on The Magician, which is about Aleister Crowley, or The Summing Up, which is about writing. But Of Human Bondage is the natural place to start with Maugham. It’s fair to call it a masterpiece. If anything, I liked it even more the second time.

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

“The Werewolf” (1979)

[spoilers] In the Angela Carter collection The Bloody Chamber, this very short story is the first of three meditations on Little Red Riding Hood to finish the book. It might be the best—short and keeping the details blunt. The “good child” has no name, no red garments. The fairy tale comes to mind only because it involves a girl, a wolf, and the girl’s grandmother. The grandmother has been feeling under the weather and the girl is dispatched to bring her oatcakes and honey. On the way there she is attacked by a wolf, which she fends off with a knife like a badass. “Here, take your father’s hunting knife, you know how to use it.” That’s a voice in her head, no doubt her mother’s. She faces the wolf head-on, drops her things, squares up, and takes the knife. “[S]he made a great swipe at it ... and slashed off its right forepaw.” The wolf goes “lolloping off disconsolately.... The child wiped the blade of her knife clean on her apron, wrapped up the wolf’s paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes and went on toward her grandmother’s house.” The spoiler alert goes right here because the ending surprised me, although you may have already guessed it. The grandmother seems to be sicker than ever. She is burning with fever. The girl takes the cloth with the wolf’s paw to make a cold compress for Grandmother’s forehead. But the paw is now a human hand. And soon the girl discovers that Grandmother is now missing a hand. Grandmother is the werewolf! The girl calls for help, the neighbors show, recognize her for a witch, and “drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, and pelted her with stones until she fell down dead.” And that’s the end of the story, except for one last paragraph: “Now the child lived in her grandmother’s house; she prospered.” Amazingly savage, amazingly straightforward about it, and all matter-of-fact. I just didn’t see any of these plot developments coming and it took my breath away.

Angela Carter, Burning Your Boats
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“Hills Like White Elephants” (1927)

Just because the 1927 Ernest Hemingway collection is called Men Without Women doesn’t mean we’re going to get any stories without women, and here we are. The story is good, or not bad, but the values it puts out are terrible, repugnant. It’s another very short story—four printed pages—and involves a conversation between a man and a woman who are traveling together and waiting at a station for a train. They are having drinks. There is something between them—it’s likely she is pregnant and they are talking about an abortion, but the story is never explicit on the point, which is annoying. I mean, I’m pretty sure what’s going on here, but the third-person narrator is never clear enough for me. It feels stupidly coy. But it’s clear enough. He wants her to get an abortion and she doesn’t want to. She would prefer to marry but it doesn’t seem to be an option for him. All speculation on my part. This is one story where the whole “iceberg” thing goes awry. The wrong things are revealed. Too much is not disclosed. The narrator has an unexplained hostile attitude toward the woman. She is referred to as a girl and she seems to be behaving petulantly and immaturely. What the story doesn’t seem to understand at all, or at least not very well, is that this man is a jerk. The way I read it, he wants her to get an abortion and he doesn’t want her to bear his child. He obviously doesn’t care what she thinks, how she feels, or what she wants. He doesn’t want to talk about it at all. It’s infuriating to me and completely explains her behavior. Of course I have some sympathy for the guy’s position. Who among us has not wanted to eat their cake and have it too? But he is at least as petulant and immature as her. I’m not sure the story, or the narrator—or Hemingway—is aware of it. In terms of the mechanics of the story, yes, I have to admit it’s pretty good. The setting and the moment are well conceived and the story is carried by majority dialogue. It could be a one-act play. It’s poignant in its way, at least insofar as it subscribes to old school values that have arguably had their day. But it’s impossible to untangle the virtues of this story from the toxic attitudes. Somehow unfortunately this seems to happen with some frequency with Hemingway.

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
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7. Sonic Youth, Daydream Nation (1988)

[2007 review here]

I agree Daydream Nation only makes it by the skin of its teeth into a countdown of psychedelic albums. No one, not even Jim DeRogatis, seems to see Sonic Youth that way. Wikipedia as usual flails with the shotgun approach: noise rock, alternative rock, avant-rock, indie rock, art punk, postpunk (each term with an article defining it). Fair enough! I’ll opt for postpunk for the sake of convention, but don’t miss the extreme, mind-bending counterpoints of this album. That’s what makes it psychedelic for me. The music is churning and raw—may take some getting used to—but the cover, the painting Candle (Kerze) by the German painter Gerhard Richter, is suitable for propping up against the wall for meditation sessions when you’re out of candles. It’s one of the most peaceful album covers I’ve ever seen and it is what drew me to it in the first place (after giving up on the band circa 1985). The title offers another arching spectrum, suggesting on the one hand the qualities of the strange tunings, the electric guitar acoustics studies, and the distanced furies in “Daydream,” but even more importantly suggesting, in “Nation,” the oceanic currents in which this band willfully loses itself. But this is an odd kind of postpunk ocean, perhaps more like a vast and unexpected inland sea. Daydream Nation works best for me—works extremely well—in limited, regular doses. The double-LP vinyl release was how I knew it and I generally took it one side at a time. I wouldn’t want to call them suites. This is not Tales From Topographic Oceans by Yes, which never worked for me let alone as oceanic. Yet in a way that is how Daydream Nation operates. These little sets and blasts of electric guitars to the brain alternate vocalists / lyricists among Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, and Lee Ranaldo (who sounds so much like Moore in a slightly different register that I didn’t notice for years, sort of like Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins). I took the album one side at a time. Or on the headphones for walking, picking it up and putting it down most days. The CD generally proved too long for me to go all at one gulp, even with shuffle—it tends to fight too much with other albums, for one thing. Lately I have listened to it on repeat, 30 to 50 minutes at a time, picking up where I left off, and that works well too. Like the candle on the cover that burns with steady flame, there is something very still at the center of Daydream Nation—within the lengthier tracks themselves (“Teen Age Riot,” 6:57; “’Cross the Breeze,” 7:00; “Total Trash,” 7:33) or in the album taken as a whole with some of its shorter pieces. Though I loved all the sides it was side 3 that called to me most often and still does, with nothing longer than 5:00. The two Ranaldo songs (all music on all tracks credited to the band collectively), “Hey Joni” and “Rain King,” are showcases for the way the band itself can feel like it has turned into a lurching monster rearing up across a cityscape, destroying buildings. Thurston Moore’s “Candle” bids to be the soul of the album. The 2:41 “Providence” is a montage of random low-fi piano tinkling, an amplifier humming, and answering machine messages from Mike Watt, which altogether suggest, among other things, that drugs were involved with the making of this album. Really, the whole thing, you know I have to say it: PLAY LOUD.

Masculine Feminine (1966)

Masculin féminin, France / Sweden, 103 minutes

Director: Jean-Luc Godard

Writers: Jean-Luc Godard, Guy de Maupassant

Photography: Willy Kurant

Music: Jean-Jacques Debout

Editors: Agnes Guillemot, Marguerite Renoir

Cast: Jean-Pierre Leaud, Chantal Goya, Marlene Jobert, Catherine-Isabelle Duport, Michel Debord, Elsa Leroy, Evabritt Strandberg, Brigitte Bardot, Francoise Hardy

Guy de Maupassant gets a cowriting credit on Masculine Feminine because the rights to two of his stories, “The Signal” and “Paul’s Mistress,” were acquired for the production. But director Jean-Luc Godard barely used them in the picture, which instead is more typical of his shattered approach to filmmaking in the 1960s, with quick setups and improvisation (see also Alphaville, Band of Outsiders, Breathless, The Little Soldier, Pierrot le fou, Vivre Sa Vie, Weekend, etc., etc.). Ostensibly broken up into “15 concise parts,” the picture mixes up cryptic textual statements on title cards (“The mole has no consciousness, yet it burrows in a specific direction”) with scenes of the lovely principals bantering and living their Pepsi-Cola Generation lives (or, more accurately, as it were, their ANTI-Pepsi-Cola Generation lives).

Masculine Feminine is only murky about the revolution. It’s a little late for Communism and a little early for Women’s Liberation, which hit harder in the next decade, although Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique had been published by then and birth control pills were more and more widely available. That’s about the depth of the sexual politics, which are otherwise more libertine. Jean-Pierre Leaud plays Paul, a 21-year-old political activist and revolutionary, who acquires his own little maybe only emotional harem, with the polyamory playing out as it will, kind of more on the sidelines if anything, off-camera. There’s ye-ye singer Chantal Goya as Madeleine, an aspiring singer. Goya’s songs fill the soundtrack. And there are her two roommates Elisabeth (Marlene Jobert) and Catherine-Isabelle (Catherine-Isabelle Duport). As much as anything it’s a movie about the Sexual Revolution—no one under 18 was permitted to see it in France—but more than anything it is a freewheeling half-improvised and half-baked intellectualized Godard exercise. I’m hard put for a synopsis. That’s about as good as I can do. Random observations follow.

“The Harbor-Master” (1899)

I’m still not sure at all about Robert W. Chambers as a writer of horror (and/or fantasy and/or science fiction). He didn’t do much of it, more inclined to writing bestselling romances that are all but forgotten nowadays. But his speculative stories have an ardent and enduring fan base, which includes Nic Pizzolatto, co-creator of the True Detective franchise. The Chambers gold is found in the first half of his 1895 collection of stories, The King in Yellow, specifically in the first handful or so of stories. The rest are romances, and cheesy. I’m even meh on the ones with all the reputation, such as “The Repairer of Reputations,” and not at all interested in the romances, which I thought took up the rest of his career. And mostly they did, but it turns out he returned to the weird now and then, as with this one. It also exists as the first five chapters of his 1904 novel In Search of the Unknown, the story of a cryptozoologist pursuing monsters and romance. Gutenberg has the novel online and the story is also featured in a 2021 Hippocampus collection of Chambers stories edited by S.T. Joshi, The Harbor-Master: Best Weird Stories of Robert W. Chambers. It makes sense to give this story the honors of the collection title because it’s the best story I’ve read by Chambers yet. It seems likely that H.P. Lovecraft was influenced by it for his so-called “Deep Ones” (off the coast, in the water) in the “Innsmouth” story. It seems likely the creators of the 1954 movie The Creature From the Black Lagoon knew this story too. Lovecraft’s amphibians interbreed with humans, but this “harbor-master,” the nickname the villagers have for it, is more of a brute animal with perhaps a taste for human flesh. He’s certainly a danger. I must say it impressed me, nicely paced, always interesting. The harbor-master is intriguing and scary too—the image of him seen from a distance is powerful. The story is also somewhat oddly funny in places. The cryptozoologist narrator is visiting the remote area at the invitation of a man who claims to have a pair of extinct birds, great auks ... and something more, if there is any interest. Our guy works for the Bronx Zoo, a detail I love. It makes sense given Chambers’s origins in New York City. Halyard, with the auks, is an invalid in a wheelchair who has a “pretty nurse” working for him. Our guy and the pretty nurse take up with one another, described comically as on all fours on the floor looking for a thimble the pretty nurse has dropped. The romance(s?) begin (in the novel)! I count this story as a good one from Chambers. Maybe I’m ready to give him another chance. He is a tough nut!

The Harbor-Master: Best Weird Stories of Robert W. Chambers, ed. S.T. Joshi

Read story online.

Listen to story online.

Longlegs (2024)

The recent horror joint Longlegs is uneven but has its points. Is it worth seeing? I don’t know. It’s a serial killer picture and, even though I get the feeling it is looking for comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs, it’s actually much closer to Zodiac, with a killer, Longlegs by self-designated name, who somehow provokes family murder-suicide slaughters from a distance and then taunts police with cryptographical messages and evident knowledge of the murders held back from the public. This puts the idea even closer to Charles Manson, although that comparison is dismissed by investigators in the picture. Longlegs has done in double-digits numbers of families this way. The FBI has been investigating because no one is quite sure how he’s doing it, or even if he is. The forensics mostly don’t support it. But his taunting does. It’s an intriguing mystery that holds our attention. The FBI investigators include Agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), who, in many ways, has the stock flat affect of a neurodivergent person. She also appears to have psychic powers, which she wants to deny. But she knows things and can’t account for how she knows them. They run her through batteries of tests. She’s psychic all right. Meanwhile, over in the coincidence bargain bin, Harker’s mother Ruth (Alicia Witt) is a blood-of-Jesus evangelical who might have something to do with the case and certainly appears to have something to hide. She is just a little too interested in it. Nicolas Cage as the devil-worshiping Longlegs has pulled yet one more basically original, manically insane character out of his big bag of tricks. He chews the scenery in a somewhat restrained way here, wearing a woman’s wig, but make no mistake. He is chewing the scenery as usual—it’s his stock in trade, his whole shtick at this point. How do I keep ending up at his movies? But he’s well deployed here by director and writer Oz Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter, low-key but worth a look). The narrative at large, however, is a bit of a muddle, unable to decide whether it’s about serial killing or devil worship or why not both? Or maybe family trauma too, with the long face. It’s full of too many cheap jump-cut scares, but arguably that’s the kind of stuff we’re here for anyway and thus we deserve it. I never spill drinks anymore at these things.

Trouble Boys (2016)

The book we always thought had to be written about the Replacements has finally been written, and I have finally read it. Bob Mehr’s sensitive and meticulously researched biography might be one of the great rock biographies. It’s hard for me to judge. I was close to the action, a Twin Cities music journalist from 1982 to 1985. As someone scarred by alcoholism, my instinct was to keep my distance from such shenanigans. It wasn’t a big hilarious joke to me. But I saw my share of terrible shows and great shows and I heard a lot of the stories. Not all of them—there were some new ones for me in this book. I followed along with the albums, which got exponentially better from Stink through Let It Be and stayed pretty good even after that. All Shook Down is where it flattened out for me and never recovered. I was aware of the first Paul Westerberg solo album and of Tommy Stinson’s foray with his own band, Bash & Pop. I even knew Chris Mars’s solo album, on the brink of his painting career. I appreciated their potential to become a legendary great rock ‘n’ roll act—I appreciated that they were, to some extent, certainly on some nights. But Westerberg is the first to say they never scored a hit, a reasonable metric for any wannabe legendary rock ‘n’ roll act. In the end their underachieving and self-sabotage was a disappointment. I was disappointed—but check out their reactions here. There’s enough heartbreak to go around. I had to wince at some of their antics—setting per diem cash on fire, as one example. Drinking, drugging, defiantly playing their worst shows when it was important to be better, as when they knew the music industry was in the building. They often followed their terrible shows with great ones, coincidentally when they knew they didn’t need to make an impression on anyone. The greatest knock on them may have been their talent as consummate contrarians. The story of the Replacements is fun and exciting, full of laughs and great music, but it’s also sad, as illustrated by the fortunes of Bob Stinson (the soul of the band) and, later, his replacement Slim Dunlap. Tommy went on to become a real-life rock star, playing for years with Guns ‘N Roses. Even if he never had a hit, Westerberg wrote a handful or more of the best songs of the era, all of which should have been hits, as they say. It pained me to read how many of his song demos Westerberg has destroyed in fits of pique and self-doubt. But, well, it’s also the epitome of the Replacements too. All the glory and all the troubles are in this great biography.

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

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte (1896)

I was tiring of Mark Twain somewhat after diligently reading a fair portion of his work, mostly chronologically, I almost skipped this gem and its strangely reverent fictionalized treatment of the life of Joan of Arc. The narrator of the formal long title, Sieur Louis de Conte, is based on a real person who grew up with Joan. She is a historical figure I never learned much about, only what I know from the epic silent movie of 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is only about her trial and death. This novel tells the whole weird, glorious story—tells it well, too—of the illiterate country girl of 17 who restored France’s faith in itself and was burnt at the stake for her troubles two years later, at 19. She has “Visions” (Twain’s capitalization). Sure, here in the 21st century we may be more inclined to account for a lot of it as mental illness. As if to shore up her credibility, Twain includes anecdotes that seem to indicate supernatural powers. Not sure how true some of these stories are. It’s fair to call the Joan of Arc story, even in its simplest terms, amazing—and of course it gets better when you make up miracles to go along with it. But it seems unlikely to me that Twain made up the apparent miracles we see here. He did have long-honed journalistic instincts, after all, although he is also plainly smitten with Joan, so maybe gullible in his readings. The same story about seeing through a ruse to correctly identify the king of France on her first meeting with him, for example, also appears in the 1999 Luc Besson movie The Messenger, but it’s not corroborated in Wikipedia. Now I want to seek out a good biography. Anyway, I found it interesting that Twain considered this his best novel, which is saying something considering the high general regard in the 20th century for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I’m inclined to agree. Huck Finn, the only other contender (or maybe The Mysterious Stranger?), has beautiful passages that cement it with American experience in unusually pure ways, but as a novel it is deeply flawed. Even its most ardent advocates tend to dismiss the last third wholesale. Twain spent much of his career mocking and excoriating Romantic literature, yet here he betrays certain affinities with it. At the same time, Twain has much latitude to exercise his misgivings and prejudices about organized religion, as the trials of Joan of Arc represent a low point (among many) for the Catholic Church. A lot of the most annoying yarn-spinning tics of Twain are restrained here, though they do appear. It is historical fiction and a swooning romantic story, but it’s easily the most competent novel Twain ever wrote. If it doesn’t hit the heights of some of those Huck Finn passages, the voice that made them work commands this whole novel.

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