Sorry, Baby (2025)

Eva Victor wrote the screenplay, directs, and stars in this gentle story of Agnes, a 28-year-old student and professor of literature. IMDb summarizes, “Something bad happened to Agnes. But life goes on—for everyone around her, at least.” Wikipedia calls Sorry, Baby an “independent black comedy-drama,” noting that it debuted at Sundance earlier this year. I don’t know about the comedy part, black or otherwise. The bad thing—I don’t think this is a spoiler, it occurs early in the picture—is that her grad school advisor, Preston Decker (Louis Cancelmi), shows a great deal of interest in her work but later lures her to his home and rapes her. The extremes of violence seem to be limited, but Agnes is sensitive and it’s a deeply troubling, traumatic event. The way she describes it it’s not so much the physical act as her entire loss of confidence in herself that hurts most. Was Decker just praising and flattering her for sex? Sorry, Baby might be a kind of challenge to those with less empathy because it makes it so easy to say or think things like “that wasn’t so bad.” Agnes’s resulting depression and withdrawal from social interactions, however—it’s pretty bad, though doubtless some will call it an overreaction. But Decker does quit his job at the college and move away soon after. It’s possible the assault was worse than we think. Agnes spent hours at his place though she shows little sign of being injured. She tells her best friend Lydie (Naomi Ackie) about it within 24 hours. Lydie takes her to a hospital and helps her report it to the police. But the reaction tends toward indifference and minimizing, especially once authorities learn she bathed soon after. It’s another sad portrait of the way women who report rapes tend to be treated. Ever since the incident Agnes has been reclusive, holing up in her isolated place in the country and mostly keeping to herself. But she does get some good news—she’s been hired for a tenure-track position at the college where she studied, in the New England region where she wants to live, she finds a kitten and adopts it, and she connect with her neighbor Gavin (Lucas Hedges) in an odd but not apparently unhealthy sexual relationship. Agnes, and Sorry, Baby itself, is almost too withdrawn, you almost miss that she is even there, crisis and all. Yet it might be good practice for empathy. I had to keep telling myself to stop minimizing what happened to Agnes and what she is going through. I felt like an unfeeling beast, not taking it seriously enough. It might be good practice for you too—although I can’t be entirely sure that was ever Victor’s intent.

“Zooey” (1957)

As I say, it’s possible to take Franny and Zooey, published in 1961, as a kind of novel in the eccentric manner of say William Faulknew, e.g., If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem or Go Down, Moses. Maybe Salinger even intended it that way. “Franny,” a longish short story too short to be a novella, and “Zooey,” a shortish novel too long to be a novella, are obviously related. Franny and Zooey are brother and sister, Glasses, and both narratives are about the same thing, Franny’s nervous breakdown and/or spiritual crisis. Together they remain one of the cornerstones of the Glass family saga as we’ve known it since the 1950s. Franny and Zooey are the youngest of seven children born between 1917 and 1934, all of whom were regulars at one point or another on a radio show called It’s a Wise Child. A lot of the bulk of “Zooey” is Glass family backstory. In fact, it’s notably remote from the main players as we have them so far, Seymour and Buddy, the two oldest. Buddy is the chronicler of these tales and happy to insert and sneak in credit for himself at will, but he’s not there with Franny and Zooey, and Seymour is years dead. We get a spirited comical dialogue between Zooey and their mother Bessie (Zooey is in the bath, reading a long letter from Buddy). And then we get a much longer speechy dialogue between Zooey and Franny on the complications of life etc. We are still getting backstory in the Glass family stories. That’s a large part of “Zooey.” It still feels like preamble to something much larger. In the legend so far, Buddy and especially Seymour are spiritual seekers well-versed on many world religions and sects and their ways. Franny’s crisis, obviously connected in some way to Seymour, is based on an anonymous mystic Christian 19th-century Russian peasant’s book with ideas of how to live (a real tome, The Way of a Pilgrim). Salinger’s voice is clarion and charming as always—a natural New Yorker writer and pleasure to read. He was on his own spiritual quest, increasingly seen in the last four pieces he published in book form. I want to take this opportunity to say that, if there is more to the Glass family story, as persistent rumors say, then let’s have it, please. What we’ve got has never felt complete.

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Read story online (scroll down).

Please Please Me (1963)

I’m still surprised when I hear people refer to early Beatles music as “bubblegum,” partly because the term never came into use until about 1967, when the Ohio Express had hits with songs like “Yummy Yummy Yummy” and “Chewy Chewy,” and partly because I think even these early Beatles have it over most bubblegum (a term that has since been abused anyway practically unto meaninglessness). Sure, you can retcon early Beatles into the definition of bubblegum as “pop music in a catchy and upbeat style that is marketed for children and adolescents” (Wikipedia). I still find it fascinating that most 5-year-olds respond positively to the Beatles, notably the early stuff—just as a lot of 14-year-olds seem to go by instinct for Nirvana. There’s something age-specific going on here, but Please Please Me nonetheless is an album for everyone except Beatles grinches. It’s their first album, released in the UK and subsequently mangled and/or sat on in the US. It’s a reasonably typical pop album for 1963, released first in mono and later in stereo, and with covers making up nearly half the songs. That’s actually a low ratio for pop albums in 1963, which were more often affairs of one or two hits and the rest covers. Please Please Me also has a handful of classic Beatles standards—“I Saw Her Standing There,” the title song “Please Please Me,” “Love Me Do,” and “Twist and Shout” (an Isley Brothers cover they made their own), along with two of my favorite Beatles singalongs, “P.S. I Love You” and “Do You Want to Know a Secret.” But the somewhat freakish choice of covers also has a lot to do with what makes this such an interesting album: “Chains,” a 1962 hit by the Cookies, “Anna (Go to Him),” a 1962 hit written and recorded by soul singer Arthur Alexander, “Boys,” a 1960 Shirelles B-side, and, perhaps most remarkable, “A Taste of Honey” and “Baby It’s You,” which would be hits later for Herb Alpert (1965) and Smith (1969), respectively. The Shirelles also got a hit with “Baby It’s You” in 1961. Meanwhile, “Misery” is a Lennon / McCartney original, but I happen to know the song better as covered by the Flamin’ Groovies on Shake Some Action. There’s a lot of pure pleasure in this set of 14 songs, a worthy start to an iconic career. On the question of early Beatles, I don’t think Please Please Me is nearly up to the stellar highs of A Hard Day’s Night, but I like it more than either With the Beatles or Beatles for Sale.

The Color of Pomegranates (1969)

Sayat Nova, USSR, 79 minutes

Director: Sergei Parajanov

Writers: Sayat Nova, Sergei Parajanov

Photography: Suren Shakhbazyan

Music: Tigran Mansuryan

Editors: Sergei Parajanov, Marfa Ponomarenko, Sergei Yutkevich

Cast: Sofiko Chiaureli, Spartak Bagashvili, Gogi Gegechkori, Melkon Alekyan, Medea Japaridze, Vilen Galstyan

This art film curiosity from late-‘60s USSR was intended by director Sergei Parajanov as a kind of intuitive biography of 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat Nova—to be sure, not a literal straightforward bio but more of an “inspired by” type of thing, indulging all poetic impulses however extravagant. Indeed, mimes are involved. The Color of Pomegranates delivers on the implied promise of the title, with vibrant color and often quite strikingly beautiful images. There is almost no dialogue or even that much of a discernible through-line, though keyed in many ways to a bio’s chronology.

Soviet censors worried that it was not literal enough and that it fell far short of a fair biography of anyone. They demanded the original title be changed and all specific reference to Sayat Nova removed. A headnote was added: “This film is not the story of a poet’s life. Instead, the filmmaker has attempted to recreate the world of a poet—the modulation of his soul, his passions, and his torments—broadly utilizing the symbolism and allegories of medieval Armenian troubadors.”

The Shangri-Las’ Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las (2019)

With this 33-1/3 volume I had the impression author Ada Wolin was more interested in researching and writing about girl groups generally, and the Shangri-Las specifically, than anything about any album. One expectation or hope I brought with me is that a best-of in this series would address the ongoing simmering controversy about the validity of best-of collections versus more intentional or “authentic” album releases. Instead, and this surprised me, I found myself once again hearing out arguments about rockism and poptimism. Well, OK, I guess. Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las has the distinction of being the first of many Shangri-Las collections, released in 1966 and marking (amazingly) the de facto end of their career. As Wolin points out, many of them were not even 20 yet in 1966. Golden Hits also has the advantage of being succinct: 32 minutes, 12 songs, not even that many of them genuine top 40 hits. The Shangri-Las are a decidedly strange beast—a girl group, yes, of course, but distinct and apart, somehow anticipating punk-rock convulsions years before impact. Wolin has a number of bones to pick with narrative history and consequences (as do we all, at least those of us suffering under material contrarian instincts). I thought some of those bones contradicted one another. She objects, for example, to the performers in girl groups getting attention only behind the songwriters and producers. More specifically she objects to Shadow Morton getting so much credit for the Shangri-Las. She cites critics—and by name: Saul Austerlitz, Ted Gioia, and others—on their quick dismissals of performers in favor of producers. Yet elsewhere she gives Morton his due, which is not negligible. “Leader of the Pack” was a staple of radio and commercials for decades and even has a certain amount of fatigue attached to it now. “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and some of the others I know well and still enjoy for various details. The one I love best is the domestic drama “I Can Never Go Home Anymore.” Wolin keeps her distance from it and seems reluctant to credit it as more than sentimental and manipulative, which may be fair enough but left me not entirely trusting her views. But she’s out there fighting for the legitimacy of the Shangri-Las and that’s the good fight.

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

Sao Paulo Confessions (1999)

Suba was born in Serbia in 1961 and emigrated to Brazil in the 1990s, already a producer and purveyor of the downtempo, acid jazz, you-name-it style. Mellow and lulling, with lively and compelling strains and rhythms, I found I could go all day with the stuff. Sao Paulo Confessions, perhaps Suba’s best-known album, was released shortly before his death. He was working postproduction on the Bebel Gilberto album he produced, Tanto Tempo (reportedly the bestselling Brazilian album of all time outside Brazil), when the studio caught fire. He saved the Gilberto material but was overcome by smoke and died. I didn’t know any of this when I bought the CD from that little shop in Vancouver that used to be so good. At the time I was plunged into downtempo anthologies such as the Buddha Bar, Café del Mar, and Hotel Costes series, each of which ran to many albums. In fact, Sao Paulo Confessions now elicits nostalgia and a little sadness for those times, along with a constant buzzing sense of déjà vu—I feel sure I’ve heard many if not all of these tracks and/or guest artists on various anthology albums but I haven’t been able to track down any specifics. I’m not sure I can count that as a good thing but, well, “chill” is the first thing you would have to say about this concept album recounting Suba’s Sao Paulo adventures. Some might say soporific, but I’m into it. Maybe slow-burn? Does that sound right? Sao Paulo Confessions is one of those albums that get better for me as I go, establishing a mood and finding ways to elevate the intensity, rewarding multiple plays. Play it now and play it often. It wanders pleasantly afield for its first half and then goes up a notch with the seventh of 12 tracks, “Um Dia Comum (Em SP)” (in English, “A Normal Day [In Sao Paulo]”), which delivers a stirring, nicely done “portrait of a city” groove with musical effects and helpless forward momentum. With “Sereia” (“Mermaid”), featuring Cibelle, now we’re rockin’. “Samba Do Gringo Paulista” (“Paulista Gringo’s Samba”) has a nice sense of false live performance and the album finishes on “A Noite Sem Fim” (“The Endless Night”) at 7:02. You might prefer rounding off your Buddha Bar or Hotel Costes sets, but Suba’s last album is nonetheless a worthy addition to any downtempo collection. Available on streaming too.

“The Hoard of the Gibbelins” (1911)

Here’s another good one from Lord Dunsany, also very short. Most of his stories are short, though he also wrote novels. It is typically biting in its mordant humor, opening with, “The Gibbelins eat, as is well known, nothing less good than man.” Their hoard consists of jewels and gold in vast amounts, a great temptation to humans living nearby. People are forever trying to rob them and forever failing. I’m giving nothing away when I say this is the story of another failure. But the knight making this attempt, Alderic, certainly gets the A for effort, among other things enlisting a dragon and getting himself past the Unpassable Forest. Something about the “Lord” in Dunsany’s name—he was authentically heir to an ancient Irish peerage—chips in to the work for me: he’s cynical and sophisticated in ways recognizably of the rich. Perhaps the title evokes some reflexive class deference. His stories are silly yet fun to read. Dunsany is better than the more uneven Saki, for example, because his stories are so well done, a light touch with the humor and always a straight face. “Cheeky” might be the operative term, but the violence can be abrupt and bracing. In my internet travels on Dunsany and his work I found an interesting forum called The Weird Tradition, with a weekly reading and discussion group called The Deep Ones. They chew over stories at about the rate of one per week. Dunsany is a regular focus of attention and I’ve learned some interesting things about him. He worked on his books and stories with illustrators, notably Sidney Sime, who created the image above and seemed to function as a sort of Jack Kirby to Dunsany’s Stan Lee. That is, many specific stories proceeded from Sime’s illustrations, which came first. The Deep Ones is very good about including these illustrations in their discussions. They illuminate the stories in interesting ways. The stories on their own, as I’ve seen with kindle products, lose a little something without the pictures. At the same time, Lord Dunsany is one of those writers who get better with more reading—you have to kind of tune into his world with a little practice. Thus, in this case, we can be pretty sure Alderic never has a chance. But he has an elaborate plan, and it’s working, and then: “... there were the Gibbelins waist-deep in the water, with torches in their hands! And, without saying a word, or even smiling, they neatly hanged him on the outer wall—and the tale is one of those that have not a happy ending.” THE END. Beautiful.

Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Black Bag (2025)

Like most spy thriller movies, I’m sorry to say, excellent or otherwise, Black Bag lost me with its many security levels, espionage protocols, and high-tech gizmos up the ying-yang. I got this far: There’s a leak at the UK National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). Counterintelligence officer George T. Woodhouse (Michael Fassbender) has been put in charge of uncovering it. There are five chief suspects, two couples and Woodhouse’s wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). A husband’s suspicion of his wife is a Hitchcockian kind of premise that rarely fails to raise plot stakes quite high. George invites the handful of suspects to a collegial dinner party, dopes the food so their inhibitions are lowered, and plays psychological games looking for insight. He may or may not get much, but violence erupts as infidelities are confirmed. In general, Kathryn is starting to look better for it. Common sense about such plots also makes her more likely for the sake of drama. But that might be misdirection too as down the rabbit hole we go, the investigation deepening. Kathryn is seen meeting (via surreptitious satellite access) with a mysterious Russian in Zurich for reasons unclear. There’s also a mysterious Swiss bank account with millions of pounds in it. By the time of the second dinner party, I was pretty well lost, although, like keeping an eye focused on one cup in the shell game, I followed Kathryn’s movements and interactions closely. However, I still can’t say if I was right—partly because ensuing events became complicated and confusing for me, and partly because I’m dutybound anyway to withhold spoilers. Even mystified as I was, Black Bag was zippy and entertaining. Fassbender disappears into his role in his usual uncanny way, and Blanchett struts the frame and holds attention any time she is in it, as usual. The supporting cast is great too, notably Marisa Abela as Clarissa, one of the suspects. Director Steven Soderbergh has an affinity for this kind of pseudo-intellectual cat and mouse thriller, often involving spies and even more often complicated plots that people like me have a hard time following, even if we’re enjoying the way it rolls. I enjoyed the way Black Bag rolls even when I lost track of who was designing what on whom. It’s good to see Soderbergh coming out of retirement to make a couple of stalwart, flashy ones the past year or two, Black Bag and Presence. Good stuff.

The Humiliated and Insulted (1861)

Humiliated and Insulted, The Insulted and Humiliated, The Insulted and the Injured, Injury and Insult
There are various problems with this novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, early and arguably his first true novel. That’s in part because it’s under influence of Charles Dickens, who Dostoevsky reportedly read in his years of exile. It’s his biggest to date, well over 300 pages by my estimate, managing multiple storylines with foreshadowing and cross-cutting. It’s still pretty crude and awkward, but it’s apparent he is absorbing and learning the craft. When I first saw the title I thought it was perfect for Dostoevsky, though it travels under various titles—some translators drop the “The,” which changes the sense too much for me. I’d even like another “the,” which appears in The Insulted and the Injured. But I prefer “Humiliated” and think it should go first. The Dickens influence is seen most clearly in the orphan girl Nellie, a 13-year-old suffering from epilepsy and homelessness, among other things. The first-person narrator is himself published, and now working on a second novel. His first novel roughly resembles Dostoevsky’s own first, Poor Folk. The best thing about The Humiliated and Insulted is probably Prince Valkovsky, who develops into one of Dostoevsky’s memorable villains. He’s even worse (or better), ultimately, than Foma Fomitch from the previous novel, The Village of Stepanchikovo. There’s a scene here that blew my mind in which this prince takes this narrator to supper and schools him on the depths of human depravity. Dostoevsky was particularly good at these evil souls. The reason I like the title as given above is because that’s how things generally go here. First these struggling poor folks are humiliated—given hopes for something, for example, that are subsequently dashed. Then followed by gratuitous insult, so it really stings. Again, this is what Dostoevsky can be particularly good at and he’s really coming into it here. The plots and subplots generally involve marriage and the grasping needs for money. An Englishman appears in Petersburg, as if to fix the Dickens influence. The structure, as I say, is somewhat awkward, but it is nonetheless compulsively readable, even as you can see the seams and how he is learning to write novels. It’s probably not necessary to read this for a better understanding of Dostoevsky, but it won’t hurt and it’s a good fix if you are jonesing for more of him.

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

Cries & Whispers (1972)

Viskningar och rop, Sweden, 92 minutes

Director/writer: Ingmar Bergman

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Frederic Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach

Editor: Siv Lundgren

Cast: Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Kari Sylwan, Ingrid Thulin, Erland Josephson, Henning Moritzen, Georg Arlin, Ingrid Bergman

Cries & Whispers is the first movie I saw by director and writer Ingmar Bergman, largely on the strength of its Oscar win—I still believed in the Academy Awards then, even if this one was only for cinematographer Sven Nykvist (who deserved the accolades, of course). I was still a teenager, but aware of Bergman’s outsize reputation for art films. I didn’t like this one much. The heavy-handed extremes felt forced or showy and in general it was way too slow. I tried it a couple more times over the years but have never warmed to it much even as I fell in love with a bunch of Bergman’s other stuff: Fanny and Alexander, Persona, Scenes From a Marriage, The Virgin Spring, Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, etc.

So I was prepared for something like an hour and a half of tedium, a study in formal miserablism, when I sat down to look at it again. It’s heavy on the red. Red furniture. Red wallpaper. Red drapes. Fade to red. Blood, of course, but that comes later. The story involves three 30something middle-class sisters, one of whom is dying. That’s Agnes (Harriet Andersson), attended by her sisters Maria (Liv Ullmann) and Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and the servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). Maybe I finally grew up enough, but for the first time this death of Agnes and all her suffering and agonies that precede it finally reached me and I started preparing myself to backtrack and praise the movie. Harriet Andersson is stunningly good.

The Heart of the Matter (1948)

I’ve read a few Graham Greene novels along the way and thought I knew what I was in for with this highly rated one. But it was a disappointment, a cheap, sour, and bleak romance. It reminded me too much of Ernest Hemingway and his eternal stoic stone face intended to represent some kind of nobility. I thought of two other writers much better at what I expected from Greene: Georges Simenon’s so-called “hard” novels (e.g., Tropic Moon and I want to get to more) and South African J.M. Coetzee, a master at compressed language and terrible developments. Greene is not high on colonialism as a general rule, but he is by comparison with Simenon and Coetzee. In The Heart of the Matter a middle-aged policeman at an African outpost is in a loveless marriage and, improbably enough, finds himself in a lousy affair with a widow more than 30 years younger. I suppose these things happen, and speak to some of the basic problems with colonialism. The sweltering weather is often noticed—even light caresses start the sweat going. Our guy’s wife is also having an affair, with a junior officer who hates him. “Syrians” are all over the place, lying, blackmailing, smuggling. Unclear where they are in the World War II setting. Not particularly with the Allies. Another detail I found annoying was Catholic religion, taken seriously by our (philandering) guy and his (philandering) wife. For example, it’s a major crisis for him when he does not confess everything in a confessional but still takes communion afterward. This is a grave problem for him. His girlfriend doesn’t get it and neither do I, frankly. And you really should get it for the ending to land as hard as I think Greene wants it to, and apparently does for others. I appreciate how meticulously structured it is to deliver maximum bleak, but you have to buy the whole Catholic thread more than I could. Also, as these people seem to be WASPy Brits, I assume it must mean something specific that they’re Roman Catholics and not Church of England, but I don’t know what that is and am not interested enough at the moment to try chasing it down. I’m not even convinced this is one of Greene’s best, let alone one of the best novels of the 20th century as per Modern Library.

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

“What Was It?” (1859)

Fitz-James O’Brien was among the earliest writers of horror stories but died in the US Civil War at the age of 34 and didn’t leave many stories behind. I found this one in The Dark Descent, where editor David G. Hartwell is typically effusive, calling O’Brien the heir apparent to Edgar Allan Poe. And it’s a pretty good story—I like O’Brien’s clean and straightforward language (for the 19th century). A couple problems, the first of which is foreshadowed in Hartwell’s intro, and that is that it is rotten with explanation. It’s also a typical early horror story in that it doesn’t try hard to scare and it does try hard to soothe. That is, merely mentioning strange supernatural details is considered sufficient to provoke anxiety. We are all generally more corrupted by now and need more effects to goose us up such as jump-scares. I thought the story’s most interesting point was the invisibility of the phenomenon, whether ghost or extra-dimensional creature or whatever. The idea was popular in the late 19th century, with Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, and others chipping in their versions. As an effect, interest in it seemed to be done by the early 20th century, perhaps marked by H.G. Wells’s 1897 novel The Invisible Man (and the 1930s Universal movie based on it). As a kid, I ranked invisibility high among my desired superpowers, but the impulse was (and probably would be still) voyeuristic. As for encountering some invisible thing, yes, as described here, it would certainly be creepy and disturbing. But I can’t say it’s ever been the stuff of my nightmares, sleeping or waking. “What Was It?” covers most of its bases pretty well, but I thought O’Brien missed a trick by not using flour to make the thing more visible. Instead, they used the bedsheets to get a general idea of what they were dealing with, and later plaster for more specific details. I guess that works too. Hartwell also identifies O’Brien as a pioneer in science fiction at least as much as horror, and in many ways this story does feel closer to SF. My problem with taking it as horror is the whole invisibility thing. It’s just not something that seems very effective to me. In fact, the story reminds me a lot of Maupassant’s “Horla” stories, equally weak sauce or more so. “What Was It?” is probably the best of the invisibility-themed stories I’ve read so far—I still need to get to the Wells—and I think it may be the earliest of them all. Is invisibility as a horror idea all played out now or is that me? It’s hard to think of examples after about 1910. I don’t think H.P. Lovecraft even tried it.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

On Becoming a Guinea Fowl (2024)

There are a number of things about On Becoming a Guinea Fowl that I’m not sure I understand, notably the title and some of the details in the opening scene. For me the picture falls into a genre of “film festival movies,” proved out by the awards it has won from Cannes, Chicago, London, and other film festivals. The opening scene is vividly, self-consciously visual: Shula (Susan Chardy) is returning home at night from a costume party. She wears a spangled helmet with dark glasses and an outfit that looks like inflated parachute fabric. She notices a body lying in the deserted and lonely highway. It is her Uncle Fred and he’s dead. Then Shula’s cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) shows up. She appears drunk, knocking at the window of Shula’s car, but Shula ignores her. Lots of activity and visuals here, but the point of the movie has little to do with how Uncle Fred died on that highway, something we never learn. Instead, what we learn is that Uncle Fred was a rapist who preyed on female members of his extended family, often when they were underage. Guinea Fowl affirms how universal this type of domestic abuse is, reaching into Zambia, Africa, in much the same way that Women Talking witnessed it in a Mennonite community in Bolivia. It’s not just Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein in the US—it’s everywhere. Some of the reasons it continues are shown in Guinea Fowl. The women of the extended family, all the aunties, blame Uncle Fred’s widow because she would not cook for him. It makes no sense, but that’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Thus, director and writer Rungano Nyoni offers a panoramic view of these crimes and family responses. Shula knows better than the aunties that it is Uncle Fred who is responsible for what he has done and no one else. But she’s in the minority. As the movie goes along, more and more victims come forward with their stories. One of the girls, Bupe (Esther Sangini), tries to tell her mother in a video she records on her phone what Uncle Fred did to her, but her mother doesn’t want to hear it or believe it. For that generation, the sole tragedy here is that Uncle Fred has died. As for Bupe: “He’s dead now,” she says. “So it’s OK.” On Becoming a Guinea Fowl is marred slightly by distractions such as the opening scene that I don’t really see as necessary. But it has a familiar (and depressing) story to tell, it sticks close to the truths of sexual abuse, and the performances are great across the board, a winning ensemble. The picture won awards from film festivals because it deserves them even if it’s not the most artfully written screenplay. Check it out if it makes your local film festival. It’s also on HBO Max.

“Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” (1955)

This long story by J.D. Salinger was packaged in 1963 with another long piece, “Seymour, an Introduction,” for the last book he published. With Franny and Zooey, from 1961, they were all Glass family stories, all as written by Buddy Glass. “Raise High” goes lighter on the spiritual / religious extracurricular activities and is essentially a very good wedding-day story. The groom, Seymour Glass, and his bride Muriel are entirely offstage. The wedding has been delayed or called off because of some crisis for Seymour. It’s 1942 and everyone is suddenly in the military. Buddy barely gets a pass to come home to New York City. When he arrives, it’s a sweltering day and wedding attendees are chaotically leaving for the reception. Buddy ends up in a full taxicab that includes the Matron of Honor. Then they are caught in traffic (a passing parade) but they are near Buddy’s and Seymour’s New York apartment, which is air-conditioned. Buddy invites them there, where they can cool off, make phone calls, and sort things out. The story is pleasantly random, full of the energy, strange ways, and grace of special days. It’s interesting to me how, across “Franny,” “Zooey,” and especially “Raise High,” Seymour is more and more manifestly unfit to survive, seemingly a simple soul in some ways. He is also, as a matter of the Glass family saga, given as a wise or even holy man. But a lot of the details here, Seymour’s gross naivete about love and relationships and practical matters, make him out at best as a holy fool. We also know what’s looming in the “Bananafish” story so there is also sadness at the bottom of this great jumble of joy and confusion and peevishness, with let’s call it an epiphany about the meaningfulness of this special day. The title comes from the sister Boo Boo, about whom we don’t know much from the extant Glass stories. It is a typically exuberant Glass / Salinger message written in soap on the bathroom mirror. Boo Boo had been staying there but recently shipped out, forced to miss the wedding. It is this absolute rapturous cheer that I may like most about Salinger in general. He is entirely up to special days—it’s the quotidian ones that tend to give him problems. Writes Boo Boo: “Raise high the roof beam, carpenters. Like Ares comes the bridegroom, taller far than a tall man. Love, Irving Sappho, formerly under contract to Elysium Studios Ltd. Please be happy happy happy with your beautiful Muriel. This is an order. I outrank everybody on this block.” So sweet I get a cavity—in the clinch, YMMV.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour, an Introduction
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Eephus (2024)

I recently recharged the love side of my love/hate relationship with the Seattle Mariners. Having followed them closely for weeks and months this past season, and finally suffering the perhaps inevitable result, a baseball movie struck me as just the thing for cheer. Eephus, however, is not a typical sports movie, which of course more often focuses on the escalating drama of a championship run, with lots of rousing and/or tender moments in the last third. See The Bad News Bears, Hoosiers, Rocky, Bull Durham. etc., etc. Eephus has its quotient of sentiment, focusing on the last ballgame played at a field slated for demolition, making way for a new school. It’s Massachusetts, it’s October, and only a handful of spectators are on hand. The players are obvious amateurs, mostly middle-aged and older guys not remotely in physical shape. The pitcher for one side drinks beers between innings and often falls down. The slapstick did not particularly work for me. IMDb classifies Eephus as both “drama” and “comedy,” which in this case feels like a hedge because it’s hard to know what this movie is. It reminded me a lot of pictures like director Wayne Wang’s 1995 Smoke, or director and writer Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 Coffee and Cigarettes, full of random characters saying wry, eccentric things to one another. One odd fellow in the dugout here, a relief pitcher, gives us the full lowdown on the “eephus,” a high-arcing curveball that falls into the strike zone and throws off a batter’s timing. The pitch is extremely slow, clocked under 60 mph, and not used often. I guess it’s a metaphor. But Eephus also has some interesting surprises, such as voiceover narration from master documentarian Frederick Wiseman and a cameo by Red Sox / Expos pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee, who pitches an inning. The game is barely tracked as such though we get enough information to understand it’s going into extra innings, which is where the heavy metaphors really start. They play on into the dark, then light the field with their car headlights and play on some more. I came away from Eephus more puzzled than anything, but it’s quite possible I would like it more with another look. It’s that kind of movie.

I Like to Watch (2019)

Emily Nussbaum won a Pulitzer in 2016 for her TV reviews in the New Yorker. This roundup of her stuff—including feature profiles and one or two previously unpublished essays—is at once an eccentric survey primer and an exploration of what has happened to TV so far in this century. She sets the tentpole starting markers at Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Sopranos, feeling called on to defend Buffy at every opportunity and noting that the accepted status of The Sopranos means no defense is necessary—in fact, some skepticism might be called for. She also takes nuanced feminist views into her analyses, which proved notably useful when Me Too rolled around in 2017. Most of these pieces appeared originally in New York magazine or the New Yorker but most of them were reworked at least a little for this excellent compendium. Three groups of reviews are organized by theme (“Girls Girls Girls,” “Breaking the Box,” and “In Praise of Sex and Violence”) and all the rest are essays and/or profile pieces, on subjects such as Tina Fey, Jenji Kohan, Ryan Murphy, and Joan Rivers. Issues of product placement are discussed alongside full-throated defenses of Buffy and Sex and the City. Perhaps the best piece here is a long meditation on Me Too and bad artists and good art and trying to split the difference. The fact that she is also a recovering Woody Allen fan made me like her even more. TV in the 21st century has become an overwhelmingly vast landscape, with which I am familiar only in relatively tiny parts. She talks about a lot of shows I’ve never heard of here (as do people all over social media, I’m kind of in the dark on a lot of this), many more I’ve maybe meant to get to and know a little, and some things I know well, like Lost and The Leftovers, the Damon Lindelof projects. If she prefers Law & Order SVU to the flagship series, which I don’t, her reasons are clear and not surprising. Ryan Murphy gets one of the biggest profiles at the very end, but he’s one I have tended to reflexively skip past—American Horror Story, Glee, Nip/Tuck, etc. I guess he got me with the OJ doc, which was brilliant. I’d say it makes me want to try more by him, except I already did with the first season of American Horror Story. I Like to Watch also promises to be useful because there’s a lot of TV here I hope I can track down.

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

Greetings From Timbuk3 (1986)

Timbuk3 was a husband and wife act straight outta Madison, Wisconsin—Pat and Barbara K. MacDonald—augmented by a drum machine for the pseudo-trio designation. Their instincts pointed them in rootsy directions, but they had a surprise top 20 hit in 1986 with “The Future’s So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades.” It’s basically skinny tie and shades new wave, but the country blues inflections combined with the nuclear anxiety at high levels then (due to Chernobyl and Ronald Reagan joking about releasing bombs) produced something everyone wanted to hear for a few weeks. It was a pretty good joke too. The singer is in college, getting good grades, studying nuclear science. His teacher wears dark glasses, presumably for the intense flash of light that accompanies A-bomb detonation, and now the singer is wearing them too. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find coming back to this album—in memory the hit seemed more like a novelty and most of the rest of the album (except the closer) a lot of half-songs that never much cohered. But my memory was faulty—Greetings From Timbuk3 is way better than I expected. The songs are shaggy and shambolic but they are good. There’s a continuing theme of the brave young couple very much in love and facing down the cruel world together. With barrels of love. Many years later, after moving to Austin and releasing six more albums, they divorced. So it goes. It does not make them any less brave in 1986. Some cynical, vaguely lefty politics are involved too. “Hairstyles and Attitudes” sells the cynicism with homely wisdom and a brief screeching guitar. “Shame on You” is the longest song here at 5:04 and the only one where Barbara K. gets a writing credit. It’s a rap song, the rap is Barbara K.’s, and it’s not bad, with all due disclaimers. The secret gem to Greetings From Timbuk3 is the last song, “I Love You in the Strangest Way,” featuring more updates from the brave couple. But this song has always hit me in the strangest way, so to speak, it's one made for howling along with at night in various states of drunkenness and/or sadness. I wonder how they felt about it then and feel about it now. The whole album is worth checking out—and now, maybe, I will look into the rest of their catalog too.

The Piano Teacher (2001)

La pianiste, France / Austria / Germany, 131 minutes

Director: Michael Haneke

Writers: Michael Haneke, Elfriede Jelinek

Photography: Christian Berger

Music: Franz Schubert

Editors: Nadine Muse, Monika Willi

Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Annie Girardot, Benoit Magimel, Anna Sigalevitch, Susanne Lothar, Udo Samel

The Piano Teacher was something of a sensation at the time of its release. It won awards from Cannes and elsewhere, often highlighting the performances of Isabelle Huppert as Erika Kohut, the sexualized, delusional piano teacher, and Benoit Magimel as Walter Klemmer, her talented student and lover (if that’s the right word). Erika is nearing middle age and lives a kind of bohemian life, a gifted pianist in her own right, who particularly loves Schubert and gives lessons to get by, but with an unusual way of life. She still lives with her mother, but she has a compulsive, adventurous private life, where fantasy and reality bleed into one another. We see her visiting some kind of discreet, semi-classy porn store, where she gets a private stall to watch a selection of videos. She finds a used tissue in the trash and holds it to her nose while she watches. Presumably some previous patron shot his load into it.

There’s more. We see her cutting herself in the bathroom, hanging out at a drive-in theater to peep people having sex in their cars—she squats down to masturbate, is caught, and must hurry away. She puts broken glass into the coat pocket of a student who suffers intense anxiety. Why is she doing these things? It’s possible they are in the original novel by Nobel prize winner Elfriede Jelinek, also called The Piano Teacher in translation—I don’t know it. But they also fit with various extremities by director and cowriter Michael Haneke, who seems prone to them, or certainly did in about this period, bracketed by the two virtually identical versions of his curious creep show Funny Games, one from 1997 and the second from 2007. Enter Walter Klemmer, an exceptional young pianist but an arrogant, immature young man, who represents much that Erika thinks she wants.

“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943)

[spoilers] This Robert Bloch story, according to editor David G. Hartwell of the Dark Descent anthology, is arguably his best, which is a pretty big statement about someone who was so insanely prolific and also author of the literary property behind Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. I’m not arguing against it (I still need to read Psycho!), but only, as an ongoing Bloch skeptic (too much hackwork and not enough better than meh, he started early and lived long), raising an eyebrow to hear the argument. In fairness, it might be the best thing I’ve read by him, but “The Hungry House” from The Weird (edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer) at least rivals it. Bloch’s primary flaw is a broad vaudevillian tendency to crack glib and jokey, all puns and dad jokes welcome. That’s less of a problem here (though it persists) and my interest in the Jack the Ripper story gets me the rest of the way over the hump. I’m fascinated by the case and up for regular reviews of the details, which takes up a portion of this story. Bloch’s semi-vampiric premise is that Jack the Ripper is immortal, committing blood sacrifice to extend his life. He disappeared as Jack the Ripper, media celebrity, but continued to kill. An investigator, an Englishman, has been on the case for years when he approaches the first-person narrator, a Chicago psychiatrist, to enlist his aid, which involves attending a bizarre trendy bohemian loft type of party along with handfuls of Chicago references. The story’s twist is brazenly gimmicky but Bloch gets away with it somehow and the story is considered by many to be a stone classic. It’s fairly a surprise that the narrator, the Chicago psychiatrist, turns out to be himself Jack the Ripper. But you really can’t think about this too much or it all falls apart. The investigator’s interest in the psychiatrist is never really given. Chicago, not to mention the world, is a big place for such happenstance. And why, as the narrator, is he withholding from the reader who he is, other than for a short story effect? In the end this story doesn’t work so well for me. Bloch is interesting because he straddles two major strains of 20th-century horror, starting out as a teenage disciple of H.P. Lovecraft, and evolving into the straightforward dialogue-driven story with a surprise (and/or ironic) ending so popular at postwar midcentury. He is fully the latter here, by 1943. In many ways the story seems designed merely to spring its gotcha surprise, rather than offer any insight about Jack the Ripper or his legend.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

The Long Tomorrow (1955)

This novel from the Library of America ‘50s SF box is by Leigh Brackett. I barely know the name but I see she has a big reputation and, indeed, she is a good writer who can construct a novel (as opposed to all the fix-ups, more common than I knew). The Long Tomorrow features a postapocalyptic scene, set in the US after “the Destruction”—presumably an all-out nuclear war. The idea is summed up in the “30th Amendment” to the US Constitution, which outlaws cities and sets limits on density. The Amish have risen to prominence because they know better how to survive without a lot of the modern technology that has been lost. Religion has returned to prominence along with biblical public policy like stoning as a means of execution. Two boys from a small town (well, small towns is all we’ve got here) are curious about science and knowledge. They want to get to a perhaps mythical place called Barterstown, which honors knowledge according to the legends and rumors. I can’t help seeing a lot of this through the frame of now, and these religious anti-city anti-science folks in charge inevitably made me think of trumpism. The boys eventually escape and make the long journey to Barterstown, which of course isn’t at all what they thought it would be. I should probably shut up now, because I’ve already spoiled Brackett’s work to keep it uncertain in the first half whether Barterstown even really exists. The thing I like best about The Long Tomorrow is simply how well done it is. There are probably better dystopias involving religion, but this certainly merits a look if that’s your thing (Harlan Ellison, say, or Margaret Atwood). It’s not mine so much. My sympathies, here and elsewhere, straddle the religious and antireligious. In this day and age I would have to count myself, in a general sort of way, on Team Antireligious. The religious folks here are pigheaded and can be brutal but they’re not all bad, much as the Barterstown residents are sadly flawed too. Hard to know exactly where, between these two sides, that my sympathies would lie. The careful ambiguity counts as a good thing by my lights. The Long Tomorrow was good enough I’m inclined to track down some more by Brackett,

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

Rockabilly Boogie (1956-1957)

I was looking for a 1956 album called Johnny Burnette and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Trio, listed in The MOJO Collection: The Greatest Albums of All Time. Instead, I ended up with this terrific 1989 Bear Family CD: 28 tracks, encompassing all 12 tracks from the original album and all 20 tracks from a 1993 CD release listed in Wikipedia, plus copious notes and scrupulous research you’ll need a magnifying glass to read. The sequencing is weirdly varied across all three. One of my favorites, for example (out of about 28 stellar favorites), is “Rock Therapy” (“I don’t need a doctor, I don’t need a pill”)—track 3 on this album, not appearing on the original LP, track 13 on the 1993 CD. In short, you’re probably best advised to get this Bear Family CD and play it loud and often. I don’t see it on my streaming service, though I might be able to cobble together a reasonable facsimile from tracks available. But why bother when I can just play this CD? I consulted the internet on Johnny Burnette, by searching on “best rockabilly artists.” Burnette, who died in 1964 at age 30 in a boating accident, seems to fall in the lower echelons of the top 10, preceded by names you would predict: Carl Perkins, Eddie Cochran, Elvis Presley, Gene Vincent, Wanda Jackson, etc. More modern names also appear, such as the Stray Cats and Reverend Horton Heat. Johnny Burnette could thus well be a familiar name but still relatively unheard except by the most dedicated followers of rockabilly. I recommend you don’t skip Burnette. This stuff throbs with life, good screams, heavenly backup singers, barbed-wire guitar breaks, and deep thick grooves. On “Touch Me” Burnette even trills like a songbird inside the clatter. Most of the necessities are here: “Tear It Up,” “Train Kept a-Rollin’,” “Rockbilly Boogie,” “Lonesome Train (On a Lonesome Track).” “Butterfingers” is a goof, possibly playing on the candy bar’s popularity. “Eager Beaver Baby” might go too far—yes, I think it might. “Midnight Train” is a country jailhouse lament—Burnette obviously had a thing for trains. The last track, “Shattered Dreams,” is all show horns and no guitars as Burnette is called on to belt it out like Bobby Darin. It’s a novelty. Most of the rest is some of the purest rockabilly you may ever hear.

Superman (2025)

I heard a lot of good word of mouth about the latest Superman movie, directed and cowritten by James Gunn, who in 2022 was put in charge of a reboot of the DC Comics film franchise (his “cowriters” here are the original Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who died last century but, as with Bob Kane and the Batman movies, must have finally won an ironclad lawsuit). The word of mouth is warranted—the movie is well worth seeing for any fan of Superman and maybe even for those, like me, now good and sick and tired of superhero movies. Gunn has an intriguing resume. He is also responsible for Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy movies and, back in 2010, Super, with Rainn Wilson and then-Ellen Page, which might be the greatest superhero comic book parody ever made. Gunn’s tongue is not as firmly in his cheek with Superman, but the picture is so lighthearted as to be perfectly refreshing, notably with its use of the super-dog Krypto, who is playful here like a dog but has those good old Kryptonian superpowers too. If this dog ever catches a car, woe to the car. Speaking of catching, this boy-scout Superman (David Corenswet) is also caught saving a squirrel in one throwaway scene. That’s how tender his heart is. Superheroes are referred to in this universe as “metahumans” and they are not always trusted, lifting a page from the mutants thing. Superman is set up by enemies as an alien invader and people start grumbling about him. Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) has a lot to do with it, appearing as a transparently Stephen Miller type, raving about alien immigrants. Pretty obvious, but OK, I will take it in this day and age. We also get a handful of extra superheroes, associated with a quasi-core to the Justice League calling themselves the ”Justice Gang”—the Green Lantern with a blond haircut like Moe’s from the Three Stooges (Nathan Fillion), a version of Hawk Girl (Isabela Merced), Mr. Terrific, new to me (Edi Gathegi), and Metamorpho (Anthony Carrigan). At the very least it’s an odd but deeply informed view of the DC universe, such as it is. Another key twist on the usual is finding out early that Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) knows Clark Kent is Superman and they are basically boyfriend / girlfriend. There’s also a pretty good joke about Superman thinking he is authentically punk-rock. I dread whatever comes next because that usually means weighing down all the best stuff with unlikely explanations and doing the continuity dance for the sake of carping fans. Like the 1978 Superman, this one can be thoroughly enjoyed on its own terms and all sequels approached with caution. Better to look at this one more than once—it’s that good.

Radio Free Albemuth (1976)

So far I have not been able to make it through even the first novel in Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy. It’s partly that it’s not an easy read and partly my own bad attitude about the Christian-ness of it all and of Dick’s life in about the last 10 years of it. Radio Free Albemuth is Dick’s first cut at what would become VALIS, prompted by an event he took as a religious experience in March 1974. The manuscript was rejected by publishers without substantial revisions. It’s interesting to me that a writer of his stature—Dick was a pretty big deal in SF circles in 1976—would still face such editorial rejection and impositions. I agree Radio Free Albemuth is weak, or parts of it feel undeveloped, but the concepts, as always, can be heady. Nicholas Brady and his close friend Philip K. Dick are the two main characters. Brady is receiving messages from an entity or civilization that hails from the star Albemuth and has placed a satellite circling Earth, blending in with other satellites. It is beaming messages and instructions to people like Brady. They are sleeper agents, I think, though their mission is not malicious but supporting resistance to a fascist regime in the US. VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System. Reading this novel at this moment inevitably brings Donald Trump to mind as the fascist US president but Dick’s intended target in 1976 was, of course, Richard Nixon. Pray for us now and at the hour of our death, as Dick might put it. That may not be fair, but there is an unmistakable religious vibe wrapped into this. VALIS feels like God by another name, indeed the more Jesus-oriented Holy Trinity God of the Bible’s New Testament. The fascist regime is notably terrible, not just with violence and imprisonment, but with the kind of reality distortion capabilities seen in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (and the Trump regime, e.g., loudly braying there is less right-wing violence than so-called left-wing, or consistently arguing climate change is a hoax). It’s fair to call Radio Free Albemuth dystopic and it makes me curious to see how it works with the trilogy. As a first draft, this one lives in a gray zone between finished and unfinished. It probably does need more work—which it basically got with VALIS a couple of years later.

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

Touki Bouki (1973)

Senegal, 85 minutes

Director/writer: Djibril Diop Mambety

Photography: Georges Bracher

Music: Josephine Baker, Mado Robin

Editor: Siro Asteni

Cast: Magaye Niang, Myriam Niang, Christoph Colomb, Moustapha Toure, Aminata Fall, Ousseynou Diop

In Wolof, the language spoken in Senegal and elsewhere in Africa, “Touki Bouki” translates as “The Journey of the Hyena,” which helps to clarify things. The picture can roughly be described as a kind of Bonnie and Clyde story crossed with the classic Western story of dissatisfied young folks in the provinces—or, in this case, an African colony of France—trying to make it to the capital—not Dakar, note, but Paris. A lighthearted Josephine Baker song, “Paris Paris Paris,” underlines the point, coming up on the soundtrack whenever Mory (Magaye Niang) and Anta (Myriam Niang) feel the great city and European cultural capital is within their grasp.

Mory owns a motorcycle on which he has mounted a long-horned cow skull. Life in this remote region is mostly about cattle ranching and Mory gets by working as a cowherd. It’s not what he wants to do with his life—that’s more along the lines of being a bohemian. But early scenes in a slaughterhouse set the tone and foreshadow his more likely doom. Though not a large part of the movie, these scenes are almost the first thing we see. They are intensely disturbing, as we witness pathetic cattle as they realize the danger late and fight helplessly. There’s nothing they can do. Touki Bouki is a low-budget affair and these scenes are not simulations, showing actual livestock slaughterhouse deaths (decapitated and bled out) in a little too much detail for me. But it certainly establishes, however playful events shown here may become, that there is always a desperate deadly seriousness behind the impulse to get away.

“The Dead Smile” (1899)

F. Marion Crawford didn’t write even a dozen horror short stories, but they tend to be among the best from the fertile turn of the 20th century. This one features a corpse that keeps escaping from its coffin in the family mausoleum—beheaded, too, and the head self-mobile, harbinger of Crawford’s “Screaming Skull,” still to come just a few years later. “The Dead Smile” riffs on “rictus sardonicus,” a term not used in the story but an apt tag on the internet—an exaggerated involuntary grin. The condition generally comes of tetanus but can also suggest strychnine or hemlock poisoning. Ray Russell put it to good use in his 1961 story, “Sardonicus.” In this story, the unnerving grin is associated most with a bitter old man who harbors family secrets. “He smiled, stretching pale lips across discolored teeth in an expression of profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred and contempt.” What’s more, and probably the best effect here, whenever he flashes this grin everyone else in the room starts to grin the same way. It’s the source of the story’s title, with interesting multiple meanings. In the spooky family crypt most of the dead are wrapped in shrouds, except the one that climbs out of its coffin and is usually found leaning against a wall with its head rolled up at its feet. This is all great scene-setting, especially when everyone starts to grin in unison. It’s good, because the story can be unfortunately a little lame and obvious. The terrible old man with the big grin wants to forbid a marriage between his son and his niece but won’t say why (it’s not hard to guess as the story goes along). I note that the marriage of first cousins made me uneasy, but not anyone else here. “The Dead Smile” largely overcomes its flaws by its strange air and details. As it happens, the point of the story, its big revelation, doesn’t have much to do with either the escaping corpse or the rictus sardonicus. There’s also a banshee on hand (in Irish legend, a female spirit whose wailing warns of an impending death), equally beside the point and perhaps the least interesting element of the story. “The Dead Smile” may not be Crawford’s best, but it holds its own.

65 Great Spine Chillers, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Hyperion (1989)

The first in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos cycle of four novels won a Hugo and sits on many lists of best science fiction all-time. It did not entirely live up to the hype for me. I admit the structure is ambitious and even impressive. Lifting from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 15th-century Middle English Canterbury Tales (as noted often), it is about a group of pilgrims making a sojourn to the mysterious planet Hyperion on a specific mission. To pass the time on the long space voyage they take turns telling stories about their relations to Hyperion, whose features include the mostly unexplained but tantalizing and evocative “Time Tombs” as well as the god-like figure that appears to guard them, known as the Shrike. Along the way there is a lot of world-building about humanity in approximately the 28th century CE. Simmons has set himself a huge balancing act, between the states of technology and human politics against the background of a federation of hundreds of settled planets, on the one hand, along with many hundreds more designated for the “Outback,” i.e., not part of the so-called Hegemony, and, on the other hand, details about Hyperion and the pilgrims. The main story of the mission is barely here. The individual, novella-length stories of the pilgrims range from slightly better than humdrum all the way up to very good. Most reviewers seem to love the priest’s story best, and the scholar’s tale is also pretty good. Hyperion is stuffed with intriguing SF ideas, from time dilation to effects of faster-than-light travel to the Time Tombs and the Shrike. Little comes of the mission here, but I understand that’s covered in the next novel, The Fall of Hyperion. Some like it even more, but many others don’t, and no one seems to care much for the last two (Endymion and The Rise of Endymion). I am curious, however, to know what comes of the mission, so I may get to the second. I’ve read one of Simmons’s horror novels, Carrion Comfort, also from 1989 (he’s a bit of a prolific genre polyglot) and thought it was pretty good. Still, Hyperion came in as slightly disappointing for me—nicely done, but only half a job. This is part of my problem with series in general. Hyperion is not really finished in most ways, anticipating further novels. The setup is for a mission and we’re left hanging on that. The individual tales vary quite a bit in terms of quality. The people who say The Fall of Hyperion is good had better be right, that’s all I have to say.

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

It Follows (2014)

USA, 100 minutes

Director/writer: David Robert Mitchell

Photography: Mike Gioulakis

Music: Disasterpeace

Editor: Julio C. Perez IV

Cast: Maika Monroe, Keir Gilchrist, Daniel Sovatto, Lili Sepe, Olivia Luccardi, Jake Weary, Bailey Spry

Strictly speaking, It Follows is not a horror show in the slasher mode. Supernatural elements abound. It’s set in Detroit, not some forest with a nearby campground. There is no final girl. Even the big bad knives that give the slasher subgenre its name go missing here. But It Follows is fully onboard with the idea that no teen sexual activity should ever go unpunished. The equation is simple: teen sexual activity leads to swift and brutal death, no exceptions. Or, as IMDb puts it in a pithy summary: “A young woman is followed by an unknown supernatural force after a sexual encounter.”

But there’s more than just that to this moody doomy premise. An additional wrinkle provides that the unknown supernatural force tracks you to your death. It might look like a stranger. It might look like someone you know. It moves slow but sure. You can run away from it but it never stops coming for you—unless you have sex with someone else, in which case it goes after that person. However, if it gets that person, murdering them in some suitably grotesque way, then it’s coming for you next. That’s all there is to it. You’re back where you started.

“The Black Cat” (1843)

[spoilers, content warnings] This Edgar Allan Poe story is an absolute classic on a few different levels. It has Poe’s claustrophobic neuroses on full display. Walling things up may have worked better in “The Cask of Amontillado” but it’s fine here too. Certain paranoid parallels are also obvious with another famous story of his from the same year, “The Tell-Tale Heart.” And layering on folk superstitions around black cats and/or their wicked supernatural powers basically makes it a wind-up-and-go winner. But my favorite part is the way those elements are not the greatest horror in this story. That belongs to the first-person narrator, an unrepentant abusing monster. He’s what’s most scary in this story, not the business with the cat and the revenge. Poe obviously knows what his narrator is and plays to it. The misdirection from the self-pitying narrator is chillingly easy to see through. That he cannot see it himself makes him even worse. He’s about to be put to death as he writes—and we know it’s the only thing that’s going to stop him. He is a drunkard as well, which exacerbates his abuse, which is shocking. He is married and though they had no children they were happy tending to a small menagerie: “birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat.” But when our guy drinks he can get mean and in one such fit he tears one of the cat’s eyes out. It’s hard to express how shocking this is. The cat survives and stays with them, but now he's fearful and not so friendly. I know using pets in stories like this is blatantly manipulative and even a crutch for writers, but they can still work on me, and I think Poe knows what he’s doing here. It gets worse. Now our guy can’t stand the sight of the cat and in another fit solves that problem by hanging it from a tree limb. After which his house burns down and a mysterious scorch mark appears in the little that survived, a scorch mark that looks like a cat with a rope about its neck. Unbelievably, it continues. He murders his wife in yet another fit of rage and thinks he can get away with it by walling the corpse up next to the fireplace in the basement. However, in his haste, he walls up another cat in the household, which was black like the previous cat and showed up shortly after that demise of the first. Hmm. When police show up investigating his missing wife, the walled-up cat raises a ruckus and the corpse is soon discovered. Yes, there are lots of unlikely aspects here, but Poe’s overheated tone and the rapid-fire series of events get us past all questions, even if in a slightly numb state from some of the shocks. I went to ISFDB and rated it 10 out of 10.

65 Great Tales of Horror, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

The Ugly Stepsister (2025)

I’m still not sure what to think of the fantasy subgenre that updates fairy tales with modern sensibilities, usually done in the horror mode. Other than Angela Carter’s exercises in this realm (her treatment of the Little Red Riding Hood tale is a near-perfect short story trilogy), I haven’t liked a lot of what I’ve seen, which admittedly is not much. This Norwegian-language swipe at Cinderella has a batch of surprise switch-ups to the original story and way too much body horror for my taste. I admit I like the idea of seeing fairy tales roughed up like this, but I was looking at The Ugly Stepsister through my fingers for minutes at a time. I like the way the story is approached here, basically offering up its twists in a prequel to the original. By the time one of these stepsisters has earned the name “Cinderella,” the prequel narrative had overturned most of my expectations. The nominal ugly stepsister, Elvira (Lee Myren), seems sympathetic at first. She never seemed ugly to me but most people in the movie think she is, starting with her mother, who subjects her to plastic surgery procedures such as they existed in the time and place of the movie, which I’m assuming is approximately Middle Ages Europe. It’s all about winning the prince at an upcoming ball. There’s a nose job involving precise work with a chisel, enhanced eyelashes (couldn’t watch it), and resizing her foot to fit a slipper. For the latter, I spoke aloud to my screen and begged her not to do it. There’s also some extraordinary business with a tapeworm. Elvira is such a punching bag of circumstances here that it starts to verge on comic, like her regular lusty screams of pain. I was kind of sorry this one decided to go jokey, but I also have to admit it was relief from a lot of the unpleasant action. Notwithstanding the unpleasant action, much here is lighthearted fun. At the ball where the prince will choose his lover, the whole thing is more like a variety show or beauty pageant. Elvira’s dance number is straight out of Busby Berkeley and/or Edgar Degas. The story stays focused on Elvira, even as, in the background, Cinderella wins the prince and presumably embarks on living happily ever after. What’s left for Elvira appears to be the opposite of living happily ever after. In the end the crows get the tapeworm and Elvira and her sister Alma flee.

“Franny” (1955)

It’s fair enough, I suppose, to call J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, published in 1961, a novel. Certainly the two narratives are related. But they were originally published two years apart. “Franny” is more like a short story, albeit a longish one at 40 pages. “Zooey” is four times that length, which makes it more like a short novel. “Franny” is an example of how good Salinger was getting, almost exponentially by the year. All his subtleties, however, worked against him a little this time. He is showing Franny Glass—yes, this is core to the Glass family tale—in the midst of a spiritual crisis of meaninglessness. She is meeting her shallow frat-boy boyfriend in some college town for a football game and party weekend. He is a Holden Caulfield version but one who can keep it together for college antics. Most readers, apparently, and there were a great many of them for the 1961 bestselling book, took the crisis to be one of pregnancy. I don’t know if I have ever read it that way, but now that you mention it I can see how people would. I never thought of pregnancy because as a teen I read the Raise High the Roof Beam book first (notably with “Seymour, an Introduction”), and knew all about the Eastern woo-woo it is marinated in. And/or that Salinger was. In many ways Franny is a stand-in for him, quivering in the face of meaninglessness and flailing for help. It’s sad, in a way, when you see Franny’s crisis as Salinger’s own. Franny has recently read a 19th-century Russian Christian devotional text (Eastern Orthodox the primary frame?) called The Way of the Pilgrim, which speaks of a technique called ceaseless prayer. At story’s end we see that Franny seems to be practicing it. It doesn’t exactly fit with the pregnancy idea, but doesn’t entirely undermine it either. Anyway, most of Salinger’s primary religious preoccupations, as I recall, are much further east—Buddhism and Taoism. The Way of the Pilgrim suggests much wider reading and implies, with the rest of the Glasses (chiefly Seymour and Buddy), a spiritual crisis of Salinger’s own, which in the most likely if pedestrian way is related to PTSD. The Glass family is decidedly middle-class with all the usual middle-class privileges. It’s unknown where Franny will go next, but she will always have a place to go. On to “Zooey.”

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
Read story online.

Pre-Millennium Tension (1996)

Tricky intended his second album as a departure from the “trip hop” label with which he was not only associated, but indeed tagged as inventor, going back to his work with Massive Attack. His claim was that he wanted to draw closer to punk-rock. I don’t hear much of that here, which maybe lands closer to postpunk as he stalks through welters of spooky sound with his filtered Spiderman vocals. The album bears some of the biggest hits of his career: “Christiansands,” “Tricky Kid” (trite confessions of celebrity by some lights), and the almost wistful “Makes Me Wanna Die.” I don’t think I like Pre-Millenium Tension as much as his first album, Maxinquaye, but it benefits from some spillover effects of that mighty debut. I’m in agreement with rock critic Robert Christgau that key collaborator Martina Topley-Bird tends to get short shrift in the Tricky annals. She’s there on the first four Tricky albums, and then gone, never to return, after their personal relationship ended. Weirdly, Wikipedia offers no songwriting credits for this album, but, according to a Discogs listing, Topley-Bird had no hand in writing any of the songs on Pre-Millennium Tension, and the same is true per Wikipedia for Maxinquaye. But she still has a lot to do with what makes Tricky’s early albums work. Her vocals are a clarion counterpoint to Tricky’s more prowling style, bringing home points of these songs in ways that make them work uniquely. While Tricky rumbles and spews on the lower rungs of the mix in “Christiansands,” for example, Topley-Bird floats in along the higher registers, enlarging the track. And she does that a lot all over the album. I do think Maxinquaye is the better set—the songs are more fully imagined, with the trip hop production that sculpts phantasms into the mix. But I still find enough to like on the follow-up—restrained and understated, it can recede uneasily to the background, reaching out at random with its various hooks and a mood that entirely suffuses any room where it plays, at practically any volume. Lower it, and conversation may still be possible, with lights turned down low. Yet you are never entirely free of it under any circumstances where it plays.

“Casting the Runes” (1911)

This story by M.R. James is tagged in The Weird, the massive and essential anthology edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer, as James’s most famous. Indeed, one scene involving a slip of paper with runic symbols printed on it, a sudden wind, and a fire in a fireplace rang a few bells for me. Later I realized the story is the basis of the movie by director Jacques Tourneur, Night of the Demon (later edited and rereleased as Curse of the Demon), the source of my déjà vu. In a general way I have to admit I have some problems with the way James tells stories, drawing on semifictional documentary sources and slowly, slowly circling his points. Some themes work like time-release medicines. They hit you later. You’re generally required to do a lot of unpacking yourself, and later rereads are not a bad idea. In “Casting the Runes” we see the text of letters along with secondhand and even thirdhand details by way of conversation. It can be maddeningly indirect yet that is large part of the unease his tales can cause you. Most characters tend to deny the validity of the weird and ghostly stuff but at the same time are unnaturally interested in it. There’s a lot of busy business here—people urgently going from here to there to investigate. But it’s not hard to see what’s going on. A man with supernatural skills is hunting people for reasons of petty vengeance. The rules are complicated and a little mechanical, veering close to the unbelievable. The slip of paper, for example: you have to get someone to accept it freely as handed to them. These rules here are spelled out more clearly in the movie. If the paper is then consumed in flame it seals the curse. If, however, the person with the slip of paper can pass it to someone else, preferably the one who gave it to them in the first place, then that person is off the hook. Busy, busy—and perhaps too rational. But M.R. James establishes a reasonably good air of mystery and dread. The details here can be fleeting but they stick, living inside you in a way that insidiously provokes anxiety. A very strange advertisement in a bus, for example, has made me look at bus cards in whole new ways ever since.

The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
M.R. James, Complete Ghost Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV (2005)

I was impressed with Erik Davis’s exegesis of the great Led Zeppelin album for the 33-1/3 series. It seems to me it’s a certain model of how these books should be done. It starts with a behemoth of not just rock or the ‘70s but of popular culture itself, and it meets the album on its own terms. And on ours as well—his treatment of the fatigue now associated with hearing “Stairway to Heaven” yet again is one of the best parts of his analysis of the iconic classic rock radio staple and of the book at large. Led Zeppelin IV came out while I was in high school and immediately changed the landscape. I paid little attention to the rumored strains of Aleister Crowley and J.R.R. Tolkien or any of that—I thought that was just part of the hype, if anything. Davis makes a strong and vaguely comical case for taking the various mystical vapors into account. He is often gently making fun of the band’s various Spinal Tap elements, even allowing that ultimately he still embraces it all. There is some kind of unholy allure to Led Zeppelin IV, we must admit. Davis consults born-again Christians gravely worried for souls lost to the band. Individual band members are an important part of this story too, of course. Davis gives them their full due. I had no idea, for example, how important John Paul Jones was beyond playing bass. I appreciated Davis’s fealty to John Bonham as one of the great drummers. For me, Jimmy Page has always been kind of a gnomic figure, both with Led Zeppelin and as a guitar player (not to mention producer). I need to get to more Zeppelin literature, but Davis clarified a lot for me about Page. And Robert Plant too, who I’ve always taken as the face of the band, even knowing he’s just the singer, gets fleshed out for me further here too. Davis doesn’t feel the need for a chapter on his personal experience, which is a bit refreshing for this series. He compresses his ardor into every line, although come to think of it he does open with a humorous personal anecdote. He’s funny too, matching Led Zeppelin’s cringiest gestures (e.g., the lyrics of “Stairway to Heaven”) with his own self-conscious credulousness. I see now that I missed a lot of the faerie leitmotifs. But I never changed the station when any of the eight songs on Led Zeppelin IV played on the radio, at least until about 1977, when my responses were more sporadic than automatic. I mean, sometimes I changed the station. Led Zeppelin IV still holds up, as I saw the other day playing it through for the first time in a long while. I’m talking about even “Stairway to Heaven,” which Davis describes as less a song or a track and more a spell. Correct! And it can still work, although, yes, it is often plagued by the fatigue. I will say I got a little tired of Davis’s insistence on referring to the title as the four unpronounceable glyphs. But it’s all in the spirit. By any other name, the glorious Led Zeppelin IV!

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