Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (2009)

From 1976 until 2002 Joseph Frank published the five (large) volumes of his biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky. As he explains in the preface to this (large) single-volume abridged version, he looked to Leon Edel’s similarly massive biography of Henry James (four large volumes), which was whittled down to a single book (large, of course). Frank thought that was a pretty good idea and brought in editor Mary Petrusewicz for the condensing work. It would take them seven more years, but I found the single volume particularly useful and worthwhile, given I had only limited interest in plowing through the original five. It connects a lot of dots that might be missed simply reading through Dostoevsky’s beyond-impressive work as a whole. Perhaps most crucially it covers the 10 years from 1849 to 1859, when Dostoevsky was charged and convicted of treasonous activity, imprisoned, forced to endure a mock execution, and exiled to Siberia. He was imprisoned there for four years, after which it took him another six years to make it back to Russia, Petersburg, and Moscow. Understanding what happened in that period is almost staggering to contemplate—he lost 10 years of writing in his late 20s and 30s, the best years for many writers. It is crucial to understanding his work, both before and especially after, when he produced most of his masterpieces. Frank also provides excellent literary context and analysis for all Dostoevsky’s work. My takes were not always the same as his, but he’s the expert here, not me, and his analyses were always illuminating. Even this abridged version is still quite a honker—nearly 1,000 pages in print and closer to 1,500 in the kindle pagination (however that is calculated). But this biography was essential as I made my way through Dostoevsky’s work, lucid and informative. Even with its imposing length I would recommend it to anyone with more than a passing interest in the great Russian novelist. Dostoevsky wrote great tales, but in many ways his life story rivals them.

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

Turn On the Bright Lights (2002)

I remember liking this first album from NYC-based Interpol pretty well, but lately I’ve been distracted trying to ID the various influences I may or may not be hearing as they hit me: Bauhaus, Catherine Wheel, Echo & the Bunnymen, Joy Division, Simple Minds. Wikipedia has more suggestions which seem apt now that you mention it: the Chameleons, Siouxsie & the Banshees. So “derivative” feels like a reasonably fair point to make. “Pretentious” might be another. Not to be harsh about it, but when you open your album (and apparently lots of show) with a song called “Untitled,” well, really? That’s all you could think of? Other clues suggest Turn On the Bright Lights is intended as some sort of concept LP. Calling track 2 “Obstacle 1” and track 7 “Obstacle 2,” for example (two different songs as far as I can tell), suggest that larger cryptic undercurrent patterns are at work here. The sequencing pairs up two 3LA (three-letter acronym) titles, one of which is “NYC,” a genial blast of slo-mo drone. The other is “PDA”—is that really personal digital assistant? Public display of affection? Pathological demand avoidance? Hard to tell. I suspect the larger concept has something to do with the big city, home at that time to a host of semi-related acts, including the Strokes, the National, and others. Another track seems to speak to the New York fixation, the overly titled “Stella Was a Diver and She Was Always Down,” which breaks down into calls for “Stella!,” a certifiable New Yorkism ever since A Streetcar Named Desire. Note also that the title, Turn On the Bright Lights, is often associated with Broadway (and/or Warner Brothers classic animation)—and embedded right there in “NYC.” I’m not entirely saying all this like they’re bad things (nor that I’m proud to have cracked some code, because I’m sure I’m overthinking it). Eventually, it’s true, with closer dedicated study, the album grew on me again. It’s often dense and heavy and if you let it it can weigh you right down like the heaviest comforter on a cold three-dog night. Bliss and ecstasies all at once. I bet Interpol was a great live act on good nights. Not sure I’m venturing any further than I originally did into their complicated catalog with personnel changes and associated acts. But still, ultimately, a pleasure finally to just play loud and let it come to me.

A Prophet (2009)

Un prophete, France / Italy, 155 minutes

Director: Jacques Audiard

Writers: Thomas Bidegain, Jacques Audiard, Abdel Raouf Dafri, Nicolas Peufaillit

Photography: Stephane Fontaine

Music: Alexandre Desplat

Editor: Juliette Welfling

Cast: Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Adel Bencherif, Hichem Yacoubi, Reda Kateb, Slimane Dazi, Jean-Philippe Ricci, Gilles Cohen, Leïla Bekhti, Jean-Emmanuel Pagni, Frédéric Graziani, Alaa Oumouzoune

I must admit I originally took the title of this epic prison movie a little too literally. I knew it involved an Arab in a European prison and I worried it was about some bearded chin-stroking holy man enlightening other inmates (or failing to), heading down some solemn religious line. The running time was the final detail that put me off it. But it turns out A Prophet is one of those long movies I’m happy to see, immersive, intense and kinetic, sending us to places where time does not exist. The camera is restless, roving, often handheld in these tight claustrophobic prison spaces. Tahar Rahim as Malik El Djebena serves up a performance that is masterful and unforgettable, inhabiting a majority of these scenes and virtually carrying the picture by himself, though he is amply supported, notably by Niels Arestrup as Cesar Luciano, the Corsican center of power in the suffocating French prison setting.

A Prophet also counts as both a coming-of-age and an immigrant picture, as the Muslim El Djebena is 19 when he is convicted of unspecified crimes and sentenced to six years in an adult prison, after spending what sounds like much of his adolescence in juvenile facilities. El Djebena, arriving at prison, has obviously been beaten recently. One wound on his face is recent and ultimately leaves a scar. He is self-possessed and wary, stalking through his days as a loner. Prison life is hard. Early on he is a victim when he is pushed around for his shoes, which are taken off his feet. When the prisoner Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi) attempts to pick him up, offering hash for oral sex, the outline of El Djebena’s new life starts to come into focus.

“The Specialist’s Hat” (1998)

Kelly Link won a World Fantasy Award for this story. It’s a little too whimsical for me but not bad. The main characters are Claire and Samantha, 10-year-old identical twins who play a verbal game called Dead. “When you’re Dead ... you don’t have to brush your teeth.” “When you’re Dead ... you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.” So on and so forth. They’re staying in a haunted house once occupied by a minor poet who their father is studying, even though he doesn’t like the poet’s work. Their mother died almost a year earlier. They compulsively measure and count things. It seems fanciful, but it paints the strange scene and setting quickly, a little bit comical and perhaps even a little bit something to envy. Staying in a ginormous haunted house to study the papers of a minor poet you don’t like has its appeals as a lifestyle. There’s also an unnamed babysitter on hand who is somehow unsettling. Specifics of the very large house follow, called Eight Chimneys because that’s what it has, with fireplaces big enough to stand in. They keep things intriguingly odd. Ten-year-old identical twins playing a game called Dead are, of course, unsettling too. The babysitter distracts with what she says and what she knows. Along the way the language can sparkle. Snatches of strange poetry, perhaps the minor poet’s work, interrupt the narrative. The story dances around the points of any haunting, teasing us with evocative details. Ominous notes attend the babysitter, “whose name neither twin quite caught.... The reason that Claire and Samantha have a babysitter is that their father met a woman in the woods.” I love how loaded and deceptively simple it all is. No one can reach the babysitter but she always shows up on time, enters the house, and goes to the room the twins are in. The babysitter tells them about “the Specialist” as if he or it is both real and unreal. The Specialist’s hat itself is a strange and unnerving object: “There are holes in the black thing and it whistles mournfully as she spins it.... ‘That doesn’t look like a hat,’ says Claire.” As it turns out, it bites. A lot going on underneath the surface of this one.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Earth, Wind & Fire, “Reasons” (1975)

[listen up!]

I was doing my much belated due diligence recently, checking up on Earth, Wind & Fire, an act I too long neglected. That’s the Way of the World is something like their fifth or sixth album but it’s where the (multiple) hits started (plus don’t forget the worthy deep cuts): “Shining Star,” a #1 hit I admit I heard enough on the radio and in some telephone company ad, the glistening title song (#12) much better than I remembered, and then this beauty, never a Hot 100 hit but it did appear on the Adult R&B chart. I was surprised—I knew “Reasons” as well as the other two, and not because it has become an unlikely staple at wedding celebrations (unlikely because if you listen to the words it’s about a one-night stand). That doesn’t explain why it seems so familiar because I don’t make it to that many weddings. The leisurely five-minute “Reasons” insinuates with fluttering horns and electric piano and Philip Bailey’s haunting, darting, lovely falsetto. But what I really love is one of those moments I’m starting to think only the best pop songs can deliver, heard in snatches on the radio (or somewhere) that stop me cold—in this case the lurching, battling rhythms that hit when the singers start going “la-la-la-la-la” around 1:15. It gets even better about a minute later when strings take the “la-la” melody line and the song sails on pure intuition, a robot out on the dancefloor reeling and careening at deliberate tempo. I can’t get enough of it. Cover versions by Miki Howard, the Manhattans, Maxi Priest (smooth reggae), Musiq Soulchild, and Nelson Rangell (lite jazz) only remind how good is the EWF original. Stick with this—and no live versions need apply either.

The Girl With the Needle (2024)

I’ve never thought of myself as too particularly squeamish—hey, I look at horror movies and true-crime documentaries all the time—but this Danish picture and period piece, shot in black & white and set shortly after World War I in Copenhagen, seems designed only to make viewers uncomfortable. Male viewers, that is, which might be the source of my troubles. The needle in the title is a knitting needle which “the girl,” a factory worker named Karoline (Vic Carmen Sonne) and a full-grown woman, uses to attempt to abort her pregnancy in a public bathhouse. It doesn’t work, and later we get a harrowing birth scene. Still later, we get some breast-feeding scenes that range close to perverse. They were all hard for me to watch. At the bathhouse another woman there, Dagmar (Trine Dyrholm), comes to Karoline’s aid. She tells her that, for a fee, she will take Karoline’s baby after it is born and find it a good home. Sonne is good as the hapless Karoline, but Dyrholm is reasonably the star of this show, or maybe I was just remembering her riveting, convincing performance as the singer Nico in the 2017 picture Nico, 1988 (make it a double feature if you must look at this one). I thought The Girl With the Needle tries too hard to merely shock. Well over halfway through this picture, I still had no idea where it was going, and that was not in a good way. The last words in the picture provide a vital clue: “Inspired by true events.” Any time I see that in a movie—more often placed at the opening—I know how to set my expectations. A lot of it will be unbelievable and, just so, most of The Girl With the Needle is hard to believe. There are good scenes here—notably the confrontation between Karoline and the mother (Benedikte Hansen) of her lover and would-be spouse Jørgen (Joachim Fjelstrup). This matriarch brings in a doctor to verify Karoline’s pregnancy (yes indeed, another uncomfortable scene) and then proceeds to shatter any illusions harbored by Karoline and her son. Jørgen is left weeping and unable to make eye contact with Karoline. But all the extremes about this story and this movie—I didn’t even get to Karoline’s husband, a war casualty—seem to exist purely in a context of unending miserablism. It left me cold. YMMV.

Double Star (1956)

I’m pretty sure Robert Heinlein remains a divisive figure among science fiction readers. Certainly I agree to the extent he injects his various conservative political ideas into his work. But he’s also reliably a very good storyteller, as this very short novel shows (under 150 pages). Yes, it’s on the preposterous side and has crazy ideas, but it’s so readable it’s not hard to knock off in a day. It’s set in the far future when the solar system has largely been colonized and settled. There’s still hope for Venus in 1956 and many planets are crawling with their own life forms. Martians, for example, look like trees. Our main guy and first-person narrator is an actor. The art of the theater is one place where Heinlein has a lot of strange ideas, but never mind. For complex political reasons the actor is called on to impersonate a high-level functionary who has been kidnapped, which would be no excuse for missing some ceremonies. There’s a lot here about the art and science of performance, sprinkled with “method” ideas and chin-pulling theory. Maybe an actual actor could speak better to it, but it struck me as a bunch of bloviating. Nevertheless, the story moves quickly and doesn’t leave us much time for doubting its assertions. Double Star is the first novel in the second volume of the Library of America’s American Science Fiction set of nine SF novels from the ‘50s, a big rollicking start. I don’t think I’d heard of Double Star before, but it won Heinlein his first Hugo. You can do worse in science fiction than go with award winners. Although the solar system setup is rife with science fiction gadgets and technology, this novel is mostly about politics, with a lot of complicated parliamentary procedures driving the action. Heinlein, happily, wastes little time on lectures and asides, but is obviously into the machinations of power—I thought that side of it was dullish. He is prone to some lecturing about acting here. The ideas are interesting but a little bit trite. No matter—Double Star is short, moves fast, and simply rushes past its flaws. It’s entertaining, as Heinlein often is for me, though I generally prefer his stuff before the 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land. After that one you’re on your own.

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

Green Border (2023)

[2025 review here]

Zielona granica, Poland / France / Czech Republic / Belgium, 152 minutes

Director: Agnieszka Holland

Writers: Maciej Pisuk, Gabriela Lazarkiewicz, Agnieszka Holland

Photography: Tomasz Naumiuk

Music: Frédéric Vercheval

Editor: Pavel Hrdlicka

Cast: Jalal Altawil, Behi Djanati Atai, Maja Ostaszewska, Tomasz Włosok, Mohamad Al Rashi, Dalia Naous, Monika Frajczyk, Piotr Stramowski, Jaśmina Polak, Marta Stalmierska, Maciej Stuhr, Magdalena Popławska, Joely Mbundu, Taim Ajjan, Talia Ajjan

The green border in director and cowriter Agnieszka Holland’s blockbuster, sickening war movie, shot in black and white, is the swampy forested region on either side of the border between Belarus and Poland. A family of Syrian refugees is making their way to Sweden, seeking asylum in the EU. They travel by air to Minsk in Belarus, on the flight picking up Afghani refugee Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), an older woman who is seeking a new home in Poland (rather than wait, as she says, for the Taliban regime to resume power). Belarus is where the problems start for them. They encounter corrupt, sadistic, and/or indifferent officials in the border patrols, thieves, bad weather, and more. Poland unofficially does not allow passage for refugees. Both Poland and Belarus have “pushback” policies, which means Leila and the family are repeatedly herded across the border, back and forth, over and over, between the two countries. Making progress is all but impossible, dependent on luck more than anything.

The family is notably vulnerable. A grandfather in poor health (Mohamad Al Rashi) is the family patriarch, a traditional Muslim who trusts in Allah and rolls out the prayer mat even in the depths of the forest. His grandson Bashir (Jalal Altawil) is more savvy to the world, more embittered, carrying a cell phone that is their lifeline along with powerpacks to keep it charged. His wife Amina (Dalia Naous) and three young children are total innocents who must trust Bashir (and Allah) to get where they are going. The youngest is an infant still being breastfed. Leila has a cell phone too and seems to be the most skilled at using it. She and the oldest boy Nur (Taim Ajjan) make a connection that will turn out to be fatal.

Link Wray, “Rumble” (1958)

[listen up!]

Link Wray’s “Rumble” was a few years late to be the first rock ‘n’ roll record, but it was the first something. Shoegaze, possibly, or dream-pop? Sonic Youth might have studied it closely. It’s an obvious influence on David Lynch’s musical projects. Jimmy Page cites it as a primary influence. So does Jack White, even U2’s The Edge. “Rumble” hits like a steamroller, dense with mass. In its own way it is very ur, even (or perhaps especially) as it stalled out at #16 in 1958. It should have been #1 for weeks and rivaled “Rock Around the Clock.” But the world may not have been entirely ready for it, though its influence now runs to the horizons. Others (notably Johnny “Guitar” Watson and Les Paul) had been exploring the tonal dynamics of the electric guitar, but no one previously treated it like a hot tub where you go take a soak. The best way to listen to “Rumble” is loud, of course, with eyes closed for maximal impact. Wray is in love with his ginormous chords and so am I. Reverb all over the place. His plectrum brushes the chords so slowly and methodically you can almost hear each string. The song plays slow and logy, hypnotic and seductive. Having established a mood so immersive it has your full attention (in a song that lasts only 2:26), Wray proceeds to begin abusing his instrument, whaling away on single strings and incidentally pointing the way to thrash, potentially yet one more innovation of this tune. We have heard it everywhere since 1958, all over oldies radio and in movies like Pulp Fiction, Independence Day, Blow, the original pilot for The Sopranos, the Japanese cult classic Wild Zero, and many more. It never gets old. I’m a little amazed it didn’t turn up in one of David Lynch’s pictures.

What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? (1992)

I’m embarrassed to note it took me so long to get to this interesting music history, by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes, that a 30th anniversary edition has already been out for a few years. That’s the version I’m pointing to below. It’s probably even better than this original, adding forewords by Billy Vera and Dave Marsh, whose bio here asserts he is the dean of rock criticism, an interesting choice of words. As per the question in the title, the book is a densely researched list of 50 songs that are candidates for the honor, from “Blues, Part 2” by Jazz at the Philharmonic (1944) to “Heartbreak Hotel” by Elvis Presley (1956). All the ones I might have nominated are here: “That’s All Right” by Big Boy Crudup and Elvis Presley, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” by Wynonie Harris & His All Stars, “Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston With His Delta Cats, “Sixty Minute Man” by the Dominoes, “Hound Dog” by Big Mama Thornton, “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” by Big Joe Turner, “Work With Me, Annie” by the Royals and the Midnighters, “Sh-Boom” by the Chords, and 41 more, including the correct answer (according to me) “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley & His Comets. Each song is profiled in great detail, with chart positions, when and where recorded, release dates, interesting anecdotes, and more. Along the way a lot of industry currents are discussed, such as the stories of cover versions, the abuse of independent labels by the majors even as the indies marched on to further heights, and many of the interconnections between musicians, producers, and songwriters. Some of these songs I barely knew, such as “Blues, Part 2,” Arthur Smith’s “Guitar Boogie,” or Fats Domino’s “The Fat Man.” All were a pleasure to hear, even if I think some are barely rock ‘n’ roll. “Blues, Part 2,” for example, sounds much closer to me to free jazz, thanks to the wild, iconic tenor sax play by Illinois Jacquet. Maybe in some ways it prefigures the Stooges’ Fun House? It’s not on my streaming service, but I found it on youtube, posted by someone inspired by this book (likely 2nd ed.). It’s not just book and library research here. Dawson and Propes spoke to dozens of people involved with these records, including artists, producers, distributors, and many other industry figures. I was sad to reach “Heartbreak Hotel” because I cared less about answering the primary question and just wanted to keep hearing the stories of how great rock ‘n’ roll records came to be.

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

L’Argent (1983)

France / Switzerland, 85 minutes

Director: Robert Bresson

Writers: Leo Tolstoy, Robert Bresson

Photography: Pasqualino De Santis, Emmanuel Machuel

Music: J.S. Bach

Editor: Jean-Francois Naudon

Cast: Christian Patey, Sylvia Van den Elsen, Michel Briguet, Caroline Lang

Director and screenwriter Robert Bresson adapted a long tale by Leo Tolstoy as the basis for his last picture (translated as “The Counterfeit Bills” or “The Forged Coupon”). The result, L’Argent, is perhaps less about the evils of money (“l’argent” in French) and more a kind of practical thought experiment in the chaos theory butterfly effect, which holds that a butterfly flapping its wings can lead by circumstances to events as devastating as tornados, or as wonderful as an unexpected windfall. Anything might happen when it comes to cause and effect. It’s hard to say why the title was not translated for English-speaking countries. In Spain and Mexico, for example, it was released as El dinero. Perhaps calling it “Money” would imply too much about the intended evils thereof? But then what are people supposed to think anywhere else?

This story starts with adolescents in need of spending money who forge counterfeit bills and pass them to a camera shop. The camera shop manager, realizing later that he has been bilked, decides to pass the bills himself and does so the next day, paying a delivery driver, Yvon (Christian Patey), who accepts them without question. It’s the beginning of the end for Yvon. His superiors catch the counterfeits, but Yvon’s story does not hold up when the camera shop staff denies even knowing him. This seems a little unlikely given the way these things are tracked, with invoices and receipts and such, but maybe it was different in 1983 in France. Yvon goes to trial for the crime. He’s convicted and given three years, and then things only get worse. His child dies while he’s in prison and his wife leaves him for a new life. He keeps getting in trouble and fights with other inmates. His imprisonment is extended. He’s all the way into a terrible downward spiral.

“England Underway” (1993)

This story by Terry Bisson with its kooky, whimsical premise—perhaps too kooky and whimsical for me—was nominated for Hugo and Nebula awards in short fiction categories (it is apparently long enough to be a “novelette” by Nebula standards). It surprised me that Bisson is from the US, Kentucky specifically, as the story succeeds in feeling British. Or maybe it feels British to me the way an American conceives it. Anyway, for whatever reason—plate tectonics is the only detail given that sounds remotely plausible, but who cares in a fantasy, right?—England and some British territories (not Ireland) have come loose and set out west across the Atlantic. No one knows why. It’s all over the news. I have to admit some of this story went over my head because I don’t know UK geography and have never been good with spatial relations. The entire land mass is also spinning slowly so the south of England becomes the east and so forth. It’s confusing. The story does have a soothing, gentle tone, milking humor from the absurdity of the situation as well as UK politics (pre-EU), especially regarding Ireland. The main character is a British chap set in his ways, with a dog and a niece in the US who writes him monthly and says he must come visit to see her baby, his grand-niece. Eventually England delivers him for the visit and he meets the baby, shortly after which England departs the New York harbor, headed east, presumably returning. There’s a nice sense of how strange it would be if England were literally only a ferry ride away from New York, but what’s strange and interesting in this story is mostly swamped by what’s cute. On the whole it’s well done but on the whole it is merely cute. In a way it plays to my own, mostly unfortunate preconceptions about fantasy—that it’s intended to be harmless if not entirely vapid (I say this knowing better now that horror is a subset of fantasy). But in other ways the story pulls against my bad attitude. Though Bisson is obviously trafficking in British stereotypes he’s doing it with a good deal of urbane charm and wit. I’m curious how Americans and Brits respond comparatively to it. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Americans like it more.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Read story online.

Willows, “Church Bells May Ring” (1956)

[listen up!]

The Willows were a five-piece doo wop act out of Harlem who fell victim to the 1950s industry convention of covering Black artists threatening the pop charts with white groups who had the resources (label PR and dough) to nab the bigger hits. It produced strange and somewhat embarrassing results, such as Pat Boone covering Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” and getting the bigger hit with it. Teens of the ‘50s, what hath thou wrought? The Willows were successfully prevented from reaching the pop charts, but the Diamonds (from Toronto) took their inferior version of what they retitled “The Church Bells May Ring” to #14 in 1956. The Diamonds version all but eliminates the bells, buried in the mix except for jazzy solos that miss the point of the song. What makes the Willows’ version so resounding is exactly the pounding bells it pushes so hard. The song, written by the Willows, was originally called “Church Bells Are Ringing” or maybe just “Church Bells”—church bells were always going to be involved. And, indeed, they are what makes the song stand out. They’re chimes, or tubular bells—as it happens, played by studio hand that day Neil Sedaka. They add a rhythmic luster around which the lusty singers dart in harmony. The song feels like the happiest wedding day, bursting with upbeat energy. “Oh ah linga linga linga linga ling ding-dong,” chants the lead vocalist with exuberance. You never knew you could dance to church bells but now you do. To be clear, I have nothing against the Diamonds. I like their big dance hit of a couple years later, “The Stroll.” But it’s a fact that the Willows plainly have the better version of this song.

Eddington (2025)

The range of opinion is wide on the latest from director and writer Ari Aster (Hereditary, Midsommar, Beau Is Afraid). Filmmaker John Waters put Eddington at the top of his list of the best pictures of 2025, while movie critic Glenn Kenny put it last on his list, in the category “No Cigar” by itself with the brushoff comment, “Piss off, MAGA boy.” I’m somewhere between. It’s a mixed bag. It’s basically the Covid pandemic as viewed and experienced from the small town of Eddington, New Mexico, but it’s a satire so lots of things are exaggerated. Eddington is only tangentially related to the disease, to Black Lives Matter protests, to QAnon, or even to masking. But it’s all here. Mandates required masks in public, as I’m sure you recall—the main virtue of Eddington is the way it brings 2020 back so vividly. Masks are an ongoing issue here and, yes, the picture is sympathetic to people who won’t wear them. “There’s no Covid here,” Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) keeps saying, although he develops a terrible cough after an altercation with a homeless person who probably is infected. Sheriff Cross is in a dispute with the mayor, Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal), who is working with shady tech bros to open a massive data center that he promises will bring jobs to the town. Sheriff Cross decides to run for mayor against Garcia’s reelection bid, dresses up his rig like the one Robert Altman used in Nashville for the Replacement Party candidate Hal Phillip Walker, and cruises the town speechifying through the loudspeaker as he goes. Like Aster’s last picture, Beau Is Afraid, Eddington is long and muddled. It's trying to stuff everything it can into it from 2020. The burgeoning hunt for pedophiles under influence of QAnon, for example. Sheriff Cross’s staff of three includes a Black man (Michael Ward), which leads to lots of easy plot developments. At least Beau had a great first hour before going off the rails. Eddington has isolated impressive points, such as Phoenix’s performance. He’s great as he always is, maybe even a little better here, disappearing into the role. The white-kid protesters are treated as robotic woke-spewing morons. One tries to explain himself to his parents, saying they’re “changing institutions, dismantling whiteness, and not allowing whiteness to reassert itself.” Certainly from the MAGA point of view that’s how the Left in this country can look, whereas the MAGA-friendly types here are arguably more down to earth. Maybe I’m talking myself into not liking this one. It didn’t give me that much to take away. Approach with caution.

Housekeeping (1980)

I thought this strange and beautiful novel by Marilynne Robinson worked really well, a kind of coming-of-age story of a girl raised first by her grandmother, then by two great-aunts (briefly), and finally by her Aunt Sylvie, her mother’s sister. The setting is Idaho or western Montana, probably in the 1950s. The narrator is Ruthie Stone, writing from memory about her girlhood many years later as an adult. Her grandfather died in a spectacular train accident. Later her mother committed suicide. Ruthie is with her younger sister Lucille for many years, but eventually Lucille runs away, leaving Ruthie with Sylvie. Sylvie is a loner and a natural transient, often sleeping with her clothes and shoes on, ready to depart at short notice. She can’t keep house and spends many days by herself disappearing into the woods. The title is less a reference to cleaning and more about what it takes to keep a roof over one’s head. This thing about spending whole days in the woods runs in the family apparently, as Ruthie and Lucille spend much of one school year doing it too. Eventually Lucille decides to go straight and runs away, making her home with a schoolteacher. That leaves Ruthie with Sylvie and the court system which is coming for them. Ruthie, it turns out, might well be the transient type herself. Her voice is straightforward yet lyrical. She makes the Idaho / Montana landscape alien and a little weird. This is not a typical western by any means—largely, perhaps, because there are no men except on the furthest margins—but the landscape alone makes it a western. No horses or Indians, but a mountainous land, western weather patterns, and of course trains and maybe Mormons. The language can lapse into dense passages of description and discussions of memory and perception. It’s odd but never particularly feels unlikely. I had a hard time feeling like I could get a handle on Sylvie, but I always liked her. Ruthie had her misgivings—and Lucille too, obviously—but in the end she comes to love Sylvie, fiercely, even as she enters a lifetime of estrangement from Lucille. Strange and wonderful, Housekeeping is a short and utterly fine little novel.

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

Kinda Kinks (1965)

The ever-amorphous state of mid-‘60s British Invasion LPs applies to the Kinks too. There are UK and US versions of Kinda Kinks, their second UK album, as well as at least two deluxe package editions that are equally close to essential. It seems likely, by the way their discography goes, that the Kinks were also bound like the Beatles and many others to an industry convention that frowned on releasing a single and then including it on the next album, whereas it was somehow OK to release singles from an album. Another significant factor is that EPs sold well in the UK but did not in the US. Because of these and other factors, and even though UK and US Kinks releases were identical as of late 1965 with The Kink Kontroversy, there are strange gaps all over their catalog. Songs like “All Day and All of the Night,” “Who’ll Be the Next in Line,” and “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” don’t have proper album homes now except on the CD deluxe package editions that started arriving in the ‘90s. In many ways the best version of Kinda Kinks is now found there. I know at least two on my streaming service, one of 53 minutes with 23 songs, and another of 80 minutes with 35 songs. I prefer the shorter one—many of the extra dozen on the 80-minute edition are redundancies, alternate versions, more b-sides (experiments that don’t always come off but usually have at least one interesting point), and/or are associated with live recordings and/or radio interviews (admittedly charming). Both playlists kick off with the 12 songs from the original UK release, which includes “Naggin’ Woman” and “Tired of Waiting for You,” neither of which are on the US version. It’s somewhat amazing when you consider “Tired” was one of their biggest hits in the US, #6 in early 1965. But that song instead wound up on a US-only release, Kinks-Size, where “All Day and All of the Night” also landed (admittedly a pretty good album!).

The nine songs on Kinda Kinks shared by the UK and US versions are as good as anything on the first album, notably in their lively jolting mode of ecstatic racket typified by “You Really Got Me.” With perspective, we can see it was rock ‘n’ roll transmogrifying into rock in front of our eyes and as early as 1964. But that’s not all the Kinks were up to. Elements of skiffle and music hall show up here as well and the songwriting is often ingenious, musical, distinct in style from song to song, and infectious. I may finally be tired after all these years of singing along with “Tired of Waiting for You,” but it remains an irresistible singalong even in my latter-day zombie variations. There’s more ecstatic racket in the cover of “Dancin’ in the Street,” which is exciting and surprisingly not that far off the Motown original by Martha & the Vandellas. Convincing tender exercises show up here as well, such as “Nothin' in the World Can Stop Me Worryin' 'Bout That Girl.” To cap it off, there’s “Something Better Beginning,” with its delicate baroque air and dense lyrical shadings: “Is this the start of another heart breaker / Or something better beginning / Something better beginning / Something better beginning.” I could do without the bawling “Naggin” Woman,” but even the stripped-down concentrated original UK 27-minute version of Kinda Kinks is quite enjoyable, standing up to close scrutiny and daily play, a pretty darned good album of itself. But there’s more, as they say on the late-nite shows, much much more.

Bell Notes, “I’ve Had It” (1958)

[listen up!]

I was listening to Vol. 2 of the Ace label’s excellent Golden Age of American Rock ‘n’ Roll: Hot 100 Hits From 1954-1963 when the Bell Notes’ one and only hit, which reached #6 in February 1959, leapt out and reminded me vividly of the early-‘80s cowpunk act Rank and File and specifically their theme song “Rank and File.” It seems likely this could be settled in a court of law because “Rank and File” sounds more like “I’ve Had It” than “My Sweet Lord” sounds like “He’s So Fine.” Just sayin’. The greater and more obvious influence on the Long Island act Bell Notes is the Everly Brothers, in both their close harmonies and in the sense in their songs of ineffective peevishness, miffed by the way things are going. In “Bird Dog,” “Problems,” “Walk Right Back,” “Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up Little Susie,” they have reason to feel short-changed and that there’s nothing they can do about it. Just so, the singer of this song has “had it,” an expression, “I’ve had it,” usually spoken by people who are likely to keep having it and know it. Exasperation as real as it gets, in a way. As for the cowpunk lift, I would not call it exactly theft on the part of Rank and File, just a pronounced family resemblance between songs, or maybe a kind of homage or salute (though it’s unlikely many in 1982 remembered the Bell Notes, who I have to keep fighting myself not to think of as the Bell Tones). Rank and File’s version, if you want to call it that, is twice as long and all rocked up heavy on a big drumkit and twangy electric guitar, with all-new lyrics. You can imagine what the “la-la-la-la” singing Bell Notes might have to say about it. It’s right there in the title of their only hit.

“Field Biology of the Wee Fairies” (2018)

This story by Naomi Kritzer is highly enjoyable, a canny mashup of girl power and “faerie” tale. To be clear, Kritzer spells it fairy, but still. In the world of this story—which is also 1962 US—adolescent girls are expected to catch a fairy and get a wish. It’s an adolescent rite of passage. The wishes are generally on the order of being more pretty. Our main character, Amelia, is a smart young girl whose skills and aptitude for science and math are frustrated by the profound sexism of the time. She is working on a science project, probably the best of anyone else’s in the school, yet she can’t get into the school Science Club because she’s a girl. The fairy thing is real in this story, though not what it appears, as the teeny creatures are wily, with their own agenda. They let themselves be caught because the touch of a human makes it possible for them to read the future. They grant a wish they know will come true, but there are other benefits in it for them. Amelia suspects some of this, and so, when a fairy appears to her and starts flitting around to be caught, her scientific instincts kick in. She captures it in a jar without touching it and then interviews it for information. What she learns enables her to triumph over the Science Club. It’s all stitched together well. As more of a girl power story it bears a light hand with the fairy stuff. The story is obviously as skeptical as Amelia—and yet fairies are real (in this story). I am undereducated on fairy lore myself, which I understand extends back far into antiquity, so I don’t know how ignorant I may sound when I talk about a Susanna Clarke model. This story anyway struck me as more of what I encountered in Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, as these fairies are small and charming, but quite intelligent, with strange and great powers, and not necessarily on our side. I like the way Amelia can break down her fairy and get some straight talk from it. She’s remarkably clearheaded for a juvenile in the first place, but at the end she definitely has the look of someone who is going to go far in this world. It’s such a happy ending it’s irresistible even as the story’s strands are brought off nicely on many levels.

The Long List Anthology, Vol. 5: More Stories From the Hugo Award Nomination List, ed. David Steffen
Read / listen to story.

United States of Trance (2001)

I’ve always been a little confused about how to think of albums like this. The major credit goes to a DJ—in this case the prolific Christopher Lawrence—who produces and/or remixes tracks by different artists. Contributing artists get so little credit that I was momentarily uncertain which were artist names and which were track names. On Lawrence’s Wikipedia page, United States of Trance is categorized with “DJ Compilations” (as opposed to “Albums,” “Singles & EPs,” or “Remixes”). OK, that sounds good. I somewhat crudely perhaps classify the genre with these exercises as “techno” at large. But hold up now, “trance” has its own meaning, which is fairly specific (again Wikipedia): “... typically characterized by a tempo between 120 and 150 beats per minute (BPM), repeating melodic phrases and a musical form that distinctly builds tension and elements throughout a track often culminating in 1 to 2 ‘peaks’ or ‘drops.’” Yes, all right, good to know. Moving on: “Although trance is a genre of its own, it liberally incorporates influences from other musical styles such as techno, house, chill-out, classical music, tech house, ambient and film scores.” A lot of styles in that list I would call “techno” and be done with it—I can’t shave hairs that fine. I have my suspicions that making such distinctions requires doses of stimulant drugs, which I imagine also go excellently with a set like this one here, beguilingly lurching and percolating and driving forward for nearly 74 minutes. I will note that the 12 tracks by 12 different artists (including one by Lawrence) are all largely instrumentals, with some occasional whispering or non-word vocalizations. They are largely matters of simple musical figures with unexpected tones and complex rhythms. They are thrilling and dull as your mood may dictate. Per the definition above, each track does indeed have its peaks and/or drops, although that does not exactly apply to the album as a whole, which chugs along in its established parameters modulating groove and finally goes out unbowed at the end, like a brass band parade disappearing down the street. You wouldn’t necessarily know it’s 12 artists. It’s less a collection of songs and more a collection of dramatic musical moments. What’s more, the album tracks seamlessly—that is, playing it on shuffle produces awkward and abrupt transitions from track to track. It’s not the same. Lawrence intends it to be listened to as sequenced. For me it is music that too often wants to recede into the background. It’s hard to stay focused. Another word might be boring, but I would not go that far. United States of Trance is more like an environment that you visit, as a kind of tourist. You may not absorb it all, but you come away with distinct memories and experiences.

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

USA, 112 minutes

Director: Fred Schepisi

Writer: John Guare

Photography: Ian Baker

Music: Jerry Goldsmith

Editor: Peter Honess

Cast: Stockard Channing, Will Smith, Donald Sutherland, Ian McKellen, Mary Beth Hurt, Bruce Davison, Heather Graham, Anthony Michael Hall, Eric Thal, Richard Mason, J.J. Abrams, Kitty Carlisle

Six Degrees of Separation is one degree of separation from a 1990 stage play of the same name, based on a real-life con man, which approximately sums up most of the problems here. Well, except for the conceit of a high concept that never quite comes off. Google AI summarizes: “Six Degrees of Separation is the theory that everyone on Earth is connected by a chain of no more than five other people (six acquaintance links).... [It may be] illustrated by the ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ game, where any actor can be linked to Bacon in six or fewer roles.”

The funny thing (funny dumbass, not funny ha ha) is that this idea has little to do with anything going on in this picture, beyond something that one major character is fascinated by in a daydreamy sort of way. That is the unbearably named Ouisa, pronounced “wee-zuh,” short for Louisa (Stockard Channing). Donald Sutherland plays her husband Flan. They are rich New Yorkers living off Central Park. Sutherland is excellent, as he always was, but he can’t save this mess. Will Smith plays Paul, who says he is the son of Sidney Poitier. That claimed connection might have something to do with the six degrees. I don’t know. I never figured it out. I did notice that Will Smith did not slap anyone in this picture.

“A Place to Stay” (1998)

[spoilers] I was impressed by this longish vampire story by Michael Marshall Smith. It deliberately applies a patina of confusion to a story of a man’s semi-lost evening with a woman he meets and wants to find again. It’s set in New Orleans, the French Quarter in all its touristy glory. The man works in the software development industry and is there for a convention and the excuse to party and blow off steam. These elements are perfect, in 1998, for a night of hard drinking and carousing. Eventually our first-person narrator blacks out. He wakes in the 4 a.m. hour in a bar that is cleaning up after closing. He remembers parts of the night, and parts come back to him as he retraces his steps trying to put it together. He thinks he remembers where the woman told him she works, a retailer of high-end kitchen goods. He finds the place, the next day, and enters, but instead of a store he finds himself in the bar from the night before, and it’s no longer day but night. Smith’s transitions as he switches back and forth between these realities can be jarring, and confusing, but they use my favorite of all the vampire powers, otherwise way too underutilized for my taste, which is the ability to cloud minds. Whatever your theory, by this point of the story the mystery is engaged. It’s hard to guess what might be coming next, specifically, but we’re starting to get the drift. There’s a decidedly modern tinge to it in the affluent, hedonistic, youthful software development world. The woman our guy searches for asked him at one point whether he believes in vampires. Decidedly, contemptuously, he does not. That’s really our only clue, beyond that I was reading the story in a fantasy/horror anthology. Nothing seems vampirish at all about her. Things reach a crescendo of confusion as our guy goes switching in and out of the night before and recovers more information about his missing time. It’s all nicely done with enough misdirection to fool me until the reveal only in the very last sentence. One thing I find interesting about vampire stories is that the lore is so wide-ranging—about mirrors and daylight and counting and all of it—that even if you know it’s a vampire story it’s hard to know how it’s going to play out. This story is obviously dependent on their ability to becloud minds, which I had forgotten as a possibility while reading the story. Smith springs it on us as an unfurling, horrific, endless nightmare, with romance and pleasure ultimately stripped away.

The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Jody Reynolds, “Endless Sleep” (1958)

[listen up!]

[content warnings] One more out here on the morbid tip. Jody Reynolds was a one-hit wonder rockabilly artist, born in Denver and reared in Oklahoma. “Endless Sleep” reached #5 in 1958, his only appearance in the top 40. But the follow-up, “Fire of Love,” which peaked at #66, was later covered by both MC-5 and the Gun Club. The label Demon liked “Endless Sleep” enough to record it, but insisted on adding the happy-ending last verse as well as tacking on the name Dolores Nance to the songwriting credit; apparently they thought the tune would do better as the product of a songwriting team. OK, maybe. The story here is literally dark from the start, opening: “The night was black, rain fallin’ down.” In profoundly mournful tones, the singer tells us he’s quarreled with his girlfriend and doesn’t know where she went. He follows her footsteps to the shore of the sea (Reynolds wrote the song in San Diego and performed it that night). She’s gone, “forevermore.” Gasp! Suicide! Then the singer thinks he hears the sea speaking to him, albeit in a kind of awkward way to make the lines rhyme, saying, “I took your baby from you away.” But we’re not done yet. Comes the voice of his beloved: “Come join me baby in my endless sleep.” Suicide-murder! Lord! “Come join me baby in my endless sleep.” It’s high, keening, remorseless tragedy, but thanks to the honchos at the perhaps ironically named Demon label all’s well that ends well. The singer rescues his babe. The “angry” sea gives it up. “You took your baby from me away.” But I don’t believe it. One or both are moldering at the bottom of the sea even as we speak. I’m sure of it.

Babygirl (2024)

OK, fair enough, this cheesy erotic BDSM fantasy thriller is hotter than a pistol, sexy as hell, and a pleasure to enjoy exactly that way. You’ll have to ignore or somehow put out of mind your better angels and the movie’s many ancient views of women and men and sex and power. It seems to believe, with so many, that the powerful—especially the powerful women—secretly yearn to be dominated. This seems unlikely when you think about it, given their behavior otherwise (cf., adventures on Epstein Island, or the movie Salo). But it’s popular to think so, much like imagining the powerful will end up burning in hell. But who’s really thinking about anything like that when a movie like this is going on? Nicole Kidman is Romy, a high-flying CEO specializing in warehouse robotics and married to a successful theater director, Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) is Samuel, an intern with a ton of poise and self-possession and a natural dominator. He takes control of Romy sexually and seems to be attempting to take over her life at large. He’s a little scary. Romy struggles with herself but keeps doing whatever he tells her to do. Turning up the sex charge is the kind of thing Kidman has done before and she’s good at it: To Die For, Birthday Girl, and most notably Eyes Wide Shut, among others. Indeed, in many ways Babygirl feels like an intentional reprise or shoutout to Eyes Wide Shut. Though this story takes place over weeks, months, or even years, for example, it is always Christmas in Romy’s living room, with a fully trimmed-up and lighted tree in the corner. The previous feature by director and writer Halina Reijn, the horror show Bodies Bodies Bodies, had some interesting ideas but was too cluttered and strangely focused to really work. She shows a lot of development in Babygirl, but the real stroke, of course, is the casting. Kidman is perfect and has a surprising amount of chemistry with Dickinson, who’s much younger and generally inexperienced than she is in real life too. Romy is the designated bottom here, but Kidman is the star of the show all the way in a tremendous performance. Dickinson, however, can keep up with her, and that has a lot to do with what makes Babygirl work at such exceedingly high levels. You might have qualms about it later regarding gender roles and such, but first you should enjoy the ride.

Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth (2017)

One more entry from the 33-1/3 series of fancy little books from Bloomsbury Publishing devoted to specific albums. This one is by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero, taking on the strangely beautiful and only album by Young Marble Giants, the Welsh minimalist trio who were briefly darlings in postpunk circles. It answered lots of my questions about the band and the album, including at least one I thought had no answer. First, both “young marble giants” and “colossal youth” are references to ancient Greek sculptures from circa 500 BCE called “kouroi,” depicting larger-than-life-size nude adolescent boys and girls. The statues can be as high as 10 feet. One of the Moxham brothers, Stuart or Philip, found a book about them and was fascinated. The third principal, singer Alison Statton, worked as a dental technician during the band’s heyday and is now a chiropractor. The answer I thought I’d never get is that Pedro Costa’s 2006 Portuguese movie Colossal Youth is indeed related to the album somehow. Released as Juventude em Marcha ("Youth on the March"), Costa, the picture’s director, writer, and co-cinematographer, specifically requested that releases in English-speaking countries bear the title Colossal Youth, harking to the album. Unfortunately, while this book is heavily footnoted, no source is given on this point, and little explanation of Costa’s reason. In fact, Blair and Bocciero seem mystified about it themselves, though convinced of the connection. I’ll take them at their word. This book reminded me of Geeta Dayal’s fine treatment in this series of Brian Eno’s Another Green World. It largely eschews personal anecdotes of their history with the album, replacing it with a lot of probing and erudite discussion of its purpose and sources. Colossal Youth really is a lovely and special album and I was grateful just for being sent back to it again. I like the way Blair and Bucciero cast the net wide to place this album culturally. Susan Sontag is mentioned a lot, as are Greil Marcus and Simon Reynolds. Usual suspects all, but Blair and Bucciero make use of them judiciously. This is a surprisingly rare thing in this series—a text that is a worthy companion to the album, enlightening and informative.

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

“Vampyr” (1871)

I should start by noting that Jan Neruda’s very short story (also known as “Vampire” and “The Vampire”) is not the basis for Danish filmmaker Theodor Dreyer’s 1932 film of that name. That honor goes to Sheridan Le Fanu. Neruda is on Wikipedia as an important figure in Czech realism and a member of the May School, although I don’t know what those things mean exactly. But probably this story is a one-off of some kind. It features a small Polish family touring the Greek islands, with a daughter who is sick. This being a vampire story, I was instantly suspicious of the family members, especially the daughter’s new husband. That’s how vampire stories can tend to go. But the vampire in the story, eventually identified as “The Vampire,” is a Greek man, a traveling young artist renowned (or notorious) for making sketches of the corpses of people recently passed. But he does them ahead of time, before their deaths. The daughter who is ailing appears to be merely ailing, but it's possible the Greek man is doing a vampire thing on her too, that is, sucking her blood or energy somehow. The story is not really clear about the matter, nor even about who the vampire is, though eventually it is spelled out more or less. The Greek artist guy shows up after the family has been settled into a hotel and begins to sketch the daughter. He does so discreetly, with his back turned so no one can see his work. He’s less like a vampire and more like a social misfit with uncanny intuition. (I will note also that daylight does not seem to bother him, nor do we know whether the daughter has puncture wounds on her neck.) That’s basically all the story is giving us. I didn’t think it was very effective or interesting and also it seems to be out of step with Neruda’s main currents and larger career. I think vampire stories by definition are not realism of any kind, not even magical realism. So possibly this was written for the money? The story is quite readable for something in translation from the 19th century, but I would have to say it’s fatally slight.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Cowboy Copas, “Hangman’s Boogie” (1949)

[listen up!]

Cowboy Copas was a country singer out of Blue Creek, Ohio, who’s probably most famous now for dying in the same plane crash in 1963 that also took Patsy Cline. “Hangman’s Boogie” does not appear to be his best-known song but it’s one that has stuck with me since I found it in the Hillbilly Boogie box set (on the Proper label). I admit it took me a few turns to grok what’s going on here. I didn’t expect anything like it from a song with “boogie” in its title (which includes most of the 100 tunes on Hillbilly Boogie). The jaunty air of Copas’s vocal perfectly belies the doom and darkness of the scene he paints, with the singer scheduled for execution in the morning for rustling cattle: “I’m gonna do the boogie with the drop me beat / Just a corny rhythm where you swing your feet.” The song was written by Larry Cassidy, another obscure workaday midcentury country entertainer with perhaps a more morbid comical bent than usual, the author also of the seagoing disaster “Save the Alcohol” (“Save the kids and the women first, then save the alky-hall,” says the captain). Cowboy Copas can be found sitting on the back of a flatbed truck in the 1949 movie Square Dance Jubilee to sing this confounding upbeat tale of woe, which seems to play capital punishment for something of a lighthearted joke. (The movie is rated 4.0 by 61 people on IMDb, but I think it’s worth a look for the music. “Hangman’s Boogie” starts shortly after 31:00.) The song even invokes the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and says outright but calmly, “It’s a doggone pity but I gotta go.” The last line and its foul image kept creeping up on me, amazed to find it so baldly in a song like this, softly hollering into eternity: “I’m gonna be dancing in the strangest way / Doing the hangman’s boogie at the break of day.”

The House of the Dead (1862)

For those keeping score, the only novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky that Vladmir Nabokov liked was The Double, and the only one that Leo Tolstoy liked was The House of the Dead. Both cases make sense for specific reasons. The Double is arty and literary (and good), The House of the Dead is full of humanity (and very good). I have to say so far I’ve liked very much everything I’ve read by Dostoevsky, even more than I expected. The House of the Dead has a tone that is different from any of the others—more sober, with more pathos. Gone is the screaming edge of anxiety, outrage, dread, hysteria. It's fair to call it a novel but much of it is lightly fictionalized, closer to autofiction, with scenes from his four years in prison at hard labor, following his mock execution, an unimaginably cruel and traumatizing exercise in which he believed he was about to die. There is little narrative through-line here, just scenes of prison life organized by theme: first impressions, new acquaintances, Christmas, the hospital, punishments, and animals they lived with and loved—a horse, a goat, etc. This journalistic novel is also where I learned that Dostoevsky’s family of origin had the status of nobility. Dostoevsky’s first-person narrator here is also from that upper class, and describes how the majority of prisoners were peasants and hated him for his class. Just another problem to deal with in prison. The book is rich with characters, and Dostoevsky’s ability to bring them to life with vivid detail and concise anecdotes is more evidence of how he continued to get better as a novelist. It may have been serialized in its initial publication, but it does not feel fragmented. Rather, it is methodical in its treatment of the subjects at hand. Some of the foreshadowing and references to other parts of the text feel a bit awkward but I like the approach he has taken. The narrator is serving a 10-year sentence for “assassinating” his wife (in the Constance Garrett translation) whereas Dostoevsky served four years for participating in a subversive literary discussion group. There are many beautiful passages here—notably the sections on Christmas, a theatrical performance staged by prisoners, and the prison animals. But I really enjoyed all of it. It’s interesting to see how much skill he has even when he is adopting a more restrained voice. The House of the Dead belongs with the best of prison literature and it’s one of Dostoevsky’s best too.

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

Batman Returns (1992)

USA, 126 minutes

Director: Tim Burton

Writers: Bob Kane, Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm

Photography: Stefan Czapsky

Music: Danny Elfman

Editors: Bob Badami, Chris Lebenzon

Cast: Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken, Michael Gough, Michael Murphy, Cristi Conaway, Pat Hingle, Paul Reubens, Andrew Bryniarsky

Director Tim Burton’s sequel to his first Batman movie makes it more obvious how much even that picture was attempting to split the difference between the campy ‘60s TV version and Frank Miller’s ‘80s reimagining of the caped crusader as a grizzled vigilante and sadistic mental case. The production design and some elements of the story lean hard into the latter but then there is Jack Nicholson taking top billing and slobbering all over the set in whooping cocaine-addled fugue states. Soundtrack by Prince. We might have thought the 1989 Batman worked, to the extent it did, because we wanted so badly the kind of Batman movie it took nearly 20 years to get. “We” meaning fans of the Frank Miller version, which I adored in the ‘80s.

Batman Returns is more like return of the camp. Casting Pee Wee Herman in the prologue as the Penguin’s father kind of gives away the game, as do casting Danny DeVito as the Penguin (who prefers to go by his given name, Oswald Cobblepot) and Christopher Walken (wearing a helmet of white hair) as Max Shreck, Gotham City’s power company tycoon implementing a dastardly scheme. Michelle Pfeiffer as Selina Kyle, who becomes the Catwoman, is another case. We’ll get to that. Early in the picture, when she is still a meek stammering secretary to Max, Batman rescues her from an assault. “Wow,” she says. “The Batman. Or is it just Batman?” The very question! So meta! “Batman” is in the tradition of the ‘50s and ‘60s comic book version leading into the TV show, whereas “the Batman” (subtle distinction!) is the original moniker for the creature of the night (including “the Bat-Man”) which Miller was trying to revive.

Arthur Smith, “Guitar Boogie” (1945)

[listen up!]

I was reading an interesting book by Jim Dawson and Steve Propes called What Was the First Rock ‘n’ Roll Record? (review next month!), which included this instrumental as one of its 50 candidates. Then I noticed the tune is included in a Hillbilly Boogie box set on the Proper label I’ve been listening to lately (with Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “The Shotgun Boogie” and one more gem for next week). Arthur Smith and his music have traveled under many names, in part because there was a Grand Ole Opry player named Fiddlin’ Arthur Smith and in part no doubt because the Smith name is so common. So we have Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith, Arthur Smith’s Hot Quintet, Arthur (Guitar Boogie) Smith & His Cracker-Jacks, etc., etc. Notably, he also wrote a song in 1955 called “Feudin’ Banjos” that was adapted by Eric Weissberg & Steve Mandell as the #2 1973 hit “Dueling Banjos” (from the movie Deliverance). Arthur Smith got around. I would not remotely consider this the first rock ‘n’ roll record—I’m not even sure it’s rock ‘n’ roll. Its chief virtue, as with “Dueling Banjos,” is the technical skill of the players and the “tasty” polish of the performance. It’s simple but resonant, and if it’s a quintet that must be at least three acoustic guitars with a bass. I’m not even sure I hear a drummer—one of the guitars is doing that duty. The tune has a nice boogie feel, of course, and some interesting interplay and solos. Overall it seems much closer to me to straight-up country—it’s telling that Wikipedia lists the people influenced by Smith as Glen Campbell, Roy Clark, and Hank Garland. In just that way “Guitar Boogie” is so smooth it’s almost soothing.

My Mom Jayne (2025)

Until this documentary came along, I did not know that Mariska Hargitay, flinty star of the longest-running live-action TV series of all time, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, is a daughter of Jayne Mansfield. Jayne Mansfield, of course, relegated to sex kitten status, was one of the midcentury “Three M’s,” the so-called blonde bombshells of the ‘50s and ‘60s, with Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren. Hargitay directed this picture, a patient and loving unraveling of the many complexities associated with Mansfield, her career, and her family and loves. Mansfield had her first of five children at the age of 16. She had wanted to be a Hollywood star for most of her life by then. After winning a series of beauty pageants she finally made it there at the age of 21. Hargitay interviews her brothers and her older sisters, visits storage units that have been left untouched for decades, and peels back the layers of family secrets, eventually uncovering a major one that involves Hargitay herself, Mansfield’s fourth child. She was named Mariska but Mansfield insisted on calling her Maria for most of the few years left to her—it’s a clue to this labyrinthine past. Full disclosure, I’ve never been a fan of Law & Order: SVU, which I think largely just leans into outrage about sex crimes to the point of monotony. A lot of my problems there persisted here as Hargitay often feels like she’s performing in her seething Olivia Benson mode. There’s no doubt, however, about her bravely facing the headwinds of heartache and family agony, and in many ways her tough detective mode is a perfect fit for this investigation. As with Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield was no dumb blonde, but was frustrated by the limitations, long-term as well as immediate, of the sex dolly roles that amounted to most of her opportunities. I still love the 1956 movie The Girl Can’t Help It (more for Little Richard and the other rock ‘n’ rollers) but have always found Mansfield hard to watch, it’s such a parade of stereotypes and cliché, pious about her maternal instincts, openly bug-eyed about her boobs. Hargitay skillfully if somewhat ham-handedly restores Mansfield’s dignity here. She doesn’t dwell much on Mansfield’s worst roles or the grotesque details of her death. She reaches out to and includes all the children and extended family of Mansfield, including Hargitay’s stepmother Ellen Hargitay as well as Mansfield’s friends and husbands still alive and she drenches it all in a lot of love. I would say it’s better than any episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, but that’s a low bar for me. Good one especially for fans of SVU and/or Jayne Mansfield.

Quinn’s Book (1988)

The fourth novel in William Kennedy’s Albany cycle is fairly called a doozy. The opening scene, which describes a natural disaster, is insanely vivid and the tale at hand proceeds from there, with drowning victims recovered and a resurrection scene so over the top all you can really do is laugh. Daniel Quinn is there as a young teenager and he saves Maud Fallon, equally young, from drowning. She begs him to steal her away from her guardian, a sex worker and stage performer and her aunt with her own oddball retinue in tow. The rest of the novel never quite lives up to this amazing opening, but the glow lasts all the way. The incident takes place in 1849 and we stay with this motley group for about a year, before the novel shifts into the wartime future of 1864, with a brief stop in 1858, mostly in flashback. I was 100% on the side of Quinn and Maud but alas things don’t always go the way you’d like or expect. Some tantalizing details, such as a mysterious shiny disc recovered from its concealment at the bottom of a birdcage, never seem to amount to anything. Maybe this disc appears elsewhere and is explained in the cycle? For that matter, as familiar as the name Quinn is from the first three novels (Legs, Billy Phelan’s Greatest Game, and Ironweed) I don’t remember the circumstances and couldn’t find anything on the internet about him. Ironweed won all the awards and attention for Kennedy and his Albany cycle of novels, but I liked Legs more and Quinn’s Book might be even better. Kennedy is one of those writers who loves language and writing and his own voice, so he tends to be a pleasure to read no matter what. He’s even making up words my kindle dictionary doesn’t know, though their meanings are always plain from context. In many ways this feels like what you’d get if J.D. Salinger wrote Blood Meridian. I love the 19th-century setting—including, of course, as it must, the Civil War—even though the sensibility driving it is thoroughly late 20th century. I was worried for Fenimore Cooper’s stultifying voice, given his tales could well have taken place in upstate New York. But Quinn’s Book is way better than any Cooper I know. My advice, if you like Kennedy, is don’t stop with Ironweed.

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

“The Lodger” (1993)

Fred Chappell’s story is very clever and enjoyable exactly for that reason. I found it in a Year’s Best anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, and what’s more it also won a World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction too. Clearly a lot of people have enjoyed it. But I think it’s closer to literary satire than fantasy, let alone horror. The clear target is postmodernism. At the same time it certainly has affinities with the bookish surrealism of Jorge Luis Borges, so give it that too. “The Lodger” manages to eat its cake and have it too in many ways. Chappell namechecks Alfred Hitchcock (whose 1920s silent movie supplies the title) and Edgar Allan Poe. The main character, Robert Ackley, is a low-level librarian in a university with a modest collection (by the tone) of 2 million volumes. He spends his evenings plunged into the strange finds he makes by day in the library. He likes the weird and elusive and obscure. He may be living in the right universe for it because this is a strange one. It’s much like our own but with certain key differences, such as, apparently, no Allen Ginsberg or Howl. Instead, there is Gerald Grayforth and Squall, which has obvious fragments from Howl and affords Chappell the opportunity to unleash, in 1993, some no doubt long-simmering mockery of the beats. There are other targets I recognized here as well and many more I suspected. Basically Chappell is making a party out of it. Everyone’s invited. One evening Ackley is reading an obscure poet from Cleveland, Lyman Scoresby—something to do with Hart Crane—and picks up Scoresby’s spirit, who then lives in Ackley’s head and begins to systematically take him over. The story then becomes a contest of wills between them and a good time is had by all. I like it because I am open to this assessment of the po-mo project. As someone who loves Ginsberg and Howl, however, I also got a glimpse of what highbrow condescension looks like coming from a vanity-damaged specimen like Scoresby, in which case I’m afraid Chappell, by extension and presumption, looks merely smug. So perhaps he and I are both smug about postmodernism, if you follow me. It stands to reason. And the story remains entertaining on balance, an intriguing piece of intellectual stunt work, especially in the way it resolves.

The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror Seventh Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
Story not available online.

Tennessee Ernie Ford, “The Shotgun Boogie” (1950)

[listen up!]

Tennessee Ernie Ford had a big hit with this entertaining story-song in 1950, which sat for 14 weeks atop the Rockabilly & Western Swing chart. It hits with a rollicking piano, hip-wrigglin’ boogie bass figure, and upbeat nimble tempo. Our narrator is a good old boy living off the fat of his land with his shotgun standing in the corner. In the first part, he is out hunting. “The big fat rabbits are jumpin' in the grass / Wait 'til they hear my old shotgun blast.” Said blast is replicated throughout the song by hard hits on the snare drum, probably my favorite part of the song and its most ingenious. It sounds right purely by context. “Look out bushy tails, tonight you'll be in the pot.” In the second part, he meets a Daisy Mae type of beautiful backwoods gal. Among other things, of course, she is a deadly shot with her own shotgun. He is instantly smitten. “I looked her up and down, said, ‘Boy, this is love.’” But the usual complications soon prevail. “I sat down on a log, took her on my lap / She said wait a minute, bud, you gotta see my pap / ... He don't like a man that's gonna trifle.” And so our guy follows the script. “Well, I called on her pap like a gentleman oughter / He said, ‘No brush hunter's gonna get my daughter.’" And raising his shotgun, fires. No worries, our guy gets the drift and outruns the shot. “I wanted weddin' bells / I'll be back little gal, when your pappy runs out of shells.” Ford’s voice is homely and flat, especially on the long notes, but it’s all part of the charm.

“The Bride” (2020)

This story by Shaenon K. Garrity is another good one from Black Static magazine, which unfortunately closed down operations in 2023 after 30 years. Garrity’s bio says she is a cartoonist, and maybe some of that accounts for the vivid imagery here, but really this is more compelling on a meta-textual level, at once riffing on the Frankenstein mythos and addressing the reader in chanting, taunting, hypnotic ways. It opens: “As you drive south, the heat rushes up to greet you like your name is in the guestbook and it has your room prepared.” It’s set in the early 1930s insofar as it has a time setting, which suggests some affinity with the Universal movie franchise. But it is wild and cold and sophisticated more like Mary Shelley herself. It’s not Bride of Frankenstein but it’s in the neighborhood. This Frankenstein’s monster is made from the corpse of a beautiful young woman by a “Doctor” to be his mate. It is in the form of an animated dead girl. She smells bad. She falls apart easily and must be put back together with wax and other adherents. Radium as well as electricity was involved in animating her, so she is also radioactive. Her vision is x-ray and she sees and hears with her entire body. The relationship between the Doctor and the dead girl is, of course, fraught and desperate. Eventually she leaves her rotting body behind entirely and exists as a kind of energy vortex, dimly seen but in the shape of a woman. Meanwhile there is another narrative thread going on in second-person that has us driving and searching for something that appears to be the end of the story? It’s still not finished at the end, leaving us in limbo, even though it certainly seems to finish the story of the bride, but implies it hasn’t to keep us going? Maybe. It’s actually a pretty neat trick, a kind of narrative moebius loop. It’s one of the best stories I’ve read in a while, contemporary or otherwise. It is splashed with bolts of color. The language is blunt. It may be coy about its Mary Shelley and other Frankenstein sources, but they are there. Garrity even slips in an ”It’s alive!” But I like even more how she pushes beyond that, into a next phase of “the Bride” as a glimmering energy vortex. It wasn’t just life that was created in this experiment, but something more profound. And it’s irresistible! (Note: I see there is a movie called The Bride! set to be released this March. It sounds like it has a similar premise and shares elements with this story, but I don’t see Garrity’s name anywhere associated with it. Credit for direction and screenplay goes solely to Maggie Gyllenhaal, so maybe it’s just one of those “something in the air” coincidences. Obviously, I haven’t seen it yet, but plan to.)

Black Static #77
Story not available online.