“The Words That Count” (1976)

This Ramsey Campbell story is purely a gimmick story, but as it happens it’s a gimmick I’m a little susceptible to. It reminded me of a detail I liked in a story by Margaret Irvin, “The Book,” where a possessed man’s prayers come out backward, in reverse word order. In this story, as explicitly spelled out in the last paragraph, the first word in every paragraph is the Lord’s Prayer in reverse word order. So the first word of the story is, of course, “Amen.” The conceit entirely eluded me in a story that wasn’t entirely making sense anyway, so making that explicit at the end is important. It brings home a certain aspect of the story to explain it, but formally it also weakens the story. A lot of things are definitely awkward here, perhaps most notably the first three paragraphs, which read like throat-clearing. The story features a pamphlet, as it’s called, with recognizable words from the Lord’s Prayer (e.g., “trespassers”) and a bizarre fundamentalist patriarch. Mostly it’s muddled, but also desperate and unpleasant, as the pamphlet appears to hypnotize the first-person narrator, daughter of the patriarch. The story may also be another example of a sad case where people had no idea how bad conservative Christianity was going to get. It’s unsettling because it’s unpleasant and confusing, and it gets a nice charge of the uncanny (at least for me) with the revelation of the gimmick. Unfortunately, that does not come until the end of the story, which until then veers between a trite treatment of conservative Christianity and impenetrability. Under other circumstances I might have abandoned it as early as the first paragraphs, which are terrible, and it doesn’t get much better from there. But as I say I’m susceptible to the trick of prayers in reverse word order as a symptom of demon possession. The Margaret Irvin story is much better. Interestingly, the story Campbell compares it to is W.F. Harvey’s “August Heat.” I don’t read that story the same way Campbell does, but I think another story by Harvey, “The Beast With Five Fingers,” has similar effects, featuring a man’s left hand writing with pen and paper unbeknownst to the owner of that hand. Things like that are practically impossible to do, which is where the kick of the uncanny comes in for me. You probably know the Lord’s Prayer. Try saying it backward—“amen, evil, from,” etc. It’s harder than you might think. I don’t like to imagine that religion is part of the effect here, but I suppose it could be.

Masters of Darkness, ed. Dennis Etchison
Story not available online.

The Roaring Silence (1976)

Marshalling white R&B / soul with prog-rock may seem an unlikely project but it’s the one South Afrikaner keyboardist Manfred Lubowitz took for himself. He hit first and often with his band and new sobriquet Manfred Mann in the ‘60s and then again (if somewhat more modestly) with Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in the ‘70s. Mann long intrigued me from a distance. I liked (but didn’t love) the hits: “Do Wah Diddy Diddy” and “Blinded by the Light” (written and recorded by Bruce Springsteen for his first album in 1973) both made #1, and “Mighty Quinn,” probably my favorite, reached #10. Somewhere I got the idea the albums were good, but I never sat down with them until recently. By way of internet recommendations, I also tried the Earth Band’s Solar Fire (1973) and Watch (1978). The Roaring Silence attracted me most, doubtless because of the Springsteen covers. Versions of the album now include the 3:49 radio edit of “Blinded” as well as the original 7:08 album kickoff. I’m more familiar with the radio version so that’s the one that sounds right to me, though I appreciate the various proggy twists and turns of the longer piece. Mostly I’m just kind of tired of the song now, and also its follow-up, “Spirits in the Night,” a soundalike to the big hit, and another Springsteen cover from his first album. It reached #40. But I found the 8:19 “Singing the Dolphin Through” irresistibly beautiful. I wish it were shorter but I’m still not tired of it, and somehow a little embarrassed that something this overweeningly sweet would get me. Speaking of embarrassing, there’s the embarrassingly titled “Waiter, There’s a Yawn in My Ear” (apparently inspiration for the album’s cover art or possibly vice versa, but someone should have stepped on that title). It’s where the band goes full antiseptic prog in a live setting, tarted up further in the studio. The crowd loved it. I don’t mind it. The album is always at least pleasant for me, such is my 20something corruption. Affection for prog does linger on in my psyche. I note that keyboardist Mann and guitarist Dave Flett can be perfectly competent-plus and even inspired on their instruments. The other main points of interest are “Starbird” and “Questions,” which continue another Manfred Mann project, adapting classical music to pop songs. In the early ‘70s, the Earth Band approached the Gustav Holst estate for permission to adapt Holst’s suite, The Planets. But when they submitted their Jupiter installment, “Joybringer” (now a bonus track on the Solar Fire album), the estate closed them down forthwith. But never say die. “Starbird,” on The Roaring Silence, is based on a Stravinsky theme. “Questions” is based on a Schubert theme—I hope and trust Schubert had nothing to do with a further embarrassment of these lyrics. I mean, really, it can get pretty dopey around here. Still, the album is good for a hit of guilty pleasure when I am occasionally in need of prog, and it also has a solid if not entirely inspired line in soul too.

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.

School Days (1976)

Rock critic Robert Christgau puts Stanley Clarke in the Meltdown list of his 1970s Consumer Guide (with England Dan and John Ford Coley, Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, Klaatu, Chuck Mangione, Jean-Luc Ponty, and many others you wouldn’t want to meet in a music discussion group). I can see the point, listening to School Days again lately, but the album has certain sentimental attachments for me and vivid mood memories of the mid-‘70s. It was given to me as a gift by a friend who also happened in his own right to be a highly active bass player, playing in a free jazz ensemble and jamming around. Clarke was a kind of peer, or maybe role model just five years ahead of him, a founding member of Return to Forever and long-time sideman to Chick Corea. School Days is Clarke’s fourth solo album and it raised his commercial profile to new heights, reaching #34 on the Billboard 200 album chart (#2 on Jazz Albums). At one time—say, shortly after the gift exchange—high points like the riff on the title song starting around 1:41 sounded positively heroic to me. I played it loud and I played it often. But after that first one (of six tracks total) the songs drift toward the inane, with various exercises attempting to evoke moods and such: “Quiet Afternoon,” “Desert Song,” “Hot Fun,” so on so forth. There’s a strong sense of dynamics here and an ability to take it down low. The horns are a nice touch, the vocals not so much. There’s too much focus on the bass, but, well. And I loved the overall antiseptic cleanliness of the sound, perhaps the primary appeal to me of fusion. After all, cleanliness is next to godliness. It was never so much the playing fast that did it for me as it was the doing so cleanly. These were virtues for me in 1976. See Al DiMeola (also on the Meltdown list) or Chick Corea, to come full circle and return to forever. Yet inevitably, in my experience, the antiseptic leads too surely to the sterile. Next stop punk-rock.

“Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly” (1976)

Dennis Etchison’s very short story is more evidence for his way of finding the hubs and spokes of evil in modern life—in freeway rest stops, heavy traffic, spring breaks. In this story it is a 24-hour coin-operated laundromat in a big city neighborhood. It’s easy to be skeptical, noting the vaguely hysterical title, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things in this story that work, and work well. In a way I could stay all night in that laundromat, paradoxically at once a source of comfort (clean laundry, chore done) and anxiety (strange others, disease, night). Our man on the scene, insomniac, is not alone. There’s a woman, “twenty-nine going on forty.” And she’s talking to herself. While handwashing a heavily blood-stained bedsheet. Talking to herself about a murder. Implying she manipulated her own child into doing it, killing her husband, his father. If she is to be believed—if this story is to be believed. Which is not easy, except it’s 3 in the morning, she is a stranger, and Etchison does the smart thing, getting in and out of the story fast. It’s far-fetched but not out of reach. Suppose it was you handwashing a heavily blood-stained bedsheet when someone walks in. One way is to act crazy, go maximum creepy, hoping to chase the person out. And in fact it works well in this case. Our guy takes a powder, quick. I think it’s a stretch for her to say she manipulated her kid to murder. It feels like either she or Etchison—and Etchison seems most likely—is piling on for effect, making her such a heartless, calculating mother. But it could all be a ruse too, she might just be protecting herself to keep strangers at a distance. So there’s wiggle room for interpreting what’s going on. And there’s really not much else to this. It’s not a story of the uncanny at all, more like one more episode in the human comedy, this one straying into a dark area, with laundry. Etchison never lets drop the grim mask, but the brevity and outrageous scenario play more to a tinge of farce. That’s all right too as a kind of palate cleanser in a collection or anthology. He does it better than W.F Harvey anyway (e.g., “August Heat”) if not maybe as well as Saki. This story is much more a mood piece anyway—that laundromat is everything. It is mainly a laundromat story. And that’s enough, especially at this size. A late-night laundromat setting might even sustain something much longer than this little chip. But it’s a little chip that’s sized just right, and it comes off.

Dennis Etchison, The Dark Country
Story not available online.

“It Only Comes Out at Night” (1976)

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

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

Carrie (1976)

USA, 98 minutes

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Stephen King, Lawrence D. Cohen

Photography: Mario Tosi, Isidore Mankofsky

Music: Pino Donaggio

Editor: Paul Hirsch

Cast: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, William Katt, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, John Travolta, Betty Buckley, P.J. Soles

Carrie the novel was Stephen King’s first published book and Carrie the movie was his first film adaptation. Unlike The Shining, he was quite happy with it even though director Brian De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen changed the ending. King’s fingerprints are more evident here than in Kubrick’s Shining, which might be part of his reaction, as he was getting such a big boost at that point in his career. In many ways Carrie launched King into the mainstream. The movie was a big hit, earning back its original investment nearly 20 times and snaring a couple of Oscar nominations, one for Sissy Spacek as Best Actress in the title role and another for Piper Laurie as Best Supporting Actress playing Carrie’s mother. To this day Carrie is regularly ranked high on lists of greatest horror movies made.

It still has a lot of its punch. Laurie as a demented Christian evangelical trying to protect her daughter Carrie from the sins of the world is extraordinarily unpleasant. She misquotes the Bible to make her insane points. She calls breasts “dirty pillows.” She locks Carrie up in a closet to pray. She didn’t bother to explain the menstrual cycle or periods to Carrie. “You’re a woman now,” she only says coldly, after the alarms and humiliations Carrie suffers from her first period. It was interesting to find out that Laurie reportedly never took the picture seriously during the shoot. She thought it had to be a black comedy and made a personal project of chewing the scenery. It shows, but that isn’t to say her performance doesn’t work. She’s one of the best parts of the picture but she could barely hold back her laughter at her own antics. Another disquieting element is the amount of hitting and slapping, which I take more as artifact of 20th-century quasi-slapstick style than anything. But it frankly shocks me (as does the same in Saturday Night Fever, another picture with John Travolta). It might be more evidence of how uneasy Carrie was making me as I watched. But people are hauling off and slapping one another around here a lot—teachers and students and parents and kids as well as kids on kids.

The Tenant (1976)

[Blogathon contribution here.]

Le locataire, France / USA, 126 minutes

Director: Roman Polanski

Writers: Roland Topor, Gerard Brach, Roman Polanski

Photography: Sven Nykvist

Music: Philippe Sarde

Editor: Francoise Bonnot

Cast: Roman Polanski, Isabelle Adjani, Melvyn Douglas, Shelley Winters, Jo Van Fleet, Bernard Fresson, Lila Kedrova, Rufus, Alain Frerot, Jacques Monod, Claude Dauphin, Dominique Poulange

Director and cowriter Roman Polanski is now likely remembered most, unfortunately, for his sex crime(s). He has always been a good filmmaker and continued to be even when he wandered off into arguably dead-end projects like this. One of his great talents was simply for constructing movies. He recognized and could attract best talents, which probably explains what cinematographer Sven Nykvist (Persona, Fanny and Alexander) is doing here. Polanski's fondness for old Hollywood is even more apparent—in Rosemary's Baby as well—as he casts various icons well past their sell-by dates yet at least as good as you could expect: Melvyn Douglas, for example, a heartthrob leading-man rival of Fredric March and Clark Gable in the '30s, plays a curmudgeonly old landlord in The Tenant. A blowsy bellowing Shelley Winters works well as the concierge of the creepy apartment building. And Jo Van Fleet is decked out in perfect makeup to chew the scenery awhile as a hideous nosy neighbor. The camera itself seems to swoon in her witch-like dizzying presence.

There's a good case, however, that Polanski took a misstep by casting himself as the lead in this strangely toned movie. It turns out he's not bad at being mousy and timid although it never rings entirely true and at about the halfway point the whole project starts to go well off the rails. By the time we're encountering cryptic Egyptology symbols and the cross-dressing starts it kind of falls apart. But I've always been perhaps unnaturally attached to this movie even with all its flaws. It has many amazing small pieces, and if the whole is less than the sum, well, they're still pretty impressive taken on their own.

"Ile Forest" (1976)

Story by Ursula K. Le Guin not available online.

This story feels more like a fairy tale than a short story, let alone science fiction. The only thing "speculative" about it is the setting, an imaginary land in Central Europe. It's told essentially first-person, although there is a frame that introduces us to the narrator. He is a doctor, and he comes to a remote village with his sister to set himself up in practice. He notices a strange and beautiful mansion in a section of forest on his arrival, one of the features that makes him want to settle there. After the doctor and his sister have been there awhile, he is called to treat the master of the mansion. The master is close to death but, with the doctor's help, survives, and they become friends. The master lives by himself. He was married once but his wife ran away with another man, and now he prefers to live by himself. But—can you guess?—in short order the master and the doctor's sister have fallen in love and are thinking of marriage. But something about the master's story of simply accepting that his wife ran away doesn't sit right with either the doctor or his sister. Getting to the bottom of the man's mysterious past is the main thrust of this story, which proceeds serenely. It feels like a fairy tale, as I say, or at least much older than the 20th century. Part of that is the imaginary setting and the way the story moves. For example, a doctor traveling and living with his sister this way seems quaint, even eccentric, but also likely more normal in times past. Then there is all the careful narrative nesting. The master's story is recounted by the doctor many years after the events described. It's not the doctor's story at all nor even his sister's, but the master's. Multiple layers have to be pulled away to get at it. Yet it doesn't feel cute or overdone for effect in any way. At points it reminded me of Bram Stoker's Dracula, at points it reminded me of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Yet there is little if anything that is supernatural or fantastic going on here. The master is left somewhat murky—I had the impression, when he was battling his illness, that he had to be an old man. Yet he is young enough or vigorous enough to attract a woman who is no older than her 30s at most. It feels in many ways like a straightforward romantic tale, yet there is something deeply disturbingly wrong about it too and I can't put my finger on exactly what that could be. A good one.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

"Letters From the Samantha" (1976)

Story by Mark Helprin not available online.

Mark Helprin's story is an old-fashioned one in many ways, and a wonderful leap of imagination. Set in the Indian Ocean sailing waters off the coast of Africa in 1909, it's composed entirely of letters, or perhaps better "memos to file," written by the captain of the ship about strange and extraordinary events. It's not exactly epistolary, which implies correspondence among two or more people, but more like a series of journal entries. Near Madagascar, the ship encounters a typhoon, a powerful cyclone at sea. They see the powerful funnel raking debris off the land as it heads to sea and creates a giant waterspout. It comes close enough to the ship that the crew hears the terrible noise it makes. Then it veers away, leaving them bobbing among the debris, miraculously uninjured. They spy an ape clinging to debris in the water. Without thinking about it, they rescue it and bring it aboard, where it quickly climbs the riggings of the sailing vessel and refuses to come down. Even as the primate comes aboard the captain realizes the mistake. The immediate plan is to put it back in the water where the currents favor it drifting to shore. But it won't come down and a day or two later they are on the high seas again. It is a powerful animal and the crew is afraid of it, but they can't capture it. The letters span about two weeks, from Madagascar to Suez, detailing the fate of the ape and the men aboard the ship. It is both comical and tragic, very funny and very sad. The letters seem gimmicky in some ways, a self-consciously old-fashioned device, but they work. The point of view is the captain addressing his corporate betters. The dates and letters also put the action at a great remove. The events, especially the cyclone, feel like fairy tale stuff. It all turns on the ape, which wisely is made more naturalistic than fantastical. The captain himself tells us exactly what to make of the events at the end of the story, and his conclusion may be the most disturbing thing of all in a story filled with gnawing unease. It feels a little like something Joseph Conrad might write, updated with the sensibilities and perspective of the mid-'70s, when the story was written and published. It's exotic and pedestrian at once. Its strangest elements, the tornado and the ape, are described exquisitely well, accomplishing that sense of transport that fiction can do so well, and then it only gets better from there.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

"Dream Children" (1976)

Story by Gail Godwin not available online.

The first thing I noticed about this story was the similarity of the title to the strange and moving essay by Charles Lamb, "Dream-Children; A Reverie"—the word "reverie" even shows up in this story, twice. It's an elliptical narrative, with many line breaks, italicized sentences, and different focuses. The main character is a woman who remains unnamed, married to a television producer and living a comfortable life in the country. Earlier in her life she lost a child during childbirth. A hysterectomy was required. With this past, she dreams at night, or experiences at night, encounters with her dead child, who is alive now in the world ("somewhere in Florida, probably on the west coast") and who is also dreaming or experiencing these encounters with her. It is likely a delusion, but the story seems equally open to the reality of a powerful spiritual or even supernatural experience. Well, maybe, but I read this openness as a kind of mushy attempt to have it both ways. The woman is undergoing a powerful experience, because she is likely deranged, yet it's all real too. That's a little too ambiguous for me. But perhaps because I like and feel so much affinity for the Lamb essay I was often willing to give this story a pass. I think Godwin must have been familiar with it. The desperation of the woman in this story for contact with the child is palpable, and moving. But then the story, which is not that long, shifts into scenes of her husband and his career, and it starts to feel like territory previously covered by Ann Beattie, or maybe John Cheever, and many others as well: sorting through the wreckage of the sexual revolution for pieces of the old ways that you liked, most notably, here, the sanctity of bearing and raising children. Thinking about it later, there isn't very much that I liked about this story. But Godwin is an unusually beguiling writer here, hopscotching a wide range of setting and incident, and implicitly promising it's all going to add up. It doesn't all add up, but she gets you all the way to the end, and that has to count for something. A bit of a mess, but an intriguing one.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

Ordinary People (1976)

Because Judith Guest happened to live in a suburb that neighbored mine, I became aware of her first novel when I might not have otherwise. I have always thought she brings a good sense for the ways of privileged white suburbia here, not to mention she is a careful yet freewheeling and interesting writer. Still, her most famous novel is now unfortunately a little dated. It seems too concerned by half with the angsts of overprivileged people, even acknowledging that the specific crises detailed cross class lines—death of a child, suicide attempt, recovery, and like that. It's just hard to feel sorry for them when the gaps are this big. "I could deal with that" is a stubbornly recurring thought, as when the adolescent at the heart of the story gets a car for Christmas and isn't sure how he feels about it. It's also part of a certain era of jaunty psychotherapy, albeit distorted heavily by stigma, that now seems more part of the past. It's distinctly unfriendly to its women characters, which was only exaggerated in the Robert Redford movie adaptation that followed in a few years (with basically all the problems, and virtues, of the book). In some ways, Guest seems to be taking a self-conscious step away from the prevailing feminism. It's a good novel, yet somehow maybe a little hollow, underwhelming, obvious. It's as programmatic as scenes from a year in the life of a recovery, implicitly attempting to normalize grief and recovery—explicitly attempting it, when you consider the title—but that's all good. There's a tremendous amount of skill in the writing—a lot of thoughtful craft and technique went into this. There are great sentences and paragraphs, with a nice ever-shifting sense of point of view. And, yes, a kind of natural ease in the milieu of white upper-middle-class repressions. We all wish we had their money, and we all probably think we could manage the crises better than they do. I'm sure we could not. But alas, that is obscured by an inevitable resentment about a lifestyle systematically denied a great many of us. It might seem more sympathetic if the lifestyle were remotely in reach. But that's another point where the '70s are different from the times we live in now.

In case it's not at the library.

"Weekend" (1976)

Story by Ann Beattie not available online.

Ann Beattie's story takes a theme that is familiar in midcentury American lit—the philandering college professor and his various agonies—and turns it on its head, taking the point of view of one of his long-suffering victims. In this case, it's George and his common-law wife, Lenore, who is 21 years younger than him and with a child by him. She is blindly loyal, but stung to the quick when she overhears George tell another woman that she (Lenore) is "simple." Much that is essential about their relationship is revealed in that slight, but there's more to tell. Lenore believes, or at least is only starting to disbelieve, that time is on her side. She thinks all she has to do is wait and George will marry and provide for her. She concentrates on keeping house, baking bread, and raising the child—there's an unmistakable hippie feel to the way Lenore organizes her life. For his part, George is slipping into dissolution. He was denied tenure and left his teaching post two years previous to this story. Since then, he has been unemployed, living the life of a New England writer in the countryside, though he doesn't appear to be doing much writing. He likes to entertain past students who stop at the house with them on weekends. Lenore sees the evidence of George's unfaithfulness—it is even pointed out to her directly in a scene that is atmospheric if hard to believe. At first her rationalizations make sense—he's a middle-aged man in his 50s. Is he having sex outdoors? But the sex itself is unimportant. He is obviously giving more of himself to these students than he gives to Lenore. As much as anything, this story is about the breakdown of Lenore's denial of that. At this point, personally, I've nearly had it with American stories about philandering college professors, but Beattie's story is moving and unsettling. The situation between George and Lenore is broken, and a little horrifying. On the weekend recounted here, George appears to be more flagrant than usual with a visiting young woman, and something causes her and her friend to break off the visit and leave early, taking off after dark on Saturday. It's unclear what went wrong exactly. What's more clear is that Lenore has suddenly realized, which I guess makes this an epiphany story, that she can't count on George for a future. He is 55. She is 34. They have a child. The story dwells deep inside Lenore, with huge blocks of paragraphs on her thoughts. Even in her clarity Lenore is something of a muddled person. The strongest sense of her is incoherent pain and resentment. As troubled as she is, you can't help sympathizing with her. Bleak but effective.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

So Long as You Both Shall Live (1976)

This is one of the short, sharply focused novels in the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain. It advances a couple of the continuing threads in the series—the detective Bert Kling's bad luck with beautiful women, which from certain angles represents an almost comic pratfall element (though grim), and the persistent noxiousness of Fat Ollie Weeks—although it depends on accepting that what happens here happens to happen randomly to our familiar cast of characters. A psychotic stalker, who is "insane," kidnaps Bert Kling's wife (a model) on the day of their marriage. But it's not for ransom. He just wants to keep her and do as he will with her as long as he can. So there is no ransom demand, the cops have no idea where to look, etc. Enter police procedure. You can probably see where it's not easy to pick out the comical element in the Bert Kling thread, because the things that happen to his various women are horrific. More interesting to me, on my recent pass through a bunch of McBains, is Fat Ollie Weeks, who I don't recall encountering much before. I like that he's such a good cop—dogged, creative, with great instincts. I'm less interested in the way he is also a reprehensible human being, and the somewhat trite conflict therein. Mostly I just love watching him figure stuff out. In many ways he's the hero here, showing up and injecting himself into a case the 87th Precinct detectives are obviously taking way too personally to think clearly. That almost has to be Fat Ollie's role to make the big story work, but at least McBain avoids making it a heartwarming moment. Better that Fat Ollie remains basically an asshole. I would really hate to see him reforming much, though I believe he starts softening on some of his racism toward the end of the series, when the books are not as good. But it's not entirely believable at that point. Anyway, this one's a dandy McBain shorty.

In case it's not at the library.

Shake Some Action (1976)

(Save time! Reader's Digest condensed versions here and here.)

I see that Shake Some Action is presently in some sort of commercial limbo, available digitally but otherwise only in expensive import CD or retro vinyl editions. For what it's worth I loved it most as a vinyl album because both sides, in different ways, offer such wonderful 20-minute sets start to finish. But everything for me is digital nowadays so same difference. I should mention that the band has a lengthy and complicated history, with partisans for other stages of it, which you can look up because I won't be going into it much. Suffice to say I believe I'm in the minority on this, which is approximately their fourth of some eight albums and miscellaneous other releases to date, with multiple significant lineup changes along the way. It's the only album by the Flamin' Groovies I care for much, though I care for it very much. But fair warning, caveats, all that: It's less connected to their earlier harder-edged Bay Area swamp-rock incarnation and more connected to a disconnected fantasy about British Invasion style and what rock 'n' roll feels like. As such, all they did was create one of the greatest rock 'n' roll albums I know.

Lou Reed, "Coney Island Baby" (1976)

(listen)

Lou Reed's death has caught me up a bit. It wasn't one anyone could say was a surprise, but I felt it as an unexpected loss and still do. More, I have been amazed by the outpouring I have seen, often exasperated by what people laud and ignore. But of course—it could not be any other way. Lou Reed contained peevishness too, a Walt Whitman of our times, contradicting himself, large, containing multitudes. I wanted to post "Baton Rouge" on Facebook as my own personal expression of grief, but played it safe with "Sweet Jane." More I was intrigued by what everybody else was throwing up—it was an amazing variety, from pre-Velvets to "Egg Cream" and beyond, which may have been the most remarkable testament of all. Applying the work ethic Andy Warhol so famously drummed into him, Lou Reed willed himself into becoming a creative giant, one of the most enduring, influential, and productive artists of his time, and someone who personally became important to me, for his storytelling and sharp eye and his stories of substance abuse, bad relationships and good, and for his commitment to physical and, yes, emotional health. I saw him in performance once in Minneapolis, in 1984, and again in Seattle in 1992, and he was a sensation both times. I've been listening to him for 40 years but am only now getting some sense of the giant figure he cut. As for "Coney Island Baby," it's Lou Reed the way I particularly like him, with his defenses down and his heart wide open, alert and paying attention and getting the details. I mean, "I wanted to play football for the coach"? How does he get away with that? Among other things, Lou Reed was a consummate showman and a dedicated student of the human heart. Sit for 6:47 and enjoy a little masterpiece, why don't you.

Network (1976)

USA, 121 minutes
Director: Sidney Lumet
Writer: Paddy Chayevsky
Photography: Owen Roizman
Music: Elliott Lawrence
Editor: Alan Heim
Cast: Peter Finch, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, Ned Beatty, Beatrice Straight, Wesley Addy, Kathy Cronkite, Lee Richardson, Arthur Burghardt

Network is one of those movies with a not undeserved reputation for getting things right, large and small. But first and more than anything it is an acting showcase, cast almost perfectly, built around stellar performances (at least six by my count), realized via Sidney Lumet, a director deeply simpatico with the art. Then it lucked into one of those defining iconic things, which defined it, ultimately outgrew and overshadowed it in many ways, in the catch phrase, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore," writer Paddy Chayevsky's nearly perfect mantra of learned helplessness, resonating more than ever today. I'm willing to bet it's a feeling familiar to anyone reading this. The reverberation of that sense is one of the great surprises and enduring pleasures of this picture.

Full disclosure: I didn't much like Network at the time of its release. I thought it was too broad and obvious, and was put off by the highfalutin corporate vocabulary, even more by what I perceived as satire that was simply too easy. I didn't believe it. But seeing it decades later brought a shock of recognition, in its pitch-perfect sense of corporate environment and notably in its anticipation of those tabloid talk shows we got from Oprah Winfrey and Jerry Springer, all stocked with armies of raging plain folks and the depressing sense their motivations were just shallow, or incoherent—and certainly manipulated. Or, as Yeats described the situation some time ago, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Taxi Driver (1976)

#8: Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976)

It seems like I've been talking about Bernard Herrmann a fair amount recently—he wrote the scores for a good many of Hitchcock's best pictures, including Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho. He wrote the scores for Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 and for a dozen or so episodes each of "Twilight Zone" and the "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour." He even contributed to The Magnificent Ambersons and Citizen Kane. Taxi Driver is the last picture he worked on, shortly before his death toward the end of 1975, and that score is a doozy. The clip of the titles at the first link below suggests how important his work is here to setting the mood and creating the unmistakable feeling of stepping into a dark, mysterious place where not all of the usual rules are going to apply.

You will also, of course, quickly notice that some appreciation must apply to photographer Michael Chapman as well, whose brilliant and eerie first image of the cab from bumper level gliding through the fog is equally affecting, perfectly in synch with the music. And then the fuzzy, lurching, streaming, super-saturated look of the city streets at night that Chapman goes to as needed takes it up another notch. So that gets us approximately two minutes into a film that never once loses its way for nearly two hours.

Let's Stick Together (1976)

This sounds pretty much like what it is, a grab bag of one-offs and B-sides from Bryan Ferry at an uncertain point in his career. It came right on the heels of the first dissolution of Roxy Music—it even seems to have half a foot still stuck back there, with alternate but not that different versions of "2HB," "Sea Breezes," and "Re-Make/Re-Model," all of whose originals appeared on the first Roxy Music album. There are also artifacts of the first phase of Bryan Ferry's solo career (as the crazy covers guy, personally my favorite of his many phases, followed closely by the Big Ripe Sigh of Avalon): "The Price of Love," an Everly Brothers song, "It's Only Love," a Beatles song, the standard "You Go to My Head." What saves this mess is the title song, which is also the first song and grabs hold tight right off the bat, in which Ferry is on the inspired attack with a scorching hot rhythm and blues band that is really something. I think the version here of "Let's Stick Together" stands up just fine to the Wilbert Harrison original or any of the other covers (by Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, Dwight Yoakam, George Thorogood, Nina Simone, etc., a number of big names). There's also a nice treatment of the Jimmy Reed song "Shame, Shame, Shame," full-on horns, harp, chick singers, whomping bottom, and needling guitar. So the essays in this direction do make the album worth checking out. Ferry would take it to some interesting places in at least one other solo, The Bride Stripped Bare, but I think its best expressions are found here. Still, in its totality the album is not that remarkable. The Roxy Music redos made and still make Ferry look a bit exhausted (if not desperate) on the ideas front. And I like the covers fine—as I say, I think especially These Foolish Things is terrific, on some days I'm even pretty sure it's the best thing he ever did in or out of Roxy Music. But these really sound like dregs and barrel scrapings, especially this second attempt at a Rubber Soul cover, which didn't even go that well the first time ("You Won't See Me," one of the few lowlights from that first solo). I wish I knew that next Bryan Ferry solo a little better, In Your Mind, because I know for sure by The Bride Stripped Bare he had some pretty interesting things going for him. Here it's limited to "Let's Stick Together," which is essential but quite possibly the only thing here that is.

Ramones (1976)

Thought experiment: The Ramones self-destruct in 1977—much as they actually did 25 years later—before getting any more than a few demos of the second album in the can, while the Sex Pistols (no doubt under the direction of Glen Matlock) release annual albums well into the '80s that work variations on and/or weakly echo the historic first. Now which band and which album would we have made iconic to the point of fetish? I guess that question answers itself. Don't forget this Ramones debut! To me, it has come to seem almost absurdly monumental over the years—the big bang of punk-rock that produced an ever-expanding universe. I think it's impossible to understate how critically important it is. There should be prominent statues in public places and speeches every year. At the same time, and this is the real kicker of it, it's equally impossible to understate the vitality and pleasure of it, still, the more so when listened to as an album, all 14 shards blasted at once and in sequence. It is a rush of oxygen to the brain, lively and fun and goofy and strange. It is truly the ur-album of a wide swath of music that followed and is still implicitly following it. It cost $6,400 to record. The song count-off emerges as badge of pride and identity. The songs are short—six of the 14 under two minutes and the longest 2:35. The Ramones didn't invent the "the" style of band names but they sure helped bring it roaring back. The band lived in the middle of a huge city, wore shades, sneakers, blue jeans, and black leather jackets. And as for the sources of this—it was new, but often felt familiar—they weren't elaborating on them the way they would later, but somehow one sensed it all intuitively: too much TV, too many trashy B-movies, drugs, comic books, dysfunctional families, sketchy street scenes, and, of course, hangin' around with nothin' to do. The unholy alliance of '60s garage and Brill Building pop, the basic Ramones musical aesthetic strategy, was a revelation at the time and it is still. Simply for so imposingly inventing itself as if all at once, this album will always be on the short list of the band's best, and indeed at the top of many of those lists. It is certainly the place to start with them, and stop if you must. For me, it's just the beginning of a long, delicious, always fun-filled ride across many years and many albums. It stands within the Ramones catalog as a most emphatic "1-2-3-4."