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.

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.

“The Autopsy” (1980)

David G. Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, was high on Michael Shea at the time the anthology was published in 1987. Shea’s Nifft the Lean won a World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1983. Hartwell compares Shea to H.P. Lovecraft and that seems about right—Shea even wrote a couple of tales set in the Cthulhu universe (then again, in the 20th century who didn’t?). The connection is easy to see in this long, dense, vividly detailed story. Hartwell classifies it as science fiction and perhaps partly because of that I also thought of the movie Alien, which came out the year before this story. The aliens here are also small like they are in the 1982 picture Liquid Sky, which in turn may also have been influenced by this story. It’s not clear exactly what the aliens in “The Autopsy” are looking for but it doesn’t seem to be anything good. Brute survival is one part of it. The alien we encounter has been on Earth for a while, taking possession of bodies and sucking the blood and life out of them, as needed. It’s not a vampire story in any other way, but it does have a certain element of cruelty that is at once gothic, modern, and very unsettling. And there’s no Kevin McCarthy to stand around shouting, "Listen to me! You're next! They're already here!" I don’t want to get distracted by categorizing, but I do think it's completely fair to call this story horror (ditto Alien, ditto Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Our main guy, a 57-year-old doctor with stomach cancer, has been called to a small mining town to perform autopsies of victims in a mysterious and suspicious explosion at the mine. The corpses are stored in an abandoned ice factory on the edge of town. It’s the middle of the night. As with Lovecraft’s work, another fair point of comparison is that “The Autopsy” requires patience and a continuing willingness to give yourself over to it. The gore is rich and plentiful, all dolled up in arcane medical / biological terminology. You can’t say the title doesn’t warn you. In the Lovecraft vein, Shea even includes a reference to going mad from an experience, and it’s better than most such Lovecraft scenes (sans “tittering,” which I admit was one of Lovecraft’s better recurring word choices). Lovecraft’s characters driven to madness are often a little unintentionally comical. There is no hint of laughs in “The Autopsy.” It is relentlessly grim. It goes to mind-bending places that are similar to those in Aleister Crowley’s “The Testament of Magdalen Blair.” It’s a regular head fuck. Recommended.

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

“The Doll” (1980)

This story by Joyce Carol Oates shows how sharp she can be at creating memorable effects even as she works with staples of horror. Here a professional woman, age 44, president of a private college, is visiting a city she has never been to before, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She sees what she is certain must have been the model for a dollhouse she had as a girl, a present for her 4th birthday. It was a big dollhouse—36 inches high—and detailed by a craftsman, some distant relative. She has fond memories of the dollhouse and seeing a mansion that looks just like it unsettles her. She stops the car, leaves the key in the ignition and her purse on the front seat, and stands before the house in reverie, trying to decide whether to ring the doorbell and introduce herself. She thinks she must be connected to this family somehow. But she decides to continue on to the conference she is in town for. But later that night she can’t sleep. She’s no stranger to insomnia and decides to pay that call at the mansion after all. This idea alone makes me nervous. It’s after 10 but before 11. She thinks it might not be too late if there are lights on downstairs. What follows is the centerpiece of the story, which seems most likely to be a dream (if you’re looking for the rational explanation here). It moves like a dream, feels like a dream—never easy to do, but Oates pulls it off. She has also calibrated her college president’s point in life, just beyond child-bearing age and never with time for a man. “I am not opposed to marriage for myself, she once said, with unintentional naivete, but it would take so much time to become acquainted, to go out with him, and talk.” The dream explores, at almost shockingly primal levels, how she views herself—as a doll. A simulacrum of a real woman, just as the simulacrum she meets in the mansion is that of a real man (in appearance it looks suspiciously like one of her childhood dolls). Oates’s descriptive language blurs the line and then she lets sharp edges flash out unexpectedly. It’s partly a playtime fantasy with dolls, but the bottom can fall out and leave the abyss on plain view. But the next day she’s up and back at the conference again.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
Story not available online.

“The Monkey” (1980)

Overall I like this longish Stephen King story pretty well. It focuses on a wind-up toy monkey I know from the Close Encounters movie and elsewhere, a 1950s-era toy that had a resurgence in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Maybe even because of this story, although first I would like to know whether King was influenced by the Spielberg movie. King and Spielberg are both very strong on 1970s-era middle-class, young, usually suburban family life. In this story King makes the toy a harbinger or perhaps somehow the agent of doom by insisting on it. It’s true he’s really good at evoking the toy, particularly the sound of it: jang-jang-jang-jang accompanied by gears or springs working. I picked one up myself in the ‘80s at a garage sale or thrift store or something, although it never scared me (and I didn’t know this story anyway until much more recently). The wind-up gyrations even charmed me, which unfortunately makes it an obstacle for me to overcome in this story in terms of believability. Sure, I can see the creepy side of the thing, but it just reminds me again that King often depends on the spaces of novels to work most effectively. The late scenes in this story, with a man rowing to the deepest part of a lake and the sudden storm and all that, reminded me of the furniture-moving pulp styles of Arthur Machen and H.P. Lovecraft. It’s a really big scene, almost ridiculously so, e.g., the cloud formation, the rowboat falling entirely to pieces, etc. I just noticed there’s a movie version coming out next month directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daugher, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House)—might be interesting. I wasn’t particularly moved by the family elements in the story, the father and son business, but that again might speak to King’s greater strengths as a novelist, where family stuff is often prominent and effective, with the space to breathe life into it. Here it is more like reflexive, with the jang-jang-jang-jang as a signal for anxiety and Pop and Junior a signal for pathos. King is going for the epic qualities of “The Great God Pan” and “The Dunwich Horror,” which have little of family feels. So he’s not quite getting it right in the story format, but he’s on the right track in many ways. David Hartwell, editor of The Dark Descent, discusses, in his introduction to “The Monkey,” “... the extent to which [King] is synthesizing and mutating, from his voluminous reading on horror, the entire historical development of the field.” That is absolutely true enough. After my teen exposure to the Alfred Hitchcock-branded anthologies in the ‘60s (including the magazine), King was my next jolt of experience in horror literature, both for his novels and, even more importantly, for Danse Macabre, which was very inspiring even if I could not really connect with Frankenstein, Dracula, or other landmarks he brought to my attention. I think the subtle problem in this story is a matter of overthinking it, or possibly trying too hard. It’s not that I have problems anymore with the ponderous, pulpy furniture-moving style.

Stephen King, Skeleton Crew
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

“The Fetch” (1980)

This long story by Robert Aickman is reasonably conventional horror business, given that little Aickman did was ever conventional. It’s more like folk horror, as “fetch” is an obscure 17th-century term for “the apparition or double of a living person, formerly believed to be a warning of that person’s impending death.” It’s not hard to see how that sense of the word could come to be. The fetch in this story is less of a doppelganger and more of a wraith, an old woman who hides her face and trails dripping seawater wherever she goes (as she evidently comes from the sea, and to the sea must we all return). Aickman’s stories tend to be long and he takes his time getting to his points. It works because his language, however dreamlike, remains clear and straightforward, and the payoffs do come. In this first-person tale the narrator details his three strange sightings of this particular fetch, which do indeed augur deaths or, in one case, a disappearance. My favorite detail about this apparition is either the turning of the fetch’s face or the dripping seawater. She simply keeps her face out of sight, even if she’s turning to look at a far wall as she climbs a staircase. Aickman might be leaning into the smell of the seawater a little hard for him. It’s not as overbearing as the recurring “fishy” smell that we get, for example, from H.P. Lovecraft in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” but it seemed unusually pushy for Aickman. He is generally more reserved and holding back as a rule, setting a leisurely pace that slowly becomes hypnotic. As an article of folk horror, “The Fetch” is specifically focused on sightings of the apparition. They are the high points even when they are approached somewhat sidewise. Sometimes I think everything Aickman does is sidewise. But it’s also, when you think about it, the way most people experience the supernatural, if they do. It always happens kind of in the corner of your eye, and rarely when you go looking for it. Whatever you believe it seems most of us experience the strange and inexplicable one way or another. Most of us have an anecdote. That confusion and uncertainty about how to take it is where Aickman’s stories live.

Robert Aickman, The Wine-Dark Sea
Story not available online.

Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980)

West Germany / Italy, 896 minutes

Director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Writers: Alfred Doblin, Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Photography: Xaver Schwarzenberger

Music: Peer Raben

Editor: Juliane Lorenz

Cast: Gunter Lamprecht, Franz Buchrieser, Gottfried John, Hanna Schygulla, Barbara Sukowa, Elisabeth Trissenaar, Annemarie Duringer, Barbara Valentin, Brigitte Mira, Roger Fritz, Ivan Desny, Volker Spengler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Karin Baal, Hark Bohm, Gerhard Zwerenz, Traute Hoess, Udo Kier, Fritz Schediwy, Claus Holm

Director and screenwriter Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, simply by virtue of its dazzling, massive, and sustained 15-hour volume, probably has to be accounted as Fassbinder’s one greatest masterpiece (even if critics in the roundup at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? seem to favor Ali: Fear Eats the Soul). Berlin Alexanderplatz is a brilliant character study as well as a brilliant profile of Berlin in 1928, in a tradition of movies such as the 1927 silent documentary Berlin: Symphony of Metropolis. Berlin in 1928 was roiling with social and political turmoil and economic despair. Our man Franz Biberkopf (Gunter Lamprecht, who is so good here it’s hard to describe) is introduced by Alfred Doblin in the 1929 source novel as “an erstwhile cement- and transport-worker in Berlin. He has just been discharged from prison where he has been doing time because of former incidents, and is now back in Berlin, determined to lead a decent life.”

What Doblin elides as “former incidents” is what Fassbinder spends a good deal of the TV miniseries dwelling on. Biberkopf formerly made his way as a pimp and in a fit of fury beat his prostitute girlfriend Ida to death. Berlin Alexanderplatz includes the murder scene in the first of its 13 episodes (plus a two-hour epilogue) and it is returned to over and over. It’s in many of these episodes. It is exactly what Biberkopf is trying to escape even as circumstances return him to it without mercy. He was sent to prison for it, serving four years (in this day and age it seems like nothing for a murder, doesn’t it?). At the beginning of the miniseries he’s back on the streets again, determined to go straight. It’s 1928 Berlin. What could go wrong?

17. Soft Boys, Underwater Moonlight (1980)

[2012 review here, 2012 review of “I Wanna Destroy You” here]

There’s so much sleaze on the second album by the Soft Boys (Robyn Hitchcock, Kimberley Rew, Mathew Seligman, and Morris Windsor) that I had to keep checking the genre designations to make sure I was where I belonged: “neo-psychedelia, post-punk, new wave, psychedelic pop, jangle pop, power pop” (Wikipedia). Underwater Moonlight is full of absolute banging rockers, kicking off with the guided missile of “I Wanna Destroy You.” That, more than its psychedelic strains, is more likely the main reason it’s one of those albums that didn’t sell well but started a million bands. The head trips lie more in the words—Hitchcock was a student of Syd Barrett and loved him almost as much as I love Hitchcock. The tracks here resemble love songs, but the twists have been torqued nearly to breaking point—“I wanna destroy you” is also the psychic mission statement for the album. It’s followed by “Kingdom of Love,” where “You've been laying eggs under my skin / Now they're hatching out under my chin / Now there's tiny insects showing through / And all them tiny insects look like you.” You don’t need a lyric sheet to catch the main themes. Hitchcock enunciates them well and they are pushed way up in the mix. An unsettling element of sexual and/or reproductive urge is often bubbling under these proceedings in uncomfortable ways. Did I say bubbling under? The longest song on the album is “I Got the Hots for You” and the one song with songwriting credit for the whole band is “Old Pervert.” The thing is, these elements—the excellent 2 guitars bass drums rock band and the weird sex notes in the words—are perfectly balanced, so much so that when the set erupts at the two-thirds point with an instrumental, “You’ll Have to Go Sideways,” it’s an orgasmic blast of thrilling energy that defines the whole project. Or at least gives us a moment off from love songs like “Insanely Jealous,” about a stalker. It reminds me of what the Pretenders did on their first album (also 1980), five songs in with “Space Invader.” Sometimes an instrumental says it all, and so it is here as far as the primo band goes. “Sideways” is followed by “Old Pervert,” about a guy who lives under a bridge and whispers to girls passing by. Wrenching, to say the least. Underwater Moonlight is an odd and perverse mix but somehow it works quite well at blowing the mind. Kimberley Rew would eventually move on to Katrina & the Waves, which doesn’t have much to do with psychedelics but a lot to do with adjacent pop (sunshine). Hitchcock, solo, with bands he put together the Egyptians and Venus 3, and in collaboration with many others, would totter down his gnomic surreal pathways always, staying true thus to the psychedelic banner, and delivering of himself at least one more stone classic.

Waiting for the Barbarians (1980)

J.M. Coetzee’s third novel was written while the South Africa apartheid regime was still in place and fearsomely powerful. It shows here in the ways all the recognizable evidence of colonialism is kept so generic. “Barbarians” is the term for native nomads who roam the plains beyond the village where this novel takes place and in the mountains beyond that. They are considered a problem that must be managed. The “Empire” is the distant power in control. The first-person narrator, the “Magistrate,” is a civil servant of the Empire who has spent most of his life in the village. The village is small and settled into routines that are comfortable for the village, the “barbarians,” and the narrator, who is genial and corrupt, mostly in the form of serial affairs. He was evidently always sympathetic to the natives and becomes even more so in this short novel. I stick with the scare quotes for “barbarians” because Coetzee is making the case here that these representations of the Empire show it as no less barbaric. In fact, the Empire’s use of torture is one of the main threads here. The novel has sections devoted to the village life the narrator has become accustomed to. He discusses the brutalities of the Empire, which he grows hostile to as they begin to affect him. After a long and arduous journey to return a young woman (in whom he has developed an interest) to her “barbarian” clan, he is accused of treason (or something) upon his return. He is imprisoned and tortured, and his meditations on the treatment follow. What he describes is horrible, of course, but Coetzee’s clinical dispassionate voice take some of the edge off it. Not that much. He covers the basic points, such as being denied sleep, water, food, bathing, and treatment for his wounds. He is turned into a grotesque and repulsive creature, though his narrative voice remains cool and descriptive. We see the actions of the Empire from his view. They all seem random and irrational. The Empire remains distant and almost benign in its affect. Soldiers appear, life changes in the village. Now the Empire is focused on aggression against the “barbarians”—who prove to be barbaric indeed, though not of course with the obviously vast resources of the Empire. Among other things, Coetzee is very good at showing how the Empire is basically a large and somewhat dysfunctional bureaucracy. Much here is absurd, but the realities of the terrorism of colonialism are vivid and disturbing. As Coetzee intends, this short novel admirably gets under your skin and keeps you uneasy. It has humor but more often horror. It feels authentic to what it is like to live in such regimes.

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

Dressed to Kill (1980)

USA, 104 minutes

Director/writer: Brian De Palma

Photography: Ralf D. Bode

Music: Pino Donaggio

Editor: Gerald B. Greenberg

Cast: Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon, Dennis Franz, David Margulies

Director and writer Brian De Palma’s trashy, seductive ode to Alfred Hitchcock movies is full of twists and turns—however ludicrously unlikely they may be—so I will necessarily be letting slip some spoilers. The Hitchcock movies overtly saluted here include Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window, the latter two of which had been out of circulation for decades when Dressed to Kill was made. Clearly, De Palma had the resources to study them. The most obvious homage, and perhaps the best sequence in the whole picture, takes place in an art museum and compresses an amazing amount of Vertigo into it.

Angie Dickinson, like Janet Leigh in Psycho, disappears from the picture not even an hour in, the result of murder by a mysterious slasher. Here’s where Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack goes “weet - weet - weet” in Psycho, but De Palma has turned instead to Italian film composer Pino Donaggio (Don’t Look Now as well as many other De Palma pictures), who generally brings more ripe, luscious, and swooning pathos. Dickinson plays Kate Miller, a middle-aged and sexually frustrated rich housewife in psychoanalysis with Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine). Here we collide with the most unbelievable developments in the thriller as well as its most unpleasantly dated, transphobic aspect. Fair warning: The telling of it reveals all.

Polyrock (1980)

In retrospect maybe my favorite thing about this album now is Philip Glass sitting in on piano and keyboards—basically a member of the band. He's also formally a coproducer with Kurt Munkacsi. But Polyrock and Polyrock (their first album) are also examples of a nervous, twitchy type of new wave that I tend to go for, typified by Talking Heads, the B-52s, Blancmange, and the Tom Tom Club, which are obvious influences here, although of course in the first place Glass is more of an influence on them, so it's all kind of a moebius strip in a way. It's further complicated because Glass was not the leader of Polyrock although he produced. Maybe he was thinking of himself in 1980 as Brian Eno with his own rock band finds. The leader of Polyrock is singer and guitarist Billy Robertson, who wrote all the songs here with his brother Tommy. Billy, who died in 2018, may well be the yelpiest of this whole new wave class, a master of vocal anxiety like David Byrne, making you nervous just to hear it. It suits the quick tempos of the band's attack anyway: chukka-chik guitar rhythms and great guitar effects, a drummer working the high-hat, soaring harmonies like washes of color, and synthesized keyboards setting the main tone, sounding the melodies, marking the bridges, delivering the washes. It is tense and coiled music, but more nervous than menacing, like a day of drinking one coffee too many. It is always inviting with abandoned dance grooves. The whole thing runs under 35 minutes and works well like an informal suite building to multiple and various highs. It notably takes off on the third track, "This Song," guitar-driven with Star Trek vocals by way of the harmonies of Catherine Oblasney and Billy, occasionally interrupted by a more sweaty Billy. Sublime ultimately. Then who's mashing the keyboard on "Go West"? It could be any one of three or perhaps combinations (I keep wanting to know what Glass is doing on every track). Crazy blubbulous noise groove. "Bucket Rider" is another with an absolutely neck-snapping rhythm, an instrumental this time. Six of these 11 songs are under three minutes—the new wave aesthetic. "Your Dragging Feet," the longest at 4:58, is virtually epic in this environment, with another showcase for Oblasney and Billy. Nice to hear this one again.

"Gazebo" (1980)

A lot of good stuff in this great Raymond Carver story—for once a story from What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that was left relatively undisturbed by editor Gordon Lish. I like the setting in a cheap motel with the disintegrating 30something couple who manage it. Yes, shabby motels, drunken daze, and relationships gone bad are certainly familiar, but the way Carver handles them they are vivid and fresh. Holly and Duane are have shut down the front office for the day to hash things out with a bottle in a suite ("we needed a suite"). Holly has found out Duane has "gone outside the marriage" with the motel housekeeper and it's really the end. The story is told first-person by the philandering husband, whose relentless dialogue cues are variations on "go," e.g., "'Don't move to Nevada,' I go. 'You're talking crazy,' I go. 'I'm not talking crazy,' she goes." It is the way people tell stories (or did) but after a while it becomes a distracting tic here. I'm not even sure people talk that way anymore. The story has a strange urgency, perhaps because it is so fragmented. The couple's drunken day is punctuated by motel patrons, presumably with reservations, trying to get their attention outside the room. The story takes place across most of one day, with the single scene of a long, drawn-out talk, set off by numerous line breaks and memories. The gazebo turns up late, an extraordinary image from a memory of better times, a wonderful contrast to the dreary motel argument. Although "Gazebo" features a relationship that is ending, it is really more a study of alcoholism, what it sounds like and looks like in the wild and all the ways it moves. Drinking is what unites this couple even as it has sent their lives all to hell. They take it by the quart. "Gazebo" is so good on alcoholism it triggers me a little, recalling my own drunken episodes or those of others. There is a great tension that comes from their simultaneous final failure at managing the motel, which echoes their personal demise. In many ways this story feels like Carver is headed confidently into his best period of writing.

Raymond Carver, Where I'm Calling From (Library of America)

Crocodiles (1980)

Annals of postpunk: I never owned a copy of Crocodiles until a few years ago when I picked up the 2003 CD edition with 10 bonus tracks (for an album that originally had 10 tracks). Echo & the Bunnymen, if you haven't noticed, can be terribly frustrating for completists and/or originalists. The box set Crystal Days: 1979-1999, for example, does not include anywhere on any of its four CDs any version of "Going Up," the opening track on Crocodiles. What, they decided to disown it? Streaming doesn't help either. On Napster, certain tracks from that box are simply not available, nor is Crocodiles at all. Anyway, as if all this fragmentation were not enough (there are also two 1980 versions of Crocodiles but never mind), my first exposure to this album was on a tape somebody made for me. I'm pretty sure I had the whole album on one side of a C-90 and I know individual tracks also appeared on mix tapes people made for me. Listening to the album more systematically I see it's what I would have considered a one-sided album if I'd had it in vinyl—namely, side 2, which kicks off with the single "Rescue" (a long-time favorite) and elevates a notch further with "Villiers Terrace," which pounds with hysterical anxiety you just have to declaim along with in Jim Morrison voice. "Pictures on My Wall," "All That Jazz," and "Happy Death Men" follow along in the afterglow. From the vantage of my old tape collection, Echo & the Bunnymen struck me as a bit of a same-y act—that is, all the songs on their albums sounded like versions of the best song, so it was easy to just let them play. I remember Bram Tchaikovsky, the Pretenders, Gang of Four, XTC, and even Elvis Costello to some degree fit that model. These artists made for good tapes for playing all day. The first side of the original Crocodiles is also not bad, I will add—I might have ended up playing it as an "upside-down" album if I'd had the vinyl, one of those albums I would play side 2 of before side 1 but would play both sides. But side 1 of Crocodiles is definitely more spotty (the hard-to-find "Going Up" is not bad but not great). For that matter, the bonus tracks on the 2003 CD have their points as well. About half are live, and a few are alternate versions in a munge of the two 1980 releases. What a mess these guys have made in a way, but I wouldn't be without "Rescue" and "Villiers Terrace."

"The Turkey Season" (1980)

It's hard to pinpoint what exactly makes this story by Alice Munro so affecting. It's a reminiscence by a grown woman remembering her first job when she was 14. The place is called Turkey Barn—the setting is the remote isolated village of Logan, Ontario, in the '40s. Much as it sounds, Turkey Barn raises, slaughters, and sells turkey meat. The unnamed narrator's job is "gutter," responsible for removing organs and inedibles from carcasses after the pluckers have removed the feathers. The story is set in December, the Turkey Barn's busiest time of year. The work is described in detail, and then all the people who work there. These people are mostly uneducated and lower-class, but they have interesting lives and are amazingly fully rounded for a short story—and there are so many of them, a crew of some six or eight. The narrator's fellow gutters, for example, are a pair of caustic middle-aged women who spend their time gossiping. "Marjorie and Lily talked about marriage," the narrator writes. "They did not have much good to say about it, in spite of their feeling that it was a state nobody should be allowed to stay out of." This feeling—more or less shared by all humanity—is the turning point of the story's plot, as one of the men working there is of marriageable age but single. In fact, he's almost certainly gay, from what we see. Even in 1980 no one talked about it directly much, certainly not in Logan in the ‘40s. The story seems disinclined to deal with it anyway, and in many ways that reticence is what makes the story so fascinating. In this way it expertly recreates the sensation of the world from a 14-year-old's vantage—sometimes treated as an adult with abundancies of personal disclosures, sometimes as a child, figuratively having doors shut in her face. From what we can make out, it's a remarkable situation. Herb, the eligible bachelor, one day shows up living with a much younger man, Brian, and a strange story why. Herb gets Brian a job at the Turkey Barn, but he is lazy and inept. He also seems to be one of those annoying people—again, the reticence expunges the exact details—who sexualizes everything in conversation ("that's what she said," etc.). Most of the people at the Turkey Barn loathe him, though the narrator is relatively OK with him. It sounds like she doesn't see the worst of his behavior, or understand why others find it offensive. It's just a very brief chapter in her life, essentially that one Christmas season, but it has stuck with her. And now it sticks with me.

In case it's not at the library.

Closer (1980)

I have a distinct memory of someone somewhere writing about Joy Division and, when it came to their second and last album, portentously remarking, "The only question now was, closer to what?" It's a good question, as the album came out after Ian Curtis's suicide and bore further alarming and eloquent evidence of his state of mind. In many ways the titles by themselves paint the picture (though all songs are jointly credited to Ian Curtis, Peter Hook, Stephen Morris, and Bernard Sumner): "Atrocity Exhibition" (the album opener, featuring a tractor and Curtis repeating, "This is the way, step inside"). Then "Isolation," "Passover"—really, I'm just giving you the album sequence here. "Colony" is fourth. In a word association game, at this point, I would be saying "Kafka." It goes on. The prevailing vanity—it's not just Curtis, everyone is pitching in to make this work—is of the meditated gaze into the abyss (or "The Eternal," second-last song). "Closer to what?" indeed. At the same time, ever since I read some other wag asking how to pronounce the title, my brain has consistently flipped to the version with the "z" sound, as in "the last part of a performance, collection, or series" (and not "a person who is skilled at bringing a business transaction to a satisfactory conclusion"). We can make some guesses about how far these folks would have gone with Curtis—and we can make some guesses about how far Curtis could have ever gone—but somehow the history of what actually happened is about as far as I can imagine it. This feels like a signoff, a denouement, a finale—a closer, even if it's really just the end of the overture. The music and songs are dramatic but not sentimental in the same way as Unknown Pleasures. And it's not surprising that a band identity this close to the void could end up with someone swallowed into it.

Here's another weird thing for me about this album. You might think I am overly interested in morbid things, and that the death of an artist would find me plunging into the catalog, but in fact I tend to go the other way. I might spend a few days listening to music or inevitably hearing it via media in the gyrations of the moment, but generally I put things away after the event for a long time, and don't always get back to them. So it went with Closer. I finally got a copy at some point but rarely listened. I never thought it was that good, too lackluster or mannered or something, but also I felt uncomfortable listening to it. This went on so long I finally decided I must just not like it as much as Unknown Pleasures. But going back one more time turned out to be the charm as the album has finally sparked up for me pretty good. Once again it's a stacked concept product. The band is steadily improving—that's heard better on the live shows included in the later editions. Producer Martin Hannett is at the helm again and gives it a similar claustrophobic from-the-bottom-of-a-well buff. The cover art lives just as squarely in the humanities vein. Where Unknown Pleasures had looked to science, a vast universe, and the Enlightenment with its graphic representation of a pulsar, Closer ushers us into an Italian tomb, suggesting medieval darkness, with a potent grace emerging from the composition of the photo and sculptures. One album is looking up at the night sky, the other is looking into the moldy earth. One album is black, the other is white. There are a lot of binaries here—and a lot of balance as well. The vision is consistent. So is the quality. Again, it may be hard to imagine listening to them habitually, but both Unknown Pleasures and Closer are great albums.

"Walking Out" (1980)

Read story by David Quammen online.

David Quammen's remarkable story is another fine entry in the man vs. nature type of adventure story. In fact, it reminds me of Jack London's "To Build a Fire" because it's a similar premise: a wintry scene in the woods threatens death if the protagonists aren't both smart and careful. Published much later in the century, Quammen's story also has a father-and-son element that is more typical of post-'60s generation gap dynamics. The main character is the 11-year-old boy David who is visiting his father in Montana. The parents are divorced, somewhat acrimoniously we understand from scattered clues, another familiar postwar element. The story is not attempting to invent anything new. It's just using what it has. So the father, who appears to have reinvented himself as a mountain man after the failed marriage, is pitifully needy for his son's approval, even as he overcompensates trying to impress him with his skills. For his part, the boy has little interest in being an outdoorsman. Off they go on a moose hunt, and it is isolated enough that they have to worry about things like bears and getting lost. On the last day of their brief foray into the woods, bad luck strikes. An unseasonal snowfall makes everything treacherous, and then some bad accidents happen. Now, severely injured and possibly bleeding out, they must get out of the woods and find help. Though the story goes to a basically unbelievable place in the end it is riveting all the way there. It's on the long side for a story, and it starts slow, but it holds interest first as a study of a father and son estranged against their will by circumstances, and then, once the snow falls, as a crackling adventure story. The language describing events as they happen is powerful and straightforward, but it's also good on what the boy is going through, and on what he sees his father going through. The point of view is the boy's, fading to omniscience for the details beyond his understanding. We are never inside the head of the father yet we come to know him well—even understanding him better than the boy, through his words and actions. The ending is a little overdetermined, and frankly hard to believe, with mishandled emphases. But you might disagree, and it hardly means getting there isn't worth the ride. This is a good one.

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

The Shining (1980)

UK / USA, 146 minutes
Director: Stanley Kubrick
Writers: Stephen King, Stanley Kubrick, Diane Johnson
Photography: John Alcott
Music: Krzysztof Penderecki, Bela Bartok, Wendy Carlos, Rachel Elkind
Editor: Ray Lovejoy
Cast: Jack Nicholson, Shelley Duvall, Scatman Crothers, Danny Lloyd, Barry Nelson, Philip Stone

Here's a platitude. Horror is a matter of personal taste—whether you like it, first, and then what works and doesn't. I like horror, but The Shining has never worked for me particularly. It's too long, too slow, too dependent on performances that are mannered or desperate, with a story full of ridiculous holes. Among other things, it is at war with its source novel. The images that jolted me are only good once (blood inexplicably pouring out of an elevator shaft) or derivative (the twin girls, too reminiscent of Diane Arbus, though underlining director and cowriter Stanley Kubrick's origins as a photographer). I've never been impressed with Jack Nicholson's cackling looney tunes turn here, even less with Kubrick's mistreatment of Shelley Duvall to provoke the raw (and, yes, convincing) anxiety that she brings.

Yet that said, those kinds of problems and many others are hallmarks of Kubrick's career, and in spite of them I keep returning to his movies. So I have kept returning to The Shining, hoping something I could hold on to would shake loose. I got an important clue from the strange and often annoying 2012 documentary, Room 237, which features interviews with people obsessed with The Shining and what they think it's "really"  and "obviously" about: the genocide of Native Americans, the Holocaust, an apologia by Kubrick for his part in the moon landing hoax, so on so forth. Out of this mess came my elusive moment of clarity, such as it was.

"Departures" (1980)

Story by John L'Heureux not available online.

John L'Heureux's story observes milestones in the life of a priest—at the ages of 25, 40, and 55. It dwells in a Catholic point of view and while it strays from that somewhat (it's a priest who is also a humanist) it never gets far from the church. It's square and regular in its construction, with symmetries and careful repetitions. At the same time it's a bit of an experimental work. We learn that the priest has taken his path not so much for religious reasons but more because the clerical life appeals to him, and the "chaos" of the world repulses him. Eventually he pursues a PhD in English. "That has stabilized him somehow, teaching English is more human than teaching theology." It's not God he is seeking in his isolation, it's humanity, which is ironic considering his choices to avoid the world. But that's also a dilemma I can appreciate. The three sections of the story are interwoven with certain points in common. He is always traveling on a train. He is always thinking about his life as a priest. His relationship with his mother always troubles him. The shadow of death is somehow never far. At 25, not yet ordained but already proudly wearing the collar, he is worried about the impression he makes on the world. He doesn't want to appear too affectionate in public, and his mother's feeling are hurt when he will only kiss her on the cheek when she meets him at the train station. The events of this scene actually occur twice: first as they happen, and then as the memories of a 40-year-old, with slightly different details, when he is visiting his dying mother. The strange repetition is one of the most striking points of this story, as if the priest is almost but not quite realizing that he is somehow stuck there, at the beginning of his life. Another common thread is a dream or vision he had as a young man, in which he is present at the Jesus crucifixion, and sees soldiers playing a game with dice. They offer him the dice, which he holds in his hand. At 55, he is returning home from "the wake of his last living relative." He thinks of where he is now in life. It is Easter weekend the priest is traveling, and on the Sunday he is in church performing rituals, "and for a second his mind veers to The Waste Land." I'm sure a lot of this goes right over my head in terms of the Catholic and/or literary themes, but I like the way it's put together.

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

Over and Thru the Night (1980-1987)

Steve Fisk is better known as a producer and foundational figure in the Pacific Northwest grunge moment. His credits include Nirvana, Soundgarden, the Screaming Trees, Low, the Wedding Present, Negativland, Boss Hog, and, more recently, Car Seat Headrest, among many others. By the evidence of this album, his own interests may lie more in the direction of ambient musique concrete, combining everything that is available to anyone to hear. Or, as he puts it, "Copyright infringement is still your best entertainment value. More noise please." As if to make the point, this compilation of fragments and long concatenations, released in 1993, casually usurps some of the most fiercely protected copyright golden calves in existence, namely the Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival (and the Dallas TV show too, though no sign of Led Zeppelin and probably too early to be tweaking Prince). In some ways it works like a comedy album, in that the spoken word fragments and their repetitions often dominate, and memorably so. "Can't somebody out there who knows the words to the song call in and tell 'em to us?" a radio announcer implores. "I don't deserve to live," says a Deputy Dawg voice in the short framing tracks at start and end, "I Wish I Were Dead," parts 1 and 2, which I kept hearing alternately as "I've lost the will to live." "Government Figures," a relative shorty at 1:36, features a voice that sounds like Lionel Barrymore running down statistics about life expectancies. I have grown to wait for a certain particularly satisfying vocal "but" on which the track turns. That's shorter stuff. Some of these tracks are very long too. Potentially they could have been broken up into constituent parts, but enough has grown on me with this album that I trust Fisk's sense for keeping some elements together and others separate. The longest track, "You Used Me," clocks in at nearly 13 minutes, defers in substantial passages to CCR's "Keep on Chooglin'," and right in the middle opens to a gray barrage of floating white noise, like an old-fashioned empty TV channel, that briefly somehow offers a kind of unmediated ecstasy, if you're in the right mood. (To get there, let me hasten to add, you may have to listen to it a few times. You know how I feel about that advice, but there it is.) Much of the found speech is from radio and TV, with potentially multiple sources in Dallas, which I don't know, but there are clues here. My favorite track, and the one by which I suspect you can judge whether or not this is for you (hey, it's even on Napster), is the six-minute "Lying in Texas," which comes late in the album and is likely from Dallas. A whirring buzz saw accompanies an unearthly conversation between a man and a woman about a deception, a hoax, played on the woman. The man participated in it but now he is coming clean with her. The woman can't believe what she is hearing and audibly starts to fall apart. The man is cool, cruel, deadly unimpassioned. Suddenly a long break, an open stop of several seconds which produces anxiety like tripping and almost falling. Then moody keyboard swirls play and now the voices run backwards, as if whipped in high winds. An ineffable sadness overwhelms it. The musical figure plays again, and again. J.R. Ewing's name clarifies, and repeats. The whole thing plays like '40s noir to me, with dark currents and mystery. I love it the most and the whole album is pretty good that way too.

Ghosts (1980)

Lately I haven't been having a lot of luck with the 87th Precinct series of police procedurals by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter, which wasn't his real name either). Here is yet another weak one. It's not even very interested in the crime in this case, let alone the police procedure for solving it. The main thing (after the usual unpleasant fixation on knives, which manifests as a description of all 19 wounds in a slashing and stabbing homicide) is the supernatural. The victim is the writer of a bestselling book about a haunted house in Massachusetts. I'm slow, so it took me awhile to notice the publication date and realize he must be riffing on Jay Anson and The Amityville Horror (the book which served as the pretext for the movie). That's McBain's other main interest here, horror writing and specifically the ghost story. Things happen that seem to be purely supernatural, including a medium with unexplainable powers. Interestingly (or not), she also looks exactly like Steve Carella's wife Teddy. And a Massachusetts winter storm strands Carella with her, as he is investigating a haunted house in a small town. Which also has some connection to Salem while we're at it. Oh it's piled on high here. And it's reasonably effective—weird, moody, vaguely unsettling maybe even. But what's this doing in the middle of my police procedural? It cheats in a really profound way on the whole premise of the series: rational investigation, scientific principles, all that. But what the hell, I suppose, why not? I remember saying something earlier about McBain's restless creativity. Still, it's annoying that the episode is equally as much about boy scout Steve Carella remaining true to his wife even in a situation where almost anyone could forgive him. The medium, recall, looks exactly like Teddy, which, as a plot point, only becomes more creepy the longer we have to live with it. What's more, this medium also has an identical twin sister who is a slut in all but name, so there you have it. Really, I'm not making this up. McBain did. Triple Teddy Strike Force. I guess it all comes with the territory, and to be fair, McBain has explored the bent toward horror elsewhere in the series (the "Nightshade" story in Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here), though never so shamelessly, wantonly indulging the supernatural. I can't really speak to his career as Evan Hunter or other pseudonyms, but I wouldn't be surprised to find he's written a horror novel or two. I would then bet you knives figure prominently. Well, nobody's perfect. But Ghosts is an underperformer in the series by most standards.

In case it's not at the library.