“The Uncharted Isle” (1930)

I thought this story by Clark Ashton Smith was pretty darn good—sometimes, in the wastelands of horror fiction, a good story gives me relief and gratitude. So imagine my surprise and chagrin to find it ranked 4 (below average) and 6 (slightly above average) on the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB), where, admittedly, the rankings are scanty. I overcompensated with a 9 (very good but not quite perfect), which should maybe be an 8 (good; recommended)—present standings with my vote: 6.33. But come on. Sure, there’s maybe not much original about the premise. A man, the first-person narrator, is lost at sea, adrift in a small boat after a terrible fire on his ship. He washes up on an island where nothing is right. He doesn’t recognize the vegetation. He doesn’t even recognize the stars at night. Things only get more weird from there. The obvious interpretation is that he is still on the boat at sea, dreaming, or perhaps raving mad. It doesn’t feel like a dream, however. I haven’t read enough Smith yet to know whether he’s even good at dreams, but I don’t think it’s what he’s trying for here. What makes the story work for me is how real it feels, in spite of its fantastic details. Indeed, the details are crazy good and unnerving. He spends a day or so recovering with fresh water, strange fruit, and rest, then explores the island interior. He discovers a community on the other side. He wanders in and finds people there of an unknown ethnicity. He is unable to communicate with them. He appears to be like a ghost, walking unseen among them. They are preoccupied with something that seems to be of great concern. “At first I couldn’t make out what they were doing, or trying to do; but plainly they were much in earnest about it. Some were looking at the sea or the sun, and then at long scrolls of a paper-like material which they held in their hands; and many were grouped on a stone platform around a large, intricate metal apparatus resembling an armillary.” The strong implication, as the story goes along, is that they too are in a wrong place, or something has gone wrong with what they know. The vegetation and the sky may not be theirs either. It feels like interdimensional membranes have grown thin, or something equally out of Algernon Blackwood. It’s a very simple story—in then out of whatever this reality is. What makes it work is that this “other” place is so well and fully imagined. The details are precise and weird, even if the ostensible explanation—it was all the dream of a man adrift at sea for “days and days”—is lame. You come away feeling it could not possibly be just a dream.

Clark Ashton Smith, The Dark Eidolon and Other Fantasies
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Anthology of American Folk Music (1952)

I grew up with my head in top 40 radio from the age of 10 and some sort of innate resistance to most folk music. I associated it with church youth groups or something. Glenn Yarbrough’s “Baby the Rain Must Fall” was more my style, thanks to that same top 40 radio (and Shindig). I never much liked singing “This Land Is Your Land” in grade school exercises (whereas now I’ll join any random singalong I encounter). I hated We Five with a deadly passion (whereas now I have come to love their hit “You Were on My Mind”). I had little use for the Kingston Trio or Burl Ives, and “Puff the Magic Dragon” was only a guilty pleasure by the time I reached junior high. I could go on. I was still having problems in the ‘60s and ‘70s with a lot of the Laurel Canyon stuff. These are my excuses for missing one of the most influential releases of the 20th century, by reputation a treasure house for anyone associated in any way with “folk” music, including Canned Heat, Bob Dylan, the Holy Modal Rounders, Steve Martin, and Pete Seeger, to briefly sketch parameters (and noting the possible exception of Paul Simon). I’m not sure I even knew the Anthology of American Folk Music existed until the 1997 CD reissue and Greil Marcus’s fierce beating of the drum for it.

In a way anthologist Harry Smith—a record collector among many other things—invented the mixtape with the Anthology. All 84 songs are commercial releases from 1926 to 1933, professional studio not field recordings. They come from Smith’s massive collection, and you get a sense of how important the sequencing is just by scanning the track listings. The Anthology has both broad themes—“Ballads,” “Social Music,” and “Songs” (whatever exactly they mean)—and obvious fine tuning within and across them. Several artists appear more than once, sometimes by pairs of songs together but more often scattered across the vast field of this sprawling set. Smith seems to be following the rules and aesthetics of the old mixtapers, thinking about the organization and sequencing and even cover art and liner notes at least as much as the music itself. It’s largely a lost art now, a neglected consideration. Burning to CDs and building and sharing playlists from streaming services offer some close approximation, of course—but choosing to listen on shuffle (as I typically do with playlists these days, and no one is burning me CDs anymore) undermines the main points of sequencing.

At the same time, the Anthology is just so big I have had a hard time for years getting my arms around it. I enjoy it when it happens to be on, usually at someone else’s place, but I rarely play it for myself, instantly flummoxed by my lack of a context for the whole thing or how it works together. Hailing it as the “old, weird America” is not enough help for me. There’s lots more where this came from that’s available now on streaming services, yet something unusual and distinct remains about the Anthology. What is it? I decided to rely on the convenience of the CD package and treat it as six separate albums in the way I approached listening to it. There’s a high degree of consistency across the whole thing (I understand some feel the “Social Music” sets are not up to the rest but that’s not entirely my experience). I should note upfront that I still don’t have my arms around it—I may never—but here are some thoughts on the songs and individual CDs.

“A Place to Stay” (1998)

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

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

Arthur Smith, “Guitar Boogie” (1945)

[listen up!]

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

Elliott Smith and the Big Nothing (2004)

As much for the opportunity to acquaint myself anew with the music of Elliott Smith, I really enjoyed reading Benjamin Nugent's early biography. I don't know any other Smith bios besides the recent documentary, so I know only vaguely whether or how much some of the principals in the story may have opened up by now. Insights or comment from his family are notably absent here, and many of his girlfriends and other key figures are also missing in action. But Nugent steps away from the problem by focusing on Smith's work and development as an artist. Nugent does not shy away from what he knows of the problems—drugs, obviously, and Smith's speculations that he may have been abused as a child, which together with other factors produced a personality that tended toward isolation. As usual in these things, the greatest obvious weakness is also the greatest obvious strength—all artists require a degree of isolation. Nugent again is very good at keeping the focus on the work. He talked to many of the people who worked with Smith in the studio, and there are wonderful revelations about Smith's sources and influences. Very high at the top were the Beatles, a fact that surprised me and then didn't. Even more interesting to find out how constructed his sound was—again, it seems obvious in hindsight, but something about Smith's music projects so directly that I'd never thought about how mediated it is. The very distinctness of his sound—based in many ways on a strategy of double-tracking both the vocals and guitar—should have been my first clue. There's more lyrical analysis here, which is all good though it reminded me, by how unfamiliar these snatches could be, how little Smith's lyrics have ever mattered to me. His music is almost purely a matter of mood, a hazy counterpane for the chills, psychic and otherwise. Instead of the Beatles (and then Kinks), I realized I had long assumed his '60s guide star was Simon and Garfunkel—more fool me, perhaps. But Simon and Garfunkel were equally masters of similar moods (and better than I had remembered or expected when I came to revisit them a few years ago)—equally literate, reasonably privileged, and capable of writing about life's underbellies in detailed ways. Smith's story remains a sad one, but his music is no less stirring and brave. Nugent's book is a nice version of his life.

In case it's not at the library.

XO (1998)

I saw Elliott Smith in 2000, and I enjoyed the show, just like I enjoy all his albums, but it didn't help me get a bead on him any better. I'm often impressed with his material; I'm often impressed with this album and with all his albums. I can distinguish this one because I can distinguish the song "Baby Britain," which I would have to call my favorite by him, although I'm not entirely sure it's in character. I'm not sure what's in character for Elliott Smith in the first place, which is the problem I'm trying to talk about. On the other hand, it's always such a lovely mood, and there is a lot to be said for that, at least in his case. This may be why I tend to prefer him by the albumful, by a dozen songs or more at a time—a groove of them, if you will. They blend with one another into the finest tapestries, touching and developing musical themes, more so as one comes to know them. But there's something vague about it too, I know. I'm still not sure exactly what the difference is between "Waltz #2 (XO)," the other single from the album with "Baby Britain," and "Waltz #1," because I just haven't taken the time to listen to them side by side (the album sequencing puts "#2" at #3 and "#1" at #8, someone else can make sense of this) to compare. I think I hear the Pacific Northwesterner in him in the wide-open eclecticism delivered with an American accent, but there are all kind of influences lurking in here like beasts of the sea—Nick Drake, Byrds, Merseybeat, to name three obvious ones. It's cozy wintertime coffeehouse music, something to play while reading Signet Classic paperbacks or for in the darkroom. It's sad and human, warm and engaging, but at the same time a little cold and clinical too, which I take mostly as artifact of an introverted personality attempting to get over, on which terms I identify. I really like this—I had better state that clearly because I think I might be making a muddle of this. It's comfortable and comforting, and if it isn't exactly memorable, in terms of causing one to carry the songs around in one's head, it is instantly and easily found residing in memory, calling up old feelings and creating new ones, elusive as fog while it plays, somehow making more sense in the times heard between, confirmed by playing again, when the familiarity and the nice comforting feel of it take hold again, deepened and refined. Nice to hear a lot of at a time.

A Simple Plan (1993)

I came to this for a few reasons, starting with being so impressed when I took another look at the Sam Raimi movie based on it (whose screenplay Scott Smith wrote). It also won some accolades from Stephen King, and then, going through Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, I realized how similar their premises were. It's not such an unusual premise in this day and age, I suppose. Even so, when I got to a scene where the principal here, Hank Mitchell, was flipping a coin in order to make one of his many heinous decisions the parallels cut pretty close to comfort. McCarthy's the better writer, of course, with more gravitas, and he's also better able to expand the story to bigger themes. Smith's novel gets pretty loopy pretty fast—I'm of the school (if such a school exists) that he did a better job of the second pass, with the screenplay. Still, as the King imprimatur would indicate, it operates successfully as some species of very nearly straight-up horror. Mitchell, as the first-person narrator, makes for an intriguing monster—rationalizing, self-pitying, with his feet on the ground. Jim Thompson territory, maybe even, particularly when he gets to the actual killing. In the end I had Mitchell pegged as all but remorseless serial killer, but Smith doesn't go there in his coda, which is just as well. That would be unbelievable, and there's a good case to be made anyway that Mitchell is just plunged into an extreme version of the psychological state of insensibility known in poker as "pot-committed." The baby Amanda was a nice touch—the baby who soaked up all the bad vibes, and becomes an unpleasant element in her own right, with a pathetic fate to match. Hank's brother Jacob, played by Billy Bob Thornton in the movie, works better in the book's version as an obese and forever-consuming sad sack (although Thornton creates a different, equally memorable character with one of his best performances). Smith also works the money aspect well. Four million dollars is a lot of money, and in the end I had nearly as hard a time as any character here letting go of it. Couldn't you try this? Couldn't you try that? I also happened to be convinced when they first found it that they should turn it in and walk away from it, and not just because I'd seen the movie twice. But once the rationalizing and especially the bad deeds were underway, I was pretty much right in there with them every step of the way. Interesting how effective it is that way.

In case it's not at the library.

White Teeth (2000)

Ho-hum, another day, another prodigy. Published when Zadie Smith was just 24, this ambitious, juicy, sweeping novel takes on globalism and post-racialism at its most mundane (and therefore its most profound) levels, the levels at which we live with it every day. A comedy acting occasionally as if it thinks it's a tragedy, it tells the story of the friendship between two middle-aged World War II buddies living in London as the 20th century nears its end—Archie Jones, a British national whose first wife is Italian and second wife a Jamaican Jehovah's Witness decades younger than him (and it's real love this time) and Samad Iqbal, a stubbornly proud Bangladeshi who clings to the traditions he knows, for the sake of his twin sons and their heritage and his own sense of identity, even as he watches those traditions rapidly disappearing in a grotesque world. Along the way these two families become enmeshed with another family of British nationals, the Chalfens. Marcus Chalfen is a brilliant Jewish scientist specializing in genetics (he is working with the DNA of mice on a "FutureMouse," to which various fundamentalists inhabiting this story have grave objections) and his wife Joyce is a lapsed Catholic hippie chick. Even as the various stereotypes embraced by this vastly multi-hued cast stand up and represent, the tangled interconnections and alliances and surprising commonalities between the various figures not only continually bleed the lines separating them but enable them—and here's the real miracle of the thing—to do so as fully formed, individual, and unique human beings, with back stories and private griefs and joys and engaging quirks that distinguish them and make them practically, as the usual cliché for this moment would have it, step off the page. After all the bluster and howling we see reported every day by 24-hour news outlets, there's a firm sense here that this is what immigration actually looks like. Laid across the scope of this novel are Bible-thumpers, apocalyptic rumblings, gangsters, rap music, marijuana, and a whole lot more, even Nazis. Is it a little bit busy? Yes, as hell. Does it work? Not always. At points it feels labored, even mechanical. Watch closely and you'll see that even a kitchen sink is involved in the action. Is it nevertheless brash and thrilling? Yes, entirely, an auspicious kickoff to the 21st century that I suspect people will still be reading even as it turns into the 22nd century (if indeed, obligatory sour note, we actually manage to make it there).

In case it's not at the library.

Back at the Chicken Shack (1960)

Admittedly, most of the stuff I post here I am long familiar with, and it is old. This is a slightly different case—old, but relatively new to me. In fact, there are large swaths of jazz unknown to me. This, from Blue Note, with Smith playing Hammond B-3 organ, Kenny Burrell guitar, and Stanley Turrentine tenor sax, is a whole new kind of all-day jazz to me—the kind that doesn't focus practically exclusively on saxophone and/or Miles Davis. It's a pure delight, warm and deceptively laidback and full of nice moments and little surprises. As for once again offering old music, I can only repeat a version of what Bob Dylan said once on his radio show. I don't have anything against new music, but there's a lot more old music than new. P.S. I want that dog on the cover.