Hyperkinetically bonkers. Time paradoxes, ancient Egyptian sorcery, a plot to own the world, cavorting sentient flames, rampant hair growth, period muHyperkinetically bonkers. Time paradoxes, ancient Egyptian sorcery, a plot to own the world, cavorting sentient flames, rampant hair growth, period murderers, London underbellies, migrating souls, double-identities, doppelgangers, surgical excesses, and ... laudanum-soaked 19th-century romantic poetry. Yes, this is a book about literature and don't you forget it. Even if the breathless chase sequences and non-stop action might make it easy to. Perhaps the rollercoaster plotting, the endless implausible chance configurations this necessitates, the sheer scope of story crammed in, the inevitable plot holes, perhaps it's all just much too much. But then it'll pause on a dime to be sidetracked by some historical note on Coleridge or Byron and there's an odd charm to it nonetheless. And for all the it's never long before the gears of plot churn up a set piece so rivetingly odd and original that I can't help but be impressed.
And where's this particular understanding of magic and its elemental and lunar idiosyncrasies coming from? It's not one I've run into before, but then I'm not much of a fantasy reader. Great heroine, too, despite the period trappings; I wish she got more page time. What a marvelously ridiculous ride. Many thanks to someone so erudite as Mark Fisher for giving this a section in The Weird and the Eerie, which I read meer days before spotting this in an overstocked book barn in my old home town while on holiday....more
A later re-riff on the thematics of High Rise, or, equally, Cronenberg's They Came From Within, this finds that the more exclusive and luxurious your A later re-riff on the thematics of High Rise, or, equally, Cronenberg's They Came From Within, this finds that the more exclusive and luxurious your gated community, the more horrifying the malaise you've trapped within it. A story of non-detection, you'll guess the crux of it from the first pages (or back blurb), but Ballard is less interested in mystery or intrigue than in the crumbling workings of post-war western civilization, and that's all the more transparent here. Fortunately, it's kept so quick and punchy that you don't really need mystery or intrigue to pull you through. Slight but quintessential....more
In the wake of sudden and resounding success of The Lover, Duras second-guesses her own telling, coming atThis is a book. This is a film. This is night.
In the wake of sudden and resounding success of The Lover, Duras second-guesses her own telling, coming at it again with an odd darting between distancing of narrative apparatuses -- is she telling a story or planning out its adaptation? -- and a confessional immediacy, disclosing much more of her family and context. But by this point, all Duras' experience and words, and even films, are part of a single body of work. There's no clear novelization or confession here, it's just her own self-distillation beyond fact of fiction. As such there's nothing unnecessary in this doubling of The Lover, even if it may not necessarily be truer or more essential (despite a few telling details withheld til this point). Probably most interesting at most aware of its impending conversion to film, and in its portrait of Duras mother and the dynamics of her by-this-point "ruined" family. But each work, even or especially those that revisit or recompose, adds another piece to Duras' life of literature....more
Since I read Adler's first novel Speedboat, liked it well enough without loving it, and picked this then-forsaken first edition up from the dollar binSince I read Adler's first novel Speedboat, liked it well enough without loving it, and picked this then-forsaken first edition up from the dollar bin at the Strand, a decade has passed during which the NYRB reissued both novels and, I'm happy to see, launched Adler back into the literary eye. To the point where, now that I've finally read this, you probably hardly need me to say how absolutely fantastic (and much more finely-tuned than Speedboat) this is.
Like the prior work, Adler puts her experience as a journalist to use in the composition of a novel from infinite interlocking vignettes, simultaneously disparate and complementary. Here, somehow the technique -- this vaguely autobiographical essay in parts (despite the recurring denial: "Whose voice is this? Not here. Not mine.") interwoven with the narrative of a decaying relationship, suggested in just enough minimal depth to give warmth to the rest -- here the construction somehow leaps from intellectual exercise to page-turner. The midsection, a highly paranoid and vaguely xenophobic trip to Ireland, was absolutely gripping despite my increasing break with the narrator (an obvious authorial stand-in? Not here, not I!) over it. There's something deft and (self?) satirizing in how the short actions, interwoven as always with fascinating digression, rope the reader forward, even if authorial complicity with the narrator's petty paranoia seems to be the only thing holding it together. Why does it work? It works. Perhaps because the construction, throughout, is of the utmost elegance. Speedboat to the nth. Sentence to sentence, passage to passage, section to section. I should have read this ten years ago, but then, I suppose, I'd have been denied the pleasure of this new Adler novel to encounter for the first time just now....more
After the opening sections of autobiographical vignettes, crisp but inessential, I was ready to file this odd, somewhat heterogenous set of very shortAfter the opening sections of autobiographical vignettes, crisp but inessential, I was ready to file this odd, somewhat heterogenous set of very short pieces away as minor Atwood. But then we reach the the conceptual heart of the book, six still short but impressively loaded essay-stories mixing feminist satire and postmodern meta reflections that at points approaching something like (to pull from much later writers) the surrealist focus of Ben Marcus' "Food Costumes of Montana" as repurposed for Joanna Walsh's essay-fictive purposes. I'm thinking especially of "Simmering" an incisive future history of how the kitchen became the domain of male work, and women shunted to the cultural margins of work outside the home, with the sensual pleasures of cooking and eating deemed unladylike. There's not much else like this -- a rich satire of the arbitrary gendering of labor and how value and cultural prescriptions are assigned based on just these arbitrary codes condensed into a few brilliant pages. This is followed by "Women's Novels", a consideration of gendered genre conceits too playful to be an essay, and "Happy Endings", a micro-encyclopedic dissection of fictional relationships. Finally, a scintillating consideration of the (infinite, hazardous) field of all literary construction, "The Page." By the time we reach the closing sequence of prose poems, the blood races with a sense of sheer possibility that they can't possibly fulfill, they become a mere coda. But for those central speculative essay-fictions, this is elevated directly from the minor and forgettable to something that absolutely must be kept close at hand.
(don't be mislead by the rating, it's really: section 1: ** section 2: **1/2 section 3: ****1/2 section 4: ***) ...more
A rare novel in bibliography of poet Rosmarie Waldrop, who has published a long series of collections and began the stellar Burning Deck Press, in ProA rare novel in bibliography of poet Rosmarie Waldrop, who has published a long series of collections and began the stellar Burning Deck Press, in Providence. Before that, she began her life in interwar German, an experience channeled here in this story of a daughter, writing to an older sister, as she attempts to unravel the mystery of her parents' relationship, and the parallel rise of Naziism, which they may have been complicit in, not through any deeply-held belief so much as in a passive acceptance of the toxic currents of their time. This has a poet's care for the construction of language, but not the lyricism. There's a pared down sense of attempted utility, even as the ideas that make up these sentences wind and digress until utility is all but lost. These are the troubles of reconstruction -- our narrator, and Rosmarie herself were too young to observe these events with any perspective. The approach must be made instead through hypotheticals and the process of writing. At times, it's an infuriatingly imprecise technique for a time that calls for clarity, but such clarity may come from aspiration at the expense of fidelity. The characters at the heart of this remain incomplete and incompletely understood, reduced to gestures like Pippin's Daughter, who in town legend performed a single act, without even her own name: the release of a square of cloth that initiated a settlement. History, personal and national, retroactively reconstructed, may be but a series of such reductions....more
I once did the majority of my reading on public transit. This system became shaky in early 2020 because I did not have a job to commute to, and becausI once did the majority of my reading on public transit. This system became shaky in early 2020 because I did not have a job to commute to, and because I was biking nearly everywhere to save money. Then Covid hit, and at once I was biking absolutely everywhere, if I was traveling anywhere outside the apartment at all. You might imagine the quarantine an ideal time for reading, but I did none. I was without clear prospects and furiously attempting to create some. By September, I'd made my way into graduate school and at once all reading was class reading, usually essays and excerpts rather than entire books. Months passed. I was not on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. How I've missed you all.
Then, this month, Covid revealed a possibility. I've been working twelve hours shifts at a vaccination site, in a fairly stop/start pattern of activity. Suddenly, I'm presented with an unexpected wealth of interstitial reading time. I'm back.
Hi everyone. I'm back. At least until next semester.
So, snatching up books from the unread heaps circa late 2019, here's Carole Maso's debut. Others have found in it an unevenness befitting a first novel from a brilliant writer, but I thought it elegantly composed throughout. Only DeLillo has this capacity for precise rhythm at every scale -- by word, by sentence, by paragraph, by section -- all with a fine sense of intercutting of a kind rarely experienced outside film. Yes, yes, the imperfections may be there if you seek them, but I see in first novels, often, a breathless unrestrainedness, a seeking to get it all down, all of it, spanning world and experience, lest one never have chance to write again. This could be uneveness, I suppose, but it feels more like kinetic ambition. There are scenes here that surge free from the page and envelope the reader in a swirling gust of snow. If there's a issue it's that she's actually written two novels here that are only nearly the same book, one a familial drama about hereditary genius/madness and the other a tapestry of America in all its traumatic marring of the physical and cultural landscape of the pre-Colombian continent, from historical genocide to the scarring runnels of capital that persist or are scored anew in the present.
But first novel ambition sometimes goes unsurpassed. How lucky we are that Maso only refined from here and later managed a novel as furiously perfect as Defiance....more
Joy Williams, better than anyone else, is capable of finely capturing the complex and arbitrary, if largely mundane, situations life works itself intoJoy Williams, better than anyone else, is capable of finely capturing the complex and arbitrary, if largely mundane, situations life works itself into. Her manner is precise and unforced, her ear highly refined. Not much needs to happen in most of these, Williams just circulates around a few characters, their surroundings, the people who may appear around them, and perfectly articulates through a thousand incidental and semi-random instants, the feelings of loss and limbo that lurk at the peripheries of every experience. And then there are the stories where she does all of this and also manages to instigate a plot, not needed by her pure craft, but adding that extra layer of momentum. This is a bleakly perfect collection of incidents and intimations....more
Assorted odd characters encounter the arbitrary and inexplicable in a fringe area? Yep, that sounds like the Can Xue I remember from Frontier, a book Assorted odd characters encounter the arbitrary and inexplicable in a fringe area? Yep, that sounds like the Can Xue I remember from Frontier, a book which seemed to fall through my grasp like sand while I was reading it, yet gives me a warm feeling in recall.
I find I'm ready to return to Xue's singular world, even if this part of her world is a excremental mire of total decay unrivaled in modern fiction outside David Ohle's The Pisstown Chaos. Particularly in the longer first novella here, Yellow Mud Street, which details the life of a neighborhood in the process of subsiding into an open sewer in a fever of maggots and tumorous growth. Everything is compromised, but life stumbles on, amidst a chatter of officialese, direct quotations from the Cultural Revolution, and thin attempts to improve the situation that suggest subversive intent. According to the introduction, Xue managed to be the most fringe Chinese author of the 80s to continuously get her work into print, perhaps because her almost non-narrative patchwork of bizarre images and incidents completely confounded the censors....more
For all the increasingly high concepts in play here, the mostly liminal characters' personal arcs, histories, and hidden depths really holds it all toFor all the increasingly high concepts in play here, the mostly liminal characters' personal arcs, histories, and hidden depths really holds it all together when abstraction threatens. Not that the strangeness and ambiguity over the overarching plot is threatening, it's actually fascinating, but it's allowed to be more so when grounded by the humans (and a few oddly memorable AIs) involved....more
A gem of aboriginal Australia from the 50Watts collections. Colonial devastation mixes with the mythic hope that existence is not confined to the opprA gem of aboriginal Australia from the 50Watts collections. Colonial devastation mixes with the mythic hope that existence is not confined to the oppressor's reality. Elegant and convincing, even when reincarnated narratorial viewpoints jump to dogs, dingos, cockatiels. Occasionally this openness towards interpretation of reality can drift out into the truly unexpected with an off-handed experimentation that makes these much more than their folkloric appearance.
Blurbed by no less than Amiri Baraka, how has this become so unread and unremembered as to have no reviews here?
(And the answer, from Sean, turns out to be that behind the pseudonoym B. Wongar was no actual aboriginal writer but a Serbian-Australian transplant. He remains a strong anti-colonial advocate, needed in Australia from any viewpoint, but it's too bad that he had to obscure his identity and so muddle the conversation around that message to get it out.)...more
Maybe it was nothing more than my need to free myself, to free myself at last from literature through literature. To simply attain the writing.
Despite this perfection of herself, she notes, in refuting the possibility she should ever be granted a Nobel prize, that she has not lived what might be deemed a correct literary establishment life.
I fought in the French resistance, I belonged to the Communist party, I've done things like that all my life. I've been arrested by the police, I've been accused of conspiring against the State, I've been an alcoholic, who knows how many more things like that.
Seeing the holism of her work, and her vast output in film and print, it's hard to imagine having had time to consider anything else, but of course her experiences give teeth to her words....more
Classic Lower East Side no-wave / art / lit time capsule, found at a zine shop in Philadelphia. With over 60 short prose pieces, mostly by seeming mysClassic Lower East Side no-wave / art / lit time capsule, found at a zine shop in Philadelphia. With over 60 short prose pieces, mostly by seeming mysterious unknowns who turn out on closer investigation to be familiar through their other contributions to the era, this seems worth some deep cataloguing and further investigation. (Note: still annotating. This is only about 1/3 of this.)
Kathy Acker - My Death :: Sets the tone well with a familiar bit that became her Pasolini-solves-his-own-murder novel, I believe. More narrative than most, despite the jarring signature cut-up.
Constance Ash - Ring Around the Moon :: A medieval legend bleakly blurring death and desire. She went on to write a series of "jarringly brutal" equestrian fantasy novels (I can see it given the harsh fairy-tale feel here) that one of the very few GR reviews calls "interesting enough to get me to stop netflix binge watching and actually read some everyday."
Josh Baer - Hurry up and die :: A miserable marathon in reverse. I suspect it's Josh Baer, based on period art/music ties (involved in White Columns, put out the first Sonic Youth records).
Barbara Barg - Jihad :: Dense fascinating, formally fluid collage text that I'd have to re-read to really comment on. Barg is a good prototype for the sort of writers I'm finding in here: of course an experimental poet mainly, but also tied to the lower east side art scene (1984 chapbook with Nan Goldin), music scene (all-poet rock band Homer Erotic, which I may be making this up, but I think Eileen Myles was involved in at some point as well), and semiotext(e), who published a collection of her work in 1994.
Judith Barry - (Vamp r y . . .) :: repurposed pulp vignette precursor to all those east village diy vampire films of the 90s perhaps. "from a videotape in progress." Judith Barry's a pretty noted artist, interesting to see her here in purely text form.
Nan Becker - The Only Difference Between a Bayonet and a Hunting Knife Is What You Stick It in :: Chimpanzee behavior narrative as universal. Worth looking into further, but she's hard to find. She was in a on eugenics and forced sterilization. Her first publication on GR is a 2011 book of poetry if I can even be sure it's the same Nan Becker after that gap of years.
Eric Bogosian - Notes for a Play (The New World) :: An unsurprising inclusion given that I most recently encountered him as screenwriter for nocturnal lower east side portmanteau film Arena Brains. I don't actually care for the ply fragment here so much, but it was produced in 1981.
Glen Branca - Running Through the World Like an Open Razor :: A kinetic essay on overriding human needs/desires. Great no wave guitarist/composer Branca was co-editor of this volume of Just Another Asshole, along with founder Barbara Ess, making some of the music connections make sense.
Brian Buczak - He Who Loves the More Is the Inferior and Must Suffer :: Bluntly interwoven sex vignettes, by a painter whose life was cut short by AIDS in 1987. Philip Glass wrote a quartet to commemorate him.
Mitch Corber - Rickets :: Total noise, maybe to be read aloud for max weirdness, or screamed over a mass of feedback. His poetry has zero attention here on GR, but he's remembered for his , and he made a strange .
Peter Cummings - City Gates of Sand and Glass :: A love story between a women and a building. I suspect this is his work, not all those thriller novels from Peter Cummings, MD. Copies are pricey though.
Margaret De Wys - The Fluted Cup :: a perplexing prose-poetic text in four parts. DeWys is primarily a sound artist and composer, but after diagnosis with breast cancer in 1999 , an experience which she's now written two books about.
Barbara Ess - This Is It? :: This swirling memoir is the work of the primary instigator of this collection, part of a series running 1978 - 1987. Though Ess, , co-edited this volume, as well as 5 (an LP compilation) and 7 (a photography book with accompanying essays), with Branca, 1 & 2 were zines she edited alone, and 3 and 4 were co-edited with J.M. Sherry and seem to have focused on visual arts (and 4 included in ArtForum). Ess was also in NYC no wave band , so the art-music crossover thoughout this collection is far from incidental.
Richard Fantina - Andrea Feldman: A Remembrance :: A somewhat self-indulgent memoir of the author's relationship with the Factory-associated actress who appeared in Trash and Heat, but it's a good snapshot of that scene and world. Fantina has also written about writers and writing (Hemingway, non-normative heterosexuality in literature, and Victorian genre fictions) as well as (no-wave link!) liners for a live album recored by at Danceteria.
Matthew Geller - Windfalls :: Dialogue excerpts from another video work. Feels like a collage of many intercut monologues and conversations, perhaps (given the title) some incidentally acquired. I doubt any of the Matthew Gellers haunting GR are him, but he's currently engaged in land art-style outdoor sculptural installations:
Michael Gira - Some Weaknesses :: Harsh vignettes of feverish sexualities and violent impulses, often colliding. The no wave connection in full effect here -- the eviscerating first Swans record, Filth, came out the same year. These text works later became part of Gira's 1995 The Consumer, in a section titled "Various Traps, Some Weaknesses, Etc".
Jack Goldstein :: A set of epigrams and aphorisms for art and aesthetics. Spontaneity is a metaphor for risk. Dangerous objects are glamorous places to be. Art should be a trailer for the future. Goldstein was film/video/performance artist who turned to painting in the 80s. Some other Jack Goldstein is responsible for the vomit of pop culture "amazing facts" books on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ (101 Amazing One Direction Facts, 101 Amazing Harry Potter Facts, 101 Amazing Slenderman Facts, etc) whereas I could have read another 101 aphorisms on art and aesthetics.
Dan Graham - Rock Religion :: A dense collage essay on the historical ties between religion, trance, music, and sex from the ecstatic repetitions of Quaker ritual right up into the rock present of the 70s/80s. Packs a lot of densely interconnected ideas into a short span. Graham was mainly an , responsible for showcasing early work by Sol LeWitt, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson among others, but also one of the first in the art world to embrace punk and no-wave. Several collections of his essays and writings would seem to hinge on this piece.
Rudolph Grey - "The Box" from "Like Mice" (1972), A Screenplay :: an absurd horror vignette in many quick shots and stage directions. Oddly nothing of Grey's films seems forthcoming -- was this ever made? Instead, his contribution to film history is Nightmare of Ecstasy: The Life and Art of Edward D. Wood which became the Burton film, and his contribution to music is in his participation in foundational Eno-recorded no wave band Mars and various other noise/jazz guitar.
Sue Hanel - The Ideal Hour :: A slew of violence and nightmarish dream-logic continuity, but unusually coherent-feeling for this sort of loosely-narrative sequence of striking poetic imagery. I instantly thought: here's someone who definitely has published a completely killer novel or collection. But no! Turn out that almost nothing is known about Sue Hanel, besides that she was the original guitarist for Swans before their first recordings, "the most ferocious noise guitarist in the city", and after a scattering of other projects through the 80s seems to have descended into drugs, living in an furnitureless lower east side apartment, then disappeared entirely. or if if Sue Hanel was even her real name.
Lindsay Amoss (curated by Steven Harvey) - Nevertheless Later :: a film-vignette of a man rock-climbing up the vertical streets of the city. Absolutely nothing of seeming relevance on either of the people involved in this.
Jenny Holzer - Survival Series :: WITH ALL THE HOLES IN YOU ALREADY THERE'S NO REASON TO DEFINE THE OUTSIDE ENVIRONMENT AS ALIEN. A thematic set of statements, Holzer doing what she does so well. A well-placed text bleed from the art world.
Barbara Kruger - Utopia: the Promise of Fashion when Time Stands Still :: An allegory and its assessment. for her collages of black and white image with red and white text, often with a feminist angle.
Peggy Katz - Cows :: A house, a bomb, a cow. Collage text mixing dairy and meat industry stats, the arms race, and Grandma Moses. An artist? Not a lot to find on her, besides in Bomb Magazine.
...jumping ahead 20 entries or so...
Cookie Mueller - Route 95 South 1969 :: If it were a film, it would be perfect for my list. Baltimorean Cookie Mueller was in most of John Waters' films up through Desperate Living or so and writes here about hitchhiking to Florida with a crappy boyfriend with a suitably Waters camp-grime (though I've not read his own hitchhiking book). Anyway, I want to read the collection of her writing that semiotext(e) put out just after her 1989 death. Another tragic AIDS casualty of the decade.
Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won't have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free.
...So this is fascinating to me, but is going to take forever to fully inventory. Expect more entires to trickle in as I have time here and there to research them....more
A paranoid schizophrenic far-right religious fanatic begins receiving messages from god to kill a popular stage magician whose teachings form a disrupA paranoid schizophrenic far-right religious fanatic begins receiving messages from god to kill a popular stage magician whose teachings form a disruption to various staid conservative American values. He also begins receiving noise signals (sex scenes, occult images, philosophical precepts, bits of memory) all of which appear elsewhere in the book, happening to other characters. Fortunately (?) he's able to sift through the chaos, which he classifies as confusion tactics by the devil, to isolate the real message, from god, that he commit murder. And unfortunately, he does. How does he know which message was the "true" message amidst the mess of information he's receiving? Clearly he doesn't, since everything he sees is part of the book's narrative reality EXCEPT the bit he chooses as the one real message in the mess of inputs (all of which, since he is hearing voices in classic paranoid schizophrenic mode, originate in fact in his own brain). From this, he chooses to believe the one bit of information that conforms to his preexisting biases / world view. This is essentially a parable of how we all comprehend reality, thus it's a crux of the novel. We don't perceive reality, no one can perceive that. We perceive our own perceptions, which exist in our own minds, not in the external world. We all have to sift through the (often contradictory) contents of our thoughts to create our own "reality tunnel", Wilson's representation of the narrow path of comprehension that any one perspective is inherently restricted to. Put simply: each of us constructs all of reality from the information existing in our own brains. This would be solipsism, but I don't think Wilson would say we're actually so isolated. We exist amongst other subjective reality tunnels, all different, amongst other lives, and with an open mind / empathy we can reroute our reality tunnels at will. Maybe it's only when we don't that we end up letting our own reflected thoughts tell us to kill a stranger.
This is one understanding of The Trick Top Hat, one very specific reality tunnel I selected through careful filtering of the perceptions/reflections generated during my reading of it. Perhaps because it conforms to certain inclinations I already possess. Wilson never says all of this, exactly, and he also says a lot of pure nonsense. Sophomoric gags, Pynchonesque conspiracies, postmodern authorial confusion, male gaze erotic fantasies, Valis-like spiritual confusion. Noise noise NOISE pulverized into little bite sized intercuts of received information. It's an invitation to sift one's philosophical reality from the dross. In an interview with Robert Anton Wilson jammed somewhere into the middle, he comments on how his prior Illuminatus Trilogy constructed its world then discredited it, leaving the literal reader to dismiss anything he'd said, and the astute reader to create meaning from selective understanding of what is true and what is false. This, supposedly, is how secret societies function: revealing and debunking themselves so that all the information is there, but none of it looks true. This novel feels like a more complicated and ambivalent version of that process.
Why, for instance, is the whole middle-part essentially porn? Not in any prudish sense of obscene content -- sex is sex, it's fine -- but in the formal sense of the sex scenes (an orgy, a few trysts, an orgasm research lab, various isolated moments of repression coming undone) largely overrun and outweigh the scientific/philosophic/narrative content. There are a few reasons for this. It's the general postmodern deintellectualization trick of inserting sex, the great unifier, to broaden its appeal (but to who -- as I said, it's very male gaze... and even to this particular mostly-male gaze, that sort of thing gets boring, let alone presumably to other reader-gazes). In another self-explanation, we hear about the life experiences of the purported author of the book-within-a-book-within-a-book we're reading, Roberta Wilson, who was eight when WWII began, thirteen when it finished, and lived continuously through other wars and conflicts, including of course the the conflagration of Vietnam, only to find that the popular entertainment media was a mess of "violence and mayhem." That violence, war, and mayhem should be mass culture and sex deemed obscene (my reality tunnel of Wilson believes he would say) is the true obscenity. This is not exactly a radical position, but it remains a fair one. So yes, why not let the erotic replace the aggressive as the filler plot? Again, if only it wasn't so trapped in male fantasy. I don't think Wilson had bad intentions, but he puts forth a world where the sexual revolution continues further past the seventies, and allow me to ask: who was most liberated by the sexual revolution? The freedom of that era went most to those who were already freest, men, and this asymmetry seems to be sadly maintained in Wilson's "utopian" fantasy. The men are scientists, authors, publishing magnates, philosophers, while the women are pop stars, models, "tantric engineers" which is Wilson attempting to bestow honor and respect on the important work being done by the prostitutes who are still, after all, serving the men of the story. This came out of the 70s and it shows. It might completely drive you from the pages. Fortunately the women, whatever their vocations here, are never portrayed as frivolous or unintelligent, and though it may only be the exception that underlines the rule, Wilson also put a black women anarchist in the whitehouse of his utopia.
This is worth noting a little further, because another of the (surprise!) very smart things Wilson has to say here is obliquely embedded in it. The first acts of President Hubbard were to abolish non-voluntary work (advances in automation), poverty (guaranteed basic income), and prison (vast realignment of penal codes, which in turn makes most crime cease to exist, and thus criminals). This is all well and good as far as utopias go (and can we have it please), but the bit that jumped out at me was that it wasn't accomplished by evolutionary processes, but by vast sudden realignment of all of society so that it shakes out in a new form and the problems of transition are worked out as a matter of course. This may be extremely optimistic (utopian) but from the depths of 2019, as slow evolutionary improvement of our country in even the most basic ways (health care, immigration, you name it) is trapped in brutal deadlock or degrading further, it seems that other means are not working out. The Situationists, in 1968 calling for a mass societal change that would then lead to its own solutions, would have agreed. The New Green Deal is fervently opposed on various practicalities that in no way make it less essential for basic human survival. Slow evolutionary change based on having all the solutions and answers ready is at a standstill. What we're doing isn't working. What do we have to lose? So I appreciated this vastly underdeveloped side point tucked away between the erotic acts.
So this is smart, it's stupid, it's intriguing, it's dated and objectionable. Robert Anton Wilson holds a Ph.D in Psychology from a disaccredited Alternative University once operating in California. His understanding that LSD may expand one's choice of reality tunnel is based on close association with Timothy Leary. Take from this what you may. He's a questionable oracle at best, but aren't all oracles? It's up to you then: choose your reality tunnel and toss out the rest. It's your reality....more
There's a spare, gripping, refined quality to Howe's descriptions, to the way she begins interweaving the lives of these meticulously realized charactThere's a spare, gripping, refined quality to Howe's descriptions, to the way she begins interweaving the lives of these meticulously realized characters. As the novel progresses, though, the writing is always perfect, but my interest waned: the titular Middle of Nowhere never found a sense of place, instead her concerns seem entirely with the stifling morality freighted onto the decisions facing her characters. Even the essentially irreligious somehow seem weighted with god, something which surely makes much more sense to Howe than it can to me, but I felt left with little else to hold this together. In the end, I liked the characters, mostly, but not the courses Howe was bent on locking them to for dubious conceptual purpose -- the ones condemned, the one freed, all of it flickering away into pointless oblivion gleamed with a thin and frustrating meaning.
Still, I love Howe's earlier Fiction Collective novel Holy Smoke. Messier, weirder, more jaded and conflicted, spurious towards its own religion as only the actually religious are capable of (as fallen priests may, perhaps, conduct the best black masses), seething with unpredictable creation rather than, as here, railroaded to foregone judgement....more
Why did Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ take away the Recommended-By / Recommended-To fields, where I would otherwise in the past insert quips about the text or in this casWhy did Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ take away the Recommended-By / Recommended-To fields, where I would otherwise in the past insert quips about the text or in this case actually thank Mark Monday for this oddity of melting SoCal 80s-accelerated Americana. The great Bette Gordon (Variety!) adapted this in 1998 or so, transposing the action to familiar swathes of New Jersey and Staten Island, but California does feel like an apt setting for homicidal childhood fantasies of smashing through the veneer of consensus society. The conversations between the three principle viewpoints here feel have the stilted elegance of a Socratic discourse edited for punk television broadcast, but on the whole the feeling that everything is arranged as a tableaux rather than an actual story strains a little. It's both like and unlike how the film works with the material, and I have to wish I'd read this first so as to have a clearer sense of it unconstrained by expectation. Clearly, I'll have to see how Bradfield developed his themes and approach in subsequent work, such as "Animal Planet", from 1995, a two-sentence one-star review of which contains one of my all time favorite lines of Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ commentary:
I quit reading when I got to the line about the crow having to shave.
Many others before have reconfigured classic story structures for their own ends, but Wendy Walker is the more memorable for being the less knowable. Many others before have reconfigured classic story structures for their own ends, but Wendy Walker is the more memorable for being the less knowable. Fairy tales often gain their sense from their familiarity and embeddedness in culture. We can accept that these bizarre event take place, even believe them to have a kind of logic, because we know that x must follow y and that this is not unexpected. Simultaneously, the fairy tale form gains a great amount of its power from the deep and irreducible obscurity at the heart of any particular instance. Stories may take on allegorical or symbolic sense, but this may be a post-hoc addition to the images themselves, which exist in a kind of other space all their own. Walker, in presenting these new fairy tales -- often not new adaptations but fiery, weird originals -- cuts right back to the fundamental irrationality of the collective unconscious from which such stories emerged. This is much more difficult to do well than it might seem, and it makes these odd constructions, deft in word and structure, each a mysterious treasure to encounter....more
This feels really 80s to me. A barely-thought-through punk garbage odyssey in what could be a series of controlledly messy album covers. But the bits This feels really 80s to me. A barely-thought-through punk garbage odyssey in what could be a series of controlledly messy album covers. But the bits about health care hold true. What are you going to do when all your flesh rots off and yet you don't have insurance?...more
During a psychological study on prophetic dreaming, something goes wrong, the study is closed, everyone involved in left shaken. Eleven years later, sDuring a psychological study on prophetic dreaming, something goes wrong, the study is closed, everyone involved in left shaken. Eleven years later, something is beginning to happen again, as reality loosens its hold.
And we're off. The blurring of dream and reality is a great horror premise, or postmodernist premise, but this really gets its hooks into me through its surprising social conscience. The cast, now distributed about greater London, are used to approach a spectrum of urban ills, those of Thatcher England and, all too often, of clear contemporary relevance -- class, race, urban renewal, police brutality, gender inequality in the workplace, the difficulty of being believed as a women. Campbell's sense of place, careful plotting, and creep of nightmarish dislocation are effective, but I was surprised to find that it was this attention all-too-sordid reality pulled me along so well. Journalist Molly Wolfe's a great lead here, with believable troubles, and despite the uncertainty of the world throughout, the story never undermines her credibility or forces the reader to question her sanity (all too common in this era of genre fiction, whether films or books).
By the end, many of the social-realist threads are subsumed by the meta-arc, as they probably must be in a mass-market horror paperback like this, so I wished somewhat for a more direct intertwining of those threads, but the fact that I even cared says something about the unique feel of this book....more
This is great. Remember all those horrible/wonderful 80s horror paperbacks? The ones with the puffy text and the die-cut covers that open to reveal a This is great. Remember all those horrible/wonderful 80s horror paperbacks? The ones with the puffy text and the die-cut covers that open to reveal a flyleaf scene like this:
[image]
Savvy friends have been telling me to read Ramsey Campbell, as one of the best examples of of this sort of thing, for years and they were entirely correct. This is pretty faultless vacation reading (literally picked up on vacation from the wonderful Green Hand Books in Portland Maine, in this edition, to the sound of the clerk sucking in her breath and saying "oooh, he's so creepy", and then read entirely on the car/train trip home. My annoyances with horror writing (enumerated in greater depth elsewhere against the lure of dread-inducing atmosphere and the freedoms of non-realist plotting) are that so much falls into predictable tropes, isn't scary, and overplays its hand into self-defeating ridiculousness. Despite the obviously ridiculous plot (malevolent dead aunt has designs on her grand-niece), and general lack of actual scariness, this does just ooze atmosphere all across the western-middle coast of England and Wales with a fantastic sense of eerie place, and one long unerringly dreamlike travel sequence that accomplishes exactly what I might ever hope it would. In the lead-up, a familiar (dangerously predictable) pattern is established, but by halfway the book has secretly jumped tracks from anything I could anticipate to its great enhancement. Campbell also moves between his family of cast members quite fluidly and manages to write a convincing enough mother-daughter story at the heart of this, while fleshing out the subtext with a study of toxic classism. The overriding goal here is clearly to entertain above all else, so Campbell never digs too deep, but it's not an empty exercise either. So I'm very pleasantly surprised and will definitely be seeking more dazzlingly die-cut Campbell artifacts whenever such should fall into my hands (which may not be often enough -- other readers have clearly caught on well before me, because I never see his novels second hand.)...more
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