boneglue

I haven't kept good track of my reading because for the last three months I've mainly read academic literature, and in that sphere, I don't often feel especially well-positioned to compose pithy summaries. God knows why I judge Crime and Punishment as a work warranting my criticism but dare not go so far as to pen a line on Critical Social Theory in Public Administration (2004) by Richard C. Box at the University of Nebraska, Omaha. And I have written before about the tension this journal can create for me--it opens a space in which I feel I ought to comment, even if I don't have much to say, which must be among the most useless types of comment there is. But I was also saddened to look back from the opening of June and have no record of what I read or what I thought about what I read. It was disenheartening, as if I had read nothing at all. Also, from time to time I find some useful thought coming out of this process of collating impressions and mustering sentences together.

So, three months on, here is a list of everything I recorded or remember reading in these three months, and one sentence about what I seem to recall. As I remember others, I will simply add them to June.

"I Remain in Darkness" [Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit], Annie Ernaux, transl. Tanya Leslie. 94pp. An astounding and terrible record; as you read you sense death hovering over your own shoulder.

Antigone’s Claim, Judith Butler, 2000. 118pp. I am fascinated by Antigone and even the critical collection of accounts of her from canonical philosophers like Hegel and La, can is very useful.

My Own Private Germany, Eric Santner, 1996. 200pp. The way I approach an interpretation of the writings of Schreber, a madman, is similar to the way I approach an interpretation of non-mad philosophical writings, which might fairly throw into disrepute my approach to philosophy in general.

On Mysticism, Simon Critchley, 2024. 336pp. The idea that mysticism describes an approach to the world, not a passive state in which one is blessed or cursed by visions, is enheartening--you too could be a mystic!

Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capitalism, Adam Kotsko, 2018. 176pp. Fascinating arguments that have the ring of the Real in a way that makes a theological approach to the morals of politics ever more convincing to me.

Do States Have The Right To Exclude Immigrants?, Christopher Bertram, 2018. 144pp. A patient, methodical exploration of the arguments against excluding people from particular national territories; I would recommend this above the more popular activist texts available on this topic (e.g. John Washington's The Case for Open Borders) for the purpose of convincing uninterested people that this is an extremely important issue with a clear correct position.

I'm So Glad We Had This Time Together, Maurice Vellekoop, 2024. 496pp [graphic novel]. I'm deeply embarrassed to say this is the only book I had to google to remember at all; it's sweet and beautifully illustrated but there's something missing for me here.

The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson, 1981. What a writer--Jameson's theory has the know-it-when-you-read-it spark and vivaciousness of great prose.

The Soul at Work, Franco "Bifo" Berardi, 2009. 232pp. I'm getting worn down by this line of theory, although I wrote an essay about this and the Max show The Pitt that may not ever see the light of day.

Água Viva, Clarice Lispector, 1973. 88pp. (Neverland / Flying Books, Toronto.) Iconic, right?

Bureaucrats and Bleeding Hearts: Indigenous Health in Northern Australia, Tess Lea, 2008. This may be the only nonfiction book I have read so far--in my life--that "gets" bureaucracy at the deeper psychic level; and I happen to think it's very important to get bureaucracy, because of the structure of our entire godforsaken economy.

Passing, Nella Larsen, 1929. This book has the fascinating effect of making the social categorization of human beings by race seem like some kind of horrible fever dream; especially interesting to read after becoming glancingly acquainted with the work of Barbara and Karen Fields.

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Selected essays and stories:

“Warehouses” by Brandon Taylor in Joyland
"Bureaucracy", in Economy and Society vol. 2, Max Weber (1921)
"Professional-Managerial Chasm" by Gabriel Winant in n+1
"Pirates of the Ayahuasca" by Sarah Miller in n+1
Chapters or important portions of: Anarchafeminism (2021), Chiara Bottici; The Body in Pain (1985), Elaine Scarry; Virtue Hoarders: The Case Against the Professional-Managerial Class (2021), Catherine Liu

Movies, TV, and performances:

Bluebeard's Castle (1911), Bela Bartok (1911), and Gianni Schicchi (1918), Giacomo Puccini, Calgary Opera
Salome (1905), Richard Strauss, Met Opera Live
The Barber of Seville [Il barbiere di Siviglia] (1816), Gioachino Rossini
Solaris [Солярис, Solyaris] (1972) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Mirror [Зеркало, Zerkalo] (1975) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
The Constant Gardener (2005) dir. Fernando Meirelles
Play (1963), Not I (1972), Quad I + II (1981), Samuel Beckett
Hummingbird Guided Meditation (2024), Miruna Drăgan & Maggie Tiesenhausen
Move Ya Body: The Birth of House Music (2025) dir. Elegance Bratton
Sinners (2025) dir. Ryan Coogler

Current Mood: 10 of wands
Current Music: meet me in brooklyn - yaya bey

Eroticism, Georges Bataille. 1957. 272pp. Local library.

I guess it’s not cool anymore to just say you hate Bataille on feminist grounds. Well, I do. Or rather I resent him because I expect I would find him so useful if I could extract his ideas from that context. A key idea from this book strikes me as an actual departure from reality, undermining to the whole project: the idea that transgression, the desire to violate the Law which thus requires the Law, the desire to violate, is what lies at the core of all human desire, all human meaning, even. I happen to think this is a subjective quirk that has gained the ground it has because of the predominance in the academy of high-libido male philosophers. To me it’s as foreign and bemusing as if Bataille was saying, “All human desire is founded on wanting a really cool car.” I am going to read some other interpretations to give the whole thing a fair shake.

What about the distaff counterpart, negative transgression—refusing to perform the action that the law would command? I think there is something interesting about a lesbian philosophy that would discuss transgression in these terms.

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Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, Franco Berardi. 2015. 224pp. Shelf Life Books, Calgary, AB.

Berardi breaks to a first-person confessional close to the end: “’Why did I write such a horrible book?’ I suddenly asked myself, once I had neared the end of this discourse” (200). This puts it in a different register: sometimes fixation on atrocity is fetishistic and sometimes it’s obsessive—sometimes you scare yourself when you wake up out of the trance. Like all writing in this vein the book wanders toward an unsatisfying non-conclusion because if the conclusion existed yet one wouldn’t have to write it.

I have to make some objection to the idea that PMC techno-anguish is the most defining affect of the era, which is a tone I detect here and there in this type of book. How much of the office’s collective feeling of despairing stuck-ness is simply the bargain we make to keep the compensatory privileges of having a nice work-from-home emails job? Berardi and I could go become monks any time. It wouldn’t help anyone, but neither does reading or writing leftist criticism, and if you read or write too much of it you really start to think nothing helps anyone, and maybe it doesn’t.

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Enjoying What We Don’t Have, Todd McGowan. 2013. 364pp.

As above: it’s funny to get to the last chapter of a book like this and realize alongside the writer that there is no way forward from the criticisms they’ve raised. I’m not satisfied—they say one’s never satisfied—but I’ll keep looking. McGowan has a reading here of An Inconvenient Truth in which this film and the moment of culture during which it arose represents the calcification of the left in the position of the admonishing "good citizen", while Bush Jr.'s right has fun going golfing. I think I've told this story at four parties since reading it, probably after drinking just the number of premixed negronis that would prevent me from detecting whether my interlocutor really wants to hear about a psychoanalytic theory of politics.

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Sula, Toni Morrison. 1973. 192pp. Local library.

I was thinking how one might write essays and criticism to organize, but stories to search; Ballard said that he thought of himself as a “scout who is sent on ahead to see if the water is drinkable or not.” What’s beautiful about Morrison is the sense that she knows from the start the search is hopeless, but she still has hope for it; you can feel her edit, her reflection and self-searching, but nothing is slick or cute. She has this trick of introducing contextless details before the context that is required to understand them, at the paragraph level, raising questions and then answering them. This encourages you to take advantage of what is unique about literature, which is that you and the book sit in time together—she encourages or even requires you to reread paragraphs. Great books reward this sort of achronic engagement because every paragraph of a great book is also its whole, worked and reworked into an incredible density, so dense it could collapse any moment, but it doesn’t: it holds more and more and more.

“Hellfire don’t need lighting and it’s already burning in you.” / "Whatever’s burning in me is mine!" (92)

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Senescence: A Year in the Canadian Rockies, Amal Alhomsi. 2024. 182pp. Lent by a friend.

Aphoristic and profuse. Now, a Zen monk might say that true aphorisms must come from subtraction, rather than profusion. Alhomsi has contrasting urges: to write beautiful prose, and to be continuous with a beautiful world that knows no writing. "Nothing [in nature] is silent, we've just been left out of a conversation that began millions of years ago....we're too proud to forget our names" (135). Is all writing that is so aware of itself a betrayal of nature? I mean, does writing like this insist on the baroque madness of the human above the uncomplaining sanity and thingness of a river or a mountain? God knows I frequently regret this impulse in myself. Alhomsi, I believe, would argue we're doing all right: the chapter I quote layers in many examples of the communication of elk and elephants. Writing is simply the human animal's particular form of calling. So perhaps it's our nature, and to criticize our nature would be to criticize nature. (Encountering a writer in my geographic region on whom I can write a paragraph like this is truly dizzying; I'm so used to thinking of great writing as something that must occur somewhere else.)

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The Demon of Writing, Ben Kafka. 2012. 184pp.

Very useful for me personally. I had a funny moment running across this review by Todd Patterson, which is so brutal I seriously wondered if it was a personal matter. I came of age in a time when Slate was already basically Buzzfeed, so discovering an era of experimental internecine academic hit jobs in its archives was surreal. Anyhow, I found the book very engaging, in contrast to the impression Patterson gives, but I’m forced to admit he's right to say you feel a bit led around by the end. At the same time, I think Patterson underestimates—perhaps because you get the feeling Kafka did at the outset—the intractable, labyrinthine nature of the question he’s interested in. The closer you get to what bureaucrats as state workers are actually doing, the more your conceptualization struggles against most of the best-known and useful tools of leftist political theory, which don’t take this into account at all. In fact, the trouble caused to such theories by the government worker starts to seem downright…repressed. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, so Kafka’s book was very exciting to me as a site of thought, even if it didn’t answer all the questions it raises. Like noticing something out of the corner of your eye, and having someone say, “no, you’re right, I saw it too--what was that?”

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Selected essays and stories:

“Breadshow”, Kenneth Calhoun, in Ploughshares #158. I actually read this months ago, but can’t stop thinking about it.
“The Living Death Drug”, Lisa Carver, in The Paris Review.

Movies, TV, and performances:

Don Pasquale (1843), Donizetti, Calgary Opera
Aida (1871), Verdi, Met Opera broadcast
Lost Highway (1997) dir. David Lynch
The Conformist [Il conformista] (1970) dir. Bernardo Bertolucci

Current Mood: clobbered
Current Music: mega circuit - japanese breakfast

happy new year!

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Frankenstein, Mary Shelley. 1818. Broadview Press Edition, 2012, eds. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, 2012. 358pp (but I haven’t read the appendixes yet, so much less than that). Little free library.

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Empire of the Senseless, Kathy Acker. 1994. 240pp. Local library.

I wrote enough on this to turn it into an essay, but I think it will be several more years before I'm ready to write that essay. I don't think I liked it...?

“The Future is a Struggle: On Kathy Acker’s *Empire of the Senseless”,* by Alexandra Kleeman in The Paris Review

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Beloved, Toni Morrison. 1987. 324pp. Mine. Third reread.

This novel has marked my reading life repeatedly as the beginning of a new, deeper cycle of engagement with literature. I had forgotten that I once annotated my copy. I finished my annotations, and this allowed me to appreciate the density of the warp; I often cheat myself of that by reading too fast. Or maybe most books just aren’t so thoughtful. Something I love in Beloved is Morrison’s lingering over folkcraft, cooking, tending fire: the brief profoundness of simple labour—done in freedom for oneself and one’s loved ones. But by those qualifiers I mean to emphasize that every motif in this book must be quietly ambivalent. Morrison asks trees and water, for example, to bear in intense pain and intense beauty by turns. Or perhaps it’s that the intense beauty of these things must be marred by the evil human beings do to each other. There’s no attempt to overtly reconcile how these feelings exist one after the other or in the same moment. How could you? Why would you? In Sula, which I read in February, Morrison writes of the Black townspeople, “What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of forces other than good ones" (90).

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Reading Genesis, Marilynne Robinson. 2024. 352pp. Local library.

Essay perhaps forthcoming: “Joseph”

James Wood in The New Yorker: “When Marilynne Robinson Reads Genesis.” Woods writes, “If God wanted to destroy the whole of mankind, [the theologist] Calvin says, he would be justified by our sinfulness….Robinson’s Calvinism holds out an earnest optimism about what awaits us in the afterlife, alongside a deep pessimism about our terrible brokenness here on earth.” Woods isn’t criticizing Robinson per se. Maybe I’ve been reading too much pessimistic philosophy, but I find myself totally sympathetic with the stance he describes.

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The Fraud, Zadie Smith. 2023. 451pp. Local library.

An enjoyable novel that performs a brutally tender balancing act in its attitude toward its central character: a white female abolitionist caught up in the events of the real historical Tichborne case. Sometimes the sensationalism and conspiratorialism around the case and the politics of Eliza Touchet’s positioning in the abolitionist cause teeter on cynically modern. But then, what’s the past good for if not to frame the present? Unless to do so privileges familiar intelligibility over unintelligible otherness.

“Is Zadie Smith All Right? Puzzling Over *The Fraud,”* by Sue Sorensen in Macrina. (I disagree with Sorensen here—the ”clutter” of the novel simply doesn’t bother me—but it’s a less commercial, thus more interesting, piece of criticism than the others I read.)

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Lacan, Malcolm Bowie. 1993. 252pp.

For those who, like me, have repeatedly run into the wall of Lacanian theory and bounced back rubbing your head. Left me with the same admixture of respect and irritation toward Lacan that Bowie seems to feel.

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The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism, Byung-Chul Han. 2022. 120pp. Local library.

Each of Han’s small, hypnotizing books has been a pleasure. As a layperson I find his account of Zen Buddhist philosophical interventions quite convincing.

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Notable essays and short stories:

“Saving Masud Khan,” Wynne Godley. In London Review of Books.
“our brothers started dying,” Natalie Appleton. In Room 47.2

Movies and TV:

Twin Peaks S1 (1990), showrunners David Lynch and Mark Frost

♫ (by tradition this is now the song of the year!)

Current Mood: clattering
Current Music: hell of a ride - nourished by time

The Burnout Society, Byung-Chul Han. 2010. 60pp.

Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead, Julie Reshe. 2023. 144pp.

A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel. 1992. 749pp. Local library.

Genesis, Matthew 1 -4 , Luke 1 - 2, in the New Oxford Annotated Bible.

White Noise, Don Delillo. 1985. 320pp. Local library.

Quick Fixes, Benjamin Y Fong. 2023. 272pp. Shelf Life Books, Calgary, AB.

The Life of St Teresa of Avila by Herself, herself. 1562 - 1565, published 1611? Penguin ed. 1988. 320pp. No idea where I got this.

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Notable essays:

In Praise of Idleness, Bertram Russell. 1932.
The Last Messiah, Peter Wessel Zappfe. 1933.

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Movies:

Nosferatu (1979), dir. Werner Herzog
Wicked (2024), dir Jon M. Chu
Interstellar (2014), dir. Christopher Nolan
Conclave (2024), dir. Edward Berger
Slave Play. Not a Movie. A Play (2023), dir. Jeremy O. Harris
Bright Star (2009), dir. Jane Campion
Nosferatu (2025), dir. Robert Eggers
Minari (2020), dir. Lee Isaac Chung
Hotel Artemis (2017), dir. Drew Pearce

🎵

Current Mood: harried
Current Music: wristwatch - mj lenderman

The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice. 1985. Mine.
Called Out Of Darkness, Anne Rice. 2008. University library.
Prism of the Night: A Biography of Anne Rice, Katherine Ramsland. 1991. Didn't finish this, because I got to the plot of Queen of the Damned before my Queen reread, and then I had to return it to the library.

Essays still forthcoming eventually.

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A Critique of Political Reason, Thomas Lemke. University library.

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The Lost Ones, Samuel Beckett. 1970. University library.

Essay forthcoming: "Living in the Cylinder"

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The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zizek. 1997. University library. Had to return.

Essay maybe forthcoming if it's not too embarrassing in a few weeks: "World of Overwhelm"

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Notable short stories, papers and essays

“Necropolitics” by Achille Mbembe
“’Kiss Me with those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula” by Christopher Craft

Movies and TV:

Dungeon Meshi (2023), based on the manga by Ryoko Kui
Mistress Dispeller (2024), dir Elizabeth Lo
The Terror S1 (2018), showrunner Robyn-Alain Feldman, based on the Dan Simmons novel
Kung Fu Elliott (2014), dir. Matthew Bauckman and Jaret Belliveau
Encounters at the End of the World (2007), dir. Werner Herzog

♫

Current Mood: yadda yadda
Current Music: they don't say (but it's true) - tucker zimmemann and big thief

In the Freud Archives, Janet Malcolm. 1984. 165pp. University library.
Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, Janet Malcolm. 1981. 174pp. University library.
Iphigenia in Forest Hills, Janet Malcolm. 2011. 155pp. University library.

Essay: "Players of Games".

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The Last Emperor, Edward Behr. 1987. 327pp. University library.

Essay: "Complicity 1".

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The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler. 1939. 277pp. Charity book sale.
The Detections of Totality, Fredric Jameson. 2016. 81pp. Accessible here.

“Thus, the work of art itself, although exhibited in that worldly place which is the museum, and drawn into a web of social and worldly relationships—those of sale and investment, interpretation and evaluation, pedagogy, tradition, savred reference—must always somehow scandalously exceed all those worldly relationships in the ultimate and irreducible materiality of its earthly element that cannot become social, the color that cannot be made altogether human.” (79)
“For now, at the end, all the events of the book are seen in a new and depressing light: all that energy and activity wasted to find somebody who had in reality been dead for so long, for whom the time of the present was little more than a process of slow physical dissolution. And suddenly, at the thought of that dissolution, and of the mindless lack of identity of the missing person so long called by name, the very appearance of life itself, of time in the present, of the bustling activity of the outside world, is stripped away and we feel in its place the presence of graves beneath the bright sunlight; the present fades to little more than a dusty, once-lived moment which will quickly take its place in the back years of an old newspaper file. And our formal distraction at last serves its fundamental purpose: by diverting us with the ritual generic aim of the detection of the criminal and of his transformation into the Other, it is able to bring us up short, without warning, against the reality of death itself, stale death, reaching out to remind the living of its own moldering resting place.” (81)

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Vita contemplativa, Byung-Chul Han, transl. Daniel Steuer. 2022, transl. 2024. 120pp. Local library.

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Making Middle-Class Multiculturalism, Jennifer Elrick. 2022. 242pp.

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The Pale King, David Foster Wallace. 2015. 548pp. Local library.

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High-Rise, J.G. Ballard. 1975. 253pp. Local library.

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Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice. 1974. No idea where I got my copy. It is simply my birthright. I’m actually not sure I exchanged money to obtain my copy of any of the books in this series, even though I somehow own five. Essays forthcoming.

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Notable short stories, essays, and papers:

“Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State” (1988), Philip Abrams.
“Postmodernism” (1984), Fredric Jameson.

Movies and TV:

Yesterday (2019) dir. Danny Boyle
Farewell, my Concubine (1993) dir. Chen Kaige
Seven Samurai (1954) dir. Akira Kurosawa

♫

Current Mood: riddled
Current Music: lucky #8 - jennifer castle

Crime & Punishment [Преступление и наказание, Prestupleniye i nakazaniye], Fyodor Dostoevsky, transl. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. 1867, transl. 1993. 624pp. Shelf Life Books, Calgary, AB.

A disturbed man navigates social challenges in his family and neighbourhood, coloured by the fact that he has just murdered an old woman for dreadful philosophical reasons. That bloodbath that sets off the events—Lord have mercy. The climactic events are also riveting. Yet I found myself increasingly unforgiving of Dostoevsky’s melodrama in the middle sections. A second soppy Christian ending after the one in Brothers Karamazov outraged me outright. When I read The Double, a woman in my book club originally educated in Russian seemed to gently imply that she didn’t really understand why we admired Dostoevsky above Gogol or Pushkin, whom, embarrassingly, none of us had read.

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Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben. 228pp. 1998. University library.

I began a reading jag this month of scholarly books which I feel underqualified to comment on. But this is only a diary, so I’ll try. I usually see Agamben’s landmark idea deployed to the effect that the defining power of the state in the modern era is the power to define which populations don’t count as legal people, or even more bluntly, which populations it is permissible for the state to kill, along with a couple of other corollary theses. In detail it’s much more complicated than that and all. I think if you were in my exact situation—interested in the idea above regularly attributed to Agamben by other writers, but lacking much background in medieval or classical political philosophy— you could get away with reading backward, starting with Part 3, “The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern”, and decide from there whether you also want the first two parts, which are, that said, definitely interesting even for the layperson.

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First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Slavoj Žižek. 2009. 157pp. Local library.
Fear of Knowledge, Paul A. Boghossian. 2006. 139pp. University library.

Stacking these two books together in the diary may seem like an odd decision. Nearly as odd as the experience of reading them one after the other. I organize them here because in both cases my notes on the work are riddled with the red pen I use to comment my disagreements and irritations. There are foibles of rhetoric I dislike which I perceive in both writers, especially the willingness to conflate opponent terminology with their own mental representations of opponent ideas, and the willingness to draw on flimsy sources if doing so will own the libs. The virtue of Žižek is that one enjoys reading him. On the other hand, like other analytic philosophers I have gratefully encountered after reading too much theory, the virtue of Boghossian is that one can read him. But I find disagreement generative, as I think they do; we can all be grateful to one another for that.

I was going to compliment Boghossian’s willingness to improve his enemy’s argument for him, a rhetorical norm in analytical philosophy that I appreciate, until I learned he’s one of those guys who submits fake “social theory articles” to sociology journals to get his chuckles. This behaviour is annoying but in a way that I also find somehow pitiable. It often seems to me that the authors of these “hoaxes” have misunderstood the purpose of a piece of writing in this rhetorical genre, which is not, for the record, to make a factual argument of which publication indicates wholehearted endorsement. Provocative, strange, slightly nonsensical commentary may be found useful if it is interesting to read and promotes genuine engagement with ideas, stretching the boundaries of thought, turning texts on their heads. Therefore, in most cases I have heard of, scheming would-be Sokals seem to wind up accidentally….writing and submitting pieces of mediocre social theory writing. Gotcha! I am also perplexed as to whether they don’t have some kind of research to do in their own fields, which might be more important than breaking into the rival high school to steal the mascot costume.

Knowing about Boghossian’s participation in this silliness, I now feel justified to relay a fantasy I first redacted: putting these two writers in a cage match where they toddle around tearing at one another’s shirts. I never felt bad about putting Žižek in this fantasy, because I think he would have fun with it.

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The Collected Schizophrenias, Esme Weijun Wang. 2019. 224pp. Local library.
Tears and Saints [Lacrimi și Sfinți], E.M. Cioran. 1998. 154pp. University library.

It’s embarrassing, or maybe a relief, but I don’t have anything to say about either of these books. I may return to Tears and Saints, or else read later Cioran when he realized the fascism was a mistake (it doesn't appear in this book to my reading, anyways).

Now I’ve been keeping this journal for going on two years, and these last few months I’ve been reading at an accelerated pace, and a part of me feels that I’ve said all I can say for the moment about any book. Obviously untrue in the sense that much more could be said be somebody about some book. Possibly true in the sense that I, now, have come to the extent of my current ability. I started to make this journal because it bored me to think of judging every book I read on a scale from one to five stars or whatever, determining whether books are "good" or "bad", but it unnerved me to think about reading without some sort of process to capture and treasure what I learned. Isn't there something more interesting to be done with a book--to honour the reason I love to read, which is not merely to form opinions and declare my tastes? And now I fear that, when I'm lazy, even in this journal I produce three paragraphs that translate to "three stars".

You know, a friend of mine once told me a story about her family’s seaside cabin in Nova Scotia. (This isn’t as much of a class marker as you might think — land in Nova Scotia was very cheap for a long time — my friend’s mother was a hairdresser.) She said her entire large extended family had come for a reunion and they all went mudding on the flats at low tide. Dozens of children were covered in mud. Everyone rushed to wash off. But it happens that in this part of the world all the houses use water systems that were drilled as long as a hundred years ago. In fact, I know of Nova Scotia communities where every well in the town runs dry in the summer due to the changing climate. People have to drive two hours south to Yarmouth and fill up hundred-gallon tanks on the back of their trucks. That day, my friend’s family used so much water at once to wash the mud off that the pump began to pull up seawater somehow. Ever since then, the shower runs salty and they can’t drink from the tap.

So I feel like I’m close to drinking seawater. Something more interesting might exist somewhere. I’ll keep playing around. Dispatches from the front.

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The Hour of the Star [A hora da estrela], Clarice Lispector, transl. Benjamin Moser, New Directions centennial edition. 1977, my ed. 2020. 93pp. First Light Bookshop, Austin, TX.

Brilliant. Shocked me into believing in prose again for several days.

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Selected short stories:

“Featherweight”, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

Movies and TV:

Succession S4 (2023), showrunner Jesse Armstrong
Fancy Dance (2023) dir. Erica Tremblay
Drive-Away Dolls (2023) dir. Ethan Coen
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) dir. Philip Kaufman

♫

Current Mood: hellacious
Current Music: the wind and the dove - bill callahan

Domination and the Arts of Resistance, James C. Scott. 1990. 227pp. University library.

Scott argues for a particular approach to reading the archive of situations of domination, such as slavery, serfdom, and casteism, taking into account the hidden transcript—the ideas and ideology professed by the dominated outside public hearing—and presenting very interesting arguments about false consciousness, for example, a topic I’ve always meant to investigate, as well as the nature of the revolutionary moment. A fascinating book, quite readable, with all the joys and potential pitfalls of its famous sister. I got this out from the library before I learned that Scott had passed away early in July; may he rest in peace.

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The Correspondence, J.D. Daniels. 2017. Vargo’s Jazz City and Books, Bozeman, MT.

An exactingly vicious set of five essays, or maybe stories, or maybe essays, starting with Brazilian jiu jitsu, and proceeding through other experiences that feel like getting your cheekbone snapped in the ring by another man’s foot. Group therapy, for example. Energetic, insistent, constantly shocking prose.

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The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde Since 1970, Henry M. Sayre. 1989. 324pp. Little free library.

Thoughtful discussion of shared philosophical readings across a variety of artistic moments we call “postmodern”: Carolee Schneeman’s feminist performance art, Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger’s interface with text, Robert Smithson’s land art. Genial and engaging introduction to the field. I especially appreciate Sayre’s obvious appreciation for feminist art, not in the hollow identarian way that I think people outside the academy often assume feminist art is intended, but for its structural, formal, discursive innovations and interventions.

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Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders. 2017. 343pp. Local library.

Those chapters composed from quotations of histories are brilliant. The main plot, which centres around Lincoln’s dead son Willie encountering a host of otherworldly trials in the afterlife, struck me as floppy, sugary, fantastic in a bad sense. Saunders’s sense of humour falls at different times to either side of that dividing line for me. Continues an interesting trend in my taste: misalignment with the jury of the Man Booker Prize. (Only exceptions so far are Hilary Mantel and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout.)

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Islands of Decolonial Love, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. 2015. 143pp. Gift from a friend.

The quote on the back from Lee Maracle: “the kind of book that is going to make me a good writer, a good listener, a good citizen.” I am cynical enough that this prescription makes me suspicious. I find this unfortunate partially because it makes it difficult for me to judge Simpson on her own merits. At her best her stories and poems are unflinching and persistent. Her use of Anishnaabe English is pleasurably bouncing and snippy, especially in long pieces like “nogojiwanong”. But when she indulges in phrases like “this beautiful disaster”, an easy, romantic sentimentality undercuts her.

+++

Short stories and poems:

“Turkey in a Suitcase” by J.D. Daniels
“A Rose Diary” by Walt John Pearce

Movies & TV:

Grizzly Man (2005) dir. Werner Herzog
The Alpinist (2021) dir. Peter Mortimer, Nick Rosen
Dave Not Coming Back (2020) dir. Jonah Malak
The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (2012) dir. Sophie Fiennes
Into the Abyss (2011) dir. Werner Herzog

♫

Current Location: doubloon
Current Music: love hurts - emmylou harris and gram parsons

The Magus, John Fowles. 1965. 656pp. Local library.

Quite a ride. Fowles seems to hate this novel, and I guess I’m glad for his foreword, which tempered my expectations. The narrator’s inveterate scumminess certainly requires the reader to steel herself from time to time—or comfort herself that he might at some point collapse under the ever-rising tower of stacked convolutions in the titular millionaire’s “Most Dangerous Game” of the mind. Over the length of the book the novelty wanes somewhat, but the experience is still enjoyable. I’m interested to read the novels that Fowles liked. Possesses, in parts, a powerful undercurrent of what hurts most in the world.

+++

I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen, Sylvie Simmons. 2011. 570pp. Local library. DNF.

Worth a look if you admire Cohen as I do, but a certain tendency toward hagiography and an insistence on cute lyrical references really wore on me here. I called it after The Future.

+++

Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust, transl. 1982 by James Grieve, original 1913, my ed. 2023. 450pp. Local library. Only technically finished.

Because of my library schedule I had to grind out the last 300 pages of Swann’s Way in a couple of days. This was mid-heatwave in my stuffy apartment. Every day I took several cold plunges in the bathtub. Somewhere in that middle section about the interminable Verdurins and their social travails, I had a fit of desperation. Please, God, I need to read something else, I thought. There were other things going on my life. I needed to enact some rebellion somewhere against obligation. Carelessly skimming the last 20 pages of Swann’s Way was more sensible than quitting my job. So what to say? I think I’m burned out. Maybe in five years, with improved stamina and more skillful reading, I’ll get around to the other six books. I happened to cross-read a French copy here and there, and I found the original French lighter and funnier. I wonder why?

+++

Selected short stories and poems:

"Sonny’s Blues," James Baldwin, 1957 (Reread)
"The Mud Below," Annie Proulx, in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, 1998 (Reread)

Movies and TV:

La vie revée [Dream Life] (1972) dir. Mireille Dansereau
Face to Face [Ansikte mot ansikte] (1976) dir. Ingmar Bergman, TV version.
Passages (2023) dir. Ira Sachs

♫

Current Mood: wellspring
Current Music: losing my edge - lcd soundsystem

Ninety Percent of Everything, Rose George. 2013. 273pp. University library.

Fascinating and undoubtedly hard-earned survey of the mysterious, ubiquitous shipping industry. The framing device, George’s personal embarkation on a Maersk container ship, is useful, although I wonder if it doesn't put her in the access journalist's classic double-bind. George’s turns of phrase occasionally caused me to raise my eyebrows: “ashore Burmese people may be rare and exotic but they are common in shipping” (19). I guess I hoped for a more Klein-like perspective, sharper and more worldly (or simply conforming better to my own political convictions?)

+++

Julian the Magician, Gwendolyn MacEwan. 1963. 151pp. University library.

Charming little piece of fujoshi history. Of course, it’s no good—MacEwan apparently wrote it at the age of 18—but I find it genuinely touching to observe historical continuity in the instincts and preoccupations of certain precocious young women beginning to build their talents. The titular magician, who believes himself to be Jesus Christ reincarnated, and his besotted companion Peter, who for some reason gets no pseudonym, have been reincarnated yet again in a thousand longfics which will someday be deleted for the sake of their authors’ dignity. Hands are frequently caressed; wrists are blue-veined; eyes are wild; blood, amber and moonlight pour everywhere. MacEwan has occult interests, which were the reason I took this Canlit research read off the shelf, and poor Julian’s a bit useless on that account. But I’m fond; I wished I could smoke a joint with Gwen in a college dorm room and talk about NBC Hannibal.

+++

Just Kids, Patti Smith. 2010. 320pp. Local library.

I confess to being underwhelmed at first, but Smith’s almost naive rhythm of prose eventually takes effect. Interesting documentation if you like the period, though the document relies on a cavalcade of names that has less effect as literature. The last section on Mapplethorpe’s death—now that is undeniable in its heartbreak, and occurs almost on a higher plane.

+++

Antigonick, Anne Carson/Sophokles. 2012. Local library.

Antigone is on my personal altar of classic figures. As a teenager, Jean Anouilh’s Antigone dazed me. The chorus speech that goes, “surtout, c’est reposant, la tragédie, parce qu’on sait qu’il n’y a plus d’espoir” [”above all, tragedy is calming, because you know there is no more hope”] is one of the first encounters I remember with the pure sublime in literature. Carson’s loose translation is obviously astonishing. I anticipate returning to this in future. I sometimes fear I need to know Ancient Greek to really appreciate the work that Anne Carson is doing; I respect her so much that I have considered pursuing this line.

+++

Mantel Pieces: Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books, Hilary Mantel. 2020. Charity book sale.

I had been working slowly through these essays, planning to include them in the “selected” category below, and then hit a run of four or five that were so impressive I finished the book in a go. As is the case with anything written for deadline, not all the works are equal. But Mantel’s thought-style is dogged and dignified, perfect for the essay. You sense her talking almost to herself, but looking you dead in the eye. Her style is beautiful but never feels artificial. She has an unflinching awareness of the possibility of terror and the inevitability of death, from which stems her unfeeling understanding, not quite compassion. Since all human beings can suffer terror and will die, she knows a bit about everyone who's ever lived. I am coming to think this may be one of the most important qualities a writer can have.

+++

Selected short stories and poems:

First Dream (Primero sueño), Juana Ines de la Cruz, 1678, transl. Edith Grossman, in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works
“The Nine Arcana of the Kings”, by Gwendolyn MacEwen, in The Armies of the Moon, 1972

Movies & TV:

Saint Omer (2022) dir. Alice Diop
Jacob’s Ladder (1990) dir. Adrian Lyne
The Wire S2, S3 (2003 - 04), showrunner David Simon
Harry Smith, American Magus (2002) dir. Paola Igliori
Juliet of the Spirits (1965) dir. Federico Fellini
Deprogrammed (2015) dir. Mia Donovan
Fallout S1
Interview with the Vampire season 2 (2024), showrunner Rolin Jones
American Fiction (2023) dir. Cord Jefferson
Blow-Up (1966) dir. Michelangelo Antionioni
Lesvia (2023) dir. Tzeli Hadjidimitriou
Manting (2023) dir. Shuyao Chen
Ticker (2023) dir. Thom Petty
Old Lesbians (2023) dir. Meghan McDonough
Vestiges (2023) dir. Yoan de Montgrand and Jofre Carabén
Cabaret (1972) dir. Bob Fosse

♫

Current Mood: quelled
Current Music: i remember everything - zach bryan

Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott. 1998. 357pp. University library. Reread.

This book was massively foundational for me. One of the first academic books I ever read seriously; it changed the course of my intellectual life. On reread I am happy to maintain that it is a splendid introduction to some issues of the nation-state, its epistemology and its means of control, across multiple periods and times that will interest the student of “modernity” (whatever that means). There are likely other and more precise texts; its sweeping quality is exciting but suspect, and now perhaps recalls Reddit-beloved sages-of-everything with increasingly thin credentials like Jared Diamond. But it’s held up for me over at least the last decade, and Scott is much more esoteric in his interests than anyone writing for popular press. As Scott would likely say, the broad and the narrow are in dialogue.

+++

“The Double” and “The Gambler” ["Двойник. Петербургская поэма", Dvoynik: Peterburgskaya poema, and "Игрокъ", Igrok], Fyodor Dostoevsky. ~ 300pp? Due to a certain series of events I read The Double in a Pevear and Volokhonsky translation borrowed from a friend, and The Gambler in the Constance Garnett translation, from the university library.

I liked these, especially "The Gambler", which is deliciously cynical. They have not stuck with me like BK, but--high bar. I would like to challenge myself with a little completionism around Dostoevsky, and these feel a bit like the completionist's materials to me but maybe I'll re-assess.

+++

L'Étranger, Albert Camus. 1942, my edition 2012. In French. 144pp. A friend lent me this astonishingly beautiful Futuropolis Gallimard edition in large format illustrated by José Muñoz. Reread.

A thin slab of stone. John Dee apparently owned a piece of flat black obsidian cut to the shape of a mirror in which he would see visions. Dee's mirror was Aztec in origin, by the way. See a little below, in Along and Structures. (I left this enigmatic comment without an explanation even to myself the first time I jotted down these thoughts on this classic French novel of a pathologically indifferent personality who commits a murder and is imprisoned. I was restless, frankly dissatisfied. I recognized the novel's effect, but my mind drifted as I contemplated it. I was thinking of colonial critique, which is fair but has been said by better thinkers. A month later I had to come back to clarify to myself. I still have nothing further to say.)

+++

Two Serious Ladies, Jane Bowles. 1943. 180pp. Little free library.

What a bizarre, salty, pleasurable little book. Two strange upper-class women have parellel adventures, each alone. Everything everyone does is nonsensical, but somehow also makes perfect sense: maybe their self-certainty convinces you. At one point I laughed until I had to wipe my eyes. Such a blatant, nonchalant style. I kept thinking of Chantal Akerman for some reason. The unspooling of time and space. Nights shamble forever, distances are crossed in instants. Depth and forwardness.

+++

Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Ann Laura Stoler. 2019. University library.
Structures of Indifference, Mary Jane Logan McCallum and Adele Perry. 2018. Purchased for me by a friend at a University of Manitoba Press book sale.

Happened to read these shortly after my Seeing Like A State reread and they prove an interesting duo to develop those ideas. Stoler cites Scott; McCallum & Perry cite Stoler. Weirdly, this is a coincidence. I actually took out the Stoler because I was searching seperately and ineptly for work on epistemic anxiety, which the book is not about. As a result, I only read some chapters, but they were incisive enough that I may go back when I get the excuse. Stoler's work is on archives from Dutch administrators of Sumatra; McCallum and Perry are concerned with the story of Brian Sinclair, an Anishnaabe man who died of a completely treatable bladder infection in a Winnipeg emergency room because the triage nurse skipped him and multiple observers assumed he was homeless and drunk. There's something about the minor, scratchy affective qualities tapped here: anxiety, indifference. I think a common popular representation is that conscious malice is the key affective scaffold of colonial dominion. Stoler argues, in maybe a single brilliant page (259), for the predominance of Georg Simmel's Lebensluge--doublethink, living a "vital lie". That the colonizer always knows what is going on, but is always dissimulating even to himself about its nature to maintain stable affect or self-image or to reduce cognitive dissonance. This is a formulation that deeply impressed me. McCallum & Perry find, for example, that the inquests into Sinclair's death focused overwhelmingly on the logistics of the triage room. Is this indifference? Or is it the half-purposeful decision, never articulated by any single colonial agent, to continue, continue, continue pretending?

+++

Movies and TV:

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954) dir. Kenneth Anger (Watch this incredibly artful fan rescore too)
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) dir. Maya Dern
Pas de Deux (1968) dir. Norman MacLaren <- Finally, cancon for tripping
Simon of the Desert [Simón del desierto] (1965) dir. Luis Buñuel
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) dir. Frank Pavich
Les Ordres (1974) dir. Michel Brault
The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) dir. Ted Kotcheff
Challengers (2023) dir. Luca Guadagnino

♫

Current Mood: temple
Current Music: very large green triangles - matmos

Le silence de la mer, Vercors (Jean Bruller). 1941. ~96pp? In French. University library.

A fine little book. Its historical import alone as the first French Resistance novel printed in secret under Nazi occupation makes it worth reading. It also has a fascinating high concept: a Nazi officer is billeted in a small French homestead whose owners decide, by mutual unspoken agreement, that as long as he’s in the room they won’t utter a single word. I didn’t realize until the very last paragraph that the book and the Jean-Pierre Melville film differ in their endings. Exactly one shot, the equivalent of one sentence, is added to the film. The change imbues the respective works with quite different meaning in a beautiful way. The film’s ending shocked me, and the book’s ending shocked me again, by the absence. The reason I was so surprised by the ending of the film is hard to explain. I can’t decide whether my shock should trouble me, and I can’t explain without giving everything away.

+++

Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy. 1891. 330pp. Little free library.

Iconic. Can't stop thinking about it. This strangely modern novel of a poor woman dealing with the lifelong consequences of a rape is haunted by strangely modern phantoms and strangely ancient ones. These appear from nowhere in the gnostic style: the threshing-machine, a "red tyrant [the farm workers] come to serve", and its engineman, "a dark motionless being...in a sort of trance...a creature from Tophet...he served fire and smoke". At the very end, Stonehenge looms, ever more bizarre because of the association it now carries with New Age kitsch, as a dissociation, a bardo, perceived piece by piece in the night with the palms of the hands. My god, the end of Blood Meridian, the field where the stones are struck. These moments that pin the heart with gospel fear, instead of, on top of, the trembling love in a novel like Gilead. I say trembling because my template for that feeling is the glass on the piano at the end of “Sonny’s Blues.” What is the relationship between these two instincts?

+++

You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine, Alexandra Kleeman. 2015. 283pp. Little free library.

A slippery collection of images and scenarios arranged together maybe by their examination of disgust. Junk food, commercials, game shows, bulimia, bad boyfriends. Ugly weird territory. That’s a wholehearted compliment. The prose is often gorgeous. I can feel the breath of Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings strongly on this book—almost chapter by chapter in fact. Something feels hollow to me about this type of theory fiction at times, and not even hollow in an interesting way, but hollow like a tech demo at E3. Perhaps this is my plebeian tendency and my lack of graduate coursework in critical theory.

+++

Washington Black, Esi Edugyan. 2018. 417pp. Little free library.

An adventure novel whose protagonist is a young enslaved boy selected as a scientist’s assistant. Enjoyable and stirring. For the first time in years I tore through this book in two days. We follow Black at the pace of a skipped stone through the requisite series of far-flung locales, meeting many minor characters who each have some particular noticeable feature or trait. I’m being slightly facetious. I’ve been reading mainly other types of fiction, so that by the end I wished for a narrower, deeper approach, but that’s not the genre, after all. Any modern reflex I detect in quasihistorical writing of this style tends to irk me. The central relationship between Black and his scientist is drawn with an interesting thorny complexity.

+++

Movies and TV:

Dune 2 (2024) dir. Denis Villeneuve
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [臥虎藏龍,Wòhǔ Cánglóng] (2000) dir. Ang Lee
Cry-Baby (1990) dir. John Waters
Cube (1997) dir. Vincenzo Natali
Nothing (2003) dir. Vincenzo Natali
Booger (2023) dir. Mary Dauterman
Omen [Augure] (2023) dir. Baloji ★
The Vourdalak (2023) dir. Adrien Beau ★
Falling Stars (2023) dir. Richard Karpala
Never Look Away (2023) dir. Lucy Lawless
Boy Kills World (2023) dir. Moritz Mohr

Selected short stories and essays:

"The Dead" by James Joyce, in Dubliners (1914)
"Darkness over Donbas" [Schlamm, Müdigkeit, Hoffnung und Tod – wie die ukrainischen Soldaten in den Schützengräben des Donbass ausharren] by Szczepan Twardoch, transl. Sean Gasper Bye
"Fits" by Alice Munro, in The Progress of Love (1986)

♫

Current Mood: tallow
Current Music: angels in tibet - amaarae

God's Red Son: The Ghost Dance Religion and the Making of Modern America, Louis S. Warren. 2017. 496pp. University library.

The usual disclaimer: I have no expertise, academic or experiential, in the Ghost Dance and Indigenous spiritual history more generally. Warren’s compelling main argument is that historians prone to exoticize Indigenous religious activity have mis-interpreted the Ghost Dance as the last romantic-tragic rebellion of a supposedly "lost" culture. Warren’s interpretation of evidence recasts the Dance as a charismatic millenarian religious movement, comparable to other contemporary Anglo-American movements like Mormonism, spiritualism, and Pentecostalism. For Warren, the Dance was interpreted as violent and revolutionary primarily by state officials who were frightened of all Indigenous activity they could not understand. All this is laid out in prose that is unsensational and clear yet powerful to read.

May I say that every time I think I've learned about something interesting on our supposedly infinite information superhighway, if I go read an actual book about it, I find that the discussion among experts is in fact just adjacent to the one I thought I was entering, more nuanced, and more interesting.

+++

"Billy Budd", "The Piazza", Herman Melville. ~1891, ~1856; in Signet Classic Billy Budd and Other Tales, 2nd. ed, 1998. Combined ~105pp. Can't remember where I got this copy.

This year I’ve resolved to read a short list of canonical writers I’m poorly acquainted with—Proust and Joyce, for example—here’s my Melville. (Don’t worry, I’m only committing to short stories and essays. I’m not a masochist.)

I love the Claire Denis film Beau Travail, which adapts Melville’s ethical fable of navy discipline into a tender homoerotic deconstruction of military-fascist masculinity. I hoped to get more from the source material. BB is not about the things Beau Travail is about, but something else, so perhaps my focus was misplaced. Lest I seem to doubt the master, however, as soon as I finished BB I started reading the next story, “The Piazza”, really quite idly, and found myself mesmerized by its bizarre, ponderous obscurity of meaning. Like “Bartleby”, for example, “Piazza” instantly creates an unnerving sense that it allegorizes something you’re not aware of. The politics of an alternate universe of human thought, for example, to which only Melville has access. So grave and so mysterious in its gravity that it feels mystical and almost threatening.

Always a revelation to discover the font of some tone or attitude shared by other admirable writers (McCarthy, Bolaño, Lispector). Melville manages to do it from nearly nothing. No scalping, no cockroach-eating, just a house and a walk in the woods. My preference between these two stories seems misaligned with general scholarly opinion, and perhaps my mind will change, but I finished “Billy Budd” untouched, whereas after “The Piazza” I looked up into my dark living room at 7 AM and said aloud in pleasure, “What the fuck?”

+++

Dragon Age: Asunder, David Gaider (LEAD WRITER OF THE DRAGON AGE SERIES). 2011. 485pp. Stole this from the library of Auberge Internationale in Québec City. Unfinished, but I will probably finish it the next time my brain turns briefly into sawdust.

If you’ve never been at a place in your life when all you could handle intellectually was a video game tie-in novel, I congratulate you.

+++

Beautiful Losers, Leonard Cohen. 1966. 255pp. Sigla Books, Calgary, AB.

I've now read several of this style of 50s-60s novel, ur-Beat, the cum-fountain confessional, and I find they have aged strangely, not poorly exactly. This one achieves the giggling high-strung tone of obscene desperation I like. It doesn’t take itself too seriously until it’s earned your respect. A nominal plot about a love triangle hinging on a pathetic deteriorating megalomaniac, which comes closer to the surface over the course of the novel — a choice I respect much more than its opposite — also invests the chaos with a grounding humanity. I like drifting through the impressionism of books like this, but this is one of the first few of the type I have felt really motivated to reread annotated by some wiser reader. The mysterious meaning pulses quite close to the surface, seems graspable.

Who was Steve Smith, 1943-1964, to whom this book is dedicated? The good people at leonardcohenforum.com are the only obvious investigators.

+++

Movies and TV:

The Bear, season 2, showrunner Christopher Storer (2023)
Slow Horses, season 1, showrunner Will Smith (2022)
Deadloch, season 1, showrunners Kate McCartney and Kate McLennan (2022)
Losing Ground (1982) dir. Kathleen Collins ★
Past Lives (2023) dir. Celine Song
Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves (2023) dir. John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein
Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets (2023) dir. Olivia Crist and Julia Willoughby Nason
Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God (2023) dir. Hannah Olson
The Sweet East (2023) dir. Sean Price Williams
Dune (2021) and Dune 2 (2024) dir. Denis Villeneuve

Notable short stories:

"The Quicksand" by Edith Wharton, in The Wordsworth Collection of Classic Short Stories
"Hide and Seek" by Dawn Muenchrath, in The Dalhousie Review 103(1), Spring 2023
"A Fight" by T. Bambrick, in Michigan Quarterly Review 63(1), Winter 2024

♫

Current Mood: rustle
Current Music: already lost - adrienne lenker

happy new year!

Confessions of St. Augustine, Augustine of Hippo. 1963. 350pp. Transl. by Rex Warner. Found Bookshop, Cochrane, AB.

Apparently the proper MLA citation is "Augustine, of Hippo, Saint". Entrancing in many places, even for a laywoman like myself without much theological grit. There are reasons I couldn’t be Catholic, at least not the way they did it in the old days. How is it that the same ardour that begs, “Let me know you, my known; let me know thee even as I am known….” (210) can also deride the “poison of curiosity” and its sensual embodiment, “the pleasure of lust” (335)? I drew a New Year passage from Sor Juana for a friend: the segment which calls physical love “the knowing that no philosophy knows." Of course, centuries of argument on the works of Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, might well clarify my considerations someday.

+++

Harlot's Ghost, Norman Mailer. 1991. 1168pp. Interlibrary loan. Nearly finished.

Less interested in institutions and structures than DeLillo's Libra, for example; but the CIA memoir as libidinal gothic, complete with haunted house, also opens up some new corridors of feeling. The petty masculine desire to open envelopes and locks and dig big fuck-off tunnels under East Germany. I was enthralled for about 950 pages, which is much more than I would have given a lesser yarn-spinner. Then I realized I essentially had two full books left to read, the deadline of the interlibrary loan was fast approaching, and I had yet to sense any momentum of purpose. I asked a man at my book club who had read it if I should struggle through the rest and he said, don’t bother.

+++

Partir, Tahar ben Jelloun. 2007. 333pp. In French. University library.

Some movements midway through struck me as sentimental or abrupt, but the main plot line in particular is wrenching—precise architectures of longing and despair. I want to read more in French, and until I do, there are dimensions I can’t perceive. Rhythms, intertextual gestures, word-choices, et cetera. I look forward to sharpening those new senses and I am glad this was my first experiment in the effort.

+++

Stealing Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic, Neville Drury. 2011. 376pp.

A very useful summary of Anglo-Western occult thought through to the year 2000. Probably indispensable in terms of scope and spread. As an anthropologist, Drury remains dutifully uncritical—of course, sound method—but this leaves me still looking for a writer who doesn’t seem to literally believe in the collective unconsciousness to help me think through, with sympathy and rigour, all the mechanisms and movement behind the attraction of these modern magic(k)al fantasies invented nearly from nothing. We need to feel important to the universe, I guess. We can hold ourselves in indeterminate quantum superpositions of belief and unbelief.

+++

Movies & TV:

House of Games (1987) dir. David Mamet
The Holdovers (2023) dir. Alexander Payne
Love and Anarchy [Film d'amore e d'anarchia, ovvero: stamattina alle 10, in via dei Fiori, nella nota casa di tolleranza...,] (1973) dir. Lina Wertmüller
The Third Man (1949) dir. Carol Reed
Johnny Guitar (1954) dir. Nicholas Ray
Silence of the Sea [Le silence de la mer] (1949) dir. Jean-Pierre Melville
The Zone of Interest (2023) dir. Jonathan Glazer

Notable short works:

"Catching Copper," "Snake-Light" by Natalie Diaz (Postcolonial Love Poem). I also read the rest of this sumptuous and sharp collection, but I'm not well read in poetry or poetry criticism, so I haven't written a whole shebang, and will probably continue not to as I read more poetry. The book is very beautiful.

♫

(2024 song of the year.... call me basic all you like.)

Current Mood: late
Current Music: chicago - sufjan stevens

Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier. 1938. 678pp. [large print--I needed it short notice for a book club]. Local library.

The first work to make me truly understand what the theorized "gothic romance" means, its appeal and thematic density. The ingenue's increasingly dissolute marriage to her grim older husband gains a terrible dreamlike iconicity—she's tricked into an offensive costume at a fancy dress ball, and so on. The mansion, the rhododendrons. Maybe we’ll look back on Sharp Objects this way in fifty years. A skillfully voluptuous popular novel intended to excite the senses can naturally transform, over time, as the familiarity it intended becomes strange, and all that it communicates into its new era is the distilled quiddity of human fear and desire. An infinite chamber of mirrors, a projection of a projection of a projection…

+++

The Men Who Stare At Goats, Jon Ronson. 2004. 272pp. Local library.

An excellent two-day read, very funny and then very unfunny. Ronson ties a damning connection through his initial investigation into the wacky and bumbling psychic endeavours of jackass generals to America’s war crimes in the Middle East and at black sites like Guantánamo Bay—a thread that Streatfeild’s Brainwash below picks up, but which before this work I had never followed so clearly. Provokes unease: hasn’t the American empire succeeded in recuperating its whole midcentury into a twisted tale for true-crime microcelebrities? (Did you know acid was invented by the CIA? Available wherever you get your podcasts.) Compare also Tim Weiner’s CIA history Legacy of Ashes, maybe for January, which comes out of the gate snarling provocatively that the CIA’s whole history is merely shambling ineptitude, irresponsible to the point of horror. No masterminds, no hijinx. The son of Frank Olson, a Company man who died under mysterious circumstances in 1953, tells Ronson bitterly, “The old story is so much fun. Why would anyone want to replace it with a story that’s not fun?” This is especially jarring to consider while reading a movie tie-in edition, which prominently features Clooney’s noble profile, emblazoned over the slogan NO GOATS, NO GLORY — ha ha!

+++

Brainwash: The Secret History of Mind Control, Dominic Streatfeild. 2006. 432pp. Local library.

Lucid, restraining the sensational instinct. Aware of reality and morality, which is to be prized in popular discourse on this topic. An impressive body of research, cleanly structured. An academic work might have taken additional inquiries toward what really mystifies me. (An academic career, more like, I guess.) What, then, is a personality? What is a belief? What currents of culture cause these governments, doctors, and parents of cultists to desire a fearful world where the mind can be forcibly remolded by a hostile actor? What does all this say about us—our resilient and chaotic minds; our hunger for control?

+++

The Rebel Angels, Robinson Davies. 1981. 326pp. Local library.

Sheerly puzzling. I’ve never read anything like it, which is a compliment. I like novels in which intelligent people attempt to one-up each other in dinner scene after dinner scene. (Essentially also the structure of a John le Carré novel, except spies drink scotch, and professors drink wine.) This chuffed upper-class discourse lulls you into complacency, but Davies is lying in wait to pull the ribbon out. Looking forward to Fifth Business someday.

+++

Movies and TV:

Fanny and Alexander [Fanny och Alexander] (1982) dir. Ingmar Bergman
Genie (2023) dir. Sam Boyd
Scrooged (1988) dir. Richard Donner
Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence [戦場のメリークリスマス, Senjou no merii kurisumasu] (1983) dir. Nagisa Ōshima
Deep State (2018 - 2019) creators Simon Maxwell, Matthew Parkhill, Robert Connolly

♫

Current Mood: feldspar
Current Music: fatalist palmistry - WHY?

The Master and Margarita [Мастер и Маргарита, Master i Margarita], Mikhail Bulgakov. 1967. 415pp. Transl. by Michael Glenny. I have no idea where I got this book; maybe it appeared spontaneously in my house.

The Devil comes to Moscow as a Looney Toon. Its high stature puzzles me some, which is not to say I didn't like it. Among so many scenes of wacky demonic slapstick (p. 360, "the cat whipped a Browning automatic from behind its back"), the sequences with deeper ambitions are outnumbered, but some are captivating--the woman, freed from social decorum by the Devil, bathing naked in the black river; that troubling (bedevilling?) novel-within-a-novel of Pontius Pilate. Confusing to follow at times, for which I feel secure, after Brothers Karamazov, blaming Bulgakov and not myself.

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Travels in Hyperreality, Umberto Eco. 1986. 324pp. Transl. by William Weaver. Shed Bookstore, Calgary, AB.

Eco's great enthusiasm for everything and willingness to speak on anything are perhaps marks of overambition that characterize the popular academic philosopher, but the results are often endearing and interesting. Stellar turns of thought appear scattered throughout; the gestalt doesn't always strike the balance of rigour and poetics. The title essay is worth the rest of the collection. Writers at the level of fame Eco attained are often incentivized to publish their less favourite works alongside their excellent works so as to make up the length of a book, and I have the impression many of these pieces were written under deadline for magazines. Prendiamo quello pane, Eco.

p. 217: "...marked by the plots of the symbolic, which, as always happens, has proved producer of reality."

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Lesbian Nuns: Breaking Silence, eds. Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan. 1985. 362pp. The Book Shop, Penticton, BC.

This collection of almost 50 submitted essays and interviews from women across North America of the titular description are striking and beautiful for their great alikeness. Of course, as a result, the reader without pre-existing interest in the archival and consciousness-raising aims of the collection may find she hits saturation somewhere in the middle. Across the cloistered worlds described, the interpretations of desires and the boundaries between them are blurred, friendship between women is as troublesome as marriage, making love often occurs over the clothes, "chastity" is employed to describe a hundred middle positions of promise and compromise. A short and memorable essay comes from a South American woman--she withholds the name of her home country for privacy--who joins, then leaves, a Benedictine convent in Connecticut after her female lover dies in a plane crash. She says, p. 215: "Sometimes, I remember little things. I can see my cell right now. I can see the chapel. Somehow I cannot see the garden; it is lost. I walked there many times but I cannot see it now."

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Movies and TV:

Stop Making Sense (1984) dir. Jonathan Demme, again
Anatomy of a Fall (2023) dir. Justine Triet
Salt of the Earth (1954) dir. Herbert J. Biberman
Sisters [Māsas] (2023) dir. Linda Olte
The Master (2012) dir. Paul Thomas Anderson
Birdy (1984) dir. Alan Parker
Breaking Dawn Part 1 (2011) dir. Bill Condon

♫

Current Mood: foggy
Current Music: tower of song - leonard cohen

Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood. 2003. 416pp. Local library. Half-finished.

I remembered disliking this novel of grotesque biohorror and scientific hubris as a young-adult SF/F fan, because of all things I don't think I found it strange enough. I suspect I was shortly off of Mieville's Iron Council, for example, in which a major character wears the mask of a bull because the horns hide the arms of her dead baby, which were grafted permanently to the sides of her head by the state. One benefit of an intellectual upbringing in genre fiction is that your sense of strangeness is expanded. Novels can be many things other than strange; but if a novel wants to be strange, the aficionado of strangeness may find it parochial and domesticated if it isn't sufficiently challenging. In concept, many things in this novel have confrontational potential, not least the presence of Oryx, a mysterious woman from a Southeast Asian country (unnamed) sold to quasi-pornographers by her rural parents. But for some reason, I never felt Atwood really wanted me uncomfortable, and that's a loss.

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Gilead, Marilynne Robinson. 2004. 247pp. Mac's Fireweed Books, Whitehorse, YT.

Such gorgeous restraint. Is this all there is in the world? Light and water? Thank God.

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A Two-Spirit Journey: The Autobiography of a Lesbian Ojibwa-Cree Elder, Ma-Nee Chacaby with Mary Louisa Plummer. 2016. 231pp. University of Manitoba book sale, purchased for me by a coworker.

Memoir is not a genre I have spent a lot of time in; this book made me regret that. Hearing a story is intimate. In sociolinguistics, increasingly personal interviews are the method of choice to elicit unguarded speech; a professor once told us to ask, "Was there ever a time you thought you might die?" Chacaby's story is shared with forthright care and spans an extraordinary range of human experience, from an upbringing in the bush in which she wandered, camped and played alone to the radical women's community of the late 1980s. Sensitive but stoic, impressive.

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Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee. 1999. 215pp. Little free library.

A novel like a still deep pool of water. I have been continually sinking my hand into it then drawing back, intimidated. An unstatement about power, and about not only the history of power but the future and memory of power. Now, as always in history, a timely moment to be asked how we will live with the things we did sincerely when we did not believe ourselves to be cruel. How to live, well or poorly, with the growing awareness of our prideful wrongdoing and our blindness. The novel is a site of interior journey, not a model of how to live, and there are choices here that are difficult for me to accept, as they are meant to be.

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Movies & TV:

Stop Making Sense (1984) dir. Jonathan Demme
Bottoms (2023) dir. Emma Seligman
Over the Garden Wall (2014) showrunner Patrick McHale
Nope (2022) dir. Jordan Peele

♫

Current Mood: ill-kempt
Current Music: after hours - sarah vaughn

The Plague [La Peste], Albert Camus. 1947. 278pp. Transl. by Stuart Gilbert, 1948. Sigla Books, Calgary, AB.

I left this novel underwhelmed and troubled. Despite moments of power, I found it overall sentimental, simplistic, unworthy of what I remembered of Camus. The cast of heroes fight a plague in the French Algerian city of Oran, which is an allegory for the Nazi occupation of France. Some of them die heroically, and then we beat the plague. Bully for us.

Other readers I discussed it with reintroduced for me the potential unreliability of the narrator, the doctor Rieux. Then a whole parallel novel opened up, conditioned most likely by my concurrent slow viewing of Marcel Ophul's The Sorrow and the Pity, in which the lacunas in Rieux's narration suggest searing criticism of French resistance mythology after the war. What was complex is made dramatic and simple. The targeted, agentive evil that dominates warscapes is transformed, by Rieux, or by Camus-as-Rieux, into a universal, headless "plague" which certainly has no parellel within one's own conscience or, say, in the completely subliminal context, French-occupied Algeria. There is a lot to say about this parellel novel; unsure whether it exists on the page or only in my mind.

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The Brothers Karamazov [Братья Карамазовы, Brat'ya Karamazovy], Fyodor Dostoevsky. 1880. 776pp. Transl. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1990. Circle Square Secondhand, Missoula, MT.

My received impression of Dostoevsky was exclusively of grim misery. How puzzling in hindsight: he's quick and funny, and BK is full of bright voicy exchanges, satirical bluster, narrative tricksiness. The titular brothers are three heirs in a small Russian village, entangled almost hilariously in nested romantic-financial triangles, whose tension with their father suddenly explodes in violence and lands one of them in the courtroom. To really describe how modern and engaging it is is almost to cheapen it by association with modernity, but you can see that the serious craft that animates works like, I don't know, The Sopranos, had its precedents in the popular serialists whom we so revere today.

Strangely I also received the impression somewhere that Dostoevsky was an atheist. Reading the novel under this impression is very powerful. Fyodor is the derelict father-god-author(!) whom nascent modernity may or may not have killed, and the final scene, in which a group of men and boys ecstatically agree they will reunite in heaven with their dead child friend, shreds the soul to fine ribbon. Several important developments strike me as instead sentimental and unearned if intended in religious sincerity.

It's not that I don't love God-in-literature. Tolstoy's revelatory numinous in Karenina's wheat field is one of my lasting spiritual touchstones, with all its class complications. (As I write this I am being overwhelmed by Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, for next month.) I will continue to recommend BK enthusiastically, not only as a great work but as an accessible classic. I suspect if I reread the whole novel with the correct context I would like it just as much but differently. Unfortunately, it's 700 pages long. So for several years at least I leave it here.

Lest I finish on a minor chord I am moved to mention that a crowning sequence from 3.8.4 to 3.8.8, a sort of tortured bacchanal under the sword of Damocles, may replay scene by scene in my mind until I die.

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Movies:

Shiva Baby (2020) dir. Emma Seligman

Notable short stories and essays:

"Family Walls" by Maeve Brennan, 1973 (in The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, March 2023, Claire-Louise Bennett and Deborah Treisman)

Current Mood: scratchy
Current Music: peace on the rise - chad vangaalen

Libra, Don DeLillo. 1988. 456pp. Charity book sale.

The classic imaginary of a CIA conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. Imagined or no, it studies with powerful verisimilitude the awkward wavefields of intention and influence that half-accidentally produce events in the world even on the global scale. Brutally satirical about the ideologies of men, “solitaries…who plan eternally toward some total moment.” DeLillo’s famous clipped style, constantly turning left midway through sentences, demands more focus than it seems it ought to. The total moment itself is hypnotic, eternal.

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The Third Reich [El Tercer Reich], Roberto Bolaño. 1989, published posthumously in 2010. Transl. Natasha Wimmer, 2011. 360pp. CAVITY Curiosity Shop, Victoria, BC.

Captivating, mysterious. Having read no other Bolaño I can't speculate on how its unique path to publication should affect interpretation. This cautionary parable of fascist gamer vacation is breakneck and hooky in the manner of a popular mystery, but the incomprehensible drifting so-called plotline belies any accusation of pandering. Very funny sometimes. Nightmarish sometimes. Once I opened it at 3AM and chickened out.

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Lenore Tawney: A Retrospective, ed. Kathleen Nugent Mangan. 1990. 160pp (exhibition catalogue). University library.
Agnes Martin: Writings, Drawings, Remembrances, Arne Glimcher. 2012. 364pp (art book). University library.
Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe, ed. Karen Patterson. 2019. 304pp (exhibition catalogue). Local library.

Apparently Agnes Martin once said, “Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my paintings." In Retrospective, Tawney quotes Max Beckmann--himself quoting "a famous cabalist?"--“If you wish to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.” I love both these artists and love to imagine them as volatile young women in Coenties Slip. Somehow Tawney’s tall woven figures have become my mental template for a whole variety of reclusive women’s art which centres meditation, the altered state, the communion with the unknown which is the divine. Priestess work. I tried to explain to my brother why Martin affects me so deeply. These paintings, I told him, are six feet tall. When you see them in person you experience something inside, and that, not the painting, is the painting. I don’t know if I was making sense.

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Movies:

Joy Ride (2023) dir. Adele Lim
Happy Together [春光乍洩, Ceon1 gwong1 zaa3 sit3] (1997) dir. Wong-Kar Wai
Oppenheimer (2023) dir. Christopher Nolan

Notable short stories and essays:

"Theory of the Dérive" [Théorie de la dérive] by Guy Debord, 1958, transl. Ken Knapp
"Meet Me in Iram" by Sofia Samatar, 2018 (in Lightspeed Magazine). Reread.

♫

Current Mood: aerating
Current Music: see america right - the mountain goats

Asphalt, Carl Hancock Rux. 2004. 255pp. Little free library.

This novel seems in hindsight to have a place in my world of ideas where I should have known something would fit. I can sense I will recommend it someday to somebody who will need it. Initially presents itself as a story about a stoic drifter with no past who agrees to DJ parties at a squat in a wartorn alternate Brooklyn, and spirals off into many unusual places, not all of which I understand on first reading. Contemplative, drifting, yet immediate and particular, capable of sudden blows of meaning that leave you weak and dizzy. Occasionally the ramshackle sentences threaten a wince, especially in moments of gothic-lurid family tragedy. But Rux has a certain undeniable control.

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Blankets, Craig Thompson. 2003. 582pp (graphic novel). Pages bookstore, Calgary, AB.

Centres around an intense week’s meeting between two long-distance teenage lovers, one of whom, the male writer, is deeply religious. Its rhythm captures a special voiceless pensiveness particular in my mind to the form of the graphic novel. In winter I hiked into a snow-covered canyon and sat alone on a fallen tree and listened out under the bright sun. The empty plate of the snow carried sound for kilometres. I heard a branch snap and then for a while rustling nothing. That not-quite-silence is what I can hear in my mind in the book. The love scenes are extremely moving, and not only because I obtained this book during an intense week’s meeting with someone I love who lives far away, but for that reason too.

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Ducks, Kate Beaton. 2022. 430pp (graphic novel). Borrowed from roommate.

Beaton’s memoir of working in the Alberta oil fields as a young Newfoundlander. My first time seeing these peculiarly Canadian, peculiarly Albertan, permutations of capitalist alienation drawn out (ha ha). In our country which we ourselves barely consider as a philosophical object, in those parts of our country with gravel roads where your birthplace can still be identified by your accent and surname. Our country on which oligarchs in suits in rooms play out their insecurities against the swinging dick of the States using men with backaches to operate huge bristling machines; the men with backaches play out their insecurities using the women. Here and there the vignettes are precariously stacked or on-the-nose, and yet, the subject is so vividly evoked, the details chosen are in some cases so poignant, that ultimately, without your noticing, Beaton’s nails dig in. I burst into tears twice in the last four pages. In my city, at almost every cocktail bar, you can buy a thousand-dollar ounce of liquor. That money from the sludge gets spent like it'll be worthless tomorrow.

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Double Teenage, Joni Murphy. 2016. 197pp. Won in a draw from Shelf Life Books, Calgary.

Beautiful work. Murphy’s prose in the narrative portions is flawless, effortless. The coming-of-age of two girl-women from Las Cruces, New Mexico, dissolves toward the end in a collage of theory which in my (uneducated) sense does not attain the depth and delicacy of feeling the actual story attains at its best. (Of course this move out and in from ironic meta-distance can be beautiful and productive, but is it enough on its own?) The most heartbreaking development occurs at the end of the first act. That could have been alone a generational novella. I guess I may be searching for something this work is not. I'm becoming primed by skimming Kenneth Goldsmith's Uncreative Writing (next month's post?) to defend the humble novel in which events occur to people. Perhaps I tend to sense cynically that theory-novelists allow themselves to draw back from ending their novels because ending a novel very well is sometimes more difficult than saying what you mean outright, with citations. God knows most of us struggle with either.

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Movies:

Asteroid City (2023) dir. Wes Anderson

♫

Current Mood: juniper
Current Music: humo en los ojos - toña la negra

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