december 2023

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…

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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!

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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?

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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.

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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

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