feb/mar 2024

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.

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"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?”

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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.

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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.

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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

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