Book 31 of 2018

Thomas Cromwell is one of the supreme Machiavellians. Mantel's novel follows him from his lowly, brutish beginnings as the son of an abusive blacksmith who often beat him near to death and thence to the heights of power as King Henry VIII's most trusted and most feared counselor.

Surprisingly, as Cromwell plots the destruction of his foes and Henry's foes he remains a sympathetic character. One can't help but admire his astute knowledge of languages, finance, business, fine art and crafts, his keen apprehension of human nature and psychology. His past as a soldier and street brawler who knows the heft of a knife and how to use it, his use of sophisticated Italian memory palace techniques to keep reams of data organized in his mind--all of this makes him eminently likable despite his dastardly and often deadly machinations.

He has a nose for hypocrisy, and hypocrites tend to fall first in his schemes, and when they don't fall first their karma is used to keep Henry's world in order and to achieve his aims. Cromwell makes himself the indispensable man, and nobles from old blood lines tremble lest he target them.

I found the book deeply involving and fascinating, and look forward to Part 2...

Book 30 of 2018

What a great little novel! It's a classic haunted house tale with a multi-dimensional twist. Once you figure out what's happening to the victims you wish, as many do at horror films, that you could intervene somehow and stop them from doing what they are about to do. That's what makes dramatic irony so cool, right?

Of course a few of the victims are really distasteful people, so it's fun to see them get their occult comeuppance. But even they don't deserve this fate. Well, maybe the cop does.

As in Cloud Atlas, Mitchell keeps track of multiple narrative lines and characters and they are all fully fleshed out with profound and individual and entertaining back stories. Of course these lines and characters all end in a similar manner because their fate is pulling them gravitationally toward the singularity of Slade House. We get to experience this same fate from different points of view, and that's a fun exercise for a writer, to imagine how different people would experience and describe the same sorrowful fate. And Mitchell shows off by keeping them in character as they are snuffed--the things they notice and how they notice them are well done.

The little alley where Slade House hides itself is carefully and quaintly wrought. All of the settings are classic ghost story with 21st century updates. The House itself is truly entertaining, and its means of haunting is unique.

And the book, though creepy and harrowing, is also funny as hell. All good haunted house novels blend humor and despair. Mitchell does so quite well.

A great Halloween read. You can finish it between handing out candies Wednesday.

Books 28 and 29 of 2018

One of my favorite genres is the drug revelation memoir. I love reading authors attempting to describe going off the rails. I think of Walter Benjamin writing about hashish, or Aldous Huxley waxing philosophically about mescalin, or Castaneda's descriptions of peyote trips, or Burroughs, etc.

One of the coolest and most interesting thinkers and describers of such experiences was Terrence McKenna. And McKenna and his ideas are a large part of Lin's book. In fact, the only parts of the book which are at all interesting are when Lin is summarizing McKenna. Which leads me to ask why the hell anyone would read this book when they can just read McKenna or watch him on YouTube.

Because--no offense to Mr. Lin--this is the most boring book I've ever read about this topic. Or any topic. It's pointless. It's meandering. It says nothing new. Even the passages about depression and feeling alienated are dull...and another of my favorite genres is the descent into madness memoir by people who feel isolated and alienated and depressed.

How can a writer with any skills at all write tedious and wholly unimaginative descriptions of DMT and salvia divinorum experiences? I simply can't get my head around it. He smokes DMT and spends pages describing feeling distracted and paranoid and moving in and out of a tent he built in the corner from a blanket. He can't make a salvia experience at all tangible or interesting? Even Miley Cyrus can do that.

Nobody cares if you felt suspicious for six hours straight after she shared her DMT with you. How many pages can you spend giving her the hairy eye-ball while she wonders what the fuck your problem is? What did you see or feel inside that realm? That's what's interesting. McKenna and virtually every other writer creates edge-of-the-seat, earth-shattering descriptive passages of breathtaking wizardry about DMT. Lin's passages sag like over wet noodles. I remember as a novice writer in the Temple University MA program how Toby Olson complimented my description of a mushroom experience and pumped me up with lavish praise during a workshop, only to say "but anyone can write a good trip, it's almost cliched."

Mr. Lin--anyone can write a good trip. Why couldn't you? I read something by you before and that was better than this, but not better enough that I would want to read whatever you published between then and now. And after having read this, I definitely do not want to read whatever you published between that and this, because this was so bad. Sorry, dude.




Thank goodness Ms. Due provided a cleanse for the above atrocity. This is a fine selection of creepy fiction, and runs the gamut from traditional ghost stories which are finely crafted and inhabit an interesting niche to more action/adventure sci-fi thrillers. I particularly liked the one about demons in a Florida swamp who take over infants for a while in the summer--has a nice sardonic tone and delicious Twilight Zone moral! And best of all are the rather intense post-apocalyptic stories at the end. Definitely should go on your Halloween reading list.

Books 25, 26, and 27 of 2018

It took me forever to read this novel. Not because I got bogged down, or because it was so long...but because I didn't want to finish it. It could go on for 5000 pages and I would love that. The characters were so compelling I wanted it to keep going forever. And the characters are not only humans, but also trees. And trees are cool as fuck. So maybe there will be a sequel from the perspective of an elm or a red maple.

The first half of the novel I thought "This isn't a novel." It definitely stretched the boundaries of any of the traditional ideas of what a novel is or was or could be. Initially I thought The Overstory was simply a collection of vignettes or novellas with a thematic link. But they all eventually coalesce and the threads end up woven together in a satisfying canopy more in line with the traditional definition of a novel.

Now if only I could remember the other Richard Powers novel I read.  Or perhaps I've read two? Can't recall, though, even when I look at the titles. Something to do with Israel? I've read too many damn books. I'm totally stumped.



There's a blurb from "O Magazine" inside the front cover of this Vintage paperback which says the writing is "reminiscent of Henry James."

HAHAHAHAHOHOHOOOTEEHEEHAR

OK, had to get that out of my system. Not sure if I'm laughing about an "O Mag" writer referencing Henry James, or the content of the blurb itself.

There is some fine writing in this book, but nothing on par with James, even James at his worst is better than this. But it's got some good bits. I mean, the novel is about a blowjob which lasts 120 pages. And that's a pretty good blow job, though the participants are pretty bored during the blow job, as they spend a lot of time reminiscing, remembering, fantasizing, philosophizing, and otherwise discursing all over the place. I mean James also does that, but much more subtly and he was a savage when it came to point of view and characterization, whereas Minot, though she writes a tight sentence, well her POV shifts a lot and yet the voice often seems the same inside different characters. So the blower and the blowee are bloviating internally in similar ways. And alas, neither character is particularly likeable or interesting--in fact, they suck, and well yes one of them definitely sucks but they both do actually. So my verdict about Rapture is not quite that it blows, but that it blows for a book about blowing and being blown. It should be hard to make a book featuring fellatio as its central action tedious, but Minot dug deep into her writer's bag of tricks and managed it, right down to the climax. But to be fair, there is also some thoughtful stuff about gender and power and the problematic dynamics of sex and relationships given the complexities of gender and power. Just not enough of it to make this worth reading.



A somewhat tepid yet occasionally interesting book about Chomsky and the anarchistic ideal of mutual aid. The artwork is not so great, sometimes the gist vanishes and memoir becomes the focus, but I enjoyed the bit about Occupy Wall Street and its library.

Books 22, 23, and 24 of 2018

A Smiley novel without Smiley. I mean, Smiley is there, and his tendrils are woven throughout. But he is only very briefly present in the novel in a physical sense.

Alec Leamas is a more Bond-ish spy than Smiley, who mixes it up mostly in an intellectual sense. Leamas is an action man who works in the field. And his fate really lays bare the realities of that era and that region and the cold callousness of the Cold War. And that Cold War did not end as suspected decades ago but was carried on by the defeated side in new and ingenious ways. This is a novel so taught it thrums like power lines. I read it in about ten minutes.



I enjoy the 'descent into madness' genre of memoir. And when the memoir is written by a Surrealist and the long-time lover of Max Ernst at a time when the entire world had gone mad, well then of course it will be a worthwhile read. The first half of the book is an exquisite introduction, analysis, and biography of Leonora Carrington which is just as good as the memoir itself.



I just may begin collecting dew when the planets are in the correct houses, because Hall lets more of the cat out of the bag than anyone else I've read.

Living that Expat Life--Panama

Books 20 and 21 of 2018

Have for a few years intended to read Le Carre. Call for the Dead has one of those immediately appealing English narrators who pull you up to the fire side and regale you with a finely spun tale. You know the sort of narrator of which I speak. And Smiley is an appealing bumbling sort of wise detective--I'd expected more of a spy/intrigue novel, but this is actually a murder mystery with some espionage overtones.

It's a good time to re-visit this Cold War era, what with a new Cold War in the wings, or perhaps the surprising new end of the Cold War after everyone thought it had already ended? We shall see. But this world of George Smiley and East and West and Iron Curtains and jockeying between Capitalists and Communists is the era in which I grew up, and how odd it is that it feels so distant now.

I found the novel appealing enough to continue with the series of George Smiley books. I like the portrait of England and English class structure after the War as its empire is dismantled and handed over to the Americans. There is the standard upper-crust snobbery and casual homophobia and anti-Semitism, but that of course was a feature of the age, and these features of English society are lampooned by LeCarre as much as recorded by him.

  

This installment is much less engaging than the first. This is more a Gothic mystery/horror tale with a gruesome murder at a decaying prestigious private school. The best bits are a sort of Evelyn Waugh-ish character whose disgust at the English class system and descriptions of its fraudulent institutions is rather amusing. But the plot is awkward and clunky, the characters are types who turn out in the end to not be what they seem a la virtually every episode of Murder, She Wrote, and as Le Carre describes the book in its introduction, there are some good instances of satire but overall it's a failed mystery thriller. I'd agree. But I shall continue with the series despite this disappointment. The end is particularly bad, as all the clues which have pointed one way suddenly are forced to point another and there is a quick arrest and then it just ends.

Book 19 of 2018

The Night Ocean: A Novel

When we were living in Baltimore and going to karaoke with a group of regulars a new guy joined us often. He was one of these young 30-ish guys who sport a carefully manicured beard, and who have a beard maintenance kit always to hand with a comb and some lotion to comb into the beard when too much beer or gin and tonic has frothed it up. He also had an aggressively maintained mustachio which curved elvishly up into spirals at each end of his upper lip. He couldn’t sing a lick, but was an enthusiastic singer nonetheless. In between singing, we drank and talked about shit. It’s what one does with karaoke buddies.

One night he pronounced Cthulhu incorrectly while discussing a meme, and I pointed it out and corrected his pronunciation, and he responded “I play Dungeons and Dragons, I think I know how to correctly say Cthulhu.” After I got over my initial shock that D & D had become a thing again (hipsters—is there nothing they won’t mine from the past and resuscitate with gusto?), I took up the challenge.

“Have you read Lovecraft?” I responded. He replied in the negative. “Well it’s interesting that you would know how to pronounce Cthulhu when you’ve never read Lovecraft. I have read EVERYTHING, and own the Arkham House four-volume Collected Works in hardback. My Honors English high school literature paper was a Jungian analysis of Lovecraft’s “Through the Gates of the Silver Key,” and I was turned on to L. Sprague de Camp’s bio of HPL by my English teacher that year. I have perused many of his letters and have even endured his Vogon-quality poetry about mushrooms from Yuggoth. I read S.T. Joshi’s biography, Stephen King’s musings on HPL in Danse Macabre, and even read Michel Houellebecq’s acid little philosophical tome about Lovecraft’s worldview in the original French. I have a blog whose title is a Lovecraft pun. In many texts both scholarly and otherwise I have read how Lovecraft pronounced Cthulhu, so I’m pretty sure I know how to pronounce it, and I’m positive you do not.”

It’s a truism in life that know-it-alls are assholes. This guy was a know-it-all without any backup for his know-it-all-ism. I’m a know-it-all who brings out the heavy (and nerdy) artillery when needed.

When I was a teenager reading Lovecraft nobody in my circles knew who the fuck he was. Until Mrs. Hardin, my 12^th grade English teacher, I don’t think I met anyone who had even heard of him, let alone read him. And now Lovecraft permeates our culture. Every time I see the latest Hollywood schlock there are HPL references, subtle or not. TV shows like Stranger Things are Lovecraft light. All the comic book films owe substantial debts to HPL. Political memes with Cthulu, T-shirts, mugs, plush toys—he’s everywhere. People who have never read Lovecraft and who would need a dictionary to get through the first two pages of “The Outsider” or “The Music of Eric Zahn” know about Cthulhu.

Many writers have been obsessions in my lifetime. Some of those obsessions re-wired my brain and came to permeate my day-to-day life. Lovecraft was the first to really do that for me, even though I only read him for a few years and stopped reading him by the time I was no longer a teen. His stories are for the most part awful—even the best ones are at best dis-satisfying. Trying to go back and re-read them is pointless; I can never slog through more than a few pages. But there was something about that alternate reality, and that cold archaic worldview…and those entities beyond time and space! For a formative time of my life, he set a standard, and though he was quickly replaced by Dostoevski and then Henry James and then others...he was a key figure in my youth and remains vitally important to me.

The Night Ocean is about HPL specifically, but more generally about stories and writers permeating one’s existence, saturating one’s being. It is an extended nerdgasm, not just for weird fiction fans, but for sci-fi geeks, political wonks, fans of archaeology, for beats and hippies. It’s also a reminder about how far we’ve come as a society in terms of acceptance of alternate lifestyles and tendencies.

Let me just run through some of the characters: Isaac Asimov, William S. Burroughs, Robert Barlow, Frederick Pohl, Hart Crane, Roy Cohn, Whitaker Chambers, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo. Houellebecq is included but is thinly disguised.

This novel is a well-imagined forgery about well-imagined forgeries about a weird Luddite racist throwback whose peculiar imaginings have tentacled their way down through the last century and a half, and whose distasteful personal beliefs and philosophy can teach Americans a lot about ourselves to this day. The Night Ocean was not what I expected, but it was a hoot. I learned some things about Lovecraft i did not know!

And, gleefully, the correct pronunciation of Cthulhu is explained herein.

Books 15, 16, 17 and 18 of 2018

Brothers of the Gun is a harrowing first-hand account of the collapse of Syria into civil war. The story is centered on Raqqa. The narrator is a student of English Literature who sloughs off what he regards as a sort of backwoods religiosity in his upbringing, and who wants to experience the wider world. The Arab Spring brings hope, but this is quickly dashed by barrel bombs from the Assad regime, and then by warring factions, and finally by the arrival of ISIS.

Marwan Hisham at once recreates and critiques his Syrian culture and history with wit and sensitivity. He bemoans the cost of revolt and what was lost as a result, but not without humor and wisdom. The people he describes are hardscrabble survivors who are determined to build the best life they can in increasingly dire circumstances. I can't recommend it enough. Fantastic illustrations by Molly Crabapple from photos by the author lend further pathos to the text.




A colleague middle school teacher told me she was having her Lit students read Tripods: The White Mountains over the summer break. I'd never heard of the novel, which she claimed was her favorite childhood book in New Zealand.

Not sure how I missed it, but it was a great read--very exciting and sort of what the world might have been like had Wells' War of the Worlds ended in a loss for humanity. Great fun.

 


Manly P. Hall brings the wisdom of the Mystery Schools into the modern age. Want to incorporate Pythogrean principals into your busy late-phase capitalist existence? These short tomes are full of helpful tips.

Can we see your papers, please?

This story from Alternet reminded me of a recent experience:

My wife and I spent a couple nights down on the Bay at a Calvert County AirBNB a couple weeks back. We'd exhausted ourselves selling and donating and gifting about 95% of our worldly possessions in preparation for moving internationally, and needed to go someplace to get our heads together in peace and quiet.

One day we visited Point Lookout in St. Mary's County and spent a couple hours walking around the shore watching wildlife. On the way into the park we'd noticed police pulling people over but hadn't really thought much about it. Inside the park several Latin families were swimming, having cookouts, and fishing from the pier. When we left the park we were pulled over for "speeding," though I was only doing 30 MPH. The cop who pulled us over had a couple conflicting stories. First, he said "We are pulling everyone over today." Then, he said "The speed limit is 15 here and you and the caravan behind you were doing 30--no big deal, we are just reminding people of speeding." There was no posted limit coming out of the park. Then I noticed that all the cars behind us which had been pulled over also had already been waved on. He chose to run my license, however.

The real reason had nothing to do with speeding, but because my wife is a person of color. The cars which were waved on immediately had only Caucasians inside. The police held my license for about 15 minutes and then gave me a warning for speeding and let us go.

This was an ICE operation, though the cops were in cars marked Maryland National Park Police. They were flak-jacketed militarized cops. They were polite and professional, but they detained us because of race, and under false pretenses. And the stated reason they were pulling people over was a facade. Presumably a "patriot" and "good citizen" felt uncomfortable with the number of Latin families in the park and called the cops?

At any rate, it doesn't take three police vehicles with six officers and a K-9 unit to do a speeding sting on a small park on the Chesapeake Bay.

Books 13 and 14 of 2018

The very satisfying conclusion to an entertaining sci-fi/fantasy series. I've been thinking of re-reading some of the old-ass sci-fi I grew up just for kicks (Asimov's Foundation series, for example). But this took care of that craving.

The best sci-fi, of course, deals with social issues of the current era and projects them into a potential future. Here we've got racism and ecological meddling and the sort of re-sacralization of Nature that Terrence McKenna preached all wrapped up in a tidy bundle.

Oh you crazy moon, you took my heart...


\

Carlos Castaneda learned this shit from Don Juan and it took like 8 books. Here, Don Miguel Ruiz distills it down and you don't need to eat peyote buttons or smoke some weird ass herb bag to get there.

Books 11 and 12 of 2018

Shirley Jackson is the best. If you drew a triangle with Edith Wharton and Flannery O'Conner and Dorothy West at the three points and muttered an arcane incantation Shirley Jackson would pop up in the triangle like in the window of a Magic 8 Ball.

Her stories are often witty and acerbically so, critical of social mores and hypocrisy in a most delightfully precise manner. Distasteful characters are deflated and humiliated. Most often there is a supernatural twist of the sort later associated with Rod Serling. I was pleased to note that a few stories in here are thematically similar to The Haunting of Hill House, which is my favorite novel of all time, and the one I've re-read most often.

I recommend this tight little volume. Some guffaws, some gasps, some grins.




Read this as part of a graduate course on Greek History. I'm taking it in a rush to try and get another few credits to prevent my teacher certificate from expiring in June.

This is a breezy series of lectures about Greek History from the Minoans forward to the Hellenic Period. There are interesting asides about archaeology vs. myth vs. contemporary accounts.

I found it mostly valuable as a refresher in all that shit I read in Herodotus 25 years ago. If you've not read Herodotus, read him first, and then 25 years from now listen to this to remind yourself what you learned. But if you don't intend to ever read Herodotus, and want to know about the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian Wars and Alexander and all that jazz, then just go ahead and listen to this now.

Books 9 and 10 of 2018

Denis Johnson has passed away. While he was in the process of dying he composed some final stories which feature characters who ruminate largely on mortality and dying. Or at least on finding ways to kill time while waiting for death to arrive.

If you have loved Denis Johnson stories in the past--for example the collection Jesus' Son: Stories, which first caught my eye 25 years ago when I was Literature Department Bookseller at Borders Books & Music store 043 in Towson, MD--then you should definitely get this as a worthy final chapter in the work of a fine writer.

The stories are reminiscent of Cheever, or Carver, or even Sherwood Anderson. They have a thin veneer of middle-class suburban respectability belied by derangement and perversion, obsession and addiction. But there is a deep empathy for the misguided and lost souls in his work, along the lines of George Saunders. And though his work can shock or disgust, often the jolts are hilarious.




I read in this breezy esoteric rumination that Jupiter is the potential Sun of a new solar system, where certain advanced souls who've progressed beyond Earthly re-incarnation gather in order to work out their final karmic debts before becoming a glowing manifestation of perfection similar to our Sun. I've read this idea in Ouspensky as well, and of course if you've seen Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, you are also somewhat familiar with this ancient teaching.

I was of course fascinated to learn that Guatama Buddha has reincarnated on Mars in order to fulfill the Christ mission for its denizens. And that St. Francis is there to help him.

Steiner only achieved access to this knowledge by following Goethe's methods of scientific observation: ie, trying to meditate on plants and seeds until their true impulse was revealed. Soon he was visited by a representative of an esoteric order who initiated him into the Temple and allowed him access to the Reader's Digest Condensed Akhasic Records.

Books 7 and 8 of 2018

Volume 2 is just as satisfying as Volume 1--of course this fantasy/sci-fi series fits the mold of all the fantasy sci-fi series I've read. Essun has powers she half-understands (think Thomas Covenant or Frodo or Paul Atreides) and must take what she can from teachers who either want to control her her kill her or mislead or manipulate her. She is a member of a mutant class of humans who are despised despite having skills necessary to humanity's survival.

The Earth suffers continuous geological upheavals because its moon has been cast into a long elliptical orbit. Earth is pissed about this loss, and tries repeatedly to destroy humans as a result--apparently in the distant past the moon was cast away by the reckless use of magic/science, and Essun and her allies are trying to figure it out.

But her daughter Nassun might be the kwisatz hederach of Earth...will she become the God Empress of Dune (I mean Earth) and restore the moon, or will the Earth succeed in wiping out all humans except for the monstrous stone eaters?

I look forward to finding out in volume 3.




Clever, funny, and charming short stories in intermediate French. They follow a classic Twilight Zone model, with surprise twists sometimes involving supernatural elements. Would be useful for a French 3 class or above if you are a teacher, or a good way to rebuild long lost French literacy skills. About 13 years ago I was reading de Beauvoir and Sartre and Leiris in the original French...now I'm back to rebuilding again, and this was an engaging place to start!

Book #6 of 2018

Reveals the dastardly machinations of an array of sordid operators who exacerbated and profited from racial divisions in Baltimore City and County. Political machines, bookies, loan sharks, hustlers, lawyers, accountants, future City Councilmen and even a future Vice President of the United States--all had a stake in stoking racial divisions for profit whether fiscal or electoral (or both). There was a lot of indignant embarrassment among residents of Baltimore County recently when Dallas Dance went down for corruption and covering it up. But read Pietila on the routine and profound corruption of Baltimore County leadership at all levels--on a level that even the City couldn't match at the time--up into the 70's and Dance seems a quaint and unworthy throwback to those good old days of truly astounding graft. It was the district where Spirow Agnew launched his political career after all...though most of the corruption was centered in the old Democratic Party machine.

The cast of characters is astonishing. Many are crooks and charlatans who have a genuine drive to desegretate the City by moving Black families into Jewish or white enclaves, but who profit heavily on "blockbusting" techniques while challenging redlined disctricts. Moral ambiguity abounds as some villains prove more empathetic than others.

But there is also plenty of downright acid racism and appalling degrees of hate, often saturating all local civic and public institutions, be they fiscal, secular, religious, cultural, or educational. This history is shameful but deeply fascinating in a city with a long history of economic, cultural, religious and racial diversity. Baltimore, as site of the first bloodshed of the Civil War, and as the hometown and burial place of John Wilkes Booth, serves as an interesting microcosm of the evolution of the civil rights movement and of racial attitudes and relations over the past 150 years.

The book is most entertaining as a rich historical record of race relations and realities in Baltimore from the industrial revolution on. Pietila tells good stories and evokes place and character well. It was fun to read his sympathetic and engaging accounts of people I knew little or nothing about and neighborhoods I know quite well. I recommend Not in My Neighborhood strongly as an indispensible work of popular history by someone with obvious expertise about the city,its past, and its national significance.

Books 4 and 5 of 2018

Taschen has produced hundreds of really well-done art and photography collections over the years. These volumes are high-quality in binding and the reproductions are exceptional--and they are amazingly affordable!

This collection keeps the Taschen standard of quality, and may be my favorite (after, of course, the lavish Butt Book). There is little text, but what there is illuminates the images thoughtfully with quotes from novels, poetry, plays, and hermetic manuscripts. James Joyce and William Blake share space with Basil Valentine and Dr. John Dee and Carl Jung. Occasionally there is commentary by the author/editor who appears to be an Adept or Sage given the wisdom of his guidance to those of us on the Path.

A volume worthy for either the curious dabbler who thinks occult or hermetic art is "cool" or for the serious seeker trying to uncover the hidden Truths.




As a Humanities teacher who works with middle graders in urban schools, I think this book is a great potential anchor text for teaching current events and historical trends in civil rights and "post-racial" America. The characters are not deep--they are types, and at times the dialogue is simply lame (putting "dawg" every sentence is just too much)--but the story is compelling, the issues are real, and I could envision teaching an entire unit about BLM and Martin and Malcolm and all of the recent police-involved tragedies with unarmed Black men using this novel as an engaging centerpiece. Nic Stone presents several points of view and it would be fun to read with a class and have Socratic Seminars after each couple chapters while learning the historical context and then researching the actual events re-hashed in this novel. The media spin on these cases is a key component of the novel, and any "woke" teacher whose kids are becoming "woke" would find something useful here.

Book #3 of 2018

A very satisfying epic sci-fi/fantasy series kick-off. Reminiscent, in richness of setting and imagination, of Dune, the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Riverworld, and the Saga of Pleistocene Exile, just to name a few of my faves from back in the day when I used to read these things much more often. The novel is structured in a very clever manner, akin to Cloud Atlas, and has a feel and sensibility similar to the furthest future in that excellent novel.

Now I'm embroiled suddenly in two sci-fi/fantasy series at once: Octavia E. Butler on the one hand and N.K. Jemisin on the other. Should I read Adulthood Rites or The Obelisk Gate next? I'm hooked on each.

The Play's the Thing...

Water in a Broken Glass - Trailer from Lodge Street Films on Vimeo.


Last night Patricia and I went to the historic Senator Theater to see the premier of Water in a Broken Glass. We were invited because our home on Madison Ave in Baltimore was chosen as location for several scenes in the film. The director found photos of the house on AirBNB and immediately contacted us. She rented the bottom two floors for 4 days...our TV room became the dressing room/makeup room, our dining room was the mess area, our kitchen was the equipment space. And our living room and 2nd bedroom became a central character's house.

The opening was PACKED. I haven't seen the Senator that jammed with people since those midnight showings of the Lord of the Rings movies. They had the restored lobby bar open. Everyone was dressed to the nines and getting photographed in front of Art Deco fixtures and a giant vinyl wall hanging with sponsors' logos and the movie title in a repeating pattern.

A bit more than midway through the movie the main character pulls up to our house, parks next to our neighbor's VW, and gets out and knocks on our door. But we don't answer at "our" house. The "owner" lets her in.

It was a peculiar and mildly unsettling experience to see our house--our belongings, our furniture--on screen at the Senator. There was our art work--stuff by Matt Muirhead, Sogh, Lance Moore. There were my knick-knacks. My bookcases full of art books and history tomes, and objects from our travels. The Chinese papier-mache painted cabinet found in Singapore, the pottery from Honduras. The Ifugao blanket from Banaue. Our mid-century throwback SCAN furniture. And in the film none of it is "mine" or "ours," but rather "hers"--it all belongs to the character Satin, who owns a bookstore on "The Avenue," but not really on The Avenue. Satin "owns" our house. But Satin's house is somewhat different. She had rearranged some of "our" art. Satin had taken other works down and replaced them with her own. Our ironing board gets screen time. And (spoiler) Satin has sex in our bed, though at the time it was our AirBNB suite's bed..and after 3 three years of AirBNB and hundreds of guests, Satin was not the first to do so. The stagers replaced several ceiling bulbs with purple bulbs for the movie, and it looked kind of cool with the period Victorian wall colors. (I remember spending a Saturday replacing our stuff after the stagers from the film crew had mis-replaced a bunch of it).

Adding a strong nostalgic and somewhat melancholic tinge to the peculiarity of seeing our house and stuff associated with a film character on a big screen, was the fact that the house is vacant now and up for sale. All the colorful Victorian era wall paint is covered up in a generic bright gray, much of the furniture has been sold or donated, and we are currently preparing to sell, donate, and store even more of it. Last year we left that house and down-sized in preparation for an upcoming move. And seeing how beautiful our home looked on screen, and hearing people in the audience commenting about it, and knowing it is no longer like that at all--that the house which was real at the time it was used in this fiction, has in fact become past that only exists now in that film as "Satin's" house--it was all made even stranger by that reality.

The main character hangs out on a bench in Druid Hill Park next to cherry trees. That bench and those trees are now gone as the Park is being renovated substantially. So that Park is now also a fiction, or a past recorded in a fiction.

So while the date-movie love-triangle story washed over me, I was thinking about how happy we were in that place, in that neighborhood, and at that time. What a great palace we had. And Satin is lucky to live there.

Last summer, Single Carrot Theater did a show called Promenade. Patricia and our next door neighbor and several other people from the neighborhood participated in the creation of the show by telling their stories about Baltimore or their neighborhood. As these stories played on headphones, the spectators rode a bus around different neighborhoods in the City. The bus stopped several times for perfectly-timed, finely executed little vignettes to happen on the street. Several extended segments of the audio were my wife and my next-door neighbor telling stories. I heard the local rabbi telling a story. While I was listening to this I was in a bus next to my wife and the rabbi and our next door neighbor were on the bus as well. As I listened to them on tape--as all the spectators did--they also listened to themselves telling stories on tape as part of a performance. Outside the bus window, the City had become a stage where actors were performing on the street right next to "real" people, who often walked through a scene, or stopped to watch because to them there was no way to know this was a show with a bus-full of spectators watching from the parked bus. And watching my own shit on screen at the Senator in a setting which no longer exists was very similar to sitting next to my wife as we watched a theater piece featuring my wife speaking on tape while I was sitting in a bus with her going past our house where actors were acting outside...it all makes me wonder if any layer of this Philip K. Dick shit I experience all the time is actually real? At one point in Promenade the bus pulled into a vacant lot and a flash mob of green-shirted people wearing visors ran over and simultaneously washed every window on the bus while staring blankly into the eyes of the spectators. As if to say "this is not a stage, not a fiction, but perhaps you need to see more clearly what is happening."

Book 2 of 2018

Sometimes I miss working in the book industry. I'll stop simply meandering through whatever books I happen to have decided to read, and suddenly I'll choose to read a buzz book--something that's hot and current. The kind of book I miss because I'm not stacking it in mass quantities on a table or end cap display, and because I don't listen to NPR or watch C-SPAN book shows anymore.

And THIS? THIS is a hot book? THIS?

Synopsis: A whiny, entitled, pseudo-intellectual European dripping with privilege sets about recording his youth and young adulthood and how banal and empty everything is, except for exposure to some art, music, and writing. Everyone is fake and meaningless. We all inhabit a bleak Bergman film where the characters each get to shred themselves and their personae in 15-minute monologues filmed in stark black-and-white close-ups. He calls his work what Hitler called his work in order to underscore some devastating truths or realizations which actually never materialize in the text.

The suburbs are soul-sucking. The middle class are adrift and alienated from their labor, their families, and nature. The death of God and tradition has been replaced with the ascendance of death and materialism unto death.

Yawn.

MY struggle was getting through this monstrosity. And yet there are some quite good passages, passages where Karl Ove is really honest and his writing (in translation) has conveyed a common experience of our era in an interesting way.

But there's not enough there here. And more volumes? Really? FOUR more? Oh hell no...

Book 1 of 2018

I read some short fiction by Bell back in the 80s--I believe in the Best American Short Stories series? The stories were of an obvious quality, so I wanted to read his more dense work, and of course there was All Souls' Rising...a novel with some substantial accolades and strong sales for literary fiction, and which I purchased in a thick quality paperback.

But several in-person interactions with the author proved him to be such an irredeemable arsehole--we're talking sexist and narcissistic and borderline sociopathic behavior--that I returned my purchased copy of that novel without reading it. I usually do my best to separate the art from the artist, but in his case I thought "fuck that guy and his novels!"

But still, I imagine some day I'll read the Haitian trilogy because the era and the history fascinate me, and as many writers and artists have proven over the years, one can be a dickhead and still create lasting works of merit.

While thinking about re-purchasing and trying All Souls' Rising, I noted Bell had published a shorter book with a tantalizing blurb about shamanism and entheogens in the modern Southwest. I thought I would try this first and see.

Bell I imagine read some Terrance McKenna or Dan Pinchbeck and scored some online mescaline powder or psilocybin spores, or maybe he took a ride on the salvia divinorum express and got woke to the thin membrane separating reality from Reality. The forgotten youthful proclivities of his generation came back--he re-read Castaneda and after binge-watching Breaking Bad one weekend Behind the Moon popped out of his aching skull.

The novel is pretty good. The way the alternate realities bleed together and coexist is done with technical skill and efficiency. The characters are confronted by layers of consciousness and reality and dreamworld as the post- or hyper- modern becomes fractured in a way that allows the eternal to bleed through.

But is Behind the Moon better than the books and authors linked and mentioned above? Is this novel capturing something happening in the continuing dawning of Aquarius? Is it exploring new understandings of the perennial philosophy or the necessity of a return to the sacred?

No. I have re-read Castaneda, and McKenna, and Pinchbeck. I found nothing worth the trouble of re-reading in Behind the Moon. But it may lead you to fruitful research if you fall down its bear-haunted cave.