Book # 29 of 2020: The House in Paris by Elizabeth Bowen

I like to consider myself well-read, with a fairly wide experience of World Lit and a strong knowledge of American and European novels. But Elizabeth Bowen has somehow eluded my erratic truffle-hunting. What a great novel!

The book is divided into three chunks. In the first a young English girl is dropped at a house in Paris en route to visit her grandmother in the south of France. She encounters a young boy who is also waiting here, a boy adopted who is to meet his birth mother for the first time that day. Henrietta and Leopold are mysterious and their encounter is unpleasant. We watch them behaving without adult supervision and it's a bit creepy how adult they are despite the stuffed animal toy and their reliance on Miss Fisher as they transit to their next destinations. There are a lot of echoes of The Turn of the Screw: the children seem unnaturally aware of the adult world, as though they've been exposed to some grown-up grotesquerie which the narrator hides. Something is haunting them, but not necessarily supernatural.

In the second chunk we find out about Leopold's parents and their connection to Miss Fisher. There is an affair with profound consequences. Leopold and who he is and why become more clear. The haunting is rendered less mysterious.

In the third chunk we return to the present of the novel. I shall say no more lest I spoil it.

Bowen's prose is exquisite, particularly so in her rendering of place. The characters are real people with depth, and their pain is first rendered with tender clues and only eventually made manifest through back story. Were I to choose a current writer of similar skill it would be Colm Toibin.

Book #30 of 2020: The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

There is a long-running debate about Conrad's little novel and what it means. Any work of lasting quality should have such a debate (there's a nice exploration of the salient points here). Was Conrad racist, and was he using tropes of 'savage Africa' in indefensible ways? Was he against one form of imperialism but for another? Was his work reinforcing European superiority?

I'd argue that Conrad was 'woke,' and was laying the groundwork for what it means to be 'woke' today, over 100 years ago. He was trying to express his burgeoning anxiety, an anxiety that all the structural underpinnings of his society and culture were based in immense criminality and shocking cruelty, and that the vast majority of people who benefited from these systems of oppression were blithely unaware of this reality. All the myths and propagandistic 'history' and the 'heroic' actions of admirable men were laid bare for him, and this cast him into a void. If the civilization whence all your morals and beliefs and knowledge derive turns out to be devoid of morals and built on lies, what next? Heart of Darkness is full of the radical tension that results when perceived truths and conventional wisdom are stretched taut and burst over the raw red wounds of slavery, butchery, conquest, and exploitation. Suddenly the heroic and civilizing are revealed as the truly barbaric, and one is confronted with the questions: Whose side are you on? How best do we confront this?

For Conrad it was to reveal "The horror, the horror" in a rich and demonically ambiguous work. It's impossible to revisit it without the ghosts of Apocalypse Now--many times when picturing scenes or characters as I re-read it, Dennis Hopper or Martin Sheen or Laurence Fishburn or Marlon Brando would intrude. That film used Conrad's novel to punch holes in the myths around American imperialism.

Yesterday in Baltimore a statue of Columbus was pulled down and cast into the Inner Harbor. Young people are feeling the anxieties which drove Conrad to write more than a century back, and they are acting on them. They are writing their own reactions to "The horror." Will this lay the foundation for new, more just economic and governmental structures, or will there be a harrowing collapse into chaos or reactionary violence? Time will tell.

Book #24 of 2020: Cold Hand in Mine by Robert Aickman

I enjoyed this second foray into the works of Robert Aickman as much as my first. These half-dozen or so carefully crafted novellas are exquisitely wrought masterpieces. Included herein is perhaps the best vampire story I've read, about a young English girl who goes down for the Count (see what I did there?). Also, there is a murderous Siren mermaid thing with an unsmiling red gash of a mouth filled with teeth. A cheap attic flat in London becomes a prison for a pornographer when a new tenant moves in below and brings a haunting along.

The characters and settings are vivid and drawn with a master's brush. The pristine realism of the stories is only quietly disrupted in the most unsettling and nigh unnoticeable ways.

If you like quiet creepy and cerebral spook stories, try Aickman. You shan't be disappointed!

Any one of these stories would make an excellent creepy film. Perhaps someone will pick these up and script them for Netflix or Amazon, much in the way Amazon made Philip K. Dick stories into the excellent series Electric Dreams.

Book #14 of 2020: The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault

Nikeratos grows up back stage, working as a hand in Greek theater as his father plays dramatic roles onstage. Years later, his bravery during a performance when a crane fails and he nearly dies catches the attention of a Syracusan noble named Dion. Dion and his teacher Plato ask him to put on a performance of a play written by the tyrant of Syracuse, and Nikeratos accepts the challenge.

This launches not only his acting career, but his involvement in political scheming and conflict as Syracuse goes through fluctuations from tyranny to democracy and back. Plato senses an opportunity to mold the new tyrant of Syracuse to his ideals of what a republic should be. Part of this is substantially limiting poets and tragedians and their productions. Will Nikeratos come to regret his role in bringing Socrates to Syracuse?

Meanwhile, an old gilt mask of Apollo comes to manifest Nikeratos' conscience. He carries it everywhere and calls on it when making decisions. The voice of the God steers him through cataclysms and successes.

Another rousing historical novel of Ancient Greece--I will definitely continue reading these, and soon hope to take on Renault's Alexandrian Trilogy. Alexander appears briefly at the end of The Mask of Apollo to set the scene--Nikeratos had always regarded Macedon as a barbaric realm where kings are always getting killed. His encounter with teenaged Alexander hints at what's to come!

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 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.

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...

Recent Books

An excellent compendium of topics in the Western Esoteric Tradition, useful not only for scholars in the field but also for casual research. The articles are interesting and illustrated. If, however, you are seeking the Truth this tome will merely guide you on your way to other resources.



Dixon continues riffing on his old age, and as I approach that time of life I can think of no funnier, warmer guide. Another wonderful short book with Dixon's distinctive, fussy and hilarious voice.




The full package--rich characters situated in a lush setting, a searing portrait of Catholic/Capitalist colonialism and burgeoning resistance and reaction in Nigeria. A book about the world as it is for much of the world's citizens. I will read more by this fantastic young talent.

Recent Reads

Imagine getting totally baked with a couple PhDs and a scientifically-minded shaman and having a wide-ranging series of conversations about resacralization of Western civilization and re-forging our species' lost link to Gaia and Nature.

That imagined convo is this book, which is a treat of speculative and badly-needed modern ideation around topics which are too commonly ignored as we all rush to the logical endpoint of neoliberal capitalism.


I love Dixon's late stories as much as I've loved all his others, including early and middle. The constant recursions and revisions, and his naive and hilarious and absolutely individual narrative consciousness make him an absolutely unique voice in modern American letters.


A nicely illustrated novella from my fave horror writer. Lots of puns and linguistic tricks and traps, and features Campbell's curious descriptive style. An out-of-work man finds a job creating a Web presence for a dilapidated bookseller. But nothing is as it seems in an eternal shop where books never leave and neither will the characters.


After a nuclear cataclysm wipes out most of humanity and much of the Earth, an alien species attempts to preserve and introduce humans back to their home. But they have their own agenda and their own desire for an "exchange" of DNA. Will humanity accept the deal and go back to a new terrestrial Garden of Eden to begin anew? Or will they resist and end up murdering one another all over again? A master of the form writes a compelling moralistic tale in the mode of Ursula K. LeGuin.

Recent Reads

Love this short graphic history of the IWW and its radicalism, its struggle for justice for the oppressed, and its myriad accomplishments. Social Studies teachers take note that this has substantial usefulness if you teach economics, labor, civil rights, or race relations as part of your curriculum. I dreamed I read about Joe Hill last night--in cartoon form!




Had a nice conversation with a Lyft driver from Nigeria about politics in our home countries and about the immigrant experience in Trump's America. I told the driver about this novel, which focuses on the experiences of a half-Nigerian, half-German immigrant living and working as a psychiatrist in NY. The narrator sees the world mostly through a European lens, with European attitudes, tastes, and morals. He seems a nice sort, well-rounded and hard-working, intellectual and curious about the world. But he is unable to really connect with other immigrants, those living on the margins of Western societies.  Though he is familiar with and a bit sympathetic to their reasons for radicalization, he is too inside his European self to really understand them. There are nods to Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Franz Fanon. Late in the book a childhood acquaintance confronts the narrator about a long-repressed crime. This crime serves as analogy for the West's imperial/colonial crimes and their repression on a societal level. A beautiful and sad work, quite substantial.





And speaking of beautiful and sad works--damn! Great portrayal of Lincoln's grief at the loss of his son. The manner of story-telling here is documentary style, with snippets from correspondence, diaries, newspaper reports, and also from the POV of denizens inhabiting a purgatory centered around the cemetery where young Lincoln is buried, and where Abe goes late at night in his despair. Like most of Saunders's fiction, the tragic is balanced by outrageous hilarity. A brisk and thoughtful work, clever in construction and much deeper than expected.




Dixon is an acquired taste, one I acquired back in the '90s when I read Frog. No other writer peels back the curtain on his process to this degree--the reader is plunged into the reminiscences, revisions, and constraints that went into the craft of the story. In fact the structure of his work often IS the story being written overtly on the page. Knowing his oeuvre quite well, I would place this in the middle tier of his novels. It's quite frustrating at times and at others is deeply sad or hilarious. What I like most about Dixon's fiction is his ability to show through that unique voice our own fussy self-revisions, repressions, and constraints--how we craft our own stories about ourselves and those we love. I remember him signing Frog for me at Borders back int he '90s, and correcting by hand with a blue marker two typos before returning it to me. Mind you, Frog is like 800 pages long and he flipped quickly to both spots and made the corrections. Something one of his narrators would do, or do do, or would think about doing and then not.



Chunks of a giant comet smashed into Earth 12,000 years ago, destroying an already advanced human civilization. A few survivors roam Earth teaching other peoples the lost knowledge, and encoding warnings about the calamity's return in sites like Gobleki Tepi and the Giza plateau. I like Hancock's books--because I, too, believe there have been previous civilizations here that were destroyed, and that the presumption we have achieved the heights of wisdom and knowledge and that all who came before are "primitive" is likely the sort of hubris that sank the Atlanteans. But I don't always buy Hancock's arguments or his reasoning--what is a speculative leap on one page becomes an accepted fact later. But: FUN!





Sometimes gorgeous and wise, sometimes cloying and silly--but always worth the journey.