‘I miss TV,’ Orin said, looking back down. He no longer smiled coolly.

‘The former television of commercial broadcast.’

‘I do.’

‘Reason in several words or less, please, for the box after REASON,’ displaying the board.

‘Oh, man.’ Orin looked back up and away at what seemed to be nothing, feeling at his jaw around the retromandibular’s much tinier and more vulnerable throb. ‘Some of this may sound stupid. I miss commercials that were louder than the programs. I miss the phrases “Order before midnight tonight” and “Save up to fifty percent and more.” I miss being told things were filmed before a live studio audience. I miss late-night anthems and shots of flags and fighter jets and leathery-faced Indian chiefs crying at litter. I miss “Sermonette” and “Evensong” and test patterns and being told how many megahertz something’s transmitter was broadcasting at.’ He felt his face. ‘I miss sneering at something I love. How we used to love to gather in the checker-tiled kitchen in front of the old boxy cathode-ray Sony whose reception was sensitive to airplanes and sneer at the commercial vapidity of broadcast stuff.’

‘Vapid ditty,’ pretending to notate.

‘I miss stuff so low-denominator I could watch and know in advance what people were going to say.’

‘Emotions of mastery and control and superiority. And pleasure.’

‘You can say that again, boy. I miss summer reruns. I miss reruns hastily inserted to fill the intervals of writers’ strikes, Actors’ Guild strikes. I miss Jeannie, Samantha, Sam and Diane, Gilligan, Hawkeye, Hazel, Jed, all the syndicated airwave-haunters. You know? I miss seeing the same things over and over again.’ …

The man tended to look up at him like people with legs look up at buildings and planes. ‘You can of course view entertainments again and again without surcease on TelEntertainment disks of storage and retrieval.’

Orin’s way of looking up as he remembered was nothing like the seated guy’s way of looking up. ‘But not the same. The choice, see. It ruins it somehow. With television you were subjected to repetition. The familiarity was inflicted. Different now.’

‘Inflicted.’

‘I don’t think I exactly know,’ Orin said, suddenly dimly stunned and sad inside. The terrible sense as in dreams of something vital you’ve forgotten to do. The inclined head’s bald spot was freckled and tan. ‘Is there a next item?’

—From David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest (1996).

Perception, Plato said, is a form of pain.

The working consciousness, for instance, is narrow, shuttered by utility, its transitions eased by habit past reflection like a thief. Impulses from without or from within must use some strength to reach us, we do not go out to them. Machines are made this way. Alert as lights and aimed like guns, they only see the circle of their barrels. How round the world is; how like a well arranged. Thus when desire is at an ebb and will is weak, we trail the entertainer like a child his mother, restless, bored and whining: what can I do? what will amuse me? how shall I live? Then

L’ennui, fruit de la morne incuriosite,

Prend les proportions de l’immortalite.

The enjoyment of sensation as sensation, a fully free awareness, is very rare. We keep our noses down like dogs to sniff our signs. Experience must mean. The content of an aimless consciousness is weak and colorless; we may be filled up by ourselves instead—even flooded basements, some days, leak the other way—and then it’s dread we feel, anxiety.

To tie experience to a task, to seek significance in everything, to take and never to receive, to keep, like the lighter boxer, moving, bob and weave, to fear the appearance of the self and every inwardness: these are such universal characteristics of the average consciousness that I think we can assume that popular culture functions fundamentally with regard to them.

—From William H. Gass’s essay “Even if, by All the Oxen in the World.” (1968). Collected in Fiction and the Figures of Life. The lines of verse are from Baudelaire, which I suppose is a third citation, no?

The very short note:

So I read Gass’s essay almost immediately after reading the section of Infinite Jest cited above, and now I can’t help but think of Wallace’s novel as a long digressive indirect response to Gass’s polemic on popular culture. Which of course is a radical reduction, but hey let’s leave that aside for a moment. Wallace conflates entertainment—particularly what Dwight Macdonald called “masscult”entertainment—with drugs and alcohol as two measures we use to “be drunk or doped or mad…dunced and numb” to our “completely aware” selves, to cite Gass again. In his essay Gass makes the same comparison (to opium, first, and then alcohol), before just laying it out as sharp as possible:

…popular culture is the product of an industrial machine which makes baubles to amuse the savages while missionaries steal their souls and merchants steal their money.

(So I’m over the two citations promised in this post’s title, and not sure how very short this very short note is, but).

Gass concludes his essay by pointing out that “none of his complaints are new,” but he reiterates that “This muck” — popular culture — “cripples consciousness.”

If Gass’s diagnosis was accurate, then let’s say little Dave Wallace, probably like in first grade when Gass’s essay was published, let’s say little Dave Wallace’s consciousness was mapped in that muck (cf. Orin’s nostalgia for TV above; cf. so much of Infinite Jest that I’ll broadly refer to here). And because he was mapped in that muck, consciousness-wise, Wallace attempts to reconcile pop culture in a way that Gass refuses to—like, Wallace has to—because the muck is quickly saturating culture, by the time that little Dave Wallace is old enough to cipher but probably not understand the words in Gass’s “Oxen.” (Please do not think I’m suggesting little Dave Wallace read Gass’s essay when little Dave Wallace (LDW?) was in first grade. I just enjoy the image). The muck inflicts consciousness, to borrow Orin’s verb.

And then me—how could I not come back to me myself me? narcissist that I am, borderline Gen X/Millennial that I am, raised in and on and through popular culture, pop cult masscult commercial cult — the military-industrial-entertainment complex that Pynchon warned us about—and then me, when I went to school, to college, to the college of liberal arts, there in the late nineties, what did I study? The English department was ruled by what they call the popular culture studies. So it was all muck, and the stuff that Gass would call art (or Art) was to be mucked or mediated or interpreted or understood through popular culture.

Which is what I mean to say is that:

And then now—when our Conversation, our Chatter—is all mucked through the muck, through pop culture, just popping popping always pop and chatter—when conglomerated concerns produce Mass Entertainments which we use for the platform, the material, the muck for Our Conversation on all the meaningful mulling matters that mean and matter and mull. And that I find myself often peering through a How-the-hell-did-we-get-here? lens when I tune in to chatter that raves against the dying of some character on a popular culture entertainment, or when yet another headline promises to tell me why some television show’s take on something matters so goddamn much.

And yet but still also—I mean, this is Wallace’s big insight in Infinite Jest, right?—that our consciousnesses, mapped in the muck, are framed in desire and reward, and we are conditioned/subjected into that system of desire/reward, so that we desire the desire, even as our consciousnesses, like Orin above, can sneer at something we love, can dismiss the muck that helped shape us even as we plunge into it, the muck. And—too, part of Wallace’s insight in Infinite Jest—too, the consciousness of the consciousness of the desire of desire—that that’s, like, the contemporary condition. And what Wallace seems to posit, or maybe I’m just way off here, but through all the AA stuff, and Mario Incandenza (who can’t feel pain, people!), what Wallace seems to want to point to is some way out of the muck of pop consciousness, a reconciliation toward a pure consciousness that doesn’t sneer—right?

Last note: Bad Baudelaire (mis)translation. Mea culpa (for all of this, really. These are notes for something more coherent, maybe):

Boredom, the fruit of dismal apathy,
Takes the shape of infinity.

David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest poses rhetorical, formal, and verbal challenges that will confound many readers new to the text. The abundance of (or excess of) guides and commentaries on the novel can perhaps have the adverse and unintentional consequence of making readers new to Infinite Jest believe that they can’t “get it” without help.  Much of the online analyses and resources for Infinite Jest are created by and targeted to readers who have finished or are rereading the novel. While I’ve read many insightful and enlightening commentaries on the novel over the years (and, in particular, over the past six weeks rereading IJ), my intuition remains that the superabundance of analysis may have the paradoxical effect of actually impeding readers new to the text. With this in mind, I’d suggest that first-time readers need only a dictionary and some patience.

(Still: Two online resources that might be useful are “Several More and Less Helpful Things for the Person Reading Infinite Jest,” which offers a glossary and a few other unobtrusive documents, and “Infinite Jest: A Scene-by-Scene Guide,”which is not a guide at all, but rather a brief series of synopses of each scene in the novel, organized by page number and year; my sense is that this guide would be helpful to readers attempting to delineate the novel’s nonlinear chronology—however, I’d advise against peeking ahead).

The big advantage (and pleasure) of rereading Infinite Jest is that the rereader may come to understand the plot anew; IJ is richer and denser the second go around, its themes showing brighter as its formal construction clarifies. The rereader is free to attend to the imagery and motifs of the novel more intensely than a first-time reader, who must suss out a byzantine plot propelled by a plethora of characters. Readers new to IJ may find it helpful to attend from the outset to some of the novel’s repeated images, words, and phrases. Tracking motifs will help to clarify not only the novel’s themes and “messages,” but also its plot. I’ve listed just a few of these motifs below, leaving out the obvious ones like entertainment, drugs, tennis (and, more generally, sports and games), and death. The list is in no way definitive or analytic, nor do I present it as an expert; rather, it’s my hope that this short list might help a reader or two get more out of a first reading.

Heads

Cages

Faces

Maps

Masks

Cycles

Teeth

Waste

Infants

Pain

Deformities

Subjects

Objects

By way of closing, I’ll simply reprint (forgive the imprecise verb) a section of a post I wrote a month ago. While this thing I wrote before may repeat ideas I wrote above (forgive the non-logic of that clause), it also offers a few sentiments on the novel’s plot and the experience of reading Infinite Jest that I don’t mind reiterating.

A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

Infinite Jest is very long but it’s not nearly as difficult as its reputation suggests. There is a compelling plot behind the erudite essaying and sesquipedalian vocabulary. That plot develops around three major strands which the reader must tie together, with both the aid of—and the challenge of—the novel’s discursive style. Those three major plot strands are the tragic saga of the Incandenzas (familial); the redemptive narrative of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, with Don Gately as the primary hero (socicultural); and the the schemes of the Québécois separatists (national/international/political). An addictive and thus deadly film called Infinite Jest links these three plots (through discursive and byzantine subplots).

Wallace often obscures the links between these plot strands, and many of the major plot connections have to be intuited or outright guessed. Furthermore, while there are clear, explicit connections between the plot strands made forthe reader, Wallace seems to withhold explicating these connections until after the 200-page mark. Arguably, the real contours of the Big Plot come into (incomplete) focus in a discussion between Hal Incandenza and his brother Orin in pages 242-58. While that scene by no means telegraphs what happens in IJ, it nonetheless offers some promise that the set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes shall add up to Something Bigger. 

Some of those earliest set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes function almost as rhetorical obstacles for a first-time reader. The  novel’s opening scene, Hal Incandenza’s interview with the deans at the University of Arizona, is chronologically the last event in the narrative, and it dumps a lot of expository info on the reader. It also poses a number of questions or riddles about the plot to come, questions and riddles that frankly run the risk of the first-time reader’s forgetting through no fault of his own.

The second chapter of IJ is relatively short—just 10 pages—but it seems interminable, and it’s my guess that Wallace wanted to make his reader endure it the same way that the chapter’s protagonist–Erdedy, an ultimately very minor character—must endure the agonizing wait for a marijuana delivery. The chapter delivers the novel’s themes of ambivalence, desire, addiction, shame, entertainment, “fun,” and secrecy, both in its content and form. My guess is that this where a lot of new readers abandon the novel.

The reader who continues must then work through 30 more pages until meeting the novel’s heart, Don Gately, but by the time we’ve met him we might not trust just how much attention we need to pay him, because Wallace has shifted through so many other characters already. And then Gately doesn’t really show up again until like, 200 pages later.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace seems to suspend or delay introducing the reading rules that we’ve been trained to look for in contemporary novels. While I imagine this technique could frustrate first-time readers, I want to reiterate that this suspension or delay or digression is indeed a technique, a rhetorical tool Wallace employs to perform the novel’s themes about addiction and relief, patience and plateaus, gratitude and forgiveness.

I would urge first-time readers to stick with the novel at least until page 64, where they will be directed to end note 24, the filmography of J.O. Incandenza (I will not even discuss the idea of not reading the end notes, which are essential to the text). This filmography helps to outline the plot’s themes and the themes’ plots—albeit obliquely. And readers who make it to the filmography and find nothing to compel them further into the text should feel okay about abandoning the book at that point.

Two final notes before I close out this (unintentionally too-long) note:

There are many, many guides and discussions to IJ online and elsewhere. Do you really need them? I don’t know—but my intuition is that you’d probably do fine without them. Maybe reread Hamlet’s monologue from the beginning of Act V, but don’t dwell too much on the relationship between entertainment and death. All you really need is a good dictionary. (And, by the way, IJ is an ideal read for an electronic device—the end notes are hyperlinked, and you can easily look up words as you read).

—and—

Infinite Jest is a rhetorical/aesthetic experience, not a plot.

The short review is, “Nell Zink’s début novel The Wallcreeper is extraordinary.”

But this argument is insufficient, unsupported, you, dear reader, may protest. Why should you spend your hard-earned time reading The Wallcreeper, eh? (I read the book in four sittings. I was late to Sunday dinner for finishing the thing). To invert one of the better book short book reviews I’ve ever read: Every sentence made me want to read the next sentence. Is that not a good enough reason to read The Wallcreeper? Maybe you want to read some of those sentences. Here’s the first one:

I was looking at the map when Stephen swerved, hit the rock, and occasioned the miscarriage.

Or a page or two later when our heroine/narrator Tiffany describes how she met Stephen:

Our first meeting prevented a crime. He saw me standing in front of the open gate of the vault.

(Don’t worry about that crime). Oh, and, on that first meeting with Stephen:

It was one of those moments where you think: We will definitely fuck. It might take a while, though, because Stephen looked as respectable as I did.

And here’s a simile from Tiffany, just because I love the line and can wedge it in here:

After the cranes had landed, the geese passed overhead in so many Vs that they merged into Xs and covered the entire sky like a fishnet stocking.

It occurs to me now that I’m probably doing this wrong, right? I should be summarizing the book a bit, no? I’m not particularly interested in that—the plot is the sentences—I mean, yeah, there’s a plot, about Tiffany and Stephen in Berne and later Berlin—and some other places too—and the different lovers they take and the various projects they undertake—music, language acquisition, ecoterrorism—and lots of birdwatching.

Maybe I should lazily just reblurb Keith Gessen’s blurb:

Who is Nell Zink? She claims to be an expatriate living in northeast Germany. Maybe she is; maybe she isn’t. I don’t know. I do know that this first novel arrives with a voice that is fully formed: mature, hilarious, terrifyingly intelligent, and wicked. The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists. This is strange, and interesting, but in between is some writing about marriage, love, fidelity, Europe, and saving the earth that is as funny and as grown-up as anything I’ve read in years. And there are some jokes in here that a young Don DeLillo would kill to have written. I hope he doesn’t kill Nell Zink

The DeLillo comparison is apt, but Zink’s novel is funnier than anything DeLillo’s done in ages. Maybe that’s not fair. “Funny” seems like a weak word, really, for Zink and her narrator Tiffany (and Stephen)—all the words I would use to describe what Zink’s doing here seem pale and imprecise. I mean witty, smart, intelligent, devastating, confounding. Extraordinary, right, that was the word I used above, yes? (He looks the word up in an online dictionary, somehow at 36 and a lifelong native English speaker unsure what it actually means). A placeholder like strange would work, except some of y’all take that word as a pejorative. Eccentric or quirky imply, I think, a rhetorical imprecision wholly absent from the novel. The Wallcreeper is a precise book. The book is very good. It is an interesting book. (What awful sentences those were! But true).

Can you know a book through the words the reviewer uses to describe it though? (No). Can you really know a character through the words she launches your way, anyway? In The Wallcreeper, Tiffany doesn’t really know herself, or Stephen, and the narrative is in some ways her kinda sorta finding out about herself (and Stephen, and other stuff), in a non-urgent manner. Or maybe very urgent, I don’t know—she and Stephen are in a constant state of crisis, sort of, or epiphany-making—

Our marriage had begun in the most daunting way imaginable. We had barely known each other, and then we had those accidents and that jarring disconnect between causes (empty-headed young people liking each other, wallcreepers) and effects (pain, death).

A wallcreeper is a small bird with crimson wings, by the way.

The titular wallcreeper, also by the way, is the thing that makes Stephen swerve in that opening sentence I shared for you above. The book is full of swerves, dips, dives, turns—each sentence swerves into the next, artfully, gracefully, precisely. Tiffany’s consciousness, or the language that Zink uses to represent Tiffany’s consciousness, swerves:

We walked down into the lower garden and sat on a bench. He looked into the pond and remarked favorably on the lack of goldfish. I thought of all the spawn-guzzling carp I had admired in the past and felt abashed. I shrank at the vulgarity of raptures over beauty, nature’s most irrelevant and unnecessary quality.

Beautiful!

But where was I? I think swerves was the metaphor I was batting about a bit—well, I suppose I could go on, suggest that all that swerving swerves up to Something More, that the novel swerves (swells? no, not swells) to an ending shot-through with mythical undertones (which our narrator punctures)—I mean to say that, yes, okay, the novel is a wonderful witty aesthetic read—each sentence made me want to read the next sentence—but readers who require More Than That will also get it. Or maybe not. The Wallcreeper, like all extraordinary novels, is Not For Everyone. The Wallcreeper was/is for me though, and I hope it will also be for you too.

The Wallcreeper is available directly from publisher The Dorothy Project and finer bookshops.

1. With the bad taste of a recentish YAish post-apocalyptish novel in my brain, I riffled through some old sci-fi titles, hoping to find something to hit “reset.” J.G. Ballard’s 1975 novel High-Rise—which I hadn’t read since I was a teenager—wrapped me up immediately with its opening  sentence:
   

   Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.
   

2. (If the promise of that first line doesn’t intrigue you, High-Rise isn’t for you. Maybe you’ll enjoy all the old High-Rise covers I couldn’t help but to scatter through this riff).
3. The first chapter of High-Rise is aptly titled “Critical Mass.” This is a book where things, uh, escalate quickly, if you’ll forgive my indulging in the parlance of our times. Ballard dispenses with any simmering in his tale of depraved debauchery (or is that debauched depravity?). He gets that pot boilin’.
4. Depravity. Debauchery. Degeneration. The boiling pot of late-20th century consciousness.
5. So, what is High-Rise about? Like, the plot, man? Class-war in a high-rise condo: A self-contained society that fails, its id overspilling into sex and violence: The veneer dissolved in piss and spite. And the best part? Ballard dispenses with any sort of explanation whatsoever. We begin at critical mass. He counted on his late-20th-century reader to intuit the whole damn deal (or throw down the book in defensive disgust).
6. Ballard structures the book around three anti-heroes, who represent, probably, id, ego, and superego—or rather, what I mean to say is ironic send-ups of id, ego, and superego—with the high-rise itself a kind of consciousness in crisis.
7. From the middle-class (and perhaps ego)—the 25th floor—there’s Dr. Robert Laing—not really a practicing doctor, no, but he works at a teaching hospital. Ballard tricks us into thinking he’s the protagonist—which I guess he is!—by which I mean audience surrogate, and also typical Ballardian hero (divorced; mama issues; a drinker). His name may recall to you the (anti-)psychiatrist R.D. Laing (as well as, perhaps, Language).
8. We might find a tidy—as in sanitary–summary of High-Rise in this brief excerpt, where our ego hero Laing packs away his tools and totems of the old world in anticipation of the new one to come:
   

   In this suitcase-sized cavity he hid away his cheque book and insurance policies, tax returns and share certificates. Lastly, he forced in his medical case with vials of morphine, antibiotics and cardiac stimulants. When he nailed the floorboards back into place he felt that he was sealing away for ever the last residues of his previous life, and preparing himself without reservation for the new one to come.

9. The phrase “to come” — as in a future to come — repeats throughout High-Rise—a kind of irony, ultimately, that I shouldn’t step all over here. I’ll get back to that momentarily, but—
10. Ballard soon trips us up by shifting his free-indirect style from Laing to Richard Wilder of the 2nd floor. A bestial brawny brawly dude (and the only father in this trio of anti-heroes) Wilder (c’mon with that name man!) is id id id all the way down (up). Wilder’s also a filmmaker, a camera in his hand, a sensing thing all the way down (up). He causes some problems.
11. (The idea that a middle-class man like Wilder might represent the proletariat here is addressed in more (although oblique) depth in Ballard’s 2003 novel Millennium People).
12. And then the super-ego/upper crust: Anthony Royal (O! c’mon with that name dammit!) of the penthouse. He’s the literal architect of the high-rise, which makes him possibly maybe probably responsible for its many, many design flaws, which boil down to intake, outtake, and power, but look like parking, garbage, and electricity.
13. And so Ballard shuttles us between these three consciousnesses, like the elevators that symbolically anchor this novel. (Anchor is a terrible verb for these mobile metaphors. Or maybe it’s the precise verb).
14. Like I said in point 5, Ballard doesn’t really bother to foreground the causes for the high-rises’s society’s degenerate descent (ascent?)—instead, he offers concrete contours and psychological descriptions. Like this one, when a psychiatrist (yep) offers this analysis to Laing (and the reader, of course):
    

    I had a bucket of urine thrown over me this afternoon. Much more of that and I may take up a cudgel myself. It’s a mistake to imagine that we’re all moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet-training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection — obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to become perverse . . .

15. (“Perverse” is a term that repeats throughout High-Rise, and I had to leave in those bucket of urine and cudgel details).
16. The concrete contours, the description, the late-20th century analysis—that’s the reason to boil along with High-Rise. The book is fucking fun in its thrilling awful decadence—it’s Lord of the Flies for adults, with the spiritual mumbo-jumbo replaced with psychiatric mumbo-jumbo. Or Salò.
17. Back to that future to come thing, here’s another citation, at some length (enjoy those concrete contours), but with my emphasis in boldface if you’re in some big fucking hurry:
    

    Still uncertain how long he had been awake, or what he had been doing half an hour earlier, Laing sat down among the empty bottles and refuse on the kitchen floor. He gazed up at the derelict washing-machine and refrigerator, now only used as garbage-bins. He found it hard to remember what their original function had been. To some extent they had taken on a new significance, a role that he had yet to understand. Even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. Laing pondered this — sometimes he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.

18. Ballard’s describing the late 20th century there, but perhaps he intuits the beginning of the 21st as well.
19. —Or maybe those are the same thing, I suppose—I mean, High-Rise was published in 1975, four decades ago, but doesn’t feel that old. For some perspective, Karel Capek’s War with the Newts was published in 1936, almost forty years before High-Rise, and that novel doesn’t feel horribly dated either, a tribute to its sharp satire.
20. —Which is my way of transitioning to the probably completely non-controversial idea that High-Rise is wonderful dark satire. Ballard ushers our consciousness to the high-rise’s summit through surrogate Laing, the limited concrete prose focused on the failed doctor’s misperception of transcendence. Laing perceives himself as the conquering brute, alpha male par excellence, inheritor not only of the falling high-rise, but also its female cohort, his harem in a future to come, his genealogical generativity restored. Laing can’t see that he’s been x’ed out of this equation, the failed phallic figure jutting impotently into mother sky.
21. So you know that High-Rise is going to be a movie? A Major Motion Picture? Starring Tom Hiddleston? As cynical as I am, I think the book should make a fine film—it’s adaptable, yes. It could even be a great video game. A video game where you eat a dog. A video game where you think you win, but you don’t.

Act of Violence, Rene Magritte

Early in J.G. Ballard’s 2003 novel Millennium People, our narrator David Markham remarks that “A vicious boredom ruled the world, for the first time in human history, interrupted by meaningless acts of violence.” The sentence delivers three of the novel’s key terms: boredom, meaningless, and violence. These words (or iterations of these words) repeat so often in Millennium People that any connotative spark they might bear becomes dulled. Even the violence becomes boring.

The violence in the novel resonates from its central plot about a middle-class revolution in Chelsea Marina, an “enclave of middle-class decorum.” Corporate psychologist David Markham is drawn into this revolution after his ex-wife dies in an apparently-meaningless bombing at Heathrow Airport. (She dies at the baggage carousel—symbolically-overloaded and thoroughly-Ballardian). Initially, Markham’s goal is to infiltrate the group as a kind of unwitting police spy. However, he soon takes part in acts of terrorism and meaningless violence, led in large part by Kay Churchill, an ex-film studies professor who rails against the evils of Hollywood and travel. Soon, Kay ventriloquizes Markham:

…I could hear her voice inside my head: bullying, pleading, sensible and utterly mad. The middle class was the new proletariat, the victims of a centuries-old conspiracy, at last throwing off the chains of duty and civic responsibility.

Kay eventually leads Markham to Millennium People’s would-be heart of darkness, demented pediatrician Dr. Richard Gould. Kay and Markham:

‘Richard says that people who find the world meaningless find meaning in pointless violence.’

‘Richard? Dr Richard Gould?’

‘You’ll meet him again, when he’s ready. He’s the leader of our middle-class rebellion. His mind is amazingly clear, like those brain-damaged children he looks after. In a way, he’s one of them.’

Kay is a far more interesting character than Gould. Unfortunately, Ballard teases out Gould as the Big Bad, occasionally having him show up to dialogue with Markham on finding big-em Meaning in all the meaninglessness of the world. God as a Void, the evils of the 20th century infecting the new millennium, etc. These ideas repeat and repeat and repeat, bumping along a muddled plot. Indeed, much of the plot and many of the themes of Millennium People might be condensed into this conversation between Markham and his one-time colleague/boring-assed doppelgänger Henry the psychologist. Markham speaks first in this exchange, explaining the revolution to Henry (I’ve added bold-faced emphasis if you’re in a hurry):

‘Middle-class pique. We sense we’re being exploited. All those liberal values and humane concern for the less fortunate. Our role is to keep the lower orders in check, but in fact we’re policing ourselves.’

Henry watched me tolerantly over his whisky. ‘Do you believe all that?’

‘Who knows? The important thing is that the people at Chelsea Marina believe it. It’s amateurish and childish, but the middle classes are amateurish, and they’ve never left their childhoods behind. But there’s something much more important going on. Something that ought to worry your friends at the Home Office.”

“And that is?’

‘Decent and level-headed people are hungry for violence.’

‘Grim, if true.’ Henry put down his whisky. ‘Directed at what?’

‘It doesn’t matter. In fact, the ideal act of violence isn’t directed at anything.’

‘Pure nihilism?’

‘The exact opposite. This is where we’ve all been wrong – you, me, the Adler, liberal opinion. It isn’t a search for nothingness. It’s a search for meaning. Blow up the Stock Exchange and you’re rejecting global capitalism. Bomb the Ministry of Defence and you’re protesting against war. You don’t even need to hand out the leaflets. But a truly pointless act of violence, shooting at random into a crowd, grips our attention for months. The absence of rational motive carries a significance of its own.‘

While Ballard’s diagnosis of the end of the 20th century is both perceptive and prescient, the novel’s repetitions build to very little. Ballard puts his interlocutors into fascinating territory, but then squirms away. Here’s Gould holding forth to Markham:

We’re living in a soft-regime prison built by earlier generations of inmates. Somehow we’ve got to break free. The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th Century. The deaths were tragic, but otherwise it was a meaningless act. And that was its point.

Markham then immediately turns the conversation to the Heathrow bombing that killed his ex-wife. The potential for a shocking exchange simply veers back to the novel’s central thesis.

And that thesis becomes muddied. Markham, Gould, Kay, and other revolutionaries make bold, radical declarations, but often append them in a sentimentality at odds with their revolutionary claims. Ballard’s characters let us know that they think murder is wrong. The contradiction between the impulse for meaningless violence and the core (and very middle-class) values that often restrains the impulse remains unexplored. This unresolved contradiction might have been a purposeful tactic meant to highlight the limits of our narrator’s desire for real revolution, but there’s little to lead a reader to this conclusion beyond his own hopeful imagination. Ballard seems as uncommitted as the characters.

A lack of force and shock—that’s the problem of Millennium People, I suppose. It’s unfair and unproductive to expect Ballard to rewrite Crash or High-Rise here, even though he’s playing with many of the same themes and motifs. And yet those novels exist. Dr. Richard Gould is a pale answer to Crash’s Dr. Robert Vaughan (or Richard Wilder of High-Rise or Strangman of The Drowned World or Dr. Barbara of Rushing to Paradise…). Ballard’s satire suffers from a lack of full commitment. The hyperbole peters out; the tonal inconsistencies, far from clashing, become dull.

Still, there’s much to commend in Millennium People even if it falls short of Ballard’s finest work. The novel’s larded with little riffs and satirical observations: “America invented the movies so it would never need to grow up,” Kay remarks. Markham observes in a riot “the outrage of professional men and women who had never known pain and whose soft bodies had been pummelled only by their lovers and osteopaths.” We’re informed that “From now on ordering an olive ciabatta is a political act.” (I would love to read the notebook where Ballard recorded these phrases, if such a treasure exists).

Millennium People’s prescience—like most of Ballard’s previous work—only comes into sharper relief over time. The erosion of the middle class, the spike in income inequality, the inability of regular working people to live in places like London or New York City anymore—Ballard’s mapped it all out here. The contemporary world Ballard satirizes in Millennium People—published just a few years before his death in 2009—is already thoroughly Ballardian. The millennium caught up to the man.

1. The final episode of the second season of True Detective airs on HBO tomorrow tonight [9 Aug 2015]. Popular and critical consensus seems to decree that this finale can only redeem Nic Pizzolatto’s supposed sophomore slump. I’m very much looking forward to the episode, as I’ve looked forward to each episode this season.
2. Season 2 of True Detective is a much, much better show than its many noisy naysayers might maintain. It’s a neon noir satire, a potboiler bubbling over with lurid, sticky flux. It’s hilarious and anxious and abject. I riff more on it in point 10 if you want to jump down there now. (Or indulge my anxieties, if that’s your deal).
3. A friend of mine pointed out over drinks a few weeks back that this season of the show will be reevaluated in a few years, after the True Detective serials have run their course. We agreed that the season will likely be reconsidered in a far more positive light. (Think season 2 of The Wire, if you will).
4. Re: point 3—I’ve talked about the show all season long with friends—texted about it, etc. There’s something still vital there, no matter how much it may seem to curdle compared to season one. Maybe you’ve talked about it with your friends too, no?
5. And re: point 4: I’ve had more people email or tweet me asking me to write about True Detective than anything ever. So, like, I’m trying, here.
6. And re: point 5: I’m guessing folks wanted me to write about this season maybe because I wrote about it so damn much last year: About its agon with consciousness, its dreams and nightmares, its literary touches, its weakest episode, and its werewolves. And then I kind of failed to write, at least immediately, about the finale, and when I did write about it, I buried it in a riff on things I wish I’d written about, writing:
   

   …I could not bring myself to write about the ending, in part because of the (perceived) negative backlash the conclusion received. I felt the need to address haters and doubters, when what I really wanted to comment on was the sheer beauty of the episode—its aesthetics, its greenness. Critics emphasized the bromantic ending, or the moment where Cohle seems to retreat (uncharacteristically) to metaphysics, but for me the signal moment was achieved when Hart is asked by his ex-wife and children, who attend him in his hospital bed, if he is alright. This question links back to a domestic lull in the middle of episode four. We see Hart and Cohle as roommates, as Lucinda Williams’s gentle song “Are You Alright?” plays. This is the middle of the series, and also the central question of the series: Are you alright? At the end of the series, Hart attempts to affirm that he is alright, but it is clear to everyone—audience, family, and Hart himself—that he isn’t.

7. In that big fat quote above, I wrote that “I felt the need to address haters and doubters” about the end of season one; similarly, part of the anxiety of writing about season 2 is that one falls into the position of having to address the “discussion” — almost all negative chatter — about season 2 — instead of, you know, discussing the mood, aesthetics, and tone.
8. And of course season 2 was born into a kind of Oedipal anxiety over its progenitor. Season 1 seemed to come from nowhere, black, electric, crackling with the charisma of its two leads.
9. (I’m such a nerd that I had a dream a few weeks before the début of the second season where I dreamed I saw the second season and it wasn’t nearly as good as the first. Inside the dream, I knew that this was my subconscious helping to deflate anxieties. And over a fucking TV show! What’s wrong with me?) Well let’s get to whatever point I might have:
10. The second season of True Detective can be read as a satire—on noir, on L.A. stories, on hardboiled pulp, on masculine anxieties. Yes: But it also plays as a satire on television itself, on viewer expectations even. Sincere satire never fully announces itself as such. This second season of True Detective is sincere satire.
11. One satirical reading rule for True Detective Season 2 is introduced in the first episode, “The Western Book of the Dead.” In one of its more memorable sequences, Ray Velcoro dons a mask before beating up an Los Angeles Times reporter who was working on an “eight-part series” to expose corruption in Vinci. The scene reads as a metatextual prick at viewers hoping to have this eight-part series laid out neatly for them.
12. The lurid violence here succeeds by connecting to a kernel of pathos for its perpetrator, Ray Velcoro (Colin Farrell). Velcoro is surely the reason to watch this season. He anchors the satire in sincerity.
13. We can find similar sincere satire in True Detective season 2’s superior cousin, Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation of Inherent Vice. There are plenty of plot convergences between these two, but the tonal overlap is more interesting to me.
14. Well, plot of course—
15. —but wait a moment with plot: Mood. Ambiance. Tone. —Of course they are linked, plot and feeling—but this season has done a marvelous job evoking the dreadnights of David Lynch (and if the directors seem to borrow a bit heavily from Mulholland Drive or Lost Highway, so much the better). And The Long Goodbye. And Chinatown (talk about Oedipal anxieties!). But also Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (why not?). Or even The Big Lebowski.
16. And the plot? What? Another reading rule, indulge me, indulge me, comes in the series’ overuse of aerial shots of L.A. freeways—big converging loops, sometimes black white gray, but often glowing lurid neon at night. The plot is easy to write off as a shaggy dog mess (see also Inherent Vice, Twin Peaks, The Big Lebowski), but it’s not. It does fit together (just like the plots of those examples I proffered parenthetically). You can even have someone explain the plot to you if you like. Ascending from the confusing and abject trenches, the looping freeways’ tangled violence resolves into a beautiful, complete, pulsing picture.
17. And there are other reading rules that guide a viewer toward TD2’s satire—the bizarre cliffhanger “death” of Velcoro at the end of only the second episode, for example. The scene was thoroughly convincing in its morbidity and illogic, an illogic predicated on its audience’s intimate relationship with hoary TV tropes of yore.
18. Or the insane gunfight at the end of the fourth episode (an answer, we know—and not a full answer, just a different one—to the famous thrilling single-take shot at the end of the fourth episode of the first season). The scene begins with nonchalant swagger and escalates into Michael-Bay-on-the-cheap territory. The hyperbole untethers from reality—it really gets out of hand fast—delivering an overabundance of violent spectation. The satire punctures any veneer of reality—but only momentarily. The end of the scene finds our detectives realizing how awful things went.
19. Or? Or the body of our (ostensible) murder victim, Ben Caspere, chauffeured about a la Weekend at Bernies? Or the scene at the Chessani estate? Or Woodrugh’s cheeks flapping in the wind? Or the saloon that Velcoro frequents, with a witch guitarist on retainer? Or the Elvis impersonator? Or the Good People commune? (Reminds me that I forgot to namedrop The Source Family in points 15 or 16). Or the garbage apocalypse movie? Rick fucking Springfield? The masks? The dildos? The knives? The teeth? The eyes? Or the fucking orgy scene, with its wonderful syrup soundtrack?
20. The satire overwhelms, I mean, re: point 19. The satire normalizes, elides its own satirical contours. L.A. and Environs of TD2 is absurd, abject, and surreal. It’s fun stuff.
21. And this, re: point 20, is what maybe fails to connect with so many viewers who’ve been so critical of the season—It takes itself too seriously! is a common accusation. But no, I don’t think it does, not a bit.
22. This isn’t to say that the actors aren’t acting so seriously—sometimes to the point that they appear to be in entirely different series from each other. Vince Vaughn is an easy example here. He’s not just playing against type as Frank Semyon, he’s playing against strength. And common sense. And maybe even good taste. (Although I don’t think good taste has anything to do with TD2). Vaughn’s Semyon occasionally comes to life when he’s back in his rough-and-tumble element, but for the most part, his character seems to be one long deadpan (emphasis on dead) satire of audience expectations.
23. Let me anticipate: Look, pal, are you saying that Vince Vaughn is bad on purpose in True Detective? No. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that he was a bad but interesting bet for the role, and I think he was cast as a satirical jab at audience expectations.
24. And but still, re: point 22, re VV’s Semyon: When, on his revenge kick in ep 5, he delivers the simile “It’s like blue balls in your heart,” what other option is there but to laugh hysterically? I mean, spit out your precious bourbon even, if it’s in your mouth! Blue balls in your heart is a satirical metaphor, the punchline to the series’ set-ups of masculine anxieties. It’s an especially excellent example of one of many, many lines in TD2 that oozes pulp. The audience is to chew that pulp and like it. (Or do a spit-take).
25. 25 points seem like too many points in a riff, as these things go, and too much has been written about True Detective Season 2 anyway—which attests maybe to its zeitgeistiness, if not its greatness. I’ve enjoyed the season very much, and I do not care at all if its loops cohere into some greater picture in the finale. I’ll happily settle for some ridiculous hardboiled neon noir satire.

Over the next few weeks, Biblioklept contributor Ryan Chang and I will be discussing New American Stories, an anthology edited—or maybe “curated” is the right word, although I’m not sure—by Ben Marcus.  

Edwin Turner: You got your copy of New American Stories? Let’s talk about the cover, the intro, and the first story,  Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “Paranoia.”

Ryan Chang: The cover and the introduction, and hence the context of the selections, elegantly mesh, which is more than I can say for 99% of covers. But I like anything that Mendelsund touches. It’s quiet, understated, but an excellent visual metaphor for what Marcus discusses in his introduction. The best part about this cover is the spot where part of the word “Stories” tries to mingle with the blocked passage from the introduction. The two don’t merely coexist, or mesh at all, but exist in this static conflict. It seems to be what Marcus wants most out of this new anthology; it occurs to me that I don’t have a lot of anthologies because a) I find them pretty boring, b) if it’s going to be an anthology, it’s going to be non-Anglo and -American — most of the time, the anthologies featuring these authors are already on my shelf in one way or another, and when I flip through them in the book store, the new context in which I find an author (say, someone like Richard Yates and Barry Hannah) isn’t new and exciting.

ET: The cover is great—spine too. I agree with you that it’s “quiet”—although that’s a strange word, y’know, considering there’s so much going on there—so much text. But the book is handsome, and the cover presents as a baseline postmodern conundrum—Where does the text begin? The authorship question is there too, on the second page, the “Also by Ben Marcus” page—as if Marcus were the author of the collection. Which in a way he kinda sorta is—the whole mixtape/DJ/curator thing—I mean he’s the author of the “anthology,” the tracklist, the occasion. I’m generally suspicious of the overuse of the term “curator,” but I think it’s ultimately more apt than editor. And Marcus spins a cool set. The book is a tasty gateway drug.

Anthologies were really important to me when I was 15, 16, 23…but now I tend to think of them entirely in teaching terms, often in very jaded terms, honestly. I would love to be able to look over the selections here with fresher eyes, if you know what I mean. As a freshman in college, I read the 1994 anthology The Vintage Book of Contemporary Short Stories, which Tobias Wolff edited. It would be impossible for me to overestimate the importance of that for me—it introduced me to Barry Hannah, Denis Johnson, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, and all these other writers who simply weren’t on my radar. In retrospect, I realize that that anthology represented a very particular kind of writing, but I think Wolff captured something of an era there.

RC: The posture of most anthologies is to celebrate/represent the coalesced spirit of a kind of writing, or an era. And I only realized this reading through Marcus’s introduction. He writes, “This anthology aims to present … a sampler of behaviors and feelings we can very nearly have only through reading. A sourcebook of compulsory emotions.” I really like this. The focus of NAS is on language — as is to be expected in Marcus’s hands — and not on, say, a particular identity, era, or whatever. This is an anthology about the breadth of styles and forms — which brings me back to the cover. It’s a really brilliant illustration of Marcus’s guiding aesthetic principle in his own work and here: the productive tension between form and content. The scope of selection is wide, and encouraging from someone known to run in “experimental circles.” This is an anthology about aesthetic modes, not being an American.

ET: Parts of Marcus’s introduction feel a little like a wide-eyed sermon for the choir to me, but maybe I’m being cynical. Maybe I want him to be cynical with me. We all know why we’re here; get to the stories. His riffs on language and what and why we (might) use language offer an adequate “defense” of the title/mission New Stories—but there’s not really an engagement with the American aspect there, which, I suppose, might have played into a deeply ideological thing, a statement thing. Maybe A Sourcebook of Compulsory Emotions is a much much better title. But—but! But that first story, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh’s “Paranoia”—that’s a very American story, or, rather, that’s a story about America: nationalism, capitalism, racism, militarism, football, a Fourth of July scene? Oh, and, paranoia.

RC: The first story is a great opener, I think. It’s a classic realist mode, which, after reading the introduction, will get the reader to think, “Will something weird happen?” The weirdness that happens is the “moral honesty” that Marcus talks about in the introduction: the weirdness is in how normal this story is. I say classic and realist and I mean that the plot is straightforward, its language is plain and mostly functional (that is, free of any acoustical poetic attention or syntactical destruction), and about, quote-unquote, real people. Here’s the weird, and it’s not even that weird: the small talk we take for granted — i.e., when we ask the other person how they’re doing; in “Paranoia,” it’s the weather — becomes this refrain for each section in the story; Sayrafiezadeh deftly shows that repetition — i.e. stability — gives only the illusion of comfort, and that comfort in almost-knowing the weather is a salve against the American reality: that the worst will always happen. I won’t give the story away for anyone reading this post, but “Paranoia” works on two really brilliant moves. They’re pretty obvious maneuvers, but I think it shows that even in a more straightforward form, if one hones in on the tension between form and content — that is, diction/syntax and images the former evokes — some affecting writing is bound to occur. The other way — a commitment to a particular position — political, moral or otherwise — comes off cheap and stale.

ET: “Paranoia” asks its reader to attend closely to diction: “That word’s not called for!” is a through-line in the story. I almost wrote tale for story there (attending to diction), but “Paranoia” is not a tale. There’s no neat bow at the end. It succeeds on vibe, on mood, on the evocation of menace its title promises.

RC: Yeah, you’re right — it demands that the reader divert their attention away from the televised bombings of “the peninsula,” and on the subversive, subdermal ways in which language organizes reality — exactly how Marcus describes language in his introduction.

ET: So…let’s read the last story together next, no? Then, you pick one that’s a reread for you, but not for me, and we’ll read it—and then I’ll do the same—pick a reread for me that you haven’t read? Good?

1. A colleague dropped by today, burst in my office really, if you’ll forgive the cliché, animated, ecstatic almost—Read this!—he commanded, thrusting a big fat hardbacked Gore Vidal volume in front of me. Read this, his finger pointing to the last paragraph of the 1981 essay “Pink Triangle and Gold Star” (ostensibly a review of Renaud Camus’ novel Tricks).  So I read it. See? It’s just like today! my colleague declared. Vidal’s essay ends with a call for the unity of marginalized people to resist “our ruling class” — the banks, The Wall Street Journal, the Pentagon — and “their kindly voice,” Ronald Reagan. We then had a brief discussion about Donald Trump’s bid for the presidency, something I have until now refused to talk about at all because it’s all just too weird.
2. I sometimes feel like I’m living in a Thomas Pynchon novel.
3. I sometimes feel like I’m living in a J.G. Ballard short story.
4. I sometimes feel like I’m living in some distorted, slipped timeline.
5. Reading Philip K. Dick’s novel  Martian Time-Slip, I kept wanting to burst into someone’s office, animated, pointing to a paragraph, crying, Read this! See? It’s just like today!
6. Not that we’ve colonized Mars but—
7. —colonial metaphors, yes? Cowboys and Indians…
8. But also, that we’d want the final frontier to be just like home: Desert Mars with green lawns, irrigated flower gardens. Swimming pools. Dick’s Mars is California 1964 and California 2015. And: a water-scarce environment to come.
9. Did I mention that the novel is set in 1994?
10. I sometimes feel like I’m living in a Don DeLillo novel.
11. But where was I? I launched into this riff with a long anecdote, so—What my colleague and I worked into was, ultimately, a discussion of the sheer irreality of modern life—the paranoia that permeates American culture, the sense that the last two decades seem like a bad repetition of Bad Times that outdated textbooks told us had been conquered.
12. (Or maybe I’m just getting old).
13. (Sorry for the scatterbrainededness of this ordeal. I finished the novel this afternoon and if I don’t get this down now it seems I won’t get anything down).
14. So obviously you can find alienation, instability, and repetition right there in the title Martian Time-Slip.
15. And Dick loads the novel with images and props and ideas to evoke those themes of alienation, instability, and repetition: autism, primitivism, schizophrenia.
16. Colonies, camps, U.N. as World Police.
17. Health food.
18. And land speculation.
19. And abjection.
20. And abjection erupts in paranoia and irreality, pointing to a People Who Aren’t People:

21. He saw, through the man’s skin, his skeleton. It had been wired together, the bones connected with fine copper wire. The organs, which had withered away, were replaced by artificial components, kidney, heart, lungs­—­everything was made of plastic and stainless steel, all working in unison but entirely without authentic life. The man’s voice issued from a tape, through an amplifier and speaker system.

    Possibly at some time in the past the man had been real and alive, but that was over, and the stealthy replacement had taken place, inch by inch, progressing insidiously from one organ to the next, and the entire structure was there to deceive others.

22. —so the sense that the contemporary person is just a technological mediation, a deception, inauthentic. (Dear reader, attach this passage to what you will, but it seems to me surpassing prescient).
23. I’ve done a poor job of outlining the plot, right? Sorry. But look, it’s a Philip K. Dick novel, and certainly one of his better ones—and if you’re a more-than-casual reader, you know it, I think, and if you’ve read his finest—VALIS, The Man in the High Castle, Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Palmer Eldritch—you might should could read Time-Slip.
24. But so plot, well: Here’s Lawrence Sutin on the novel, from Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick:

25. Life in the bleak Martian colonies bears a striking resemblance to business as usual on modern-day Earth…In the parched Martian colonies, grasping Arnie Kott is the chief of the powerful plumber’s union (based on the fifties Berkely Co-op Phil despised for its wrangling politics). The little guy, repairman Jack Bohlen, is a onetime schizophrenic who still lives with schizophrenia’s aftereffects. An autistic kid, Manfred Steiner, slipslides helplessly forward and backward in time, into realms of entropy and death.

26. Arnie seeks to capitalize on Manfred’s timeslipping, and Dick—who, let’s just admit it, isn’t always the most writerly writer (whatever that means) handles the time slippage with rhetorical aplomb, making the reader slip-slide through time with Manfred, Arnie, and Jack. I shared an extended passage a few days ago as an example; it shows us (a version of) Manfred decaying in a future Martian slum. The imagery is abject and pitiful, evoking again the notion of a human’s decay into machination:

27. He lay there for a hundred and twenty­three years and then his artificial liver gave out and he fainted and died. By that time they had removed both his arms and legs up to the pelvis because those parts of him had decayed.

    He didn’t use them anyhow. And without arms he didn’t try to pull the catheter out, and that pleased them.

28. Time-Slip rockets into rhetorical reverberation, cycling its final chapters into a strange decay. The timeslips jar the reader’s narrative perception—Hey wait, didn’t I already read this?—unsettling expectations, and ultimately suggesting that this Martian Time-Slip is just one version of Martian Time-Slip. That there are other timelines, distorted, slipped.
29. And there are threads—wires, if we want to borrow one of the novel’s motifs—that don’t fully connect. There are short circuits, misfires, gaps. Dick tears into the real stuff, the inner material, and pulls it up to the surface without putting it all back together too neatly.
30. There’s even a slippiness to the Dick’s resolved wires (if you’ll excuse my torturing the metaphor). The novel concludes in a strange jolt of domestic restoration, a kind of farce of the traditional comedic and tragic conventions where all returns to normal—there is no normal, never—and so No normal never is, paradoxically, paranoically, normal.
31. I sometimes feel like I’m living in a Philip K. Dick novel.

For the past year, I’ve run a strip from Paul Kirchner’s cult classic The Bus each Sunday. The strips come from an album posted at Imgur full of high quality scans. I posted the last scan last week.

The Bus originally ran in Heavy Metal from 1979-1985; Kirchner’s done a few  over 40 new strips over the past few years, as he notes in a recent memoir-piece at The Boston Globe. The new strips will be collected in The Bus 2 from Editions Tanibis.

I’ve enjoyed posting the strips tremendously. I first saw a few strips at an image forum I frequent, and quickly found the Imgur album. Posting one each Sunday was my way of, well, not bingeing on them.

The Bus is a profound strange wonderful trip. Kirchner’s visions often evoke Escher’s paradoxes, and the best of his strips make us attend closely to what we’d otherwise dismiss. The Bus is subtle and sly, occasionally (very occasionally) dark, but also, I would argue, sensitive—there’s something deeply endearing about the strip’s central human protagonist, an often passive (even hapless) passenger, a kind of late-20th century Everyman.

The Sunday blog posts of The Bus have gotten more “I don’t get it” or “Can someone explain it?” comments than anything in recent memory—a good sign, I think. (There are also plenty of appreciative “That took me a minute” or “Subtle!” comments too).

What The Bus does best—better than amuse or provoke or entertain (which it does very well)—what I think The Bus does best though is play with our notions of a stable reality. Kirchner’s strip allows us to imagine—perhaps along with his passenger protagonist—a world as utterly banal as our own but one that might tip over into surrealism at any moment. Excellent stuff.

But my writing about The Bus is really no good—it’s like trying to explain why a joke is funny or why a song is soulful. Better to read view experience it yourself.

-What is the book about?

-Language.

-I mean, like, what’s the plot?

-Okay. I’ll try. The narrator is Gordon Lish—a version of Gordon Lish, of course (Gordon!), who tells us about a cryptographic “test” his aunt, an agent for the National Reconnaissance Office, sent him in 1963.

-Why did she send him this test?

-Poor Gordon was jobless and had a wife and kids to support and-

-You mean his kid the novelist Atticus Lish?

-Please don’t interrupt; no, these, these are other kids; Atticus comes later, but Lish does write about him in Cess. Anyway-

-What does he say about Atticus?

-He writes that “Atticus is, a, you know, a writer by Christ—is a novelist, by Christ, is indeed, if I, by Keerist, may say so myself, ever so proudly so, ever so rivalrously so, a novelist of nothing less than of rank.” Okay?

-Okay.

-So: The narrator gets this “test” from his aunt and-

-What does it look like? What is it?

-It’s a long list of esoteric words.

-May I see?

-It’s a pretty long list.

-How long?

-About 170 pages, about 22 words per page.

-May I see a section then?

-Sure:

-Whoa!

-That’s what I thought too! In fact, I first got a digital copy from publisher OR—so I was just reading, you know, on an iPad—which is, I mean, if you can imagine, I wasn’t doing the flicking through thing, the physical browsing thing—so I had no idea that there would be this big long list of words as like, the main course. I was shocked. It was electric.

-Isn’t that all a book is though—like a list of words, arranged somehow? Isn’t that then maybe what Lish is doing here then? I’m reminded of something Derrida-

–Sh. Please.

-and of course John Cage has-

–Sh. Shhhhhh.

-And Blanchot, of course, has written-

–Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhut the fuck up.

-Okay. So, this list of words, it’s like, a test you say?

-Yes.

-And Lish is sort of, like, passing the test onto the reader?

-Yes.

-Did you pass the test?

-No, no, not the first time—or maybe not at all—I mean, I don’t even know if I read it properly, you know? It was exhausting, I didn’t know the words, etc. But when I reread it as a physical/paper copy, I kinda sorta maybe got it, or at least noticed some clues/keys. I’ll leave it at that.

-May I see a little more?

-Sure:

–Impubic?

-“Prepubescent.”

-Devasting?

-An obsolete form of “devastating.”

-So, okay, so—most of the book is this big long list-test-cryptogram?

-Yes and no—there are two notes, one before the list—which the table of contents titles “In the Cesspool”—and one after. And a “Postfix” which undoes the answer to the test, perhaps. The second note is the real animating force of the text—there’s a lot going on there—Lish’s life is in there, sort of-

-You mean like it’s a memoir?

-Well I have it on authority from a Lish scholar that “Almost everything he [Lish] writes is made-up, especially the most apparently biographical stuff.” Which complicates my reading of so much of Lish, from my favorite stories in Mourner at the Door to last year’s collection Goings in Thirteen Sittings, which I claimed in my review is “like a memoir-in-fragments.” And Lish of course, is playing with his persona throughout: “I am, you see, a fiction-writer, once an editor thereof, once a teacher thereof, once a teacher thereof, and am, you can surmise, surely not at home, nor anywhere near to it, when in the company of what I have been seeking to establish as fact—more direful still, as corroboratable fact.” He constantly writes stuff like that, stuff like, “I’m just trying to do all that I might to prove to you that I, Gordon, am doing all that one might to affirm as to how I am (being) on the (one hundred per cent) square with you.” And then, of course, there are all sorts of digressions that digress, maybe, around language’s gaps, its failures to mean with the absolute authority we might wish it to possess. Which is what Cess is about. And is. But like I was saying, there’s a lot in that second note—a riff on the Lish-narrator (Gordon!) going on a date with Marlon Brando’s mistress, for example. Lots of fun funny stuff, and as always, it’s the voice, the force of the language that compels us to read Lish.

-Us?

-Us.

-There is no Us; the whole concept behind this ostensible “review” is a bad joke; it isn’t even a concept; it’s a fucking schtick.

-I don’t think there’s a “c” in shtick. Also, reviewing Lish is, like, hard. There’s a moment in the second note of Cess where Lish writes, “Words! Jesus Christ Almighty words!” and all I could think was Yes yes yes of course yes me too. I dogeared that page. I dogeared almost all the pages of the second note though.

-Anything of note?

-Hell yeah.

-Such as?

-“I am, qua Gordon, what the experts refer to as an authentic human being.”

-And?

-“…you know, but because the truth never seemed to me quite true enough, I’d concoct some goddamn lunatic elaborations which everybody would then look at me with a look which looked to me as if they knew perfectly well I was calculating my head off and how precious little of—yes, yes, how little of it was anywhere near close to the honest-to-God…okay, skip it, let’s just go ahead and skip it, you and your friends and relations know exactly what I am sitting here getting at and are probably, you know, not all that fabulously, or weren’t, when you were a kid, all that different in handling a hotspot like that, etc., etc.”

-And?

-“Sorry for all the words; sorry that in your getting a look at them you had to suffer so much talk.”

-So much talk? Isn’t it reading? How is reading different than talk?

-Don’t you mean different from?

-Ugh. Look, he calls it, or subtitles it, A Spokening. What the hell is a “spokening”?

-Let’s cite the text: “For isn’t this (you were paying attention, weren’t you?) a spokening? Ah, so what in the duce is a spokening? Here’s my answer—don’t ask me again.”

-Ha!

-Yeah, fucking lol, right?

-Cool…so…did you like the book?

-Hell yeah.

-And?

-I don’t know if there’s an and…I mean, in evaluative terms, I don’t know if it’s the best starting place for readers new to Lish, you know—but also, it’s like, the Lishiest Lish, you know?

-I don’t know. Is it worth reading though. Like, worth, uh, time, effort, moolah?

-Hell yeah.

Gordon Lish’s novel spokening Cess is available now from OR Books.

Does Suttree die?

At the end of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, I mean?

Look, before we go any farther, let’s be clear—this little riff is intended for those who’ve read the book. Anyone’s welcome to read this riff of course, but I’m not going to be, y’know, summarizing the plot or providing an argument that you should read Suttree (you should; it’s great)—and there will be what I suppose you’d call spoilers.

So anyway—Does Suttree die at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree?

This question percolated in the background of my brain as I revisited Suttree this month via Michael Kramer’s amazing audiobook version (I also reread key sections—especially the last), in large part because of comments made on my 2010 review of the novel.

The first comment suggesting that Suttree dies at the end of the novel came in 2012 from poster “Jack foy,” who suggested that Suttree “has died in the boat and that it is his corpse cariied [sic] from there and his spirit and not his body hitching a ride at the finale.”

Earlier this year, a commenter named Julie Seeley responded to Jack foy’s idea; her response is worth posting in full:

I kind of agree that Suttree dies at the end also–or at least there are a lot of indications that the ending is meant to be ambiguous. Suttree reflects on his life, saying something to the effect of “I was not unhappy.” He visits his own houseboat and finds the door off and a corpse in his bed. A driver picks him up and says, “Come on,” even though Suttree had never even stuck out his thumb to hitch-hike It feels oddly similar to Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me.” All of the scenery whizzing by faster and faster does feel like (sorry for the cliche) his life sort of flashing before him. This was a thought-provoking novel that I am looking forward to reading again soon.

Julie Seeley’s analysis is persuasive and her connection to Dickinson is especially convincing upon rereading the book’s final paragraphs. In my Suttree review, I argued that the book is a synthesis of American literature, tracing the overt connections to Faulkner and Frost, Poe and Cummings, Ellison and Steinbeck, before laundry listing:

…we find Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, Walt Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, and William Carlos Williams, to name just a few writers whose blood courses through this novel (even elegant F. Scott Fitzgerald is here, in an unexpected Gatsbyish episode late in the novel).

Revisiting Suttree this month I found myself again impressed with McCarthy’s command of allusion and reference. Its transcendentalist streak stood out in particular. (Or perhaps more accurately, I sensed the generative material of the American Renaissance writers filtered through the writers that came before Suttree). But one American Renaissance writer I failed to name in my original review was Dickinson’s (near) contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose work of course filters through all serious American novels. There are plenty of echoes of Hawthorne in Suttree—Hawthorne’s tales in particular—but it’s the way that Hawthorne ends his tales that interests me here. Like the dashes that conclude many of Dickinson’s poems (including “Because I could not stop for Death”), Hawthorne’s conclusions are frequently ambiguous. Like the conclusion of Suttree.

So: Does Suttree die at the end of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree?

Well, wait. Let’s go back to the beginning. Of the novel, I mean. Like I said, I’d had this question buzzing around in the back of my head as I revisited the book.

So, the beginning. Well, I’d forgotten that Suttree had a twin brother who had died at birth. The twin resurfaces a few times in the text, and there’s even a scene in the musseling section featuring a set of twins. Does Suttree’s twin brother’s death in infancy prefigure Suttree’s own death? How could it not? But—at the same time—hey, it’s ambiguous if Suttree dies; should I have stated my answer to my own damn question earlier?—hey, at the same time, the twin brother’s death is not Suttree’s death sentence, right? It simply introduces a motif—the dead body.

Or rather reintroduces a motif. The novel opens with a suicide on the river. I’ll return to this. Swear.

Let’s fly through the novel’s rich fat body. The motif repeats (as motifs do). Deaths, and near-deaths structure of novel. Suttree’s twin’s death is twinned in the death of Suttree’s son. Suttree figuratively dies repeatedly—an assault with a floor buffer, f’r instance. Or a weird trip on mushrooms in the woods lovely dark and deep. Or that final bad illness, with its hallucinatory sequence—hey, there’s even a priest there, last rites, etc. And then there are all those characters who meet their demise in the narrative—Jones and the ragman and Suttree’s young young lover. Suttree’s ancestor, hanged for a murder. The old dead man whose body Suttree helps dispose of. And of course the final corpse, resting in Suttree’s houseboat, in Suttree’s bed. Etc. Death punctuates the novel—like Dickinson’s dash—simultaneously connecting and disconnecting the novel’s episodes.

And then back to the end, yes? I suppose let’s pick up with the witch Suttree visits, the deathtrip he takes in her weird hut; a deathtrip bursting in vibrant decayed deathimages—” a dead poodle”; “a mooncalf dead in a wet road you could see through, you could see its bones”—and the episode ends with Suttree “half waking” (like Young Goodman Brown who surely must have wondered, Was it all a dream?)—“his feet together and his arms at his sides like a dead king on an altar”—death image, right?—but the image ends:

He rocked in the swells, floating like the first germ of life adrift on the earth’s cooling seas, formless macule of plasm trapped in a vapor drop and all creation yet to come.

The deathtrip is a lifetrip; a transcendental vision: life|death—all creation yet to come.

Life|death. Should I note all the sex in this novel? Or at least highlight Suttree’s erection in the hospital, when he’s on the verge of death? At least point out that sex organizes the novel as much as (No, almost as much as) death? No? Move on? Okay.

Or move back, just a few pages before the witch scene, to when Suttree performs his own last rites—or, no, but at least a catechism of sorts:

Suppose there be any soul to listen and you dead tonight.

They’d listen to my death.

No final word?

Last words are only words.

You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell.

I’d say I was not unhappy.

You have nothing.

It may be the last shall be first.

Do you believe that?

No.

What do you believe?

I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.

Equally?

It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.

All souls are one soul. Side by side. Emerson. Etc. Pari passu. “Out of the dimness opposite equals advance,” wrote Whitman in Song of Myself. 

So does Suttree die?

I think we’re working this out, no? Yes? Yes|no.

But wait—I’ve failed to let Suttree finish his catechism. Or was it confession?—

Of what would you repent?

Nothing.

Nothing?

One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

Oversoul oversoul oversoul. That triplet sounds too cynical. Isn’t Suttree’s repentance beautiful?

So—does Suttree die? Well hell’s bells don’t we see a reconciling with death in the citation above?

But back to the end. J-Bone fetches Suttree from the hospital; “They seemed a long time going,” the text notes, echoing the voyage in Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death.” The ride back shows McAnally a wasteland—Eliot’s Wasteland:

…nothing stood save rows of doors, some bearing numbers, all nailed to. Beyond lay fields of rubble, twisted steel and pipes and old conduits reared out of the ground in clusters of agonized ganglia among the broken slabs of masonry. Where small black hominoids scurried over the waste and sheets of newsprint rose in the wind and died again.

But Suttree “knew another McAnally, good to last a thousand years. There’d be no new roads there.” His transcendental vision here does seem to suggest that J-Bone’s horseless carriage heads toward eternity.

And yet and yet. Suttree parts way with J-Bone, meets a few folks, does a last few errands.

He meets the sister of his erstwhile disciple Gene Harrogate. She’s looking for the lad, who’s landed in the penitentiary (just as Suttree forecast). The prison is in Petros, a word she stumbles over and repeats. And repeats. Petros. Peter. The rock. Upon this rock I will build my church. Harrogate, witness to Suttree.

And then Suttree meets Trippin Through The Dew, calling him by his Christian name John. This is the last narrative confirmation of Suttree’s existence by another named character in the text. “After that nothing. A few rumors. Idle word on the wind.” But not the last witnessing.

What happens to Suttree when he parts from Trippin Through The Dew?

He lifted a hand and went on. He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he’d taken for talisman the simple human heart within him. Walking down the little street for the last time he felt everything fall away from him. Until there was nothing left of him to shed. It was all gone.

I think here of the “uncanny token of a vanished race” Suttree finds—likely too that someone will ages hence take up Suttree’s amulets. And I think of Walt Whitman, who, in the last stanza of Song of Myself, describes his own falling away into nothing, into spirit:

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

Whitman bequeaths his spirit to us, advising us to look under our boot soles for such talismans as we may.

Suttree, in giving up his identity, his ego, makes good on his repentance and performs  Whimtan’s transcendental affirmation of life—a rejection of the suicide that opens the novel.

But Whitman’s death at the end of Song of Myself is purely symbolic, entirely metaphorical. The speaker of the poem gets up and walks on. Does Suttree, like, actually die? Is that his corpse in his bed? We’re told that the ambulance that comes to take the dead body away gets stuck in the mud; “After a while three tall colored boys in track shoes came along and pushed the ambulance out.” The ambulance driver tells them that a man died in the house and asks if they knew who lived there. This triumvirate lies and then the ambulance leaves. And then:

Shit, one said. Old Suttree aint dead.

Which I think is a perfectly good answer.

The last few paragraphs of the novel find Suttree in new clothes, leaving the construction wasteland of Knoxville. He meets a youth with a water bucket, whose “pale gold hair” appears “like new wheat.” Suttree “beheld himself in wells of smoking cobalt, twinned and dark and deep in child’s eyes, blue eyes with no bottoms like the sea.” The imagery here perhaps suggests a reconciliation of Suttree to his own lost twin, or his soul, which he is now in possession of’. The phrase “twinned and dark and deep” recalls Frost’s snowy woods, lovely dark and deep, a condensation of death-urge with the sublimity of nature. The bottomless sea from which a new Suttree may emerge “the first germ of life adrift on the earth’s cooling seas.”

And then—the last driver: “A car had stopped for Suttree, he’d not lifted a hand.” Because I could not etc. Move on.

The final images of the novel dwell on a huntsman. Or rather the huntsman. I think we know who this guy is. This is the last paragraph:

Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of the cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them.

Fly them. There’s the command—or let’s call it a suggestion. But that’s what Suttree does—Suttree flies from the hounds, departs to new space, escaping the agents of evil. Like Huck Finn, he’s got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest. Consider the vitality there. Admire the spirit. And even if that is Suttree’s corpse back there in the bed, in the ambulance, in the muck, his spirit moves forward, flies the hell hounds. And his spirit remains too—remembered, witnessed to, both by the characters in the novel and, of course, the readers. McCarthy offers a vision of transcendental spirit here, an overcoming of the modern world’s abject deathliness. Shit. Old Suttree aint dead.

The captain watched through the glass.

I suppose they’ve seen us, he said.

They’ve seen us.

How many riders do you make it?

A dozen maybe.

The captain tapped the instrument in his gloved hand.

They dont seem concerned, do they?

No sir. They dont.

The captain smiled grimly. We may see a little sport here before the day is out.

The first of the herd began to swing past them in a pall of yellow dust, rangy slatribbed cattle with horns that grew agoggle and no two alike and small thin mules coalblack that shouldered one another and reared their malletshaped heads above the backs of the others and then more cattle and finally the first of the herders riding up the outer side and keeping the stock between themselves and the mounted company. Behind them came a herd of several hundred ponies. The sergeant looked for Candelario. He kept backing along the ranks but he could not find him. He nudged his horse through the column and moved up the far side. The lattermost of the drovers were now coming through the dust and the captain was gesturing and shouting. The ponies had begun to veer off from the herd and the drovers were beating their way toward this armed hides the painted chevrons and the hands and rising suns and birds and fish of every device like the shade of old work through sizing on a canvas and now too you could hear above the pounding of the unshod hooves the piping of the quena, flutes made from human bones, and some among the company had begun to saw back on their mounts and some to mill in confusion when up from the offside of those ponies there rose a fabled horde of mounted lancers and archers bearing shields bedight with bits of broken mirrorglass that cast a thousand unpieced suns against the eyes of their enemies. A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained weddingveil and some in headgear of cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses’ ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse’s whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen’s faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brim tone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.

Oh my god, said the sergeant.

1. The legion of horribles passage comes near the end of Ch. IV of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, and is probably the passage I see cited most often from the book—which makes sense: It comes early enough in the novel and doesn’t really need much context—other than its own language—to mean. And of course its language—well, that’s the occasion, yes? The passage condenses the book’s violence into a baroque and surreal fevered dream (to steal a phrase from the passage). We have here an ornate parcel, a prefiguration of ecstatic violence.
2. I remember the first time I read this passage. It was 2008, very late at night, and it just sort of short circuited whatever brains I had left. I had to go back and start the novel again, hit reset.  I’m revisiting Blood Meridian (I’ve reread it at least once every year since I first read it, a common practice of many of its fans I’ve realized over the years) after having just revisited Suttree. Blood Meridian always seems funnier and darker, and somehow—how?!—more violent.
3. The legion of horribles passage is not acutely violent in and of itself; rather it stages the violence that explodes in the next few paragraphs, a dizzying, overwhelming violence. Scenes of rape and murder.
4. I claimed in my first paragraph that the passage doesn’t require context, but here’s some anyway: We have there at the beginning Captain White and his sergeant. White—appropriately named—plans to lead his unauthorized band of irregulars into Mexico to loot and spoil and steal. He’s recruited the kid, the would-be protagonist of Blood Meridian. With its vile nativism, xenophobia, and racism, Captain White’s recruitment monologue (which doesn’t really persuade the kid as much as the simple promise of a horse, rifle, and saddle) wouldn’t be out of place in American politics today. White’s racism makes his initial impression of the fabled horde that will kill all but a handful of his men—and, spoiler, behead him—all the more ironic/moronic: “We may see a little sport here before the day is out,” he grimly jests. This seems to me almost the set-up to a punchline, with a long excursion into a description of the advancing “horde from hell” as the meat of the joke (Joke!?), with the final punchline/payoff in the sergeant’s dry horrified realization: “Oh my god.”
5. In Suttree, McCarthy synthesizes American literature; in Blood Meridian, he’s condensing something more primal. Myth and history, time and space, whorled into blood and violence.
6. We can see this condensation of myth and history in the very language of the legion of horribles passage. McCarthy offers a nightmare vision of time collapsed into a single violent, overwhelming space—and as I go now to pull an example, I find that there are too many, that the passage is all example, all detail, all image.
7. Or, okay, hell, just one image then—the “armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust”—there, that’s it, that’s all of it, history, myth, violence.
8. Or just the words themselves, the diverse diction, culled from so many roots and tongues (attic, biblical)—and the compounding of words (bloodstained, weddingveil, headgear, cranefeathers, rawhide, pigeontailed, etc.), the compression and synthesis of words, the force of the words. The onomatopoeia. The barbaric yawps.
9. What happens next? Okay, I’d say, Read the book—but I’ve already told you—the horde eviscerates White’s men. The kid survives, somehow, and the first section of Blood Meridian seems to end—as if this fabled horde, this legion of horribles were merely a preamble to the darker violence to come—a preview of the Glanton Gang and their sinister commandant Judge Holden.

Last month, to mark its bicentennial, Penguin Classics published a deluxe edition of Jane Austen’s novel Emma. It’s a beautiful, hefty book, with deckle edges, French flaps, and a cool cover by Dadu Shin.

Beyond its obvious aesthetic appeal, Penguin’s new edition offers its readers helpful resources, including a note on spelling in the novel, a glossary, and a range of essays that offer context for better appreciating the plot (topics include “Dancing,” “Food,” and “Health”). Indeed, this edition seems geared towards helping younger readers appreciate and enjoy Emma. In a prefatory note, editor Juliette Wells writes:

This edition is designed to help. It’s a reader’s edition, not a scholarly one. In other words, the information you’ll find here is intended to support your understanding and appreciation of Emma rather than to instruct you in literary terms, theoretical perspectives, or critical debates. In choosing what to include, I’ve borne in mind what I’ve heard from students and others over the years about what has intrigued, and frustrated, them in reading this novel.

Wells’s brief introduction helps offer new readers context about the novel’s composition, publication, and reception. She even offers a short series of tips for reading Emma (sample: “If you’re feeling frustrated or bored because nothing much seems to be happening, remember that Austen’s own contemporaries commented on how little plot Emma contains and how ordinary its characters and events are”). The edition also features helpful maps (by Wells), along with illustrations and title pages from previous editions. The volume concludes with a suggested reading and viewing list “for further exploration.”

Emma is obviously in the public domain and available in plenty of inexpensive versions (like the Dover Thrift copy I read in high school)—but this new Penguin Classics edition makes a strong case for itself as the future go-to version for high school students. Wells’s editorial vision (and the aesthetic design of the book) show a strong love for Austen’s text that will carry over to a new generation of readers. 

Penguin’s blurb:

Beautiful, clever, rich—and single—Emma Woodhouse is perfectly content with her life and sees no need for either love or marriage. Nothing, however, delights her more than interfering in the romantic lives of others. But when she ignores the warnings of her good friend Mr. Knightley and attempts to arrange a suitable match for her protégée, Harriet Smith, her carefully laid plans soon unravel and have consequences that she never expected. With its imperfect but charming heroine and its witty and subtle exploration of relationships, Emma is often seen as Jane Austen’s most flawless work.

This Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition celebrates two hundred years of Austen’s beloved novel. With a beautiful cover designed by illustrator Dadu Shin and comprehensive notes drawing specially from the Jane Austen Collection at Goucher College, this is an edition to be treasured by students and collectors alike.

In Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giant, a metaphysical mist engulfs sixth-century Britain, clouding the memories of all who inhabit the land. Saxons and Britons alike cannot recall their bellicose past. Against this mist, elderly Britons Axl and Beatrice seek their long-lost son. They meet a Saxon warrior who hunts an ancient she-dragon he’s vowed to slay. He’s aided by a youth, Edwin, who’s been exiled from his village after being bitten by a mythic creature. King Arthur’s aged nephew Sir Gawain lingers as a courtly protector, a figure from an already-bygone era; the mist seems to slowly rot his brain and his conscience, pushing him into paranoia and madness. There are Charonic ferrymen and awful ogres; there are mad monks and terrible pixies. A hellhound, a dragon, a poisoned goat. Rivers and mountains and crypts and villages. But most of all that mist.

Ishiguro makes the reader experience that mist. He obscures. The action that occurs—and yes, there’s action here, measured action (often measured in a literal sense)—the action that occurs in The Buried Giant is almost always oblique, shadowed, indistinct, but also very mechanical. The memory-mist renders the world treacherous, immediate, a dark, vague place that offers its travelers no purchase of reference. Deceptive.

Forgive me for quoting at such length, but I think a longish passage here shows how and what Ishiguro is doing. Almost all of our principals are here, underground—note their procession, their movement—a constant motif in the novel, movement, single file or side by side—and the presence of a light, illumination—also a motif. Note the variety of interpretations of not knowing, not seeing, note the simple horror:

They went on into the tunnel, Sir Gawain leading, Axl following with the flame, Beatrice holding his arm from behind, and Edwin now at the rear. There was no option but to go in single file, the passage remaining narrow, and the ceiling of dangling moss and sinewy roots grew lower and lower until even Beatrice had to stoop. Axl did his best to hold the candle high, but the breeze in the tunnel was now stronger, and he was often obliged to lower it and cover the flame with his other hand. Sir Gawain though never complained, and his shape going before them, sword raised over his shoulder, seemed never to vary. Then Beatrice let out an exclamation and tugged Axl’s arm.

“What is it, princess?”

“Oh, Axl, stop! My foot touched something then, but your candle moved too quickly.”

“What of it, princess? We have to move on.”

“Axl, I thought it a child! My foot touched it and I saw it before your light passed. Oh, I believe it’s a small child long dead!”

“There, princess, don’t distress yourself. Where was it you saw it?”

“Come, come, friends,” Sir Gawain said from the dark. “Many things in this place are best left unseen.”

Beatrice seemed not to hear the knight. “It was over here, Axl. Bring the flame this way. Down there, Axl, shine it down there, though I dread to see its poor face again!”

Despite his counsel, Sir Gawain had doubled back, and Edwin too was now at Beatrice’s side. Axl crouched forward and moved the candle here and there, revealing damp earth, tree roots and stones. Then the flame illuminated a large bat lying on its back as though peacefully asleep, wings stretched right out. Its fur looked wet and sticky. The pig-like face was hairless, and little puddles had formed in the cavities of the outspread wings. The creature might indeed have been sleeping but for what was on the front of its torso. As Axl brought the flame even closer, they all stared at the circular hole extending from just below the bat’s breast down to its belly, taking in parts of the ribcage to either side. The wound was peculiarly clean, as though someone had taken a bite from a crisp apple.

“What could have done work like this?” Axl asked.

He must have moved the candle too swiftly, for at that moment the flame guttered and went out.

Ishiguro gives us mystery, interpretation, and then an incomplete, ambiguous revelation. (This is the basic structure of the novel). Beatrice never relents in her belief that she’s stumbled over a dead child. Brimming with lost children and lost parents and orphans, The Buried Giant is a novel of erasures. But an erasure leaves a trace, a violent, visceral marking into the page’s blankness. Revelation through absence.

We would have no plot, not really, without some overcoming of blankness, and Axl in particular overcomes the mist in his quest. A backstory fleshes out, in watery strokes albeit. The Buried Giant, as far as fantasy epics go, is awfully indistinct. Or rather, Ishiguro offers only mechanical and immediate glimpses into this world, a Britain on the cusp of the Middle Ages. Through Axl’s consciousness (and conscience), we see the vital precision in hand-to-hand combat, for example. Its patience, its slowness, its dependence on muscle memory. Or perhaps (dare I say) more boringly, we feel the very real peril involved in walking in the wild dark as an elderly person. The thrills in The Buried Giant come not from its sword and sorcery costumes, but from its Kafkaesque edges and gaps. This is a novel about not knowing.

And it’s here that The Buried Giant is most successful—as an evocation of not knowing. Axl and Beatrice’s quest unfolds as a series of choices and consequences severed, for the most part, from the anchor of memory. There’s an episodic vibe to the novel, a sense that it’s making itself up as it goes along. (It’s not). The novel strongly reminded me of some of the old RPGs I’d play on a Commodore 64 as a kid. The graphics weren’t great and I had to use my imagination a lot. The games were sometimes frustrating and slow. But perhaps you want a more, uh, literary comparison? Something more recent too? The Buried Giant recalls Ishiguro’s short story “A Village after Dark” a lot more than, say, A Game of Thrones or The Lord of the Rings. It’s a fantasy novel, but one that feels etiolated, its vivid colors drained. More Gustave Doré than Gustave Moreau.

While a precise indistinctness (forgive the oxymoron) is part of The Buried Giant’s program, there’s nothing indistinct about its heroes’ love for each other. Axl and Beatrice, A & B—can I say I came to love them? Or if I didn’t quite love them, I was rooting for them, say? Rooting for their survival, but specifically their survival as a they, a shared survival. Ishiguro successfully communicates their intimacy, their romance, their love, a love threatened by both the natural world and the supernatural return of lost memory. Their relationship is the heart of the novel upon which Ishiguro fixes his themes of memory, justice, vengeance, and love. Ishiguro’s commentary on those themes ultimately may feel pessimistic to many readers, particularly in the novel’s conclusion.

Excepting the ones that we love and return to and obsess over, we retain little of the novels that we read. What memories remain are kernels—the outline of a plot, a strange lingering phrase or detail, a bright or bold character, a theme, an idea, an image. It’s the love between Axl and Beatrice that I’ll likely recall most strongly from the shadows of The Buried Giant. If we can’t remember, we can at least experience.

Biblioklept contributor Ryan Chang and I continue our discussion of New American Stories, an anthology edited—or maybe “curated” is the right word, although I’m not sure—by Ben Marcus.  Read the first part of our exchange here. In this exchange we discuss holes, white American violence, paranoia, stories by Clare Vaye Watkins, Robert Coover, Lydia Davis, and Tao Lin, and that “Wait! Why? How?” feeling that good fiction can produce.

Ryan Chang: What’d you think of the Claire Vaye Watkins story?

Edwin Turner: Yeah…so… “Diggings.” It’s taken me so long to get back to you about this one because I don’t really have anything intelligent to say about it. Which is really strange: I think I’ve told you that I’ve been obsessed with holes for a few years now, and the aesthetics of digging in particular. I’ve been compiling a bibliography on writings about holes, so I guess “Diggings” fits into that. And I like the general milieu and everything, the Western thing. And I appreciate Watkins lucid storytelling style. I do. But I found myself having to slog through it, and then the end, the sort of climax or whatever…I don’t know. No spoilers for the readers, but it didn’t ring my bell. Again, I’m not saying anything particularly interesting about it. I think my problem might be with the length of the story—to be clear, that’s my problem, not the story’s—but with a few notable exceptions (“Bartleby,” “The Metamorphosis”), superlong short stories don’t do it for me. I’d rather read a novella I guess.

I’m pretty sure “Diggings” is the longest selection in New American Stories. Lydia Davis’s “Men” is obviously the shortest in the book—it’s one of her better ultrashorts, and it’s already been widely anthologized via blogs and Twitter. I wish one of her longer pieces was included though–maybe something like “Marie Curie, So Honorable Woman.” But I’ve fallen into the stupid trap of What Would Ed Do?

Another short piece in the collection is Robert Coover’s “Going for a Beer,” which is a Perfect Short Story. Just perfect. It’s a perfect postmodern gesture without any gimmickry, a story about storytelling that’s actually a story. But maybe I only think it’s so perfect because I’ve read it so many times now and even used it in the classroom. Your thoughts?

RC: There are a few things I really like about Watkins’ “Diggings.” For one, I think the voice is what really carries this story, and the pretense of the subheadings. It certainly lends the story this epic-ness that, for the most part, it does well, but my resistance to this story comes from its place within the collection.

But first, I want to touch on the hole motif. There’s the easy reading of the kind of digging and the value invested in it. The tenuous promises of a new start, or a restart. The neutrality of money; that is, one’s self-worth is in direct proportion to one’s ownership. But Watkin’s story is a critique of that very American myth of manifest destiny. Was it ever good for anything? In this light, the story seems fine. A well-executed story with enough of the right moves to keep me going. I’m impressed by Watkins’ pacing, as well as how convincing this voice is. I don’t think we should forget that. Watkins’ inflection of that gruff, macho Westernly voice is what’s most convincing for me, and contributes to the irony that enables the critique of the American myth overall. Also, to end, I’m happy to see that the principle antagonists—besides the characters’ own desires—are the “Chinamen,” who are often footnoted or forgotten in the long history of white American violence.

But to be a little academic—that the collection ends with this critique of manifest destiny and (white) Americanness strikes me as counterproductive, or redundant, to the kind of politics this collection may (may!) be advocating: the flexibility of the American voice. I’m talking about Sayrafiezadeh’s story, and your point that the protagonist can’t listen, that no one can really listen. It’s redundant to me because that theme is shot through the entire collection. Did we really need it recapitulated again? And have it be our final punctuation mark on an otherwise strong and smart anthology? This is probably my own What Would Ryan Do? situation. The story reads like a watered-down version of the punch this collection attempts to make with “Diggings.” But we should remember that this is only one anthology compiled from one editor—whose own work we both really dig (God; no pun intended)—from a body of literature that would be impossible to completely anthologize. The best things about metaphors is that they fail to fully figure their abstract possibilities in text, fixing their content in time and place; instead, they point outside of themselves. That’s exactly what NAS does here: it says, the “American Story” is flexible, strange, and ever-moving. All its permutations cannot possibly be contained.

OK, but, I like that my response is going to end on a few considerations of Coover’s story, “Going For a Beer.” In an interview, Marcus says that it’s under Coover’s tutelage where he began to cut his storytelling teeth, and you can see a lot of resonance between, say, Marcus’s early work and Coover. But even now, the one thing they share—as well as Watkins—is a commitment to the strange.

You’re right to say that it’s a perfect example of a kind of postmodern fiction without any of the gimmickry, and a “Perfect Story” in this capacity. The way it calls attention to itself is, yeah, by foregrounding the artifice of storytelling through storytelling. But it’s not a “trick,” it’s a tweak: instead of one central conflict for the protagonist, we get a replication of several conflicts, they produce the next in the series. Our readerly expectations of conflict-resolution are turned upside down; Coover collapses the arc between readerly anticipation and pacing. Always, we’re like: “Wait! Why? How?” It hinges on when Coover makes the protagonist think—by merely thinking, the action happens, and we’re led into the next sentence of the story. In that light, it’s very Quixotic, and how the story calls attention to itself in that postmodern way. I could try to break this story down more to its components, but that’s not completely our purpose. But even if I did break this down some more, it wouldn’t suck out any of the magic of Coover’s story. Which is how, I think, Marcus understands language as a drug. The certain, indubitable and inevitable syntactical arrangement of words has this inexplicable effect on both us and the writer. The mystery is what keeps stories going.

ET: I got some of that “Wait! Why? How?” feeling from Tao Lin’s “Love Is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists,” although at a far more subtle level—maybe more like, wait–why?–huh?. Like Coover’s “Going for a Beer,” Lin’s story feels effortless—but a different kind of effortless. Coover’s tale is masterful and precise. There’s something a little tossed-off to Lin’s story; a riffing poetry which gives the story some of the energy it needs: “You, the botched clone of you, the Miami Dolphins, Cocoa Puffs, paper plates, a dwindling supply of clam juice. That was life.” Wait–why?–huh? “Love Is a Thing on Sale” (wait, do I need to name the whole name? Does it remind you of a Raymond Carver title?) — “Love Is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists” has almost no plot—it’s very Tao Linish. It also captures something of the post-millennial malaise and paranoia of the previous decade. Reading it I thought, “Ah, yes, that feeling”—like there was still a freshness to that exhaustion. We learn that our protagonist Garret “often suspected that The Future Was Now,” which of course it was. And now passed.

The hole pops up as a metaphor again, although I’m not sure what Lin’s doing with it besides the very, very obvious (“There’ere’s a hole in you/Gets emptier, ah-oh, each day” is a line from “Sigh (Hole),” the “radio hit that year”). The story seems best to me when it strays from its Barthelmesque absurdities into actual emotional contemplation, as when Garret, via Lin’s free indirect style, wonders about love and truth and being considerate—that love requires real attention, consideration, punctuality. (Garret is deeply flawed too, of course).

I was surprised at how much I enjoyed “Love Is a Thing on Sale,” especially because it frequently annoyed me, with its ultra-specific signifiers of capitalism (“KFC spork”!) juxtaposed with its leery vagueness (the protagonists “flew down to Florida” for a vacation. Florida, the fourth largest state in the US. Florida. Florida, which has an east coast but also a west coast. And where do they go in Florida? Fucking Red Lobster, man). One of my favorite moments of the story is actually one of these sparks of vagueness, of sheer impossibility, of how language is a drug that can compress banality into radical action: “A few minutes passed, and then Kristy got up, called the airline place, called a cab, and flew to New York. The next day, though, she flew back, and the rest of the week in Florida was very calm and sunny.” That passage is a piece of fantasy.

RC: Mm, yeah, there’s certainly a confidence in Coover’s story that isn’t in Lin’s, but it doesn’t mean his prose is any less precise. Part of the magic in Coover’s story is watching him handle the technique he’s devised and watching him perform it, amazed that we’re buying his gambit. Though we’re puzzled, we’re not in disbelief as to what’s happening. The absurdity of his narrator’s thought generating the action becomes self-reflexive because, again, it’s an ironic joke of how stories work. Someone thinks of something, and then it happens.

This tossed-offness and the contrast between ultra-specific images set off in myriad vagaries​ you’re feeling in “Love Is a Thing on Sale” is ​core to Garret.  There’s a disappointment he can’t name in The Future (which is Now) which gets played out in the daily failures and confusions and indeterminacies of the things and people around him. Especially his girlfriend Kristy. This​ passage, which I really like, shows this:

​It was vague to Garret these days what was happening in the rest of the world. He found it difficult to comprehend how large the world was, how many people there were. He would think of the Middle East, of strife and mortar, then suddenly of Australia, and then New Zealand, giant squid, tuna fish, and then of Japan, all the millions of people in Japan; and he’d get stuck there, on Japan–trying to imagine the life of one Japanese person, unable to, conjuring only an image of wasabi, minty and mounded, against a flag-white background​.

The images develop, like a Google-search hole–to affect a “Linism”–nonsequiturly. In the Now, we’re given all of the concrete images we’ve ever wanted at our fingertips–or are they only illusory? And what we do with them, the effects we think we, in turn, effect through them in the world–aren’t they only illusory too? What these images show us is utter lack of context. They’re only bound by their inexplicability or, the illusion of meaning. Its abstract possibility is a very big maybe. For love is a thing on sale for more money than exists.

And you’re right about Garret’s contemplative moments being the strong ones here, but they wouldn’t be anything ​without these strange huh?moments that we’ve listed. These moments read like sort of very condensed essays, searching for their footing. Each time Garret thinks that Love is this or Love is that, he thinks he’s found something concrete to hold onto, to explain how to advance his relationship, his self, etc. But, like Australia, it only leads him to New Zealand, to something else, because people aren’t fixed, and neither are emotions. But our tools for understanding and approximating love and others are crummy. They’re words. “At the anti-war meeting, they wanted to abolish the words ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘them.’ Some others wanted to abolish the word ‘I.’ … They wanted semantic unity.” Ah! How nice this place would be with semantic unity, because none of us would exist.

But the huh? moments here are as precise as Coover’s, albeit in a different key. I think Lin is incredibly precise with his modifiers and images. “…they dared to squint out into their lives, and what the saw was a grass of bad things, miasmic and low to the ground, depraved, scratching, and furry–and squinting back! It was all their pets, and they wanted names. They just wanted to be named!” I love the transformation of this image. The scrutinizing squint yields a saturated vision of a nothing (a field of grass), but who decided that it was the sickly people who held the power of the gaze? Maybe they were being squinted at, they were the fleas in the hair of the dogs. Perhaps they had squinted at the wrong things.

A lot of Lin’s characterization and scene-setting techniques develop like an inexplicable growth. One of the reasons why I continue to read Lin, though the experience is sometimes insufferable (not a bad thing necessarily; it’s something I ‘enjoy’; this is part of the intended effect of many of his stories, I feel), is that he’s an incredible sentence writer, and a sentence-level writer up there with Schutt, D. Williams, and the rest of them. I don’t think people give him enough credit for this. Let’s just end with this sentence, which comes to us in the beginning of the story.

​He had seen all the apocalypse movies of the nineties, and all the signs were here: the homeless people rising up and walking around, the businessmen entering the parks and sitting down, sitting there all day, leaving late at night–why?; the focus on escape–people always talking about escaping to California, Hawaii, Florida; and the stalled technology, how all that was promised–underwater houses, hover cars, domed cities on the moon, robots that would shampoo our hair and assure you that everything was going to be okay–was not here, and would probably never be here.

Where does that parenthetical phrase begin–after the italicized why, or after the focus on escape? Or are there two parenthetical phrases there? I love how everything gets jammed up in there, in the space of that first semi-colon​. How the digressions build on the momentum of the emdashes; failures and indeterminacies leading us to only more failure and indeterminacy. You’re right to say that this story is definitely about millennial ennui/apathy/or whatever, but buried underneath that is a frustration that Garret can’t get to love. Which requires, maybe, too much desire to love.

George Orr is not well. The meek protagonist of Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Lathe of Heaven abuses prescription drugs in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to stop himself from falling asleep. Orr doesn’t want to sleep because he believes that his dreams come true—that they literally alter reality—but in such a way that no one but Orr realizes that the world has changed. Orr gets caught using a “Pharmacy Card” that doesn’t belong to him, and is court-ordered to begin treatment with a sleep research psychiatrist, Dr. William Haber. Although Haber initially doesn’t believe Orr’s claim to be cursed with “effective dreams” that transform reality, he soon realizes that Orr’s dreams somehow do come true. Then, via hypnotic suggestion (and an “Augmentor” device), Haber begins wielding Orr’s gift/curse as a clumsy tool to “better” the world.

The world of The Lathe of Heaven is grim, gray, dystopian. Published in 1971 and set in Portland in the palindromic year of 2002, Le Guin’s novel is depressingly prescient. Not only does she capture the onset of seventies malaise (the ashes of hope that burned out in the sixties), she also points to a future of environmental catastrophe:

Very little light and air got down to street level; what there was was warm and full of fine rain. Rain was an old Portland tradition, but the warmth—70° F on the second of March—was modern, a result of air pollution. Urban and industrial effluvia had not been controlled soon enough to reverse the cumulative trends already at work in the mid-twentieth century; it would take several centuries for the CO2 to clear out of the air, if it ever did. New York was going to be one of the larger casualties of the Greenhouse Effect, as the polar ice kept melting and the sea kept rising…

This is also a world of urban sprawl, overpopulation, malnutrition, and total war (a clusterfuck in the Middle East, wouldn’t you know). The government is a vague and menacing presence here—vaguely totalitarian, vaguely Big Brotheresque. We learn of the “New Federal Constitution of 1984,” one of many references to Orwell’s book. (The most obvious is our passive hero’s name).

So it’s no wonder that Haber sets about to create a utopia, right? Wouldn’t you, like, try to make the world a better place if you could? Haber is repeatedly described as a “benevolent man”—Le Guin withholds the word dictator—but the central theme comes through repeatedly: Is it possible to alter reality for the greater good? Or do we simply exist in nature, a part of everything around us?

Haber’s experiments with Orr’s mind have unintended consequences. How might we, say, cure overpopulation? How about an awful plague. Orr’s “effective dreams” revise history, rewrite reality, remap consciousness. But he’s never quite able to pull off the massive tasks Haber sets for him—end racism, end war, cure the damaged ecosystem (Le Guin is extremely pessimistic on this last front). Orr is burdened with the consciousness of multiple realities, and feels deep guilt for his role in uncreation. He starts to go crazy:

“I am cracking,” he said. “You must see that. You’re a psychiatrist. Don’t you see that I’m going to pieces? Aliens from outer space attacking Earth! Look: if you ask me to dream again, what will you get? Maybe a totally insane world, the product of an insane mind. Monsters, ghosts, witches, dragons, transformations—all the stuff we carry around in us, all the horrors of childhood, the night fears, the nightmares. How can you keep all that from getting loose? I can’t stop it. I’m not in control!”

The language here points to a fascinating feature of The Lathe of Heaven—as more “transformations” unfold from that “stuff we carry around in us,” the novel becomes richer, more vivid, more alive. The early chapters are spare, gray—there’s a scraped-out feeling about them. They feel small. As Haber pushes Orr into bigger dreams, things get weirder—and, uh, bigger. And while The Lathe of Heaven never quite reaches the rich, full territory of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed and the Earthsea books, it’s important to note that that’s not what Le Guin’s trying to do here. The Lathe of Heaven is ultimately about philosophy, not anthropology.

Perhaps the signal character of The Lathe of Heaven’s philosophy is Heather Lelache, who somehow synthesizes Haber’s agency with Orr’s passiveness. A lawyer (in one reality…), she tries to help Orr become free from Haber, hypnotizing him to implant a counter-suggestion, but also realizing what “unimaginable responsibility [she had] undertaken”:

A person who believes, as she did, that things fit: that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole; such a person has no desire whatsoever, at any time, to play God. Only those who have denied their being yearn to play at it.

If Orr’s name echoes Orwell, then perhaps Lelache echoes Le Guin. Haber’s name may allude to Fritz Haber, the German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for inventing the Haber-Bosch process. Fritz Haber’s invention essentially allowed societies to create much larger quantities of food fertilizers, literally saving billions of people from starving. (Fritz Haber’s Wikipedia page notes that the “food base of half of the current world population is based on the Haber–Bosch process”). But: Fritz Haber also invented chemical fucking warfare, going so far as to enlist in the German Army in World War I, where, as a captain, he oversaw the implementation of weaponized chlorine gas he invented. He probably thought he was, uh, making the world a better place. Later, the Nazis would modify Fritz Haber’s invention, the pesticide Zyklon A, removing an odor humans could sense. They used it in their death camps to murder people. Fritz Haber was Jewish.

Did I get off track here, riffing on Fritz Haber? (I happened to hear a Radiolab story on the man around the time I was finishing up The Lathe of Heaven). I think his real-life story illustrates, in its condensed form, so many of the problems that Le Guin plays with in her novel: How do we bear our choices? How much can we really affect the world? Is our agency authentic? Do our good intentions matter? How do our decisions ripple out into new realities—and cut off other realities?

As a way of perhaps offering a range of (oblique) answers to these questions, Le Guin opens each chapter in the novel with an epigraph. We get citations from Chuang Tse, Lao Tse, Lafcadio Hearn, H.G. Wells—there’s a particularly beautiful passage from Victor Hugo on dream and reality that somehow poetically summarizes The Lathe of Heaven better than anything I can do here. 

As if to rival the poetry of the epigraphs she’s chosen, Le Guin opens her novel with three imagistic paragraphs which outline her novel’s themes. She gives us the image of a passive jellyfish, “most vulnerable and insubstantial creature [which] has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.” The image is echoed later in Heather Lelache’s notion “that there is a whole of which one is a part, and that in being a part one is whole.” But ultimately, the jellyfish is suggestive of consciousness in dream:

What will the creature made all of seadrift do on the dry sand of daylight; what will the mind do, each morning, waking?

Yes. What will the waking mind do?

The Lathe of Heaven is a propulsive and intriguing read. I can’t believe I hadn’t read it before now. Great stuff.

Roberto Bolaño’s short story “The Return” is so good that it has two perfect opening paragraphs:

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is life (of a kind) after this life. The bad news is that Jean-Claude Villeneuve is a necrophiliac.

That’s a hell of a way to start a story! Bolaño lays out his two themes—the afterlife and necrophilia—in a jovial, almost cavalier, but dare I say sweet, even charming way. And then this paragraph:

Death caught up with me in a Paris disco at four in the morning. My doctor had warned me, but some things are stronger than reason. I was convinced, mistakenly (and even now it’s something I regret), that drinking and dancing were not the most hazardous of my passions. Another reason I kept going out every night to the fashionable places in Paris was my routine as a middle manager at Fracsa; I was after what I couldn’t find at work or in what people call the inner life: the buzz that you get from a certain excess.

Those are the first two paragraphs, and maybe they’ll entice you to read the story. However, the following riff includes what some people might consider spoilers; my hope is that if you’ve never read it before, you’ll take it on faith that “The Return” is a great, great story and you’ll go read it and stop reading this riff now. (Maybe come back later though after you’ve read it).

“The Return” is a ghost story that transmutes the horror of death and the abjection of the corpse into love, empathy, and communication—and art. It’s a beautiful ghost tale in the Romantic, Gothic tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, from whom Bolaño drew heavily. However, while Poe’s tales of necrophilia (like the poem “Annabel Lee,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “Berenice” to name just a few) obsess over repression, loss, burial, and imperfect and violent attempts at restoration, Bolaño’s “The Return” offers its readers a peaceful reconciliation with death. It’s collected in The Return (New Directions, English translation by Chris Andrews), which is a perfect introduction to Bolaño—so many great stories there (“Buba,” “Clara,” “William Burns,” etc.). So go read it.

So but and anyway: a close reading continued for those inclined.

Our narrator is a ghost, a man who died on the dance floor. Bolaño’s next move is so ridiculous that it almost seems unbelievable at first:

Like just about everyone else, I went to see Ghost, I don’t know if you remember it, a box office hit, with Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, the one where Patrick Swayze gets killed and his body is left lying on a Manhattan street, or in an alley, maybe, on a dirty pavement anyway, while in a special-effects extravaganza (they were special for the time, anyway) his soul comes out of his body and stares at it in astonishment. Well, apart from the special effects, I thought it was idiotic. A typical Hollywood cop-out, inane and unbelievable.

But when my turn came, that’s exactly what happened.

The narrator is quick to accept the conceit—he’s quick to accept a lot in this story. He concedes of Hollywood artifice that there’s “more to American naiveté than meets the eye; it can hide something that we Europeans can’t or don’t want to understand.” This acceptance quickly turns into a new affect: strange joy: “Once I was dead, I felt like bursting out laughing.” (Forgive me, but it’s impossible for me not to note that “The Return” was composed very late in Bolaño’s too-short life, that its composition strikes me as a kind of love letter to his audience, more than a consolation prize: a gift).

Our ghost-narrator, not quite sure what to do, follows his corpse to the morgue: “What a paltry thing it seemed, my body or my ex-body (I’m not sure how to put it), confronted with the labyrinthine bureaucracy of death.” The labyrinthine bureaucracy of death!

The (metaphysical) narrator then starts to reflect on metaphysical matters:

The feeling of dizziness gradually abated, although at one point I got to thinking about heaven and hell, reward and punishment, and I had a panic attack, but that bout of irrational fear was soon over. And, in fact, I was starting to feel better.

Bolaño’s narrator quickly overcomes a religious tradition of “irrational fear” and guilt; here, death–by which I mean ghosthood—is life anew. In his new life|death, the narrator comes to understand the “insomnia and pervasive insecurity” (note here the language of Poe) he once felt over his “being a toy (or less than a toy) for [his lover] Cécile.” The ghost-narrator can find a certain grace in his one-time desire to be desired, his desire for solidity.

So. The plot, yes? Well, Bolaño’s already announced his theme of necrophilia, yes? How do we get there?

Two orderlies from the morgue sneak the body away, transporting it to the most beautiful house (mansion!) that the narrator has ever seen. The orderlies are described variously as hipsters, poseurs, and (significantly) “pseudo-artists.” Despite employing these terms, the narrator is ultimately sympathetic to the orderlies. (As an aside, I can’t help reading the two as figurations of those romantic dogs Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano, strivers, would-be greats, youth).

The orderlies deliver the body to a famous fashion designer, Jean-Claude Villeneuve. And:

I didn’t know what his intentions were—I’ve always been an innocent. If I’d known, I would have been nervous. But I didn’t, so I sat down in one of the comfortable leather armchairs in the room and waited.

Our narrator is again identified with innocence and naïveté (one senses that it preceded his rebirth)—but Bolaño lets his tale play out in an unexpected way. The abjection that follows doesn’t corrupt innocence; rather, it allows for empathetic communication.

But, reader, thou art forewarned—Bolaño literalizes the necrophilia that is merely metaphorical in Poe:

…after a quarter of an hour of cuddling in the semi-darkness I noticed that he had an erection. My god, I thought, now he’s going to sodomize me. But that’s not what happened. To my surprise, the designer rubbed himself against one of my thighs till he came. I would have liked to shut my eyes at that point but I couldn’t. My reactions were contradictory; I felt disgusted by what I was seeing, grateful for not having been sodomized, surprised to discover Villeneuve’s secret, angry at the orderlies for having rented out my body, and even flattered to have served, unwillingly, as an object of desire for one of the most famous men in France.

What a paragraph!—shocking, humorous, human. 

Our narrator immediately judges the taboo-breaking that has occurred as abject: “You should be ashamed, I said.”

But then something supernatural happens—the designer responds to the ghost.

I knew at once that he had heard me. It seemed like a miracle. Suddenly I felt so happy that I forgave him his act of depravity.

Human recognition—contact—becomes a “miracle” here (recalling the word “grace” from before), transmuting abject depravity into radical forgiveness. And then the narrator declares aloud:

It’s not a problem, I said in a conciliatory tone, You’re forgiven.

These are the words so many of us long to hear—but maybe most of all we wish to hear them when we are most wrapped up in our private abject sins. It’s as if Bolaño here absolves all the mad aesthetes of the Gothic tradition in one empathetic quip.

But of course, our necrophiliac-designer must worry that he’s going mad, mustn’t he? He searches for speakers, bugs—any physical explanation for that metaphysical voice. Again, our narrator is empathetic; again the language here points to Poe, but also to a reversal of Poe’s abject pain:

From experience I know that trying to wrench yourself out of a nightmare is futile and simply adds pain to pain or terror to terror.

The narrator then sets about proving that he’s real (or if not “real,” then at least that the narrator isn’t insane) by describing the various beautiful objects in the designer’s home. Aesthetic sensation confirms shared perception.

This tour of proof concludes in the style of Poe, in a tomb-space, all aesthetic objects removed, like something from “Usher”:

…we came to a little room, covered inside with a layer of cement, in which there was nothing, not one piece of furniture, not a single light, and we shut ourselves in that room, in the dark. An embarrassing situation, on the face of it, but for me it was like a second or a third birth; that is, it was like hope beginning and with it the desperate awareness of hope.

The abject embarrassment of the human body in close contact with a stranger is converted into rebirth and hope.

As the story ends, the fake-artist orderlies arrive in the morning to retrieve the narrator’s corpse. He realizes that he could continue haunting his body, but makes the choice to let it go:

But I mustn’t give in to sentimentality, I thought, and when the orderlies’ car left the garden and vanished down that elegant, tree-lined street, I didn’t feel the slightest twinge of nostalgia or sadness or melancholy.

In accepting the loss of his body without “nostalgia or sadness or melancholy,” our narrator affirms his new life.

The tale concludes with the narrator returning to the designer’s living room to discover that the man has been talking aloud—to the narrator, whom he believed was still with him. The story ends with this beautiful line:

I let him go on talking as long as he liked.

Reconciliation and acceptance rule in the end. Bolaño turns Gothic horror and abject pain into human empathy here.

Am I reading too much into the tale if I find in it a declaration of Bolaño’s acceptance of his own impending death? Perhaps. In any case, those who’ve formed an opinion of the man’s work based solely on the grisly reputation of 2666 would do well to check out “The Return.”

Two new(ish) graphic novels from Nobrow, Vincent Mahé’s 750 Years in Paris and Victor Hussenot’s The Spectators, showcase Paris as an enduring site of progression, turbulence, and renewal, both in culture and consciousness. Mahé’s 750 Years in Paris is a time-machine, putting its viewer in a stationary position to observe the dramatic changes in one building—and French society and culture—over the course of nearly a millennium. Hussenot’s The Spectators is a dream-machine, shuttling its characters through different skins, faces, and eyes. The titular spectators transcend not only time and space, but mind. Both books attest to the power of transformation while subtly noting the various forces that shape identity.

Vincent Mahé’s 750 Years in Paris begins in 1265 and moves its viewer through time to 2015. The book takes us through the Black Death Plague and the 100 Years War, the reigns of Louis XIV and IV, the storming of the Bastille and the Reign of Terror, Napoleon and Hausmann, a grand Metro and a terrible Flood. The second shot in this chronology shows us a Knights Templar procession in 1270. The crusaders remind us that Western history is inextricably bound in violence, religion, and territorial expansion—but also in the exchange of ideas, information, and knowledge. We get to May 1968 with a strong visual context for France’s history of intellectual turbulence.

The book ends in 2015; I’ll let Mahé’s image speak for itself:

750 Years in Paris shows us that Paris not only survives drastic change, but progresses in the face of violence. When we see, for example, that a winch has been used to hang a Protestant during the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572—

—it’s worth noting that on the next page, neighbors help each other during a terrible fire. The winch remains in the picture, a visual motif of progress, of building up.

Like every Nobrow title I’ve read, Victor Hussenot’s The Spectators is better experienced than described. Its aesthetic is its narrative and its narrative is its aesthetic, flowing from a lovely dream-logic of identity shifts. Who shall I be today?, the book asks.

The titular spectators try on different skins, wear different hats, look through different eyes. Paris’s metro becomes a labyrinth dream-lab, where the spectators create the world anew by synthesizing known with unknown:

This vision of synthesis carries the narrative through a poetic examination of individuality and society. How much of me is me? Hussenot frames his characters in the geometry of picture puzzles, only to blur the borders that would constrain them.

It’s possible to imagine the spectators of Hussenot’s book gazing on Mahé’s ever-changing Paris building. Or, conversely, we can take Mahé’s building as one of Hussenot’s spectators—another shapeshifter in a city of shapeshifters.

I’ll close with an image from The Spectators that points towards a dream of synthesis, of infinite perspective, of unity. We have here not just a dream, but a vision of progress:

Paul Kirchner’s cult classic comic strip The Bus originally ran in Heavy Metal from 1979-1985. The (anti-)story of “a hapless commuter and a demonic bus” (as Kichner put it himself in a recent memoir at The Boston Globe), The Bus, at its finest moments, transcends our expectations for what a comic strip can and should do. Sure, Kirchner delivers the set-ups, gags, japes, and jests we expect from a cartoon—but more often than not The Bus surpasses the confines of its form and medium. Its protagonist The Commuter is an allegorical everyman, a passenger tripping through an absurd world. Kirchner’s strip often shows us ways to see that absurd world—which is of course our own absurd world—with fresh eyes.

Thanks in part to the internet (and, in particular, an album of scans posted at Imgur), Kirchner’s comic has found a new audience. Over the past few years, Kirchner’s produced more than 40 new strips, which are now collected in one handsome volume as The Bus 2 (or the bus 2 if you like) from French publisher Tanibis Editions. Tanibis also has collected the original run of The Bus in an edition that’s more complete (and polished) than the Imgur album. These books are fantastic stuff.

The Bus 2 picks up in full satirical mode with an intro that informs us that “the studio that produced ‘The Bus’ was forced to shut down” in 1985; “Its closing left over 70 talented employees jobless.” The intro unwinds over a few pages—we’re told the bus itself and the “commuter’s iconic overcoat” are now in museums, and that the role of the commuter in this sequel will be played by the son of the actor who played the original commuter. From the outset, Kirchner uses irony to draw our attention to the artificiality of his strip, highlighting The Bus as a performance, an entertainment focused on the utterly mundane topic of a daily commute. And even though the intro unfolds over four pages, Kirchner keeps it true to form—literally: Six equal black and white panels.

The first strip in the new collection positions The Commuter as an ironic hero, a foundling in a basket like Moses or Superman (note the signs that Kirchner employs to show the passage of time):

In no time, our hapless hero is back on the chain gang, quite literally:

As in the strips from eighties, the punchlines in The Bus 2 often pivot on our expectations, our perceptions, our subtle, unexamined prejudices. Kirchner often asks us to see that we don’t always see:

And while The Bus is primarily humorous, there’s an aching existential dread underneath the humor, a sense that there’s no exit from this trip:

Indeed, our Commuter is a Sisyphean hero of sorts; even if the trip doesn’t seem to go anywhere, it’s nevertheless inescapable:

“Existential dread…no exit…Sisyphean” — okay, maybe I’m laying it on a bit too heavy here. If The Bus 2 evokes existentialist themes, it also embraces the surreal fun that an absurd world offers for those willing to lift the curtain:

Again and again, Kirchner’s Commuter finds a new way of seeing. He gazes out the bus window onto a street scene that shifts into a glimpse of the cosmos; the fantastic tattoos of a fellow passenger come to full demonic life; the bus itself becomes a circus performer. Mundane absurdity transmutes into fantastic absurdity.

The Bus 2, like its predecessor, is a remarkably and perhaps unexpectedly human strip. We  may often identify with its passive protagonist, thrust into a world that is so often beyond our control—let alone our comprehension—but we can nevertheless dream awake. Are our visions just imaginative consolations in an otherwise mundane life? And if they are, does it matter?

1. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is a fun entertainment that achieves its goals, one of which is not to transcend the confines of its brand-mythos.
2. SW: TFA takes Star Wars itself (as brand-mythos) as its central subject. The film is “about” Star Wars.
3. To this end, SW: TFA is basically a remake of A New Hope. My saying this is not insightful and cannot be insightful.
4. In the first Star Wars film, A New Hope (aka Episode IV, aka simply Star Wars), George Lucas synthesized Flash Gordon and Kurosawa, Joseph Campbell and WWII serials into a cultural product that was simultaneously new and old, hokey and profound, campy and heroic.
5. SW: TFA is not a synthesis (and does not seek to be a synthesis); rather it is a transcription, repetition, and  replication of the previous Star Wars films—particularly the so-called “original trilogy” (Episodes IV, V, and VI).
6. Hence, SW: TFA often feels like a greatest hits collection, its sequences and visuals (engaging and visually spectacular) cribbed from the previous films. I could spend the rest of the riff outlining the correspondences—major and minor—but why? The correspondences are intentionally obvious to anyone who has seen the film; furthermore, they are not allusions, but the formal structure of the film.
7. And this formal technique, this replication—it’s all very enjoyable and often warm and unexpectedly humorous and at times awfully sad even.
8. And I liked the new characters very much, which I was of course supposed to. They are all in some ways replications of previously existing characters, just as the set pieces and sequences they act in/out/upon are replications.
9. Let’s consider Rey, the heroine of The Force Awakens really quickly: She is, in some ways, a synthesis, but only a synthesis of the principals of the Star Wars brand-mythos: She is at once Han, Luke, and Leia: A figuration in the foreground: A childhood fantasy.
10. A childhood fantasy: Watching SW: TFA feels like watching a Star Wars film—which is the film’s intention, obviously.
11. But not obviously and really quickly and not a gripe: Isn’t there a part of us, by which us I mean me, that wants something more than the feeling of (the feeling of) a Star Wars film? That wants something transcendent—something beyond which we have felt and can name? Something that we don’t know that we want because we haven’t felt it before?
12. Re: Point 11: I already made an (awfully) oblique argument at some length almost three years ago about franchise films in general and Star Wars films in particular, arguing (maybe arguing) for, say, Wong Kar Wai to direct the next Star Wars film.
13. In that riff I wrote that, “J.J. Abrams is a safe bet. I can more or less already imagine the movie he’ll make.” That prediction was incorrect only in that I enjoyed the product that he made more than I thought I would. That prediction was wholly correct in that I could imagine the product Abrams made. It was easy to imagine. I’d already seen the film dozens of times before he even made it.
14. So, to return to point 11, the “not a gripe” point: Is the argument then that film as an art form allows us (the illusion of) a transcendent perspective? That film at its best, at its strongest and strangest, offers us a new way of seeing?
15. (Yes).
16. The Force Awakens is strong but not strange. Its major advancement (by which I mean break from previous films) evinces in its casting choices—but these reflect the progress of our own era, not the brand-mythos of Star Wars itself, which was of course always diverse.
17. The Force Awakens is fun. Entertaining. Like I wrote in point 1.
18. And, to repeat point 2 after repeating point 1: SW: TFA is “about” Star Wars.
19. So what do I mean by this? Consider for a minute what the other Star Wars films are “about.”
20. A New Hope is about escape and rescue, both in the literal, romantic, and metatextual sense.
21. The Empire Strikes Back is about Oedipal anxieties and Oedipal violence, family entanglements, friendships and loyalties.
22. Return of the Jedi is about restoration and redemption, a film about the genius of ecology over mechanization.
23. And while the (so-called) prequels are generally reviled, I like them: They are “about” something.
24. For example, Revenge of the Sith is about democracy and fascism, community and ego—and more of that Oedipal violence.
25. Indeed the entire series is Oedipally structured—which The Force Awakens replicates and continues.
26. Yet Abrams’s reverence for Star Wars bears no clear trace (at least on my first viewing) of Oedipal anxiety towards Lucas. No attempt to transcend or surpass—as such a move would entail a kind of critical (if metaphorical) violence directed at Lucas’s vision. (Notably, many of the criticisms of the so-called prequels rest on the way those films look beyond their predecessors (in a way that Abrams’s film doesn’t)).
27. “In order to criticize a movie, you have to make another movie,” said Jean-Luc Goddard.
28. And Harold Bloom: “Every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem. A poem is not an overcoming of anxiety, but is that anxiety…There are no interpretations but only misinterpretations, and so all criticism is prose poetry.”
29. Abrams’s goal was not to criticize Star Wars or poetically engage it; his goal was to praise it—to praise it as stasis, to replicate its comforts, to avow and vindicate its forms and tropes. And he succeeded.
30. And of course the biggest success of the film: I want to watch it again.