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Charles Burns’s Sugar Skull Reviewed
Sugar Skull concludes the trilogy that Charles Burns began four years ago with X’ed Out (I reviewed it here) and its 2012 follow-up The Hive (I reviewed it here). In X’ed Out, Burns introduces us to...
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David Mitchell’s New Novel The Bone Clocks Falls Far Short of His Best Work
David Mitchell’s latest novel The Bone Clocks is 624 pages in hardback, its sprawling metaphysical plot jammed into six overlapping sections that move through six decades and several genres. Any...
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Doré’s Ghost of Banquo (Ghost Riff 1)
It’s the disconcerting incompleteness of Gustave Doré’s The Spectrum Appearance of Banquo at Macbeth’s Feast that, paradoxically, creates the full, troubling effect of the picture. “Enter Ghost of...
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Phantoms and Ghosts in DFW’s Novel The Pale King (Ghost Riff 2)
The narrator of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King assures us at one point that “phantoms are not the same as real ghosts.” Okay. So what’s a phantom then, at least in the universe...
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Stephen Collins’s Allegorical Fable The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil Reviewed
Stephen Collins’s début graphic novel The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil tells the story of Dave, an especially average (forgive the oxymoron) guy in the neat-and-tidy island of Here, a place where...
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Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage Reviewed
I should probably start with a confession: I’m not a big Haruki Murakami fan. I’ve tried. I’ve probably abandoned The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle more than any other book (save maybe Proust). I lost...
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A Too Many Cooks Riff, Focusing on The Killer, Who Is There Right from the...
If you haven’t yet seen Too Many Cooks, Casper Kelly’s short film for Adult Swim, here it is: Too Many Cooks compels and rewards/punishes its audience not because of its comedic elements, but rather...
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List with No Name #48
The desire to manufacture and maintain happiness leads our culture, our society, our whatever to repeatedly perform contrived aesthetic scenarios. Happiness being, perhaps, a modern, or at least...
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J.G. Ballard’s “The Subliminal Man,” John Carpenter’s They Live, and Black...
Today is Black Friday in America. I don’t think it’s necessary to remark at length on the bizarre disjunction between this exercise in consumerism-as-culture and the intended spirit of the Thanksgiving...
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Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (First Riff)
A. Mason & Dixon: I bought my copy at Shaman Bookstore in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in the fall of 2002. I had just read and absorbed V., but could not get into Mason & Dixon. Chalk up this initial...
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Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (Second Riff: The Pygmies’ Discovery of Great...
A. Okay. So I finished the first section of Mason & Dixon a few days ago. I’m now at the part where our titular heroes are smoking weed and eating snacks with George Washington. I can’t possibly...
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Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (Third Riff: The Rabbi of Prague)
A. I’m a few chapters–three, precisely—from finishing Mason & Dixon. “Finishing” is not the right verb here, though—Pynchon’s novel is so rich, funny, strange, and energetic that I want to return...
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Reading/Have Read/Should Write About
The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon After a few false starts over the last decade, I finally submerged myself in Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon in those bourbon-soaked weeks between...
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I review my review of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice an hour before...
I’m leaving to (finally) see Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Inherent Vice in a few minutes. I’m going with my uncle. (I also saw No Country for Old Men with him in the theater. This point seems hardly...
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A few quick thoughts on Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Inherent Vice
A. Let’s start with this: I need to see Paul Thomas Anderson’s film adaptation of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Inherent Vice again. Like, I’m compelled. B. But maybe a quick sketch before, no? Like, here...
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DFW’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, books as memory objects, etc.
On our short walk home from her school yesterday, my darling daughter inquires if we can go to the bookstore. She needs some new Junie B. Jones, she reports. I assent. This particular bookstore is...
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Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Film Birdman Reviewed
Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Birdman relies heavily on a central stylistic conceit: The film unfolds as one continuous uninterrupted shot, the camera unblinking, restlessly moving after Riggan...
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Reading There Will Be Blood as the expanded epilogue to Blood Meridian
Watching (again) Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 film There Will Be Blood last night, it struck me that the film can be read as an expansion of the epilogue to Cormac McCarthy’s 1985 novel Blood Meridian....
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Jane Bowles’s novel Two Serious Ladies confounds with sinister humor and dark...
Two Women, Gwen John Here’s a short review of Jane Bowles’s only novel, Two Serious Ladies: The book is amazing, a confounding, energetic picaresque suffused with sinister humor and dark delight. I...
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Some notes on beginning Evan Dara’s novel Flee
A. What a cover on Evan Dara’s 2013 novel Flee, don’t you agree? B. From the back cover: C. That’s all there is. Well, okay, there’s an ISBN too. But no blurbs, no other text. D. “Something always...
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