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A short report from The Charterhouse of Parma
Have you read Honoré de Balzac’s 1833 novel Eugénie Grandet? I haven’t, but I’ve read the Wikipedia summary. I’ve also read, several times, Donald Barthelme’s 1968 parody, “Eugénie Grandet,” which is...
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The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway’s Tale of Doomed Polyamory
In general, I dislike reviews that frontload context—get to the book, right? So here’s a short review of Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden: it is stranger than most of what Hemingway wrote, by...
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Another short report from The Charterhouse of Parma
Robert Andrew Parker’s ilustration to Ch. 4 of The Charterhouse of Parma After many, many false starts, I’ve finished Stendhal’s 1839 cult classic The Charterhouse of Parma. (I read Richard Howard’s...
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A review of Lucia Berlin’s excellent short story collection, A Manual for...
The 43 stories that comprise Lucia Berlin’s excellent collection A Manual for Cleaning Women braid together to reveal a rich, dirty, sad, joyous world—a world of emergency rooms and laundromats, fancy...
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A riff on the Westworld pilot, “The Original”
Watching HBO’s new show Westworld, I couldn’t help but think of the late American novelist William Gaddis’s obsession for player-pianos. The narrator of Gaddis’s final novel Agapē Agape howls that the...
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“A wild dream of a witch-meeting”| Westworld episode two reviewed
Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest, and only dreamed a wild dream of a witch-meeting? “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” was...
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Gravity’s Rainbow, annotations and illustrations for page 299 | Some of us...
In the Venusburg, John Collier (1901) There is that not-so-rare personality disorder known as Tannhäuserism 1 . Some of us love to be taken under mountains, and not always with horny expectations 2...
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>intoxication o’r dizziness
Arno Schmidt’s 1970 novel Bottom’s Dream is finally available in English translation by John E. Woods. The book has been published by the Dalkey Archive. It is enormous. As you can see in the picture...
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No knightly hero | Gravity’s Rainbow, annotations and illustrations for page 364
The Gray Tree, Piet Mondrian (1911) Toward dusk, the black birds descend, millions 1 of them, to sit in the branches of trees nearby. The trees grow heavy with black birds, branches like dendrites of...
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Phantoms and ghosts in David Foster Wallace’s novel The Pale King
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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A riff on my favorite ghost story, Roberto Bolaño’s “The Return”
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...
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Yoko Ogawa’s Revenge is an elegant collection of creepy intertextual tales
In Yoko Ogawa’s new collection Revenge, eleven stories of fascinating morbidity intertwine at oblique angles. Tale extends into tale: characters, settings, and images float intertextually from chapter...
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Wherein I Suggest Dracula Is a Character in Roberto Bolaño’s Novel 2666
The Self Seers (Death and Man), Egon Schiele I. Here’s my thesis: Dracula is a character in Roberto Bolaño’s dark opus 2666. Specifically, I’m suggesting that Dracula (like, the Count Dracula) is the...
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Sunday Comics (From Hell)
From Hell, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s epic revision of the Jack the Ripper story, posits Sir William Gull, a physician to Queen Victoria, as the orchestrator of the Ripper murders that terrified...
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The Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth | Gravity’s Rainbow,...
Ouroboros, Codex Parisinus, 1478 Kekulé 1 dreams 2 the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth, the dreaming Serpent which surrounds the World 3. But the meanness, the cynicism with which this...
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A place must be made for innocence | Gravity’s Rainbow, annotations and...
In a corporate State 1, a place must be made for innocence, and its many uses 2. In developing an official version of innocence, the culture of childhood has proven invaluable 3 . Games, fairy-tales,...
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Gravity’s Rainbow — annotations and illustrations for page 539 | There is a...
I 1 think that there is a terrible possibility now, in the World 2. We may not brush it away, we must look at it. It is possible that They 3 will not die. That it is now within the state of Their art...
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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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Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren: I quit
Samuel Delany’s 1975 novel Dhalgren: I got to page 258 (of 801 pages, in the 2001 Vintage paperback edition). On that page, the visiting poet (Visiting Poet?)—he’s visiting the post-apocalyptic city of...
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Roman Muradov’s graphic novella Jacob Bladders and the State of the Art reviewed
Roman Muradov’s newest graphic novella, Jacob Bladders and the State of the Art (Uncivilized Books, 2016), is the brief, shadowy, surreal tale of an illustrator who’s robbed of his artwork by a rival....
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