tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-34328175498593274582024-03-15T09:52:59.766-07:00Thinking Againmark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.comBlogger332125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-68495125033114740752024-03-15T09:05:00.000-07:002024-03-15T09:52:11.875-07:00Honey Mine (Collected Stories) by Camille Roy<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJhCl1Gf9IlUUjuqxblUrVDe3-CUHGW-0WG-ZlhttgVGdnP3bj48Yo4vOudKwoIALtK1q4YD4__liRb6jg0bYoYjju1wuJAMLnJ07UEFC2hpgZI7Ei1cSFDNquZrJiSQyZVLO8exjxr9FL4LvbMOnLRYXc2WJ-vpry-BEjcihcAm5tyyeTpfpaPjGxEBM/s4029/Camille%20Roy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4029" data-original-width="2446" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJhCl1Gf9IlUUjuqxblUrVDe3-CUHGW-0WG-ZlhttgVGdnP3bj48Yo4vOudKwoIALtK1q4YD4__liRb6jg0bYoYjju1wuJAMLnJ07UEFC2hpgZI7Ei1cSFDNquZrJiSQyZVLO8exjxr9FL4LvbMOnLRYXc2WJ-vpry-BEjcihcAm5tyyeTpfpaPjGxEBM/w242-h400/Camille%20Roy.jpg" width="242" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table></p><p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">There’s a lot of brilliant writing in this book. Camille Roy has a remarkable style: crisp, vivid, energetic. Although the subtitle of <i>Honey Mine</i> is Collected Stories, this is a profoundly hybrid collection. Short stories, memoir, poetry, essays, all of these ways of writing weave in and out through individual pieces and the text as a whole so that genre categories never remain stable.<br /><br />One of the key themes of this book is that underground and alternative communities, whether based in sexual identity or identities and politics of other kinds, can form genuine and meaningful alternative values. And if Roy wants readers to understand that those communities and values sometimes thrive by being opaque to the rest of the world, everything in <i>Honey Mine</i> communicates powerfully, even when it chooses what not to speak of.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-79926854480895299442024-02-12T09:36:00.000-08:002024-02-13T06:34:39.769-08:00The NIght Before The Day On Which, by Jean Day<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRm9GLkXIfL5cG7ri4J4WdbyTDGSvQoNtUm7V6y7KGhv5REgcmeNriP9EFdhKdiTE9slqzWmjuvCOe-tYPL5oobjAbq69lmuUsjElcNSVTFZZecCvCGFnxV2CXQw-F2H49FDY8d1wy3KR4aRUadn08N0CV4qpBH3kFh1wf3tJFDp0exIw8yVXVTdL7UN8/s2100/Jean%20Day%20The%20NIght%20Before%20The%20Day%20On%20Which.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2100" data-original-width="1575" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhRm9GLkXIfL5cG7ri4J4WdbyTDGSvQoNtUm7V6y7KGhv5REgcmeNriP9EFdhKdiTE9slqzWmjuvCOe-tYPL5oobjAbq69lmuUsjElcNSVTFZZecCvCGFnxV2CXQw-F2H49FDY8d1wy3KR4aRUadn08N0CV4qpBH3kFh1wf3tJFDp0exIw8yVXVTdL7UN8/w300-h400/Jean%20Day%20The%20NIght%20Before%20The%20Day%20On%20Which.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><p></p><p><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">This is the first book of hers in which Jean Day’s work finally “kicked in” for me at a higher level of connection and understanding. Her poems have always been evocative, disruptive, oddly bent, never going where I imagine them going, Ashbery-like in their elusiveness. But somehow </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><a href="https://www.roofbooks.com/the-night-before-the-day-on-which" target="_blank">The Night Before The Day On Which</a></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> is the one in which I could feel all the writing in the book gathering together into something that felt cohesive, a vast yet tight pattern, however much any given line turned away from a previous line.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
A twisting and twisted Americana.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">
There’s something about the accumulation of one detail after another, of metaphors that jump away from each other, that add up to a world view that I can feel as connected, a strange mesh of identifiable context. It’s a context that reaches far into the past, that branches out into speculation and query, and and yet still always has a firm, even harsh, critique of the limits that people and their values impose on each other, now, here, and in other times and places:
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Inside the kernel’s a tiny game.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">You can hear a Timex pound fifty feet away</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">It’s not music</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">not even microscopic</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">but plain speeches of the fish and branches</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">of LaCrosse, Wisconsin</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">midway across the Miss.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">from a circus of fleas</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">to flat-out wilderness</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Our foes</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">don’t want us in their schools
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“No worries.”</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;">God has decided to withdraw his tiny hands (p. 54)
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There’s a incisive take on politics and culture throughout the book, especially if you can imagine what it might feel like to be a nested doll stuck inside another nested doll, layer after layer, none of us ever getting free, each one of us brilliantly done up for a festival of the freedom of lights that is often promised but never arrives.
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In the poems, I feel myself present in many contexts of struggling to understand, of not always knowing what I don’t know or what I might know, of not becoming what I might. In a way, these are tragic poems, but not of the obvious kind, sort of like a tragedy you didn’t know was a tragedy until long after it happened.
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There’s a lot of space out there in the world, both inside and outside the human, but the openness that one might imagine from it feels, in this powerful book, almost endlessly deferred.</span></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-42302842912850745202024-01-11T09:00:00.000-08:002024-01-11T09:00:24.905-08:00Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWWfsy-GesbOFQyQU0iQQRPXwWDkHYmDat_bWZmGM5UaEHzURuEnsVQ1BWRzVjHOxGWsaJwW0k3hwTnWDiz4FJ3uEPdB5qB7kaN08urP_KOCkJZ_2Z5_VrpeqUaDQ8ZlUs0jMtGGZMpMje6DFJe9FyeCYDaZV0PI2e4IXagMVG7cvOGNWe-UELpwwmwb0/s3896/Doppelganger.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3896" data-original-width="2653" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWWfsy-GesbOFQyQU0iQQRPXwWDkHYmDat_bWZmGM5UaEHzURuEnsVQ1BWRzVjHOxGWsaJwW0k3hwTnWDiz4FJ3uEPdB5qB7kaN08urP_KOCkJZ_2Z5_VrpeqUaDQ8ZlUs0jMtGGZMpMje6DFJe9FyeCYDaZV0PI2e4IXagMVG7cvOGNWe-UELpwwmwb0/w273-h400/Doppelganger.jpg" width="273" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; text-align: left; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">I’m not opposed to “depressing” books. When people complain that a book is depressing, I usually like to say that one of the key things about literature is that it can explore the full range of human experience, and some human experiences are very sad.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">That said: wow, </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Doppelgänger </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">is a depressing book. It combines two novellas focusing on several central characters struggling with age, bodily collapse, and suicidal impulses. They’ve been mistreated by others, including often enough their families. They’ve been abused by the Nazis or post-WWII Eastern European communists or (lucky people) both. They live in cold places and in various degrees poor and sometimes disgusting environments among broken things that don’t work. They’re not even good people really, although they do helpful things a few times maybe among many other unhelpful things. There are going to be some moments of hopes and dreams and glimmers of possibility in each tale, but not many. </span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">What made it possible for me to read this book was the humor (no kidding; it’s frequently hilarious), the tight, high energy sentences, and many of the genuinely brilliant and compassionate (if often enough unbearable) insights into human behavior and the failing of the human body. What made it full of surprises were the clearly experimental, avant context-jumping and formal oddities. There’s an amazing long section that comes from who knows where (but belongs perfectly) about Foucault and Althusser, and a long list-like conversation about artists and suicide. There’s not a huge amount of narrative tension to take anybody’s mind off the relentless trouble of the characters, not much dramatic conflict (though there’s plenty of conflict as such) to take readers away from the cold facts. You can put up with it or put it down. When reading it I often couldn’t stop, it was that compelling. But when I would stop, I often wasn’t sure I wanted to start again.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The author Daša Drndić, a Croatian who died in 2018, called it her “ugly little book.” It is truly almost unremittingly ugly. But not entirely ugly somehow, as trying to tell the truth can never be an entirely ugly desire, and because laughing at or with the worst things possible makes them more possible to bear. I can’t say I would recommend </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Doppelgänger</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> to anybody who isn’t prepared for what they’re going to read. But I can’t say I’m going to forget it, either. There are a lot of books that are more easily enjoyable that I barely remember at all.</span></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-57355873292316199812023-12-13T09:02:00.000-08:002023-12-13T09:02:39.275-08:00Terence Winch: Seeing-Eye Boy and Celtic Thunder: Live in Concert 1978-2018<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVoLWqhXVrbN-7BeQjgNf3_siQpgSywks8T-l4shs7QrsH3dhMcF0I85X2Ct8iwBKPv16X7zK-YBQOe6_P-mM74gUbsJf29R7v2BQ3K0KbpZyhW1WWH-jE2qnPGjZ4YwgEmPRikQDlUGDtnVgsw7WIRZOgKUSjp5opf91s92DYrWxb9svLP3JUy9iy_t8/s3852/Winch%20Seeing-Eye%20Boy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3852" data-original-width="2490" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgVoLWqhXVrbN-7BeQjgNf3_siQpgSywks8T-l4shs7QrsH3dhMcF0I85X2Ct8iwBKPv16X7zK-YBQOe6_P-mM74gUbsJf29R7v2BQ3K0KbpZyhW1WWH-jE2qnPGjZ4YwgEmPRikQDlUGDtnVgsw7WIRZOgKUSjp5opf91s92DYrWxb9svLP3JUy9iy_t8/w259-h400/Winch%20Seeing-Eye%20Boy.jpg" width="259" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">While there are certainly numerous artists who dabble in an art form other than their main one, having a long-run history of excellence in more than one art form is a rarity.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">With 30 plus years work as both a musician and a writer, Terence Winch is one of the few people to have such a history. The music on </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Celtic Thunder: Live in Concert 1978-2018</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> was released this year, and features many high points for that long-running East Coast band, one of the best American bands to be focused on Celtic music.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">And just a few weeks ago, I finally had time to read </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Seeing-Eye Boy</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> (published in 2020 by Four Windows Press), Winch’s novel about growing up Irish in the Bronx in the 1950s. As an author, Winch is mostly known for his many excellent books of poetry, and he is also the author of two books of short stories. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Seeing-Eye Boy</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> is his first novel though, and it shows that he is highly capable of doing more artistic things very well than people even knew.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;">The novel balances careful realism and Irish and Irish-America history and folk history and ultimately manages a rough-hewn and even feel-good tale about growing up that never becomes either fantasy or nostalgia. As a narrative about Irish-American life, there are very few works I can think of that might be a match for it. The novel never stops being both informative and enjoyable. It does a great job of mixing its pain and its pleasure, which as everybody already knows, is what Irish folk music too is all about.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-7225804898623106012023-12-06T08:58:00.000-08:002023-12-06T09:27:33.025-08:00Poor Gal: The Cultural History of Little Liza Jane by Dan Gutstein<p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRGXjvrpKC_3z-Rfh_eaD5FgLHgj3GD_nSqPgZg74wPJjR4E1T7DVsLSxyncLqlt5FAh9wavW9qXlBjZaCGPbhsGeQxtEJLmbqW3D6xi2OTvrGycX1gTMF6qHbDqLobz6GxOhA5ONhzKLsCb6uCr-ZgbJVsKutkG8F60aI4tG6Ms-IYnWB9FaoVBBerlA/s4032/Poor%20Gal%201.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRGXjvrpKC_3z-Rfh_eaD5FgLHgj3GD_nSqPgZg74wPJjR4E1T7DVsLSxyncLqlt5FAh9wavW9qXlBjZaCGPbhsGeQxtEJLmbqW3D6xi2OTvrGycX1gTMF6qHbDqLobz6GxOhA5ONhzKLsCb6uCr-ZgbJVsKutkG8F60aI4tG6Ms-IYnWB9FaoVBBerlA/w300-h400/Poor%20Gal%201.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj81LY2eDXfBi3qjT-Mau0kpQJvl0p5qvjsl4ubnzEgHVmlwoCY8kTBx_4rBfHDba9j-ghdp53b0P082yL8RVVR0ZC9xWzQ3ffcez5T4MDPzbb3cXraJQh_ntmiKC7sOmWB-zWqu3imvdPuh2pRaIS6Fy6lv_ngs9dSHFaDWeQSMt3lZlHdpS6EFhGyivc/s4032/Poor%20Gal%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj81LY2eDXfBi3qjT-Mau0kpQJvl0p5qvjsl4ubnzEgHVmlwoCY8kTBx_4rBfHDba9j-ghdp53b0P082yL8RVVR0ZC9xWzQ3ffcez5T4MDPzbb3cXraJQh_ntmiKC7sOmWB-zWqu3imvdPuh2pRaIS6Fy6lv_ngs9dSHFaDWeQSMt3lZlHdpS6EFhGyivc/w300-h400/Poor%20Gal%202.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-bf42907a-7fff-7201-a601-12077301f97f"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">My junior high delinquent suburban punk jock hockey player going-nowhere-fast friend Dan Gutstein, former scourge of Silver Spring playgrounds, who somehow has become the author of books of poetry and fiction and has been the lead singer of a jazz punk band that has “won awards” and been featured on NPR and who has a significant feature in a National Geographic episode on rats not of the human kind, although he knows a lot about both, and who fritters away everything sensible people are supposed to do and has worked all kinds of short term, who-are-you-kidding jobs from farm work to assistant professorships, who was turned down when he tried to join the Merchant Marine, who spent a year in Northern California and nearly froze indoors, who once asked a Provost in a job interview “What does a Provost do?” and who one year was declared the “hottest professor in America” by Rate My Professors.com and experienced his own personal warming event, has now also somehow become the author of a scholarly work on a fascinating and little known portion of the history of American music.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">Poor Gal</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"> from the University Press of Mississippi traces the history of the song and character “Little Liza Jane,” who not entirely unlike Dan has danced and sung her way across much of the history of America and American music.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;">And to think I once let this guy housesit my place and he went through all my clothes and drank my expensive, high-alcohol beer without knowing what it was. What was I doing? This is not a man who can be trusted. Why am I his friend? Because he doesn’t like the word hockey and prefers the Canadian term “shinny”? At least he once sent me an 8-CD homemade anthology on the history of jump blues. Why does he keep writing these books that no one expects him to write and that other people want to publish and read? I have no idea. But I’m telling you: if he comes to town, steer clear, because you have no idea what might happen next.
The book can be purchased from the press at this link and of course from other online sources as well: <a href="https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Poor-Gal">https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/P/Poor-Gal</a></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", serif; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></div></span></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-89946519507056069502023-11-26T09:20:00.000-08:002023-11-26T09:24:53.937-08:00Commentary on Robert Stone's Damascus Gate <p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiptFXwwlxrCOJjNOY-hLhZ5IjQtgjtxKbucCSTxo9goLM2KDoLlQlqoTyDt1Sn9H4j9gxXGzBPDATg962MJJJoNp2_CTlqpnnHSJnUXKZIyMnsW2YxEZzFZYMyOdlV6dl3x_HAxgkc97pZM-CwDYECGgywLeOSAwXIvEOdpOYhU8sA2HGmqqmSQ4pTjs/s3645/Damascus%20Gate%201.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3645" data-original-width="2595" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiptFXwwlxrCOJjNOY-hLhZ5IjQtgjtxKbucCSTxo9goLM2KDoLlQlqoTyDt1Sn9H4j9gxXGzBPDATg962MJJJoNp2_CTlqpnnHSJnUXKZIyMnsW2YxEZzFZYMyOdlV6dl3x_HAxgkc97pZM-CwDYECGgywLeOSAwXIvEOdpOYhU8sA2HGmqqmSQ4pTjs/w285-h400/Damascus%20Gate%201.jpg" width="285" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK7i3GA609A9XSpIS6eHOMUxebduc_PSLIVweXiWPEhmC37tTtZZLVhDCwmf6Z751w4jnBfdqH0u1L7hXfEWBFZt6aBSvUvAa6TOuMulmBeFLDLpK1UyYU_uwk7aLETJF4pVeJyetigSUFbB5TJ1KzOGsKhtMLaOedUaQmj9PJvpraAQf-eEynWXkNxWk/s4032/Damascus%20Gate%202.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjK7i3GA609A9XSpIS6eHOMUxebduc_PSLIVweXiWPEhmC37tTtZZLVhDCwmf6Z751w4jnBfdqH0u1L7hXfEWBFZt6aBSvUvAa6TOuMulmBeFLDLpK1UyYU_uwk7aLETJF4pVeJyetigSUFbB5TJ1KzOGsKhtMLaOedUaQmj9PJvpraAQf-eEynWXkNxWk/w300-h400/Damascus%20Gate%202.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><br /><br />Published in 1998, this novel obviously has nothing directly to say about events in the Middle East in October and November 2023. At the same time, the portrait it offers of life in contemporary Israel shows the social and political forces struggling in the region to be very similar to those of right now. Life in Israel has a long history, and the stakes that people have in it have a history that’s just as long.<br /><br />The book is centered on events in Jerusalem, with significant sections taking place in the Gaza Strip and Tel Aviv. It’s a book about money and power and violence and religion and much else. It shows Israel and Gaza as sites of political struggle not just for the people living there but for power players from all the world who come and go with their own agendas.<br /><br />It’s not for me to say what those with close personal ties to recent events might learn from this novel, or people who have been experiencing any part of those events directly. But I can certainly say that for those of us who are in some degree outsiders, whose experience of recent events comes through television screens and social media and public events, protests and otherwise, in countries far away from the center of the violence, this book is incredibly revealing of the differing forces that shape the struggle for power in a profoundly contested part of the world.<br /><br /><i>Damascus Gate</i> seems to me an undeniably great political novel. The variety and precision of its information is astonishing. Thomas Pynchon is the only other writer I know of who can rival it. The range of Stone’s compassion and understanding is admirable. Although the book is deeply serious, there’s still quite a bit of humor, albeit often darkly ironic. Some of the horrible moments in the narrative are emotionally wrenching, even exhausting. At times I couldn’t put the book down. At times I had to take a break because I couldn’t handle any more.<br /><br />It’s not a perfect novel: a few sections in the first half of the book move a little slowly and threaten to overwhelm the reader with information, and some of the murkier entanglements of the second half remain murky, although clearly that’s part of the point. But the novel’s feverish intensity and stunningly impressive range of knowledge combine for a unique experience of a kind no other author could likely offer. The novel feels profoundly aware of the variety of sincerities and ironies and cynicisms that people bring with them to this part of the world, along with their weapons, physical or intellectual.<br /><br />And just to be upfront: everybody knows by now that there’s no such thing as objectivity. Books and people have perspectives, and this one is no exception. The novel’s central character is to a significant degree an uninformed outsider regarding the events taking place. But I will say that this book is not <i>partisan</i>, even as it never holds back on the problems and results of violence in international partisan politics. What is most marked in it is a sense of empathy for all involved, as well as a refusal to deny what’s horrible. It’s trying to show readers how an inevitably global politics works in a region of the world that is deeply beloved and contested by people with differing ideas about what it means to believe. It’s not a book that offers certainty, as if it was the role of novels and novelists to <i>solve</i> political problems.<br /><br />Instead, it’s about what happens when certainty collides with certainty and blends inevitably into uncertainty. It’s about both the possibility and impossibility of universalism.mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-89829247925162587932023-07-06T16:24:00.002-07:002023-07-06T16:30:27.724-07:00Brief Review: The Course by Ted Greenwald and Charles Bernstein<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqO9yaXxsskiUgGnFslG5sXxqwEAQoPavQlAIljNklRf8zFbrdQZHjPk6BdUr71RUHhtbsSkoMrDb7lKZPfumG69sSEcf3cyaiShOVurXFMbuzGUUGEjkbJkOwVgTZQ1Uzey_zZs18gOq2x1wfT7r643vg6kBSLopRMKUgLoCJV34noVsdEdrw_W1hszU/s4032/The%20Course.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiqO9yaXxsskiUgGnFslG5sXxqwEAQoPavQlAIljNklRf8zFbrdQZHjPk6BdUr71RUHhtbsSkoMrDb7lKZPfumG69sSEcf3cyaiShOVurXFMbuzGUUGEjkbJkOwVgTZQ1Uzey_zZs18gOq2x1wfT7r643vg6kBSLopRMKUgLoCJV34noVsdEdrw_W1hszU/w300-h400/The%20Course.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><i>The Course</i><br />Ted Greenwald and Charles Bernstein<br />Roof Books, 2020, 350 pgs.</p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bam, pow, wow do I love this book. I can’t immediately think of other books of poetry that embody the concept of the jazz jam session so thoroughly. Two language and musical intelligences bounce ideas and energy off each other in a rapid, varied, and ultimately extended back and forth.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">At times it seems like I can recognize this or that line as likely the work of one or the other of the writers: the deadpan, flat, yet somehow full of wonder pop art understatement of Greenwald; the twisting puns and pungent ironies of Bernstein. But mostly what feels created here is a third voice containing both of those approaches and a tone that seems to come from both poets simultaneously. Ultimately, identifying who wrote what hardly matters. As Bernstein says on the back cover, the writers themselves frequently forgot which lines were originally their own.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The focus on language play rather than reference dives occasionally into reference and creates through interaction a pertinent world view in which play and perception and response matter more than defined theme and statement. Development over the course of the book is like the development in music; the mood and tone tell the story. I feel like I’d have to go back to early Clark Coolidge books like <i>Polaroid</i> or<i> The Maintains</i> to get this much non-referential verbal interplay jumping around on the page so pleasantly:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Spit into face</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">All about</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A U</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Another nice day</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">2nd movement</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">How bout snack</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: inherit; white-space-collapse: preserve;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tangy thirds</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is peligrosso</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Means huh?</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A what-about-me</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Somebody</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In a Dodge</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Medical street</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Work out for</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Beast</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’m about to stare</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Revenue of the wasted)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Base relief)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As in</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bad day at</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Welcome to)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: inherit; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Huh?</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">From “Succor Punch”</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">I don’t feel like I read<i> The Course</i> so much as participated in it, feeling the music, letting it do the talking, giving up on explanation and just being alive to what’s present in human involvement. As Bernstein’s note on the back cover also says, the collaboration continued until several days before Greenwald’s death in 2016. This book in relation to that fact is a key reminder of how much life we can live in every day of living it.</span></p><div><br /></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-51741582255498702432023-04-02T11:36:00.002-07:002023-04-18T18:21:49.722-07:00Confederates, a novel by Thomas Keneally (1979)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI3Kk3RkGi7CI1TNFxi1edTgaRFhs3Fl1dETbyRDR5XyIl85oh80F99TDSw2cw-WCy6lWcVi9vhAuwqnu0xhW5d3rUjSBZfeJzVidEkdJeOENtb5rVOwIhypkNj1m5qp3eeFIn0l9mLHuRkLHZmfpKEX1Ow4CIcJzNMZUweYUttbCOn3JRexbsMHR2/s600/Confederates,%20Keannelly.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="600" data-original-width="600" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjI3Kk3RkGi7CI1TNFxi1edTgaRFhs3Fl1dETbyRDR5XyIl85oh80F99TDSw2cw-WCy6lWcVi9vhAuwqnu0xhW5d3rUjSBZfeJzVidEkdJeOENtb5rVOwIhypkNj1m5qp3eeFIn0l9mLHuRkLHZmfpKEX1Ow4CIcJzNMZUweYUttbCOn3JRexbsMHR2/w400-h400/Confederates,%20Keannelly.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><p>Why doesn’t this book, first published in 1979, show up on lists of the best Civil War novels ever written? Maybe because the author is Australian? It can’t be because the book focuses on Confederate soldiers (of all ranks). Other lesser novels of that sort (<i>Shiloh</i> by Shelby Foote, or the barely tolerable <i>Cold Mountain</i> by Charles Frazier) regularly make lists of Ten Best Civil War novels.</p><p>Unlike those two books, this one is not tacitly pro-Confederate. The flaws of the Confederacy, both in its beliefs and in its functioning, are displayed clearly. As part of that, its characters are complex and insightfully portrayed, whether it’s General Tom Jackson (aka Stonewall) or the men of various ranks serving under him. Jackson is an anti-slavery, religiously-convinced-anyway zealot of the Southern cause, determined to attack the Union at whatever cost to anybody. He comes across as fascinating, charismatic, brilliant, and vicious, with an oddly and believably incoherent set of feelings about the world around him as he tries relentlessly to destroy the enemy. He knows what he wants, even if it’s never clear that he knows logically why he wants it. It’s a religious feeling, a messianic power he never questions.</p><p>The soldier characters, and there are many of them of all kinds of backgrounds, from Generals on down, are not always as individually interesting as Jackson, but taken together their varied stories are fascinating and they serve to create a panorama of the kind of men who soldiered for Jackson and Lee. Their various fates are uniquely and believably and often enough horribly portrayed. Yet the book is also very funny at times. In some ways, it’s a book of character sketches, and all of the characterizations (or let’s say nearly all) are convincing and filled with both psychological and social insight. If a few times I wished that the story would return to the Generals, that’s only because the portrayal of those actual historical human beings was so compelling. As far as I know, some of the non-General characters might be based on real persons as well, but Keneally doesn’t say.</p><p>This is a book of action as well, both the action of war and of politics. It handles those subjects like the others, with a level of precisely realized historical realism that few other Civil War novels (or indeed many war novels period) can match.</p><p>The weakest portion of the book, for me, is the portrayal of the women characters, who are connected to some of the few less convincing and in some cases annoying subplots. They’re not one-dimensional in either social context or character, and it’s reasonable enough that they’re mostly not the center of events, although desire for them often is. But few of them are as believable as the male characters, and some of the comic elements of their roles feel like they come as much from the 1970s (when the book was written) as from the 1860s. </p><p>Some of the near-to-the-conclusion battle scenes are as realistically believable (and necessarily graphic) as any I know of in war literature.</p><p>All in all, <i>Confederates</i> is a vivid and powerful novel that taught me as much about the life of Civil War soldiers as any work of fiction I’ve read.</p><div><br /></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-79846643708277949042023-02-26T15:52:00.002-08:002023-02-26T15:56:40.822-08:00Charles Baxter's The Sun Collective<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0SZDrpsKUh61i07TgXMdZot9tbiTtRhZTO-yvlAr6sjeJk_CNcMRhXYqD8SJIQDz53o7PLwV9uhAOHLaYN4jqC1T6D5kg1HZ7Ha3XIqZtcDigjOYnGP0gtjCxGwWt95mdeV4QN2QAG22khZMrxGaiyFltPpuCr61qh-j5eTZc6amlKmGER3UwlYq1/s4032/The%20Sun%20Collective.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0SZDrpsKUh61i07TgXMdZot9tbiTtRhZTO-yvlAr6sjeJk_CNcMRhXYqD8SJIQDz53o7PLwV9uhAOHLaYN4jqC1T6D5kg1HZ7Ha3XIqZtcDigjOYnGP0gtjCxGwWt95mdeV4QN2QAG22khZMrxGaiyFltPpuCr61qh-j5eTZc6amlKmGER3UwlYq1/w300-h400/The%20Sun%20Collective.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Fans of the work of Don Delillo, or those of you who like my novel <i>Crab</i>, might find Charles Baxter’s <i>The Sun Collective</i> (Pantheon Books, 2020) an intriguing and worthwhile read. A combination of realism and political parable set in a just slightly alternative world (so slight that the differences might or might not really be there), the novel explores what it means to care for others, or to even imagine one might be caring for others, under the massive political strains of contemporary high tech, hyperreal capitalism. The related problems of alienation and aging (and both together) are handled deftly.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;">The Minneapolis setting gave off a powerful aura of social deadness that occasionally and unexpectedly springs to life. I can’t think of many novels that capture the feel of Midwestern cities this uniquely and precisely. The writing style is often quite gorgeous, although the novel did feel a little long-winded in some portions. Thanks, Dan Nielsen, for suggesting this book to me.</span></p><div><br /></div><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre;"><br /></span></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-83692286081625938202023-02-05T17:17:00.003-08:002023-02-05T17:17:40.160-08:00Edogawa Rampo: The Black Lizard and Beast in The Shadows<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHppHIXcwVy0OkucxZDAKZOtGqxdkS1PisFGUkJA5NsP-1sIAkc19e5zMS1e74NSbBqqX3-yEDzkkOrEtaYpdO7T35cRgw872icl55YCa0NjmCdO852gr14mYrCnUrUMhiVOV-h5EGnzh5ZH9psPZzQEttFvPLj7yx-uTXCz6lKxbCDWAj_5pfdU80/s4032/Rampo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHppHIXcwVy0OkucxZDAKZOtGqxdkS1PisFGUkJA5NsP-1sIAkc19e5zMS1e74NSbBqqX3-yEDzkkOrEtaYpdO7T35cRgw872icl55YCa0NjmCdO852gr14mYrCnUrUMhiVOV-h5EGnzh5ZH9psPZzQEttFvPLj7yx-uTXCz6lKxbCDWAj_5pfdU80/w300-h400/Rampo.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /> <p></p><p><span id="docs-internal-guid-97ac9a9b-7fff-5538-28ec-247941b71e40"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These two Japanese mystery-adventure novels from the 1920s share a lot in common with their European counterparts of the same era. Wildly improbable plots not even meant to be probable are linked with a lot of coincidences and reversals and nearly cartoonish action. The detective of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Black Lizard</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is nearly a superhero, while the narrative of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Beast In The Shadows</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> could nearly be called postmodern, with unreliable narratives nested inside unreliable narratives. Edogawa Rampo was the pen name of Hiro Tarō (18940-1965) and is an anagram and cross-language pun for Edgar Allan Poe. These books weren’t meant as great literature and they aren’t, but they were early and essential books in establishing a Japanese tradition of the detective novel, one that continues like most national traditions in the detective novel to be continually expanding, lucrative, and entertaining.</span></span></p><p><span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-56050061351749244952023-01-19T07:35:00.007-08:002023-01-19T08:08:49.025-08:00T.S. Eliot and What The Thunder Said<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqyn9OfEg_JqacMgcUFjaNoKx7zyK30MtxS6-ogSO-N-8Tj6xK6MMillnjobtlL0niPXbTcrCXxvZVEIRVxRosRsuLMEANKsJQoiYbB3kNaJk1A93ceB3X3ETL5D928PthRP610fvPbOve0JNnk6szxwtVeBhomxj49IDAuRDyTfu7pceuN2eaEBGY/s4032/What%20The%20Thunder%20Said.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqyn9OfEg_JqacMgcUFjaNoKx7zyK30MtxS6-ogSO-N-8Tj6xK6MMillnjobtlL0niPXbTcrCXxvZVEIRVxRosRsuLMEANKsJQoiYbB3kNaJk1A93ceB3X3ETL5D928PthRP610fvPbOve0JNnk6szxwtVeBhomxj49IDAuRDyTfu7pceuN2eaEBGY/w300-h400/What%20The%20Thunder%20Said.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-1eda1a80-7fff-dafc-5305-4b6fae0d88a2"></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><i style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">What the Thunder Said: How <b>The Waste Land</b> Made Poetry Modern</i></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jed Rasula (University of Princeton Press: 2022)</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">This is not a formal review, just a response.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The center of the broad range of events and people in this book is 1922, the year of the publication of T.S. Eliot’s </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, although it covers history from decades earlier and goes forward to decades later. I wanted to read it in 2022 although it came out late in the year. I succeeded, finishing on New Year’s Eve.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anyone who wants to know how </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> became such an essential poem in English (defining what Modernist poetry in that language was broadly considered to be) and beyond should certainly read </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What the Thunder Said</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. The book explains a lot about how and why the poem became what it became, and what and who it changed. The reaction it caused, the effect on critics and writers, the elements of media sensation of the time, those are all here. I appreciated the way the book brought the Modernist 20s alive again even after all that has been written about them.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oddly maybe, one of the most interesting things to me was how often the book moved away from Eliot and </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, which taken together are not the subject of even half the book’s pages. That’s not the fault of Rasula as scholar (he is impressively informed) or an error; he wants to put the poem in a larger context to help readers understand why it felt so new at the time. He starts with Richard Wagner and and Nietzsche and reaches forward to 1971, the year that </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> manuscripts were published.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Still, I couldn’t help feeling that the shortage of pages on Eliot and his poem results partly from the fact that there’s not as much to say about them as there was for many decades. Eliot and </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> have received about all the coverage and literary analysis they need. Although recent revelations about Eliot’s long-running connection with Emily Hale (revelations that seem like they appeared after most of Rasula’s book was already written) are going to lead to some new criticism about Eliot’s motivations and sources, and (given our own time and place) probably some criticisms of his character, there’s really not much more to be said about the place of Eliot and his poem in English-language poetry.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rasula mentions the issue briefly, but my sense is that the centrality of Eliot’s poem began being displaced even in his lifetime, at least and especially in the U.S. Eliot did not end up a hero for the Beats or for the New American poetry or for the counterculture that both helped usher in. By the 1960s </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Howl</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was rivaling and had maybe surpassed </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> as the most famous 20th century American poem (and book of poetry), although Rasula calls </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Howl</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> in “hindsight… clearly an idiomatic update on Eliot’s vision” and not the rebuke to Eliot that it was sometimes taken to be (Rasula 281).</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Eliot’s story as poet and as a person with feelings, the crisis of soul that prompted the poem and resulted in Eliot’s conversion to Anglicanism in 1927, and his story as a dominant poet-critic for the next 40 years, is hardly a triumph of the radical new, however much the poem originally brought that with it. It’s not even especially inspiring or tragic; it feels kind of sodden and restrained, a bit of a tightly wrapped bring down, like Eliot himself could be. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What the Thunder Said</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> also tells the story of Eliot the poet as carefully crafted institution, guarded by institutional rules and regulations that he significantly controlled. As I can imagine Patrik Ourednik saying, “And that too was modern.” By late in his life, Eliot and his poem were already beginning to seem too wedded to the past, more a guarded monument and less a harbinger of the future. I guess that means that the height of </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">'s prominence </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">was really about 40 years, although it obviously continues to hang on in university curricula that still have a place for Modernism or Modernist poetry.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">For myself, I appreciated most the cultural and historical contextualizing of Rasula’s book. The thumbnail sketches of various writers and their publications that the book sometimes races through were more or less interesting to me depending on how often I had heard those writers’ stories before. But why, and how, and for whom the poem became so central made for me a fascinating historical study. It made me want to pick up and read Eliot’s work again. Almost.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe though, like Rasula seems to be showing but not quite saying, </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> just isn’t as interesting as it used to be, especially for those of us who have read it many times and moved on.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Rasula’s book helped fill in what I didn’t know about how </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> became so crucial in 20th century English language writing, and even beyond English. But it didn’t (nor was it trying to) make a case that there’s any more to the poem than people already understand. Speaking for myself, </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What The Thunder Said</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> left me feeling that I’m unlikely to return to Eliot as more than a writer of historical significance whose life and work now belong definitively to the past.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Waste Land</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> shocked and changed people in its own time. It’s great to know why, and knowing that knocked some of the dust off and brought the poem alive again for me for a moment. But its original magic feels now, at least to me, like it’s still floating back in the post-World War I waste land that, to its credit, and in some ways even against Eliot’s understood intentions, it pushed American and European culture to move beyond.</span></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-2214931800436792912023-01-05T11:53:00.003-08:002023-01-05T11:54:27.850-08:00October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: The Fifth Group<p><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Fifth Group</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-c3a54846-7fff-ca40-7d2f-87b414424465"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">E.F. Benson, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Collected Ghost Stories of E.F. Benson</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1992)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">E.F. Benson was a prolific and successful writer and not just of ghost stories. He is maybe most well known now for his series of Mapp and Lucia novels, a comedy of manners set in a seaside town and that has been made into two British TV series, but his ghost stories too continue to be widely known and read. He’s a key writer in bringing the British ghost story into the 20th century, with his haunted tales set in a variety of believable environments, country and town and city, and with a wide range of ordinary people among his cast of characters. His 1906 story “The Bus Conductor,” whose key elements were borrowed by the famous British multi-episode horror movie </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dead of Night</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1944), is just one example of the kinds of ordinary daily life contexts in his ghost stories.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Benson’s style is sort of a streamlined Victorian that, like his subject matter, also rides the line between the 19th and 20th centuries. And if neither his style or his stories have the incredible precision of M.R. James, Benson can still tell a ghost story with some nicely chilling twists. His stories also seem to me a key link between the classic British ghost tale and what became modern British horror fiction. I imagine, for instance, that what was once a new generation of British horror with a basis in realism, established by Ramsey Campbell’s </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Face That Must Die</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1979), might have been significantly influenced by these crisply told tales.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">J.S. LeFanu, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Best Ghost Stories of J.S. LeFanu</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1964)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">And now, my personal favorite. The ghost and related horror tales of Joseph Sheridan LeFanu (1814-73) are historically just early enough that they neither conform to or create a standard for ghost fiction except to the extent that these highly original tales remain some of the highpoints of all supernatural literature. LeFanu is not as inventive as Poe, but his tales can be very psychologically acute and disturbing, and he can be quite effective in his characterizations (and of women as well as men).</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Like some other collections in the Dover series of supernatural writing, the work in these two books is by no means all ghost stories. LeFanu covers a big range of supernatural concepts and unique perspectives like those in “Carmilla” and “Green Tea,” stories which are either too obvious to need mentioning or else you need to go out and read them right away if supernatural fiction appeals to you. A story like “The Haunted Baronet” contains complexities of psychology and symbol that make it a ghost tale like no other written before or since. It has no predecessors, and no imitators though it anticipates some elements of surrealism and of Robert Aickman’s even later concept of the “strange story.”</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Le Fanu’s more conventionally ghost-oriented tales have a clear basis in the folk stories of the Irish. His work is filled with a powerful sense of time and location and how to distort it. In his stories, the past is dangerous, the present is just as bad, and people are complex and often unforgettably horrible. The woods and the fields hide stories that his characters realize too late that they never wanted to find out about. Along with mystery and the unexpected, there’s loss and tragedy of a vividness that the ghost stories of the British isles rarely otherwise reach.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Schalken the Painter,” half ghost story and half something more terrifying, and among the greatest of the stories collected here, was years ago made into a British TV movie that’s well worth seeing. The movie’s sense of dread and precision of detail is heightened by the relatively minimal amount of dialogue.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Paul Gallico, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Too Many Ghosts</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1959)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, writing this series has been fun for me, and darkness on All Hallow’s Eve is nearly upon us. I thought I’d end this series for this haunted season with a ghost farce by Paul Gallico. You can call </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Too Many Ghosts</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a cozy horror comedy, with all the classic features of the British ghost story gathered together: a mansion that may or not may be haunted, a cast of characters with conflicting and conflicted goals, and all the moving furniture and turning doorknobs and seances and poltergeist experiences you could want. It’s like the ghost novel that Agatha Christie never wrote, although Gallico’s style takes a bit of getting used to it at first.</span></p><br /><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The novel is a mystery too. I’m not going to give anything away, but if you want a funhouse of light-hearted affects and plenty of chances to skewer the British aristocracy without really doing them any harm, plus, who knows, maybe even a love story, then this novel and all the many many ghosts in it is about as much silly fun as any ghost book I can think of.
</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></span></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-43405150649014817472023-01-04T14:45:00.004-08:002023-01-05T11:54:14.765-08:00October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: The Fourth Five<p><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.
</span></p><p><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fourth Five</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">
Mary Butts, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">From Altar to Chimney Piece: Selected Stories of Mary Butts</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1992)</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Maybe these aren’t exactly ghost stories in a conventional sense, but the hovering, not always graspable presence of the supernatural definitely has enough consistently ghostly qualities for me to think it belongs in this category. These are subtle, elliptical Modernist stories written between 1923 and Butts’ death in 1937. This collection, and a more recent edition of her complete stories, both feature introductions by John Ashbery, which makes sense because many of Butts’ stories have an oblique, suggestive, and disconcerting feeling that have more than a few similarities to Ashbery poems. From </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Altar to Chimney Piece</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is literature exploring the supernatural that you can read without feeling like you’ve sullied yourself with genre trash, if feeling sullied by genre trash is something you happen to worry about.</span></p><p><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">R.B. Russell, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghosts</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2021)</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Anybody who thinks that the classic British ghost story is played out or is now just a nostalgia trip has not read R.B. Russell. These stories have some of the expected shape of ghost tales (and not all of them are about ghosts), but their turns are subtle, psychologically fascinating, and surprising. You might think you know what’s happening, but you don’t, and the ideas here about perception, memory, and longing are very contemporary in their perspectives while retaining a certain classic haunted story feel. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghosts</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a compilation of Russell’s first two short books, both published in 2009, the story collection </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Putting the Pieces in Place</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and his fabulously titled novella </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Bloody Baudelaire</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. One thing I especially love about these stories is that I don’t stop thinking about them after I’m done reading them. They continue to be disturbing and disorienting when I think back on what they are. And sometimes when one pops back into my head unexpectedly, I shudder.</span></p><p><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Henry James, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Stories of the Supernatural</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (Hardback 1970, Paperback 1980)</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The material collected in this 750+ volume contains the most psychologically complex ghost literature I’ve read. James doesn’t confine himself to the realm of ghosts, of course, so there’s a range of supernatural subject matter, but all of it’s brilliant, and all of it is connected to people and their problems. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Turn of the Screw</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> deserves all its praise as one of the best stories about a haunting ever written. And the thing is, as that short novel and some of the other stories in this collection show, the refinement and subtlety of James doesn’t mean that he holds back on the vicious. In his stories, it’s not just the supernatural that attacks people; it’s James understanding of what’s wrong with those people and exactly what it is that’s going to </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">crumple</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> them.</span></p><p><b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">M.R James, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Collected Ghost Stories</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2011)</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">M.R. James is more or less the gold standard of the classic British ghost story. Compact tales, gentle by modern standards, but rich in history and moments of chilling surprise. If you want a precise 30-40 minutes by-the-fire-on-a-rainy-night ghost story, you can’t do better than these.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">By ideology, James was the opposite of a materialist. He was a deeply closeted gay man (saying this so directly is still considered rude by some James fans) whose taste in literature and politics was very much traditionalist conservative, although he was often as closeted in his political positions as he was in his sexual orientation (he was provost for many years at King’s College, Cambridge, and later at Eton College). He believed that his important writing was his medieval scholarship and wrote ghost stories to entertain his colleagues, and it’s his knowledge and interest in history that makes his tales models of materialist precision about detail and location.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">His stories are set in a precise real world against which their supernatural mysteries stand out. His horrors are often revealed only partly or indirectly. He’s not great with characterization; his bachelor scholar main characters aren’t particularly distinct from each other, with many of them being given to a scholarly curiosity that sometimes passes into dangerous obsession.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My Oxford </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Collected Ghost Stories</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> hardback has great annotations and an essay by James on the ghost story, but I first read a lot of his stories in the two little Dover books which feature his first and second collections, the most essential of his four collections, although the later ones also have some great stories. The Dover books were given to me one Christmas by my father; I had read a few James stories in anthologies before and it was great to read his fiction more thoroughly.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">By now I’ve read all these stories more than once, and I read them again from time to time, and I’ve watched them in various televised versions, and I don’t imagine I’ll ever be tired of them. Their suggestiveness about the strange things that lie just outside the narrow minds of human beings are for me among the most fully pleasurable of literary experiences.</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Susan Hill, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Small Hand</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dolly</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2012)</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I own more than one book by many of the authors I have posted about this month, but Susan Hill is the only author I’m going to feature more than once. That’s because these two novellas are so different than her famous novel </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Woman In Black</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">. Written in the 1980s, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Woman In Black</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> was a conscious attempt to write in the 20th century a 19th century ghost story that would outdo the originals, an attempt that pretty much succeeded.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Small Hand</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, and </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dolly</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, two novellas published together in 2012, are contemporary in setting, though they still have the classic feel of British countryside horror. They’re also sleek, precise, chilling, and relentless. They’re still part of the history of the understated ghost story as opposed to effects-heavy horror gore, but ultimately they’re also much more vicious than you might expect. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Dolly</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> might make you want to rush right back to the overexcited silliness of Chucky in order to feel less disturbed.</span></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-66555252438114745092023-01-03T10:49:00.003-08:002023-01-05T11:54:58.291-08:00October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: the Third Five<p><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Third Five</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-883cc418-7fff-04c5-5635-52e9cbda2dea"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Edith Wharton, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1973)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Edith Wharton’s “Afterward” is rightly among the most highly regarded of English-language ghost stories, with a title that’s perfect for the story in several ways. The rest of the stories in this collection are quite effective too. “The Lady Maid’s Bell,” “The Eyes,” “The Triumph of Night, and “The Pomegranate Seeds” are among my favorites. Wharton (1862-1937) has style, restraint and much more political consciousness than many Americans, writers or otherwise, of her era and elite background. A very enjoyable read!</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Oliver Onions,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Widdershins</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (first published 1911; Dover Books edition 1978)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One thing that distinguishes the ghost stories of Oliver Onions (1873-1961) from others in the classic British ghost story is their air of urban bohemian decadence in a tradition that has often been placed in the rural and the remote. Onions shares with writers like Algernon Blackwood and Arthur Machen an interest in the mystical, the magical, and the pagan, but unlike them he creates a kind of stylish urban decay, exploring the world of strange artists and those who have fallen or are falling outside the conventional British social order. There’s more than a hint of Huysmans, if you know the work of that famous French decadent.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Today, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Widdershins</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is Onions most well-known book, and it starts with one of the most rightly famous stories in the British ghost story tradition, “The Beckoning Fair One,” a slow burn of dark and dangerous enchantment set in a growing urban wasteland. The mood it creates makes it one of the best ghost stories ever. His later collections are worth reading too. He also wrote novels and stories without ghosts dealing with problems of magic, psychology, and even using detective elements, which were equally well known as his ghost stories in the decades of his greatest fame but which are never mentioned by anyone any more, at least not that I know of.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Richard Matheson, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A Stir of Echoes</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1958)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not his best novel (that’s </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I Am Legend</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, followed closely by </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Incredible Shrinking Man</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">) but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A Stir of Echoes</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is still quite an enjoyable ghost novel, not the least of whose horrors is the claustrophobic life of 1950s Southern California suburbanites. The novel was also made into a 1999 movie starring Kevin Bacon that’s well worth watching although it moves the setting of the story to urban Chicago. Matheson (1926-2013) is the source of many great movie scripts (both as a fiction writer and screenwriter), some of which are among the best movies of their kind.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">F. Marion Crawford, ghost stories (many different editions; mine is called For </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Blood Is The Life</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">For nearly 20 years, from the late 1880s until the early 1900s, F. Marion Crawford (1854-1909) might well have been the best-selling of all American fiction writers. No kidding. It’s a pretty long run. He wrote historical novels of many kinds, most notably on the subject of Italian crime families and stories set in what Americans often then called “Arabia.” These books have been out of print for many decades, although the digital environment has recently brought them back, though I can’t say I’ve done much more than glance at them. Their emphasis on non-English-language criminal societies likely suggests something about their cultural perspective. They were combinations of romance action adventure and relatively flimsy realism and were often willing to incorporate magic and fantasy. Crawford also wrote plays, some of which became movies late in his life and after his death. I often use Crawford as an example in my classes of the strange fate of many writers immensely popular in their times, but who within not that many decades become almost completely unknown. Of course, none of my students have ever heard of him.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Crawford could tell a high energy story and was quite an entertaining writer. His eight ghost stories are the work of his most read today and are very much worth reading, probably because they’re so enjoyable and don’t focus on dated portrayals of supposedly exotic environments. “The Open Berth” is probably his most famous story, and it sure is good, and the others are similarly fun and sometimes genuinely haunting. The same eight stories published in the collection I have from the 1990s have been republished in numerous editions. If Crawford is remembered today mostly because of these eight stories, that’s not the worst fate a writer might meet.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">César Aria,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> Ghosts</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (2009)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This book by Argentinian writer César Aira gets lumped in often with South American magical realism, and I suppose it meets at least the technical definition. To me though it seems more like straight realism, although a bit dreamlike, that also happens to have ghosts in a major role. The narrative is about the relationship between infrastructure (buildings under construction) and people and reads at times nearly like an allegory in service of political critique, except that it’s more subtle than such a description would suggest. It’s not a horror novel really, although there are quite a few odd and chilling moments that make it a good read both for more adventurous genre fans and for those who don’t reject serious fiction just because it has ghosts in it. I think it’s fair to call </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ghosts</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> a successful example of slipstream work.</span></p><br /></span></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-43276310582179491512022-12-30T10:31:00.001-08:002023-01-05T11:55:25.915-08:00October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: The Second Five<p> <span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.</span></p><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">Second Five</span></div><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div><div><span id="docs-internal-guid-13df8acf-7fff-b5a8-6d45-16f03de0eb3d"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Kingsley Amis, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Green Man</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1969)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This book has a better reputation than it deserves, I think, and the same might be said of its author Kingsley Amis and even his son, novelist Martin Amis. Still, the horror and haunting elements of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Green Man</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> are very effective and suggestively extreme. I wish I could say the same about the dated sex romp satire portions regarding a group of bored families of the suburban British middle class.Those sections take up more than half of the book and are tedious to get through and I found myself skipping chunks of them. Bonus points for the very funny characterization of a parson who tells his congregation at an afternoon drinking party that they need to get beyond the mythological elements of Christianity, but demerits because the novel seems to suggest that he’s wrong. This book is an interesting lesson in the potential dangers of trying to write slipstream fiction: The supposedly trashy horror elements are much better (and classier!) than the actually trashy and supposedly more important human relationship elements that have led this book to be considered a significant work of literary fiction.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Collected Ghost Stories</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1974)</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852-1930) was an American writer of primarily realist fiction set in New England. She is most known for her feminist perspective in creating strong, often independent women who stood out at the time from more standard late 19th century portrayals of women in American fiction. Her stories have a firm grounding in culture and place. Her precision and insight in connecting character and environment carries over to these quite well done, understated ghost and horror stories. In fact she didn’t draw a hard line between ghost and horror stories and her other writing; although she did publish one book of ghost stories during her lifetime, others of her ghost stories were published in other books alongside her realist stories. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Collected Ghost Stories</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is a posthumous publication from 1974.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peter Straub, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If You Could See Me Now</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1977)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Peter Straub claimed that this was one of his favorite books, and I understand why. It might be my favorite of his too. His horror scenarios are often mixed with mystery, action, and adventure, and sometimes take place on an epic scale, but </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">If You Could See Me Now</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> always feels intimate (not to mention occasionally cosmic), an intimacy no one could possibly want. Also, in most of his books, Straub usually goes for subtle, often effectively understated horror. While the story here still works through understatement, it’s probably his most viscerally frightening book, with a number of really scary moments. One scene in it is, for me, one of a handful of the most memorably frightening moments in all of horror literature. Yes, like other early books of his, this is a ghost book. And this ghost is not messing around.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Jean Ray, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Malpertuis</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1943)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">What do you get if you cross gothic narrative, surrealist dream lunacy, plenty of ghosts, and high energy pulp-style trashy writing from the first half of the 20th century that just keeps coming and coming? Jean Ray’s </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Malpertuis</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">, of course, and there’s nothing like it except for other writing by Jean Ray. </span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Susan Hill, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Woman in Black</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1983)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The 2012 film version of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Woman In Black</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is at least energetic and entertaining. However, the 1989 British ITV version is terrifying, one of the best film adaptations of a classic ghost story ever. The ITV version was hard to come by for some years, but it now seems to be available again.</span><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Really, though, the 1983 book (published in 1986 in the U.S.) is the place to start. It was written as a consciously retro version of a 19th century British ghost story, and it outdoes almost all its predecessors. Mood, shadows, tension, menace, chills, and many truly terrifying moments. For anyone interested in the history of the ghost story,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The Woman In Black</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is essential reading, by far the best 19th century ghost story written in the 20th or 21st centuries that I’ve come across (and yes, many others have tried). The version of the book I have has some fun illustrations too.</span></p><div><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div></span></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-43115088033291848902022-12-29T11:38:00.002-08:002023-01-05T11:55:53.105-08:00October Hauntings: Ghost Tales in my Book Collection originally posted Oct 1-31 2022: The First Five<p> <span style="font-size: 12pt; white-space: pre-wrap;">The following brief responses to some of the ghost fiction in my book collection were posted on Facebook between Oct 1 and 31, 2022. I didn’t post every day though I tried to post as many days as possible. The original Facebook posts contained photos of the books.</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-2a107476-7fff-6925-9edf-1a7f6ffadb21"><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">First Five</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Lost Stradivarius</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1895), J. Meade Falkner</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the great ghost novels of the 19th century and in fact of any century. One of the best stories about a sustained haunting that I can think of. The novel is also as much a classic gothic as it is a ghost story and succeeds at being both. The moral smugness of the British characters, probably shared by the author, might turn off some contemporary readers, but seemed to me to contribute to the power of the haunting and of the incomprehension of conventional morality in the face of it.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">There aren't many ghost stories I like better.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J.H. Riddell </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">(Dover 1977)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These are tightly crafted, subtle ghost stories. A bit on the gentle side compared to the genre as a whole, calm and with a clear (overly clear for later standards) sense of right and wrong. Pleasant and comforting (mostly) and eerie fireside ghost reads. E.F. Bleiler, who probably read and wrote about more ghost stories than any other scholar, says of her that “apart from J.S. LeFanu, no other writer of the Victorian period could handle better the emergence of the supernormal.” I can’t think of any reason to disagree.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Ueda Akinari’s </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Tales of Moonlight and Rain</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1776)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This book is often called the first collection of ghost and supernatural stories ever published. More or less all ghost stories are based in folk tales, part of what in western culture have often been the low or populist traditions of writing as opposed to the traditions of high literature. I’m not informed enough to know whether the placing of folk literature in the category of the low rather than the high also exists in Japanese literature (I suspect it might), but I do know that the folk tale quality of these stories will be clear to readers in English. These stories have a familiar weird fairy tale quality but the structures and motivations of these folk-based ghost tales are quite different from English-language folk tales. Still, folk tales from both contexts share a similar rejection of the real vs. the unreal dichotomy that dominates much western literature. Strange and alienating and pleasurable reading.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">H.R. Wakefield, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Best Ghost Stories of H. Russell Wakefield</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1978)</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">H.R. Wakefield (1888-1964) didn't always like people very much, and his ghosts don’t either, and that makes them just a bit more vindictive than the ghosts in your standard British ghost story. And if he’s sometimes sentimental, well, it’s not usually human beings that he’s sentimental about.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Wakefield had a bad reputation among some writers and critics of the ghost story, like M.R. James, but that seems to have been partly because Wakefield was much more politically left-wing than most of the relatively conservative writers of British ghost stories during his time. His perspectives on war and animals in particular would have marked him as an outsider to many writers of this kind of work.</span></p><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">This book collects most of the best-known stories of his maybe five or six books of ghost tales and is well worth reading. There are good stories not in it. Luckily, Wakefield’s other books are now available in ebook format after decades of little availability.</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Shirley Jackson, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The Haunting of Hill House</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> (1959)</span></p><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Consider how rare it is that a book offers the most exact definition of a book of its kind while also being the best book of its kind; I’m talking specifically about haunted house novels. Also, note that most haunted house novels are really about a person (dead of course) who haunts a house, but in this book, the house itself does the haunting. Maybe. I’ve gone through a number of editions of this novel; this is the one I taught from most recently. It’s also possible that</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-style: italic; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> The Haunting of Hill House</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-size: 12pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> is not even Jackon’s best book, although it remains my personal favorite.</span></p><br /></span>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-70654643163125222132022-12-29T09:10:00.001-08:002022-12-29T09:10:38.682-08:00My Night With Alex Chilton<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxWbC4BaS95mMABJBdR2WzcJQHCMB4W7-QX9AOb63qQYwVCE_4t1eE9cmzh5pCQlBXs5uwAz_RBB1ChwmP8fMhBAmvdY8SUxDt47ac7FVOgr5QzqU-tAbSt1ohMdyzEVcpRy9zoZosZcVr-9ekFCXQSYnwFF1sqR3DW3IbGorNt0X98JOo8FhPiQJ3/s1566/Chilton%20photo.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="881" data-original-width="1566" height="225" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxWbC4BaS95mMABJBdR2WzcJQHCMB4W7-QX9AOb63qQYwVCE_4t1eE9cmzh5pCQlBXs5uwAz_RBB1ChwmP8fMhBAmvdY8SUxDt47ac7FVOgr5QzqU-tAbSt1ohMdyzEVcpRy9zoZosZcVr-9ekFCXQSYnwFF1sqR3DW3IbGorNt0X98JOo8FhPiQJ3/w400-h225/Chilton%20photo.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><span style="font-size: medium;">(This essay was originally published in the online magazine Celebrity Brush in February 2014. It no longer seems to be available online so I’m reprinting it here.)</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">Alex Chilton was appearing at the 9:30 Club in D.C. and I had to go.<br /><br />A year or two earlier I had discovered Chilton’s music by finding a record called Big Star’s Third (known now usually by its originally intended title, Sister Lovers) in one of the many record stores I frequented in the mid-80s. I had never heard of him but the record had a mysterious dark blue cover with a drawing of Chilton’s face in moody silhouette. The back cover chatter about a “lost classic” hooked me. The record had somehow escaped being picked out of a bin at a time when all the Big Star records (The Velvet Underground records too) were out of print. It was an era when there really were lost classics.<br /><br />Other friends of mine turned out to own the other two Big Star records and soon a lot of us were Big Star fans. In 1985 and 86 Chilton released two new EP’s. Several of the new songs, “Lost My Job,” and “No Sex,” were tightly distilled examples of later-Reagan-years dead end malaise. Between working a couple jobs I couldn’t stand, getting out of a relationship with a girlfriend who had a drinking and cocaine problem, and building a drinking problem of my own, I had plenty of malaise. I was a writer but didn’t know anyone in any writing communities yet. Nothing was happening. I was developing a public patter of sardonic morbid bitterness that I had translated into occasional short stories and failed novels.<br /><br />Only one friend, my housemate at the time, Ginette (she was a Chilton fan too), went with me to the show. I’m sure it must have been on an early-in-the-week weeknight. There were maybe twenty people in the audience. This was the old, smaller 9:30 Club on F Street with its not large main stage and only one tiny back bar, but it was still painfully empty. Chilton was a rock and roll legend, but that night it seemed he was a secret. Ginette and I didn’t mind. Chilton and his two other band members played a solidly rocking show for the few of us milling around, a set in which his onstage grumpiness chimed well with the cynicism of his best recent songs.<br /><br />When the show was over and Chilton had disappeared from stage, Ginette said, “Let’s go talk to him.”<br /><br />I was startled and asked her what made her think he’d want to talk to us. She shrugged. “There’s nobody here. He’s not likely to be talking to anybody else.”<br /><br />I doubt I was persuaded, but I went along with it. We walked downstairs to where the musicians were. A few people were packing up equipment. Chilton was sitting on a bench, and we walked up to him. Ginette started talking.<br /><br />Chilton was laconic in speech and languid in motion, very Southern, very unlike our own DC mile-a-minute pacing. His face was acne-scarred and pockmarked. He was happy to talk to Ginette. That was no surprise, it occurred to me quickly. Most guys I knew wanted to talk to Ginette. She was half European (Swiss, I think) and half South American (Brazilian, I think, but this many years later that’s just a guess). She was a guitarist who knew a lot about music and who could talk about books and politics and who liked a good party. She was small and shapely and had constantly curious eyes that seemed always to be asking everyone, “Just who are you?”<br /><br />The absent part of all this is that I don’t remember much of what we talked about. It wasn’t that memorable. Almost everybody had cleared out by the time Ginette said, “Want to get stoned with us?”<br /><br />Chilton did indeed want to get stoned with Ginette, and if I was part of the bargain, that was okay.<br /><br />The pot, however, was back in Ginette’s room at our group house. We had gone to the show on the Metro but it was closed by then. Chilton offered to drive us home.<br /><br />And boy did he ever have an old, shitty fake-wood-paneled station wagon. He had been driving it on tour but said he didn’t expect it would last long. In the car, we talked about places he had been eating on the tour and how dull the traveling had been. He talked a bit about how at 17 in 1967 he had gotten rich from the Box Tops’ “The Letter” but was out of money by 1970.<br /><br />And that’s how I ended up at my own house, spending as few hours drinking beer and smoking pot with Alex Chilton.<br /><br />I don’t remember much about the conversation there either; places he had traveled, guitar equipment, musicians he knew. What has stuck with me is not anything he said but who he was; a relaxed, vaguely grim guy in a flannel shirt, jeans, and boots, who liked to play music but had gotten tired of touring, who had car trouble and was often bored and was happy to drink and smoke dope with strangers a dozen years younger. An unremarkable, cynical man in his mid-thirties who had been the driving genius behind three of the best albums in rock and roll history. Those albums were out of print and he had just played a show for twenty people.<br /><br />I ought to have found the situation depressing, but I didn’t. Someone could do something artistically essential yet still be wandering around in the evening looking for whatever was happening, like I was. As if being an artist or musician or writer wasn’t this glamorous other thing for special people but was something anybody—even me—could do. I didn’t mind the idea that you could do something great and it wouldn’t change much about the way you lived.<br /><br />Chilton left eventually, and I went to bed. Except that he was Alex Chilton and had taught me, indirectly, a crucial lesson about what it meant to be an artist, there was nothing about the evening any different than many nights I went to shows and ended up with people at my house. The fact that the evening was so perversely ordinary has remained for me its main fascination.</span><div><br /></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-68194609000466983692022-12-28T11:43:00.007-08:002022-12-28T15:25:27.564-08:00Tom Hibbard (1947-2022) and The Songs of Divine Love<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPMfXTSqL4RW3kwLGvDYTr38YbBpfspqbaMzc-l0vLNoM613mZz0NWSH86SmEfcD_y2fmbVXmKuAb4aEGTg-TE6yEbye6UIg7ARYLWekYbZ0p8nCGO-RV8ujOgrJ9b4ogsOggfqUHiisg0Y2y80p68hXs8yLjY6DSjgEkfTLrNGKjC9S280mTF-zhV/s4032/Hibbard%20Songs%20of%20Divine%20Love.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgPMfXTSqL4RW3kwLGvDYTr38YbBpfspqbaMzc-l0vLNoM613mZz0NWSH86SmEfcD_y2fmbVXmKuAb4aEGTg-TE6yEbye6UIg7ARYLWekYbZ0p8nCGO-RV8ujOgrJ9b4ogsOggfqUHiisg0Y2y80p68hXs8yLjY6DSjgEkfTLrNGKjC9S280mTF-zhV/w300-h400/Hibbard%20Songs%20of%20Divine%20Love.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS1w7n-56hyNuMIrW5-UwJbOT3KhlocUvtqQZyCu-yqAjBs8vXq-2ivObyqWskJEbB6o9NWRsxEtbOZ66oVDy_UT6U3hRqmPvxLMZViNP-zL4e650TIFdQ-K5Q-WPAu8y3hp3Aw6eNtHfTVCxbMdQX3GJCy89K4R_99FLpHMxBS0qhliM-LCqYNmVl/s4032/Hibbard%20Songs%20interior.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgS1w7n-56hyNuMIrW5-UwJbOT3KhlocUvtqQZyCu-yqAjBs8vXq-2ivObyqWskJEbB6o9NWRsxEtbOZ66oVDy_UT6U3hRqmPvxLMZViNP-zL4e650TIFdQ-K5Q-WPAu8y3hp3Aw6eNtHfTVCxbMdQX3GJCy89K4R_99FLpHMxBS0qhliM-LCqYNmVl/w300-h400/Hibbard%20Songs%20interior.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p><span style="font-size: medium;">Tom Hibbard sent me many of his small press and self-published little books over many years. I liked all of them, but one of them, <i>The Songs of Divine Love</i>, had a powerful effect on my work. The poems in it were tight, imagistic, paratactic, aware of social conditions, vivid in what they said and refused to say. They were experimental and approachable. They taught me something important about how a poem could be brief and still be contemporary, how it was possible to write poems when one had little time for writing. I borrowed some elements of his formal constraints for my collection <i>Belief Is Impossible</i>, which has never been published as a book although most of the poems have appeared in literary magazines. It was a form I returned to more than 15 years later for <i>The End of America, Book 11</i>.</span></p><span style="font-size: medium;">News of Tom’s passing on December 15, age 75, from a perforated ulcer, reached me over the Internet just today (Dec 28).<br /><br />Tom and I corresponded and traded work over many years. I met him only once in person, in fall 2010, when I gave a reading in Racine, Wisconsin, only the second time in my life I’d ever been in Wisconsin (I haven’t been again since). Tom missed my reading but greeted me outside afterwards. He had, curiously and surprisingly yet also characteristically, been out around town because he was running for office, trying to get elected as (I believe) a Wisconsin state assemblyman, a self-financed campaign he was never going to win but still undertook with his always present combination of generosity and sincerity with very visible touches of irony. I think I still have his “Tom Hibbard for Wisconsin” button somewhere.<br /><br />Tom was one of an often connected group of midwestern and southern experimental poets first appearing in the 70s and 80s and operating hopelessly outside the narrow worlds of the mainstream poetry of their regions. But like many of those poets, Tom was far from hopeless. He believed in the value of outsider art and poetry, of connecting to others through DIY literary practice. He was friendly and warm yet willing to make insightful criticisms. In reviewing my book <i>Haze</i>, he wanted to see more specific cultural and historical references, a criticism I disagreed with but found slowly seeping into my later writing.<br /><br />In recent years I’d been having a lot of small scale social media correspondence with Tom. In what will now be “the last few days before his death,” he’d been writing posts that were brief photo essays of moments in the holiday-season behavior of the people around him. As usual, he saw people both generously and sharply, accepting as he was of foibles and eccentricity but not of cruelty or the crueler forms of idiocy.<br /><br />Somebody should reprint <i>The Songs of Divine Love</i>. It is, I think, brilliant, and stands as unique in the experimental writing environment of its time and place. Its effect on me endures; I have picked it up to read it again and again over many years.<br /><br />Here is his poem “land of yesterday”:<br /><br /><br />One child loudly supported nationalism.<br />One child died of diabetes.<br />One child was a dock worker.</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Injustice manufactures new virtue.<br />Each insight made is, in turn, covered up.<br />One only becomes a perpendicular distance<br />By pretending life is something it is not.<br />The Fourth of July holiday is again approaching.<br /><br /><br />And here is “time wound”:<br /><br /><br /></span><div><span style="font-size: medium;">I present proof of my success:<br />My severed finger to wear on your key chain.<br />You will wear it when you say goodbye.<br />They give the impression of knowing what you know.<br />Inaccuracy of emotion is quite common.<br />Pickerel is a fish of the Pike family.<br /><br /><br />I will miss him.</span></div></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-82223693927496856872022-12-13T16:19:00.001-08:002022-12-28T15:26:45.194-08:00The End of America 8 now available for pre-order<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhawCsK93gp0STwAb7JzMmupGV4rnHsQcsw_jOJJFgCiKlV8DcqWeq8_2nDtYsHu9gUKDNknJiXrf3dbNVJ9eU59RF593YEkdjeIJ0xVpi5XsTSZYrThcETX_LxMccxYQTYbFCZUC-1-FB4-q1ithf26lhbbq_rM-lsP83fuyTR0s2U6ZuhS4gblm9e/s4032/EOA%208%20Front%20Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhawCsK93gp0STwAb7JzMmupGV4rnHsQcsw_jOJJFgCiKlV8DcqWeq8_2nDtYsHu9gUKDNknJiXrf3dbNVJ9eU59RF593YEkdjeIJ0xVpi5XsTSZYrThcETX_LxMccxYQTYbFCZUC-1-FB4-q1ithf26lhbbq_rM-lsP83fuyTR0s2U6ZuhS4gblm9e/w300-h400/EOA%208%20Front%20Cover.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p><br /></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTUdOoY-QIjc6EF1dEvUMSj5jNFZjbl3-2eIE_Jzgk85PlU2Im5LVA-ONS3p6WTcdNnQW8AS9LlYEyurYZxsWtPjrWntL48JYWqdbxYImKS_ZbAtRfGnCeQgDBq6yuyVhNvIIdDBZUS4V0XIAUJl8zW8V0CKJsB_V-kqzqmgNSF6rBE0ema78jJR8s/s4032/EOA%208%20Back%20Cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTUdOoY-QIjc6EF1dEvUMSj5jNFZjbl3-2eIE_Jzgk85PlU2Im5LVA-ONS3p6WTcdNnQW8AS9LlYEyurYZxsWtPjrWntL48JYWqdbxYImKS_ZbAtRfGnCeQgDBq6yuyVhNvIIdDBZUS4V0XIAUJl8zW8V0CKJsB_V-kqzqmgNSF6rBE0ema78jJR8s/w300-h400/EOA%208%20Back%20Cover.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">My new book, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>The End of America, Book 8</i></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">, is now available for pre-order, on sale, from <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-end-of-america-book-8-mark-wallace/18814717?ean=9781943899166">Bookshop</a>.</span></p><p><span id="docs-internal-guid-e018ca6b-7fff-44c9-8b7b-ba477cf03166"><br /></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap; white-space: pre;">Orders coming mid-January on <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-end-of-america-book-8-mark-wallace/18814717?ean=9781943899166">Bookshop</a> and on Amazon.</span></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-73520555322589281872022-08-04T12:09:00.004-07:002022-08-04T13:05:07.959-07:00The Snake Tree by Uwe Timm<p> </p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_9qyXMdl3APJoAsIv85elvN_JWK4Q_IkFOxSGns8RBHSp5D4er97GrybGaZ8bzV0GrcAekPE3I-tAPLqVjc1TwzRd7-dq3Cl6QgCPeiVrlLBIgzjqwqU5-ouaE2YIF3wbk5vRgBmB10d-JePtO_GXM-lp4RRGEd-uS7OsqvLyoqmbvegisSL-wIs5/s4032/Uwe%20Timm.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_9qyXMdl3APJoAsIv85elvN_JWK4Q_IkFOxSGns8RBHSp5D4er97GrybGaZ8bzV0GrcAekPE3I-tAPLqVjc1TwzRd7-dq3Cl6QgCPeiVrlLBIgzjqwqU5-ouaE2YIF3wbk5vRgBmB10d-JePtO_GXM-lp4RRGEd-uS7OsqvLyoqmbvegisSL-wIs5/w300-h400/Uwe%20Timm.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><p></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.2; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Translated from German and published by New Directions in 1989, Uwe Timm’s <i>The Snake Tree</i> is a book in which pretty much every sentence is tense with anxiety and foreboding. The story does not either let up or let go. It belongs to that category of novels, like the books of Paul and Jane Bowles and Alejo Carpentier, or Peter Mathiessen’s <i>At Play in the Fields of the Lord</i>, in which Europeans or Americans find themselves in remote third world contexts. Both the people and the physical conditions of that context are simply not subject to Western thought-control and machine-control, however much that control harms them.<br /><br />The main character Wagner, “an all-efficient German engineer,” finds himself in a place, whether on his worksite or off, whose logic escapes him and whose people he can’t fathom. Even more so than books by the other authors I’ve mentioned, <i>The Snake Tree</i> presents an increasing spiral of terror and goes both differently and farther than readers might expect (even readers of this kind of fiction). It’s also an especially good example of showing how wrong bureaucracy can go and how much it can make bad problems worse.<br /><br />Reading up on Timm, I find that he’s still alive as of summer 2022 and has been a tremendously popular writer in Germany. The book reads like an excellent blend of streamlined narrative and complex and sophisticated literature that would never be popular in the United States. It’s simply too g<span style="background-color: white; color: #202122; white-space: pre-wrap;">ood at what it’s trying to do.</span></span></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-42270545910406231552022-07-21T11:48:00.004-07:002022-07-21T11:58:13.221-07:00My Washington, DC meeting with Jeremy Stewart<p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2UNBJux2oEacs7AdX3oH905d_Zi69Mhvf4Bf7COzoFmGMHsrDuJ7H-9vFaiG-fWenuw4nZS9BPqOgeuLj5xgp-4gdfGNZFFFuFpSA3ug5TUKH8eeA5RNt_DxxIvCUydBK5KI81EcJ3zaonjxPORZLA31G5-2NKWBLufucQ-GY6cKbzbPZXhYIVLpH/s4032/Stewart%20Photo.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg2UNBJux2oEacs7AdX3oH905d_Zi69Mhvf4Bf7COzoFmGMHsrDuJ7H-9vFaiG-fWenuw4nZS9BPqOgeuLj5xgp-4gdfGNZFFFuFpSA3ug5TUKH8eeA5RNt_DxxIvCUydBK5KI81EcJ3zaonjxPORZLA31G5-2NKWBLufucQ-GY6cKbzbPZXhYIVLpH/w300-h400/Stewart%20Photo.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /> <p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyOopa_ipFE4X8xxcYVRV4c6wFEuW8MDl-RxrrrdZpgWGlH-tNHj9Z5201KO2vc2I_zVsXiVrE-ckABnSK-2ULTRSrOWYAkHIOx6d6bfVDgrw7DBYkghgDYyds9da6HbFt6bqpMHOCLjXTQhX0V3QXo23J_118j3BRVTFStCwX-wVhQhMfinspRGRc/s1280/Stewart%20Book.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjyOopa_ipFE4X8xxcYVRV4c6wFEuW8MDl-RxrrrdZpgWGlH-tNHj9Z5201KO2vc2I_zVsXiVrE-ckABnSK-2ULTRSrOWYAkHIOx6d6bfVDgrw7DBYkghgDYyds9da6HbFt6bqpMHOCLjXTQhX0V3QXo23J_118j3BRVTFStCwX-wVhQhMfinspRGRc/w300-h400/Stewart%20Book.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><p></p><br /><br />So if you live in San Diego, like I do, and you’re having great conversations online with someone who lives in British Columbia north of Vancouver, where do you meet? In Washington, DC, of course. When I was there back in June, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Jeremy Stewart, a poet, essayist, scholar, and musician. He was in DC for a conference on Jacques Derrida (who knew they had those in DC?) and headed on to other stages of a journey, the next of which I think was Boston. We’ve been having conversations online since 2017, when he wrote me about publishing some of my poems in his magazine <i>Dreamland</i>.<br /><br />Jeremy’s most recent book, <i><a href="https://press.ucalgary.ca/books/9781773852201/">In Singing, He Composed a Song</a></i>, published by the University of Calgary Press, concerns alienated youth in a British Columbia town and the way music and their friends and hanging out and drinking and taking drugs (usually not too serious ones) gets them through a difficult growing up but can also land them in trouble with schools, the police, and even hospitals. It’s a novel (loosely) comprised of poems, photographs, prose narrative sections, and interviews (fake or real: they seemed so true that I couldn’t tell the difference). The story centers on one young guy and how trading a cigarette for a poster about a poetry reading while on school grounds can land someone in a lot more trouble than they ever expected.<br /><br />Oh, and by the way, Jeremy told me he was doing some academic job interviews too. Given his wide array of talents, someone ought to hire him and quick. They won’t regret it.<br /><br />mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-72070463102057009672022-07-19T08:52:00.001-07:002022-07-20T06:51:33.558-07:00The Changeling by Joy Williams<p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMjLHeOFpmdO1VdwsuLEK5OZRvBztdUjcabXDwyzpUVcugGPfy6EDhu96-utlUEWjJ0VOybHuq0OMiNZBy30Wo_F0KYvc6_De6NlLQfQ9vwyHWC38py6mDLoCDpbs-wZqwMznHyh4gbTFC8Zhk7Zmqpugyo6okdcRWG8cO-tpF8IRoJEM_xRJl_0oT/s500/Joy%20Williams%20The%20Changeling.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="312" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiMjLHeOFpmdO1VdwsuLEK5OZRvBztdUjcabXDwyzpUVcugGPfy6EDhu96-utlUEWjJ0VOybHuq0OMiNZBy30Wo_F0KYvc6_De6NlLQfQ9vwyHWC38py6mDLoCDpbs-wZqwMznHyh4gbTFC8Zhk7Zmqpugyo6okdcRWG8cO-tpF8IRoJEM_xRJl_0oT/w250-h400/Joy%20Williams%20The%20Changeling.jpg" width="250" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br />Talk about an ambivalent reaction to a book. There were so many things about Joy Williams’ <i>The Changeling</i> that I loved and quite a few that I didn’t like at all.<br /><br />Positives:<br />Fabulous imagery, often very disjointed and yet logical in its odd associations, a psychological weirdness that reminded me of Shirley Jackson. A still quite contemporary-seeming American surrealism that was often deeply convincing.<br />Propulsive, unforgettable sentences with a relentless drive.<br />An interest in psychological perverseness and the fringes of human complexity.<br />A vivid collapsing of the boundaries between the human and the animal.<br /><br />Negatives:<br />A lack of narrative energy and focus, despite the intense energy of the sentences. Events in the book meander more than develop, and at times the momentum of the narrative comes nearly to a complete stop while the powerful sentences just kept going. There are significant stretches of the book that feel like the story is going nowhere.<br />Unconvincing portrayals of the real, especially when it comes to the nature of events. The “real world” in the book is at times at odds with the “dream world” and at times seems to blend with it. While that’s interesting when I put it that way, in practice the passages that seemed to be taking place in reality were often not convincing and relied boringly on coincidence and the unlikely. “Maybe it’s all a dream” is both unconvincing in terms of the narrative and also a boring cliché.<br /><br />I also had mixed feelings about the stream of consciousness passages, which had a sort of “look what I can do” showiness that felt imitative and not essential.<br /><br />Add it all up, I guess, and there’s a mix of less convincing story and narrative elements with fascinating writing and world view.<br /><br />Sometimes I read the reviews on Amazon of ordinary people who write responses to an author or book, and I found all sorts of people saying things not all that different from what I’m saying about not only this book but others of hers as well: brilliant writing and strange thinking but unfocused stories that people lose interest in.<br /><br />So my conclusion: at best, brilliant. At other times, an unconvincing pile of words that’s not headed anywhere. And no, I’m not saying something here that’s anti-experimental fiction. Experimental fiction still usually has narrative drive, and this book isn’t especially experimental anyway. The introduction to the 30th Anniversary Edition comes from Rick Moody; Williams’ work seems most connected to the context of later 20th century American realism even while the realism of this book is very thin.<br /><br />Anyway, if you’re a fan, help me understand what you like about Joy Williams’ work.<br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-37520606399461696652022-07-08T12:00:00.002-07:002022-07-09T08:32:25.277-07:00The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart (my Goodreads review)<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiv3M-ZD2Px7LbzLHv-zuzy__7a8XZF1qpq-r6-9s9M30ZFvm5a_uzQ4xK1y8K036Fs9NglLOrw5S9aNvs9JbWJ9MDR6Y3k8MozGf-60yG-TLnM2-TOxQd9gM4UbLkdtOGPwFBDGOzYeLs4Z_QtQSMw5evaR0JjF7-Z0SVzaJiRr2RDoQATm_VoFgIo/s245/The%20Circular%20Staircase.jpg" style="display: block; padding: 1em 0px; text-align: center;"><br /></a><br /></div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKK9Dx50PzRfIRIsKiLFKWpwkJ03qu-dmRKOittmth7GwlcuCRFAukDAz5BHwjPZJlCSmyi3HyZzgI9ApweV5w7LF0Y1SMfJyjWl9aRYUeu_lytP3kR4ge_zNiIy_KME7dfC8Erz6QdLd3Dsei5xIU-TtjbIr6wTLE6RKm_pH0I_HCdHnxLbNoj2IM/s245/The%20Circular%20Staircase.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="245" data-original-width="206" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKK9Dx50PzRfIRIsKiLFKWpwkJ03qu-dmRKOittmth7GwlcuCRFAukDAz5BHwjPZJlCSmyi3HyZzgI9ApweV5w7LF0Y1SMfJyjWl9aRYUeu_lytP3kR4ge_zNiIy_KME7dfC8Erz6QdLd3Dsei5xIU-TtjbIr6wTLE6RKm_pH0I_HCdHnxLbNoj2IM/w336-h400/The%20Circular%20Staircase.jpg" width="336" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><br />This book is a fun, energetic, easy read, of no huge distinction until you realize that it was published in 1908, a dozen years before Agatha Christie’s first book. What that means is that the things it seems like it might have in common with Christie’s work (a big rural house, untrustworthy servants, most people as possible suspects, etc.) are not things that Rinehart, an American author, borrowed from Christie.<br /><br />Otto Penzler’s introduction identifies Rinehart as the leader of a loose school of “Had I only known!” authors. While I don’t think I’ll be following that particular lead any further, it’s interesting to note that Rinehart’s curious overuse of this foreshadowing technique was seen by others as a good way to build suspense. If Rinehart is hardly the first American woman writer of detective fiction, she seems like a big player too in the history of the cozy mystery concept. Nothing in the book is ever really shocking, no matter how often the narrator, Rachel Innes, is shocked, and the book feels entirely light and easy-going. <br /><br />Miss Innes, as she is usually called by others, is not the official detective, although she certainly does plenty of sleuthing. She’s someone who wants to maintain order and happiness among her family and the others she cares about and is determined to do so. She’s curious sometimes, and sometimes not, but she’s always protective. It’s interesting to think of her amateur detective status, and that of a few other amateur women detectives, as preceding the creation of Christie’s Miss Marple.<br /><br />One serious caveat about these books: the class and race attitudes, although gentle in expression, are pretty appalling not only by contemporary standards but probably even by those of the progressive political era of American history in which the books appeared. Servants are invariably silly and superstitious, and if they’re black they’re especially superstitious even if they might otherwise be portrayed as thoughtful and sensitive. There’s only one line, late in the book, that’s aggressively offensive, but the light-hearted class and race humor doesn’t fare well now, and people who want old works of pop literature to offer present-day standards should consider themselves warned.<br /><br />There’s nothing great about this book, and nothing about it is remotely convincing, but it moves along at a highly energetic pace for a book more than a hundred years old, and I enjoyed it. I think the book will mostly be of interest to people who want to know more about the history of detective fiction and the history of detective fiction by and about women particularly.<br /><br />This review can be found also on my Goodreads page:<div><br /></div><div><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4828257810">https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4828257810</a></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-45171509412793185242022-07-04T10:36:00.000-07:002022-07-08T12:03:05.415-07:00What Happened to the Confederate Press?<p> <table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyUYQkv8rw3X8AeAeyY7IIcI0Wx-ZzZzJGIU0yLnRypwGHsW9iB1oGuNpS6gSfyEbrhDpajpUA-oxCbMla-9YeBO76jv8jKgDVIguTBN_bdGLHFDibUxItzKOj8zQxX0ogI1G3ufNficI_MqctZC-NMKQzJ6J4cqf9KRei6FWz1VekoQGkNO2QDqUD/s4032/Lincoln%20and%20the%20Press.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="4032" data-original-width="3024" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyUYQkv8rw3X8AeAeyY7IIcI0Wx-ZzZzJGIU0yLnRypwGHsW9iB1oGuNpS6gSfyEbrhDpajpUA-oxCbMla-9YeBO76jv8jKgDVIguTBN_bdGLHFDibUxItzKOj8zQxX0ogI1G3ufNficI_MqctZC-NMKQzJ6J4cqf9KRei6FWz1VekoQGkNO2QDqUD/w300-h400/Lincoln%20and%20the%20Press.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">I’ve been looking for an adequate answer to this question for awhile and never found it before reading Harold Holzer’s <i>Lincoln and the Power of the Press</i>. What role did newspapers and government intervention into newspapers play in the role of the Confederacy? In contrast to the rambunctious, contentious Northern press, which produced viewpoints of all kinds, why was the Confederate press so limited and controlled?<br /><br />Holzer’s book isn’t just about Lincoln and the press but about the development of newspapers in the United States from the 1830s through the end of the Civil War. Yes, Holzer looks at Lincoln’s deep involvement in the world of newspapers over the whole of his life and political career, but the book is more broadly about the connection between newspapers and politics in American life during the years leading up to the Civil War. Holzer shows not so much how changes in American newspapers affected the ways people saw the war, but how newspaper men actively intervened in and shaped and sometimes controlled Northern response, often including official response, to the war.<br /><br />One of Holzer’s basic points is that far from creating comments that came from outside the world of U.S. politics, the U.S. newspaper industry was directly connected to the U.S. political industry, with many people going back and forth between roles at newspapers and official government roles as politicians. As his key opening example of this interconnection, Holzer gives details regarding the fact that in 1859, Abraham Lincoln purchased and subsequently ran a German-language newspaper operating out of his hometown of Springfield, Illinois, although very few people even then knew about it. Lincoln’s investment (financial as well as political) in the world of newspapers was one of his most key and successful political practices.<br /><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">Holzer’s 566-page book devotes only five of its pages to the history of Confederate newspapers. What’s surprising is that those few pages are all that’s really needed to answer the question of what the Confederate press was and what became of it.<br /><br />Why did the Confederate press not keep its citizens as widely informed as the Northern press? Why was there so little information, why was it so controlled, and why did the Confederate press play such a very small role in the life of people in the South, offering them poor information, late information, and often enough no information at all?<br /><br />For context, it’s important to understand that during the Civil War, in the North there was in no simple sense freedom of the press, although there was equally no simple censorship. Instead there were newspapers presenting all perspectives, including pro-slavery and pro-southern ones, and including newspapers whose owners and editors were accused of being, and sometimes were, traitors secretly supporting Confederate armies. It was often forbidden to report on the specific movements of troops, reports which might reach Confederate armies. The question of what ideas might be forbidden, under a national government that officially supported freedom of the press, depended on who you asked.<br /><br />Who might do the forbidding was also a key issue, and the answer was different in different cases. Censorship was sometimes enacted on specific newspapers, editors, or reporters by Union army generals and other military and political representatives stationed in the local environments of the press in question. It was just often enacted unofficially by citizens who would attack press buildings or the operatives of those presses, including reporters, when those presses or reporters were seen as pro-Confederacy. If censorship was never a broad and clear political policy in the North, it was never absent either.<br /><br />Lincoln’s response to all of this was, as Holzer shows, yet another example of Lincoln’s political savvy.<br /><br />Lincoln said very little publicly on the subject beyond supporting general concepts of freedom of the press and denying that one had the right to tacitly or explicitly be a traitor. In practice he often said nothing when local officials shut down or destroyed an anti-Union press, although he sometimes chastised generals for going too far (especially if they weren’t generals who had won important battles). He also helped some Democratic presses and journalists (that is, those that might be pro-slavery and anti-war but not traitorous) return to production, although only after stern warnings. So Lincoln never said a lot publicly in favor of censorship while being willing to see it happen, encouraging or discouraging it in some cases.<br /><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">So what was the Confederate Press like during the Civil War and why does it get only four pages in Holzer’s extremely detailed book? The answer turns out to be both simple and startling.<br /><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">During the Civil War, in the South, Holzer writes, “a once robust two-party political culture vanished” (457). There was increasingly over the years of the Civil War no Confederate press at all.<br /><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">Holzer lists a couple of key reasons why the Confederate Press vanished. One of them is not a lack of readers. People living in and under the Confederacy were often desperate for news, and just as often they couldn’t get it.<br /><br />The first reason Holzer gives for the vanishing of the Confederate press was “near-universal white conscription.” Nearly all white males roughly ages 16-65 were required to join the Confederate army and fight, which left very few white men able to run a press or be a reporter. How the men who were exceptions came to be exceptions is something that Holzer’s book doesn’t discuss.<br /><br />Another key element is that what Southern presses did remain were shut down quickly by the Union Army whenever a city was successfully invaded. The Union knew very well the role that Southern newspapers had played, often through false and outrageous stories, in creating the war in the first place, and so the army shut them down and also helped pro-Union papers in the South get started. As early as 1862, there were pro-Union papers in parts of the Carolinas, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee and Virginia.<br /><br />Lastly, and this reason was the most surprising to me: as the Civil War went on, the Confederacy and its supporters increasingly had little or no paper. And so, obviously, they had nothing to create a newspaper on. As Holzer points out, “The South boasted only a fraction of the nation’s paper mills before the war began, and fewer still once Union forces began occupying significant portions of its territory” (458). Given this extreme shortage of paper, newspapers had to cut back publication and increasingly just ceased. In some cases, they continued for a while publishing small, often even one-page editions. During the siege of Vicksburg, an extreme case obviously, the one remaining newspaper in town published a few small editions on the backs of former bits of wallpaper from (I’m guessing here) buildings abandoned in Vicksburg when the citizens left their homes during the bombardment to live in caves.<br /><br /></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">A few Confederate newspapers, like the Charleston Courier, held on longer than others, and surprisingly a few new periodicals Confederate periodicals opened (temporarily), but editions were small both in terms of numbers of pages and sizes of print runs and they could reach no more than a few people. Obviously, such papers had only limited information to offer and presented only pro-Confederacy perspectives.<br /><br />A few years ago, a friend of mine said when I was talking with him about differences in the news and newspaper cultures of the North and South that he had probably assumed, without thinking about it, that news in the North and the South operated on relatively similar principles. As it turns out, not only was what could and couldn’t be said very different (not to mention what <i>was</i> and wasn’t said), what was even more different was the material and social conditions under which newspapers could say anything at all.<br /><br />In the North, wildly energetic press activity tried to present a huge range of perspectives, including those of not just pro-slavery and pro-war voices but of acting traitors to the Union cause. It ran up against equally loose and fractious censorship activity, sometimes military and government, sometimes unofficial groups of angry citizens, activity that for the most part Lincoln quietly supported or condemned from a distance.<br /><br />In the South, the one-party Confederacy had, over time, fewer and fewer newspapers to publish its perspectives, fewer reporters to write them, and ultimately no paper on which those perspectives could be written.<br /><br />I’ll conclude this essay with one final thought: in the days of the Internet, any individual or group no longer needs paper to produce large scale editions of their perspectives that can be distributed widely. A post-paper, Internet news future is one in which the mechanics of reaching people has profoundly changed. It’s a change that will affect the future of war, rebellion, and revolution in ways we are only now beginning to see.</p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><br /></p>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3432817549859327458.post-26218392510188589402022-05-22T16:14:00.005-07:002022-07-08T12:04:13.205-07:00Shudder Folk Horror Movies Thumbnail Reviews Batch Two<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVPm9GGQB4aGuEwavfZ01BhcH9VthKU2Di4iGaF6b17qBsRgBlYkXwZSqfSkwPFmOUWWEEEFCdrjacer6IIDYNiHRjuAXIt-GHQtYpcg7fMcMDJi19LgYGJtLLHDotcaRjvxdfE4ctVDGOOWFF0zE5c5cAiaKBYkNt2RiGpckotMYjedgmf37r2ckb/s292/il%20demonio.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="172" data-original-width="292" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiVPm9GGQB4aGuEwavfZ01BhcH9VthKU2Di4iGaF6b17qBsRgBlYkXwZSqfSkwPFmOUWWEEEFCdrjacer6IIDYNiHRjuAXIt-GHQtYpcg7fMcMDJi19LgYGJtLLHDotcaRjvxdfE4ctVDGOOWFF0zE5c5cAiaKBYkNt2RiGpckotMYjedgmf37r2ckb/w400-h236/il%20demonio.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /> <br />I’m not sure how much longer the Folk Horror collection on Shudder will be available, since Shudder rotates its titles fairly frequently. In any case I’ve enjoyed watching all these movies, even the ones I didn’t like much. It was a fun project. The term “folk horror” feels pretty broad at times as a descriptor for all these films, but nothing I watched seem to fall outside the concept, which ultimately makes it pretty effective as a term for thinking about the subject matter and themes of these films.<br /><br /><i>The Wicker Man</i>, British, 1973 (5 stars): Still often called the best British horror movie ever made, and I’ve not seen anything that makes me disagree. I have a DVD box set of this movie. Nearly every moment is beautiful; nearly every moment is eerie and disquieting, and the pervasive discomfort just keeps building. As a viewer, you always know something’s wrong, but the film is so surprising and original that you never know what it is. By the way, the hugely popular 2019 film <i>Midsommar</i> borrows tons from this movie and I haven’t seen anybody else note that. And I can say this and viewers still won’t know what to expect from this movie.<br /><br /><i>Il Demonio</i>, Italian, 1963 (4 ½ stars): Surprisingly and effectively, this movie splits the difference between an Italian neorealist film and a horror movie. Set in a convincingly disturbing rural environment, the movie depends on Daliah Lavi’s outrageous and compelling portrayal of a out-of-control character who often turns out to be less disturbing than the more ordinary people around her. The movie’s not scary really, but it sure is disconcerting. Also, there’s a scene in it that’s the basis of an infamous scene in the director’s cut of <i>The Exorcist</i>. The scene was probably cut from <i>The Exorcist</i> for good reason, but the original in <i>Il Demonio</i> is riveting.<br /><br /><i>Kill List</i>, British, 2011 (4 stars): This movie is even more brutal than its brutal trailer would lead you to believe. But it’s also a much better movie than the brutality might lead anyone to suspect. The situation is off-kilter and disturbing, the characterizations are effective, and even if one has a general sense of what way the mysterious elements of this film are going, I myself didn’t really see the ultimate turns coming. There’s more than a little Tarantino influence here, but this movie is really doing its own thing. I’m not kidding about the brutality though, so consider yourself warned.<br /><br /><i>The Blood on Satan’s Claw</i>, British, 1971 (3 ½ stars): The term “folk horror” was originally used by reviewer Rod Cooper in describing this movie. It’s quite enjoyable although much of the story is ridiculous and the psychology of it paper thin. Good atmospherics and tone carry the day so that the action doesn’t become too ludicrous to bear. The atmospherics of this movie are quite foundational in terms of many horror movies that follow it, including <i>The Wicker Man</i>, so it’s an essential folk horror watch despite moments that might make you laugh derisively.<br /><br /><i>La Llorona</i>, Guatemalan, 2020 (3 stars): There are some things to like about this movie and a lot not to like so much. Director Jayro Bustamante borrows heavily from Guillermo Del Toro, but as much as I like the idea of setting a horror movie in a rich historical and political context, the movie takes the worst part of Del Toro (and the reason I’m not a fan of <i>Pan’s Labyrinth</i>): a heavy-handed political moralizing that precludes much surprise. At every moment, this movie tells us exactly who is bad and for what reason and in what degree and then proceeds to sledgehammer its agenda into place. There’s a good sense of mood, good acting, and some memorable and at times chilling visuals, and those things help lift it above its dull and obvious moral lecture.<div><br /><i>Dark in August</i>, American, 1976 (3 stars): The first hour of this movie is quite good, a four star effort that establishes intriguing characters and a striking rural setting. J.J. Barry is an original presence as the main character. But then there’s the rest of the movie.<br /><br /><i>Clear Cut</i>, Canadian, 1971 (2 ½ stars): Graham Greene is such a compellingly watchable actor that he almost pulls off the two-dimensional character he plays He also overwhelms the mediocre performances by the other actors. The plot, about a land struggle between white Canadians and indigenous people, has all of the expected features but not much more. I like it when horror gets political, but that like anything else needs to be done well. The film is supposedly controversial because of the stand it takes that sometimes violence might just be the best response to oppression, but I didn’t care enough about the white characters to be concerned at how badly they were beating treated. Don’t more conventional slashers also suggest that it’s tremendous fun to see stupid arrogant assholes get sliced and diced and that the world is a better place when they’re gone?<br /><br /><i>Tilbury</i>, Icelandic, 1987 (2 ½ stars): The flat acting and lack of convincing action were on some level an important part of this odd little film, which tries to combine the presence of an ancient horror with a historical drama of World War II Iceland during a period of occupation by supposedly friendly British and American troops. The disjointedness made the action difficult to care about, so this movie survives on its weirdness mostly, and it was often weirder than I was expecting, with some scenes that are surrealist not in a loose sense but truly.<br /><br /><i>Roh</i>, Malaysian, 2019 (2 stars): Sigh. I was rooting for this movie when I started watching it. But the story was verging on absent, and the mythology was general and vapid: bad things happen to bad people, and even the possible twist that everyone might be bad couldn’t save the slow scenes, the barely comprehensible narrative turns, and the lack of strong atmosphere. A lot of the story revolves around a mother failing her children, or supposedly failing her children, but I’ll be darned if I could ever figure out what it was she was supposed to have done. Apparently she became a bad mother right when her husband died, or was being accused of being one from that moment, not that the story ever resolved or even really approached an answer to what had created the problem.</div><div><br /></div>mark wallacehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10047292022080114501noreply@blogger.com0