Books I Read January 24th, 2021

Weather has finally arrived here in Los Angeles. By birth and upbringing a resident of the Northeast, I am well aware that our winter – which consists of daytime lows in the 50s, occasional periods of grinding and miserable rain interrupted by delightful bursts of sun – is to be envied over that of most of the rest of the planet. Still, misery is subjective, and its unfamiliarity renders us ill-prepared to deal with it (witness the disturbing fact that more LA unhoused freeze every winter than SF and NY combined). To judge by my weather app, most of next week will see Angelenos huddled around our space heaters and dreaming of the nine straight months of sun which constitutes our other season.

In any event—these are the books I read last week.

Negrophobia: An Urban Parable by Darius James – A surrealistic, horrifying, semi-humorous faux-screenplay exploring American racism. I felt I’ve seen other writers explore this territory with better success.

Hieronymous Bosch by Virginia Pitts Rembert – Two things about Jerome that cut against his Christian message and give his art a (probably unfairly) reputation for transgression. The first is that the characters in the hellish portions of his paintings don't seem usually to be that bothered by being shat out they sphincter of an anthropomorphic organ grinder (or whatever). The other is that the paradisaical portions of his paintings tend themselves to be so weird and horrifying, with crystalline towers and odd animals, that looking at it you're kind of going 'shit man, if that's paradise maybe I am better off with monkey-faced whores, drinking drafts of hellfire and playing dominoes with an obese cat-man.

Prefecture D – Four novellas dealing with members of the Tokyo police's internal bureaucracy, and their attempts to maintain justice while upholding the complex code of etiquette/ethics which underlies Japanese law enforcement – which, if you hadn't guessed, are super, super weird. These were weird and engaging, I'm looking forward to picking up something longer by the author.

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld – The remarkably miserable story of an impoverished Dutch girl and her rural, reactionary, lunatic Christian family. Contra Tolstoy's dictum, I tend to find books dedicated to the intimate depictions of failed families tedious, but even by the standards this was not good. Ghoulish, nasty to the point of self-parody, unreflective in any meaningful sense of the human condition (even the human condition at its very worst), and written in a voice which sounds utterly unlike that of the 10 year old girl it is intended to represent. The success of this book can only be attributed to the perverse quality found among the critical elite of mistaking an unpleasant read for a profound one.

Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones – A sorcerous cad is saved by the intrusive affections of a not-quite-everywoman heroine. Appallingly adorable, worthy of the esteem in which its held.

Pylon by William Faulkner

The man (the writer) sat in the early morning sunlight beside the window he had meant to clean but didn't yet, drinking his coffee from the coffee pot that he never cleaned, because he believed that there was no point in cleaning a thing just to put the thing you cleaned back into it or maybe only because he was lazy, or maybe (who knows?) because he just never thought about it, it was just a thing that sat there because it always sat there, demanding no more of you than the distant though visible mountains or even the horizon itself.

The book, you were talking about the book.

Right, right, the book, of course. So he sat there drinking his coffee which was not the cheap kind of coffee but not the most expensive kind of coffee either, in his neighborhood there were, right now, even with the pandemic raging and LA County breaking new highs for death every day even then you cold still walk right out down the block and go into a coffee shop/general distributor of precious things and buy a eight ounces of beans for twenty or twenty five or even thirty hard-earned (not by him, we have told you he is a writer, but by someone) heard-earned American dollars, not to mention a set of rose-gold measuring spoons and a knitted afghan for your niece.

The book, though, you were going to tell us about the

Book, the book, I remember. So he getting set just then, at the very moment, with his record player spinning some psyche-country tune and his medium-expensive coffee cooling getting ready to write something about this book, which is about a New Orleans air show and various shenanigans descending from said spectacle, but it occurred to him that there isn't really a point to explaining the plot of a Faulkner book--

But you said you would--

no point because you aren't reading the books for the plots, not even for the best ones some of which have very good plots but (of course (of course)) for his long, rolling sentences, which at first are tedious but as you sort of sink into it become more and more pleasurable to work through

I disagree!

like falling in love or a stone rolling downhill. They're fun to read but they're also lots of fun to write, you look down and boom you've got a thousand words straight, with nary a punctuation mark to mar the space. It's so much fun to write like that that he (the writer, the one in the chair in the sun) sort of figures the other writer (the dead one, the southern one, the one with the alcohol problem) might have gotten so caught up in the sheer joy of pumping out language that he did not always have energy to dedicate towards quality control, particularly when putting back a few pints of whiskey each afternoon.

For God's sake! For God's sake!

It's OK. I'd probably start with Absalom, Absalom.