The Sorrows of Young Werther is a timeless examination of a young man's journey through unrequited love and the struggles reality can pose to one with a value structure loftier and more abstract than that which society enforces. These lasting themes, combined with the novel's unique structure, are why I believe the two and a half century old story persists today. It is also endlessly whiny in a way that I had mistaken for exclusively modern, which adds to its relevance.

This is not so much Goethe’s fault as his intention. Young Werther, the titular subject of the book, is a young artist born to the upper middle class whose privilege as a member of this class affords him a long term, essentially unemployed stay in the little German village of Wahlheim. We are relayed this story largely through the medium of Werther’s letters to his friend Wilhelm, whose name is far too similar to the oft-mentioned village. This method of chronicling young Werther’s triumphs, despairs, and eventual death is highly effective, as the personal nature of such writing allows us to peer nakedly within Werther’s mind, which frankly is where the lion's share of action seems to take place. 

Werther meets his love interest nearly at the outset of the novel, as he sits in a field sketching “the fraternal pose” of two children he does not know. Eventually he comes to find that these children are the charges of one Charlotte, affectionately referred to as Lotte, who he instantly falls head over heels in love with. His feelings are only reinforced when at a “ball arranged in the countryside”, Lotte’s partner allows Werther to dance with her. He discovers that she is as good as engaged to a man named Albert, which affects Werther so greatly that he becomes distracted and forgets how to dance. 

To say that Werther wears his emotions on his sleeve would be an understatement of hilarious proportions. He is constantly pacing back and forth before people when he has something to say but wishes to appear as though he doesn’t want to say it; You would need several hands to count the number of times he is driven to tears throughout the novel by something rather minor. After his revelation about Lotte, he essentially tucks the information about Albert deep into the recesses of his brain and continues seeing her and the children she is in charge of on a near daily basis. He describes this period of his life to Wilhelm:

“I am living such happy days, days such as God reserves for His saints and come what may, I cannot say that I haven’t experienced life’s joys, it’s purest joys.”

Eventually, Albert returns to Wahlheim and Werther is confronted with the unpleasant reality that he is a perfectly congenial man, if a bit reserved as compared to our protagonist. 

“And he is so honorable, and hasn’t kissed Lotte in my presence a single time. May God reward him for it!”

As Werther spins it, Albert does not mind his lingering around his fiance because Albert knows what a gift his fiance is to the world and how selfish it would be to keep such a gift all to himself. The story being told through Werther’s letters, we are often charged with reading between the lines in order to see through the narrator's inherent bias. I interpret Albert’s indifference to Werther as his complete dismissal of the fragile man as any sort of romantic competitor. Werther even believes that Albert has no idea that his dreams of Lotte lie anywhere beyond close friendship. He does not extend this delusion to Lotte, but instead thinks (somewhat rightfully) that she must feel something of the same for him.

“And, I feel it, you cannot hate him who burns for you so.”

Eventually the pain of being so near Lotte and yet being unable to “possess” her overtakes Werther and he makes the drastic decision to move away to the town of Weimar where he gets a good job in the government service at the behest of his mother and Wilheim. Obviously Werther detests this job and specifically his boss, who he sees as small minded and unnecessarily harsh. Moreover, when he meets another woman in the town, known as Fraulein von B, and attends a dinner with her he is further aggrieved at the class driven attitudes of the upper fringe of society who look down upon him and find his presence at their event disquieting. The culmination of these factors leads to Werther resigning his job. He goes for a period of time to a nobleman's estate, where he briefly considers joining the army, before returning once again to Wahlheim.  

It is upon his return to Wahlheim that Werther truly begins to unravel. By this time, Albert and Charlotte have married. The beautiful walnut trees from which Werther once drew inspiration from have been cut down (The mirroring of Werther’s state of mind and nature is a constant theme throughout the novel), and it seems that all that was once good in his life has now soured. A peasant that he met during his brief stint in Weimar, whose unreciprocated feelings toward his widowed mistress Werther greatly sympathized with, has killed the man who replaced him as the widows farmhand when his feelings grew too overt. When Werther defends this murderer in court, Albert denounces him once and for all and tells Lotte that she must stop seeing him so frequently. Lotte half-heartedly relays this to Werther, who completely ignores her instruction as by this time he has already decided that he will soon commit suicide. 

Werther visits Charlotte once more when Albert is out of town. He reads her a poem (Werther loves reading poems), a translation of Ossian. To be entirely honest, I had a lot of trouble following what was happening in the poem, but essentially this was Werther’s confession to Charlotte that due to the fact that he cannot be with her, he will be forced to take his own life. Charlotte and Werther share a kiss at the poem's conclusion before Charlotte locks herself away from him in shame. 

The final portion of the book detours from the previous narratives convention of journal entries, and instead relies on narration from the third party that is supposed to have collected these entries for our reading and intermittent writings that have been scavenged from Werther’s home. He writes letters to Lotte and Albert, and actually ends up borrowing Albert’s pistols to do the deed. Lotte knows that this is why Werther is borrowing the guns, and yet she still gives them freely to his messenger. As Werther wrote: 

“One of us three must die; It shall be Werther.”

After writing a series of dramatic farewells to Wilhelm, Albert, and Lotte, Werther shoots himself with Albert’s pistol. He does a rather poor job and does not die until after he is discovered the following morning. 

Werther’s self-importance, the intensity of his feeling, and the feelings of those around him are all brilliantly highlighted through the choice of using journal entries as the main vehicle of the story. With this, we can see directly what Werther believes to be happening, and intuit through his descriptions of events what might actually be taking place in reality. Werther is a truly lost soul, one searching for a world more meritocratic, yet easier, more romantic, yet somehow entirely aligned to solely his desires. He is selfish, difficult, and seems to accomplish relatively little as an artist throughout the whole of the narrative. Clearly we are not meant to sympathize with him and yet the ubiquitousness of his struggle to win the heart of one who has already given hers to another strikes a chord that renders the character compelling.

 It is certainly a triumph to have written a character piece such as this in 1774 and have it still be relevant and insightful to this day. However, I will say this about young Werther- I don’t think I’d like hanging out with him one bit!

With each and every one of my book reviews, I worry that I fail to do the work in question justice. Never has that worry been more acute or likely justified, than in the case of Suttree. 

Cormac McCarthy died this year. I've only just begun making my way through his resume, starting with Blood Meridian, then The Road, Outer Dark, and most recently Suttree. Each of these was clearly the work of a truly brilliant author. In order to really enjoy McCarthy, it is probably best that you first enjoy lengthy, hyper-detailed prose and the directing of this prose towards some of the more violent, disgusting, and visceral aspects of life and death. If this sounds up your alley, than you would be well served with any of the above titles. 

It almost feels impossible to describe this novel in any succinct way. The book was published when McCarthy was 46, though supposedly he had been at work on it for a twenty year period in some fashion or another. It is 140,000 words and made up of a series of misadventures and characters masterfully interwoven in an effortless sequence of tragedy and hilarity. Even in a novel this complex and littered with individuals who themselves could fill a biographical, I find that what personally affected me most was the prose. It feels almost impossible to overstate the skill and ingenuity with which McCarthy is able to place the reader directly into Suttree’s setting and state of mind. He has a talent for making the simple complex and laying the convoluted plain. The unbelievable level of detail he brings to his work would be exhausting coming from a lesser writer, but it is difficult to tire of such masterful displays:

“It is overcast with impending rain and the lights of the city wash against the curdled heavens, lie puddled in the wet black streets. The watertruck recedes down Locust with its footmen in their tattered oilskins wielding brooms in the flooded gutters and the air is rich with the odor of damp paving.”

The book is deep and overwhelming and seemingly unassailable. It would be a disservice to boil it down to a highlight reel of plot points and yet even this small glimpse into the web of humanity woven throughout its pages feels like the work of a lifetime. In short:

 Suttree is a younger man who has abandoned his wife and their young son to live on the riverfront of some backwater town along the Tennessee River. He resides in a houseboat and makes what little money he has fishing the river and selling his catch in the marketplace. He and almost every one of his friends have been in and out of the local jail, often as a result of their latest drunken escapade. It is within this jail that Suttree first encounters Harrogate, a simple-minded boy trapped in a mans body who latches on to the little bit of kindness that Suttree shows him and becomes perhaps the second-most important character behind the titular. There are fights, doomed relationships, misguided business ventures, and it becomes clear that this chapter in Suttree's life has arisen as a desperate attempt to solidify an identity of some kind. There is the sense by the end of the novel that most of Suttrees closest confidantes are either dying or somehow escaping to a better life. The violence, present from the first chapter in which Suttree witnesses the local police fishing a body from the river, somehow ramps up to even greater levels until eventually Suttree’s houseboat burns into the waters of the river and he escapes from the city with nothing more than a suitcase of his belongings and memories of friends passed. 

There is an indescribable amount more to the novel than this. I haven’t touched on the witch, on Harrogate’s scheme for thieving coins from payphones, nor his tunneling under the city. I didn’t mention Suttree’s brief and tragic foray into the world of musselin’ and the romance that ensued. I even kept secret his stint in the madhouse. It would take dozens of more pages to discuss the themes of identity, brotherhood, and absurdity, among many others. 

In truth, I wouldn’t say this is my favorite novel in the sense that I would crack it open and reread its passages fondly if I had fifteen minutes to spare. It is more that I am in awe of it, in the most genuine sense of the word. It boggles my tiny mind to think that one man had the ability to write this, and even more so that he began writing it at such a young age. To me, this is as close to perfection as I have read and I imagine I will be revisiting it time and time again. 

“And what happens then?

When?

After you're dead.

Dont nothing happen. You're dead.

You told me once you believed in God.

The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got no reason to think he believes in me. Oh I'd like to see him for a minute if I could.

What would you say to him?

Well, I think I'd just tell him. I'd say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there's just one thing I'd like to know. And he'll say: what's that? And then I'm goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.

Suttree smiled. What do you think he'll say?

The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer it. I dont believe there is an answer. ”

As a self-taught English major I still have much to learn about the world of books and novels and even books. One clear example of this is that my main conception of George Orwell as an author was of a guy who really liked writing about pigs and socialism and not much beyond that. It may shock you to know, as it did me, that he actually wrote quite a bit more, and what’s more is that some of it is good!

Down and Out in Paris and London is a 1933 novel written about living as a member of the lowest class in two of the world's most well known cities. In the research I did for this review(reading Wikipedia) I found that Orwell was actually from quite a well-to-do background and had purposely sort of ‘disguised’ himself as a member of the lower class for a time in order to experience what life as a menial Parisian and London tramp was like. It’s a testament to the success of the novel that I did not realize this until afterwards. 

The novel begins in Paris, as Orwell is struggling to pay his rent after his savings are stolen and the Parisians he is giving English lessons to suddenly decide that they’ve learned enough of this lower language. Orwell describes a series of hilarious and desperate characters, all of whom share the common theme of thinking no further ahead than where their next meal lies. He touches on the secrecy and boredom of poverty, how his days were split between lying listlessly in bed, too starved to rise, and ducking frantically into coffee shops to avoid being seen by more well-to-do friends. 

Eventually, Orwell reaches out to an old Russian friend of his who was employed as a waiter and whom he believes will be able to help him land a job as a dishwasher. Unfortunately, he finds this friend in a state of poverty even more pitiable than his own, though Boris is a proud and confident man who is certain that he will be able to call in a series of favors from old war buddies in order to secure them stability and employment. As it turns out, eventually he is proven correct, though the time between their starving and their actual employment is long and tortuous and wrought with other unfortunate happenings. 

The book is somewhat biographical, as Orwell really did experience these things or was at least adjacent to them, and this includes his eventual tenure as a plongeur (dishwasher and general laborer) at ‘Hotel X’ in Paris. He seems to look upon this period of employment with something approaching fondness, since, as he puts it, “Nothing could be simpler than the life of a plongeur.” He woke and started to work at 5:45 and was not home until 10:00 and his days were so exhausting that to do more than sleep and perhaps drink a little in his few idle hours was an impossibility. 

Eventually though, burned out from such a thankless lifestyle, he writes to a friend in London beseeching him for a position which might allow him a greater amount of rest between shifts and his friend tells him that he may have such an opportunity involving the care of a medical imbecile. Orwell leaps at this opportunity and travels to London in order to make good on this offer, only to find that his would-be-employer has gone temporarily abroad and he is left to fend for himself, nearly penniless, until their return. 

What I loved about this novel was that it was essentially a slice of life piece, though the life is so far removed from what I view as ordinary that the usual issues of monotony or lack of action that plague the genre are entirely absent. The state of poverty is such that every waking moment is spent fighting for your next meal and a place to sleep and combined these two needs send Orwell all across London through a system of ‘spikes’. Spikes were essentially tramp houses in old London. The main catch to utilizing this system is that no tramp was allowed to spend the night in any one spike more than once a month, which sent Orwell and his fellow travelers all across England in search of lodging as they scrounged and begged for scraps of food. These unique circumstances and the people that inhabited them allowed Orwell to create a snapshot of a truly interesting time. 

The book is relatively short and a very easy read. Orwell, having purposefully descended to the status he holds in the story, is able to be objective and truthful in a way that would be difficult to come by by any other means. Down and Out in Paris and London is actually perfectly in line with the two other Orwell titles I’ve read as yet another highly successful piece of social and political commentary, but written in a manner that I found much more casually enjoyable.

“And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone that has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs- and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it.”

Kevin Barry loves writing characters. 

That may sound a bit stupid. Every author, almost by necessity, has to enjoy writing characters. But Kevin Barry in particular seems to love writing characters- A paper-thin, albino gangster with a nose for fashion, a lazy-eyed, half-pikey beauty bored of city wars, a mini-fridge sized redhead with a thing for Asian girls whose best friends with a skyscraper named Fucker. It seems as though every character introduced in City of Bohane is more far-fetched than the last, the end result of which is somehow their being grounded in reality, or at least in the world of Bohane. 

And as memorable as the characters are, it is the titular Bohane that the book centers around. The narrator waxes poetic on the city, the badness that comes in off the Bohane river, the mysticism and savagery that make up the people populating the fields and bogs of “The Big Nothin’”, which in itself pales in comparison to the weirdness that is got up to by the sand-pikeys residing in the dunes down the southern outskirts of the town. Each of the different districts have at least as much character as any of the people walking among them. 

City of Bohane, in what I am beginning to think of as typical Kevin Barry fashion, is not particularly user-friendly. It takes several chapters to draw an approximate map of the place in your mind, and several more to get used to the slang terms that are thrown around from the get-go. A few of my favorite of such terms(definitions derived through context clues as internet searches come up empty):

Lampin’: Looking, taking a look, glancing, etc.

Gommie: A stupid person.

Latchiko: Lazy, good-for-nothing; A layabout.

And, number one in my book:

Ye sketchin’?: Do you fucking get it?

If you can suffer through the first few chapters enough to find your bearings, you will emerge into the underworld of Bohane, where the violence of the city is blamed on the nature of the place and an unusual period of calm is about to be cut short by several murders pinned on the Hartnett Fancy, the largest gang in the city of Bohane run by the albino gentlemen mentioned above, affectionately and somewhat reverently referred to as the Long Fella. 

The ensuing gang war is only some of the city's trouble- There are a swirl of romances and old grievances dredged up from the annals of the past to complicate things. Violence begets violence, plans are enfolded into larger schemes. The perspective shifts here, then there, heads across town before returning again, and in this way we learn a little at a time what goes on across Bohane. 

I have several things I love about this book but perhaps one of my favorites parts of Barry’s writing is the poetic way in which he describes the city. Being a good author is, in part, being able to describe things in a way that others have not thought to, and Kevin Barry is better at this than most:

 “The air was rich, maritime, nutritious. It was as though you could reach up and grab a handful of the stuff.”

“Sunlight flashed from behind the cloudbank- It peeped out for a few seconds at a time, skittish as a young thing, and showed the colours of the rain.”

“Nostalgia, on the peninsula, was a many-hooked lure.”

Slightly less obvious are the choices Barry makes in his storytelling. The whole of the book is written in first person, and yet we do not meet the narrator until part two of the novel(and in fact, I am of the opinion that our meeting him at all is one of very few disappointing choices in the writing). Prior to this(and for the most part, after it as well), the narrator speaks as though speaking on behalf of all of Bohane. He says we when referring to the citizens, talks of the city as an old familiar thing, knows its histories and alleys and long pent-up blood lust. It’s as though the tale is being told to us over the campfire by some ancient Irish uncle we were unaware of having up to now. 

On a more micro level, the storytelling choices hold up just as strongly. At one of several points that could be considered the book's climax, the Fancy go into a violent battle against several families that have banded together against them. Barry chooses to tell this story by taking the perspective of a newspaper photographer reviewing his shots of the fight after the bloodbath. It is a creative way to offer a cinematic birds-eye view of the conflict that fits seamlessly in with the rest of the story while simultaneously standing out as a particularly succinct and powerful passage.  

Another example: As the tensions in the city heat up and regular citizens evacuate the premises, we are updated on the happenings within the city limits through the perspective of an old man who has paid a boy to spy on the goings-ons and report back to him in the Big Nothin’. The boy bursts into the bar where the man and dozens of others have gathered, waiting tensely for news, and has to be spoon fed slugfuls of liquor to prompt the story out of him. These choices seem obvious after the fact- How simple to tell a newsworthy event through the perspective of a newspaper!- But I find it admirable how consistently he manages to select the most unique approach to telling a story. 

The book is excellent, a love letter to a fictitious Irish city grounded in the realities of love, ambition, and betrayal. Barry doesn’t seem to be concerned with any Greater Themes™ or deep, underlying messages. He is simply writing entertaining, human stories about fantastical people with just enough problems to be believed in. Although I don’t find the prose quite as beautiful as that within the previously reviewed Night Boat to Tangier, the book is still well worth any wannabe Irish gangster's time. 

Ye sketchin’?

If you, like me, are desperate to see what authors look, sound, behave like in real life, you’ll be delighted to know that a small number of Michel Houellebecq interviews are hosted on Youtube, and an even smaller number of them are actually in English. The man is old now, born in 1956. He still has a slight head of hair, and retains his lifelong smoking habit. He is neither ugly nor attractive. He comes off abrasive and more-intelligent-than-thou, both of which are partially natural and definitely intentional. 

The effeminate men and masculine women interviewing Houellebecq in these Youtube interviews deem him “the bad boy of French literature”. In many cases it is easy to separate the art from the artist- You hardly see Frodo as a self-insert for Tolkein- But in the case of Houellebecq(pronounced Welbeck, according to the Internet), the lines are somewhat blurred. He seems to write almost exclusively about disillusioned, misogynistic middle aged men, who tend towards nihilism and violence, along with a general disdain for society and the people that inhabit it. They also all seem to smoke a lot and have one long-lost love in the past, a woman who seemed perfect but turned out to be batshit crazy. Just a curiosity that I’ve observed.

However, Houellebecq insists these characters are not self-inserts and though it is tough to believe, it doesn't much matter either way. The fact is that the reason he is given so much attention in the literary world is because he is an excellent, perceptive writer. And unlike 95% of modern day fiction, he feels at home wrestling with very uncomfortable topics, even if he doesn’t come off exactly squeaky clean at the end of these bouts. 

The novel in question, Whatever, was Houellebecq’s first publication. It is a delightful 155 pages, a fact that I salute the man for; It is increasingly difficult to find worthwhile fiction one can finish in a single day. The main character, written in first person perspective and never addressed by name, is a predictably depressed, erudite, hateful individual who it seems has had enough of life and is getting quite close to believing life has had enough of him. This protagonist, who I will refer to as Michel, works as a programmer for the Ministry of Agriculture in France. He is tasked with going around the country and attempting to sell their latest programming technology to various agricultural groups. Accompanying him is the indefatigable and catastrophically ugly Tisserand. Unlike the romantically closed off Michel(who has had relationships in the past, but seems mostly unconcerned with that aspect of life throughout the novel), Tisserand is frankly desperate to meet a woman. He is charming and successful but horrendously ugly and this defect prevents him from ever "sealing the deal". At the age of twenty-eight, Tisserand remains a virgin. 

In essence, the novel is about several things at once. The state of society, circa 1994 and still startlingly accurate. Michel’s descent into utter madness, complete professional ruin, total lack of belief. Tisserands journey, first towards women, then towards despair, pointed towards murder, and finally ending in tragedy. And plenty more, most of which was really covered in the first point when I said ‘state of society’. 

One of few salient ideas that Houellebecq manages to absolutely hammer home arrives via one of Michel’s “short stories”(Michel, as a character trait, writes short stories concerning animals. These stories can go on for dozens of pages within the novel and are essentially a way for Houellebecq to insert his own diatribes on society at large under the guise of entertainment) is a comparison of the clear economic hierarchy to that of the less agreed upon sexual hierarchy. As Houellebecq sees it(real name Michel Thomas, by the way, until he just decided to make it cooler I suppose), sexuality is a system of social hierarchy. He draws many parallels to capitalism, concluding that economic and sexual success are the two planes of societal interaction upon which one’s life is valued. The two are interrelated but certainly not perfectly and the determinant behind success in either realm is largely luck. The pessimism with which he describes this situation suggests that the time for taking action against such a cutthroat system has long since passed us by. In reality, I feel that the truth probably lies somewhere between this view and a much more optimistic one; But Houellebecq is not exactly known for holding a healthy middle ground.

The best part of reading Houellebecq is having him put into words a societal phenomenon that has bothered you to the core of your being and yet you could never quite place your finger on prior to reading his work. The man is an observer in the truest sense of the word, thorough and bipartisan. I very much enjoy his takedowns of corporate culture, of the architectural decay and lack of life we allow to creep into our societal spaces in the name of being cost effective, and his noting of the social minutiae that people perform in observation or defiance of the invisible social hierarchy. To me, these clever insights are well worth the somewhat troubling (and very embarrassing to read on a plane) paragraphs in which Houellebecq compares women to cattle in a detailed, quite grotesque manner while a woman who looks like my aunt glares at me six inches to my right.  

This will be my final complaint with Houellebecq, though I do feel that it is justified as he receives wide amounts of praise from people who are justifiably fed up with “establishment” literature and yet are perhaps veering too far sideways in their search for an icon- It feels as though he writes things knowing that he will get a reaction. To me, this is behavior worthy of a Buzzfeed “reporter”, not a creator of serious novels. He will write racist or frankly pedophilic paragraphs that seem to add little to the message of the novel outside of certainly drumming up some press for it upon its release. It’s also entirely possible that he is just racist and pedophilic and too stupid to make even the laziest attempt to conceal this within his novels but truthfully, I doubt that. I think he knows what will sell and enjoys the attention. To me, this feels like incredibly lazy behavior from a writer with Houellebecqs clear potential, but also I’ve never been published and that doesn’t seem likely to change soon, so perhaps I should stick something backwards in the middle of my next attempt at a novel and see what happens. Don’t knock it till you try it I suppose.

There's a less than zero chance that I greatly missed whatever point was trying to be made with this novel and perhaps I will read it again in the future to see if I can discern it. In a very, very private space, of course.

In an effort to somehow lift my own writing out of mediocrity, I have begun a personal project of rereading books I very much enjoyed and trying to ascertain just what it was that made me like the writing. I did not start with “My Year of Rest and Relaxation” by Otessa Moshfegh but regardless, that’s the book I’ll be reviewing today.

“My Year of Rest and Relaxation” is one of the only books I’ve found by listening to the recommendation of someone who wants people to know that they read so badly, they made a TikTok about it. It follows the story of a young, largely selfish woman who is attempting to spend an entire year in a deep, vegetative state after the death of both of her parents. She does this through a combination of her natural ability, the constant drone of the television, and an otherworldly cocktail of highly controlled drugs prescribed to her by her wack job psychiatrist. 

Close to 75% of the novel takes place within the protagonist's New York apartment. The large majority of our insights into the outer world come in the form of loose trains of thought or highly detailed flashbacks. Occasionally, a woman named Reva comes over and vents about what the protagonist sees as stupid, fleeting things. I wouldn’t call Reva her friend so much as a participant in the symbiosis that is their strange relationship. 

As the novel goes on, it is clear that although this period of hibernation was brought on for a number of different reasons, the main one is the death of her two parents, neither of which she had a particularly close relationship with. The novel explores these feelings of grief and how they intertwine with growth, while maintaining a witty and cutting narrative voice that lends both levity and a feeling of reality to the situation. 

I believe what I like most about the novel is how very modern it feels, in a way that even the best novels written today do not. When reading Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon, not to compare levels of quality, the setting of the book always feels as though it is somewhere out of our timeline, and thus they can explore themes and ideas without the constricting boundaries of real life getting in the way. This often makes for even more effective novel writing but it is occasionally enjoyable to be put into a world so recognizable as the one in “My Year of Rest and Relaxation”. 

I told myself I would try and pick out at least a few negatives with the books I read and so I must admit that although I loved the novel, it did feel that the protagonist's redemption felt rather rushed after the long and lovely buildup throughout the rest of the book. I also take slight issue with the character of Trevor, a long-standing enemies with benefits type character who I feel loses relevance to the journey of the protagonist at around page 150 out of 300. However, it is not as though these flaws can be thought of as severely detrimental to the work as a whole and although the redemption might have felt slightly rushed, it still manages to come across as completely genuine. 

I feel that this book more than most is one that I could perhaps convince a few people in my life to read without them eventually coming to regret it. It is smart, yet accessible, modern, yet dealing with timeless themes. The very concept of the book is funny and the voice in which the author writes is pure snark, poking fun at some of the worst of society. I recently got a Goodreads account which forces me to give whole star ratings for some reason, instead of being able to add or dock a half-star as I will inevitably want to some day. Regardless:

★★★★

We Learn Nothing is a collection of essays from professional cartoonist Tim Kreider. Do not let the fact that he draws poorly formed exaggerations of political actors for a living dissuade you from reading the book; It’s actually quite good.

Through the collection of essays, you can put together a relatively holistic biography of Tim: He was adopted; He seems to have always been an intelligent kid, who was encouraged to read and believe as he pleased; He went to college for… English? Perhaps cartooning. He then went to grad school, emphasis also unclear. He drinks/drank a lot and with a very large number of people. He is very atheist, very anti-children, and very open minded outside of those two things; And he is getting older.

This is my second read through of this book and I think the reason I’ve returned to it is that reading Tims essays gives me a sort of renewed hunger for life. Hearing about all the different experiences he’s had- A month spent fake married in Mexico; Finding out about his two half-sisters at forty years old; Getting his throat slashed and proceeding to live the most carefree year of his life- I see these as a sort of gauntlet he’s thrown down: Here are mine. Can you do better?

Another thing I really enjoy about Tims perspective is how well he demonstrates the lost art of empathy. Although he does have some rather set-in-stone beliefs about particular things, he is at least able to be honest about how he came by these beliefs. He doesn’t pretend to be some intellectual, holier-than-thou wise man, nor does he pretend to entertain ‘the other sides’ beliefs as the equal to his own, an inherently false and fruitless exercise. Instead, he acknowledges that the base, human drives that form the basis of his deepest convictions probably also took part in shaping those of the man sitting opposite. So although he refuses to relinquish his beliefs (And why should he?) he also recognizes that other people have different ones- And he may agree or disagree with them, probably even thinks of others as very stupid for having them, but he understands that they came by theirs honestly, just as he has.

‘The Creature Walks Among Us’ is an essay in which Tim explores the quality of love which may drive us to do stupid, unexplainable things when overcome with it. I don’t really disagree with this notion, but I will say that where I differ the most from Tim is perhaps in his approach to relationships- It feels inherently toxic, less like love and more like momentary infatuation. He even seems to acknowledge this himself but still- It gives me a strange feeling to hear this otherwise intelligent, middle aged man write about relationships as though they must be completely overwhelming and all encompassing to be worthwhile. Even at his lowest though, Tim writes wonderfully; On taking a reprieve from dating for a while: 

“I’m functioning and accomplishing things; everyone approves of my behavior and agrees I seem happier; I’m not embarrassing my friends with any histrionic displays. But I also know that all around me the air is full of songs too beautiful for me to hear.”

Hearing about Tim’ friends is half the fun of his essays. True to his cartoonist roots, he seems to have a knack for attracting the strange to his life and then amplifying their most interesting qualities to the point of caricature in his essays. In ‘The Czar’s Daughter’ he writes about his friend Skelly, who unexpectedly died of a heart attack. I feel particularly attached to Skelly due to the fact that he was apparently a compulsive liar, who would lie about anything at all, at any time, for no reason other than it was fun; A man after my own heart. That’s why it was quite devastating to hear how, when his friends were charged with going through his belongings after his death, it was revealed that he had been hiding a very serious mental illness. Tim doesn’t elaborate much on this point but I think it reasonable to assume some form of schizophrenia based on the context clues, which certainly casts his fun white lies in a bit of a darker light. I really appreciate that Tim sees this massive, yet well hidden facet of Skelly’s being as a reason to be all the more impressed with his old friend. The essay serves as a reminder of the importance of choosing to remember the best of those that pass on- Because what would be the point of doing anything else?

Summarizing the whole of each essay would only ruin the book for anyone who might read it, not to mention take up a whole bunch of time, but each and every one of the essays brings something interesting to the table. ‘How They Tried To Fuck Me Over (But I Showed Them!)’ is about how many people use anger as a way to feel good, even as they don’t consciously realize it and should be required reading for anyone thinking about making a Twitter account. ‘When They’re Not Assholes’ is a pretty astute, fair minded way of dissecting the political atmosphere of circa 2010 America, in ways that are still extremely applicable today. ‘Lazy: A Manifesto’ has one of my favorite lines of the collection, a truism that I choose not to follow every single day of my life: 

“Life is too short to be busy.”

The topics of the remaining essays range from the complexity of feelings surrounding losing a friend as an adult to a hyper-aware examination of ‘conspiracy theory’ to a compassionate and realistic retelling of what it is like when one of your long-time friends comes out as transgender at 40. The writing is as broad as it is excellent, and this wide brush is likely why I find myself returning to this piece of art again and again. After reading it this time around, I went online and saw that he has since released another book, I Wrote This Book Because I Love You, which I am more than prepared to be disappointed by. Being stabbed in the throat is really only interesting the first time it happens to you; More than that, and you need to start doing some serious self-examination.

There’s an idea in the nethersphere(my word for Twitter) that people of times past were more… Literate. “Look’, they’ll say. “Look at these letters from an eighteenth century tradesman. Look at the beautiful prose, the captivating imagery, employed by this simple man. Imagine a blue collar worker today even reading a book. You can’t, the image fails to even begin to form it’s so preposterous. How far we have fallen!” These are the negative claims made by the inhabitants of the nethersphere and not at all indicative of my viewpoint; I myself believe that blue collar workers can read and write almost as well as normal people.

That being said, White Noise by Don DeLillo, published in the year of our lord 1985, certainly makes a good argument that people in the ancient days were simply better writers. The book follows a professor at College-On-A-Hill, Jack Gladney, as he navigates through life and his fear of death, while trying to keep up with his quirky family and his growing responsibility as a pioneer in the field of Hitler studies. DeLillo writes funny and sharp, wordy and artful. He makes claims that cannot possibly be true and yet, in the moment you completely fail to contradict.

“Babette is tall, and fairly ample; there is a girth and heft to her. Her hair is a fanatical blond mop, a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blond. If she were a petite woman, the hair would be too cute, too mischievous and contrived. Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.” 

Babette is Jack’s wife, who is later revealed to have the same petrifying fear of death that Jack himself holds. Jack, who has been divorced four other times, settled down with Babette purporsefully because she was unlike his previous wives in that she was not concerned with things such as death. When he finds out the unfortunate truth, he makes several hilarious statements about how “You’ve been depressed lately. I’ve never seen you like this. This is the whole point of Babette. She’s a joyous person. She doesn’t succumb to gloom or self pity.” He loves saying “This is the point of Babette.” It ends up being weirdly sweet, kind of. Also kind of not. 

At least partially also in love with Babette is perhaps the most memorable character in a book full of unforgettable people- Murray Jay Siskind. Murray is Jack’s professor friend who has moved to town from New York. Murray is perhaps best described as a theorist, a philosopher, but his theories and philosophies stretch from the innate capacities of men and women to the spiritual recharge people get from their local grocery store. When Jack is in doubt throughout the novel, he turns to Murray who seems to be the final word on just about everything, even if that final word is completely and utterly absurd. 

The family go through a series of ridiculous events- They are evacuated from their home due to a toxic agent that Jack is then exposed to. He finds that the toxic agent may or may not affect humans, but it definitely affects rats, and he has somewhere between one week and thirty years to get his affairs in order. Jack’s paranoia leads to him getting more and more medical work done on himself; Meanwhile, he and his daughter discover that Babette is taking drugs under the table from a discontinued study on a medication that is supposed to suppress the fear of death. The large part of the remainder of the novel is Jack wrestling with this fact and the circumstances surrounding it. 

The second best part of White Noise is DeLillo’s mastery of observation. A motif throughout is the constant, inescapable noise of the world. In the midst of serious conversations, climaxes that have been built up to for chapter upon chapter, DeLillo will insert a line such as: 

“Someone turned on the TV set at the end of the hall, and a woman’s voice said: “If it breaks easily into pieces, it is called shale. When wet, it smells like clay.”

 This is such a simple way of showing us the almost insanity of the constant influx of information we are faced with every single day. Our hopes, our fears, our most intimate moments are all underscored by the muffled sound of the infomercial that came on after the football game. 

The best part of White Noise is the characters, which dance with mesmerizing grace along the line of believability. Heinrich, Jack’s oldest son, is fourteen years old, has a massively receded hairline, and plays a mass murderer in chess by exchanging moves with him one at a time via snail mail. His best friend, Orest, is an older boy who is going for the record for longest time spent sitting in a cage with poisonous snakes continuously(sixty-seven days). This is a fact that is impossible for Jack to wrap his head around. 

“‘Why would you want to get killed going for a record?’

‘What killed? Who said anything about killed?’

‘You’ll be surrounded by rare and deadly reptiles.’

‘They’re the best at what they do. I want to be the best at what I do.’”

The book as a whole, in fact, does an excellent job at delivering a very real point with a very unreal situation. Early on in the novel, Jack and Murray journey to visit the most photographed barn in America. DeLillo, as he does again and again throughout the novel, manages to twist this ridiculous concept into serious commentary on tourism, on crowds, on the nature and creation of a simulacrum.

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

“We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies."

There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides.

"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism."

Another silence ensued.

"They are taking pictures of taking pictures", he said.

I would recommend this book to anyone; I plan on rereading it soon myself, as I am sure there were hundreds of details and Murray theories that I missed my first time around. Also, apparently a movie of the same title based on the book was released on Netflix only a few days ago. Time to watch that with my girlfriend and shock her with my uncanny knack for predicting plotlines.

Every now and then I will encounter an author that seems to be universally loved; This author might be lauded as cerebral or cutting or insightful but invariably they're written about in such a way that makes me think their work is nothing short of lifechanging, if you understand it. Which is why it always makes me feel a little intellectually inferior when I read their work and am less than enthralled. J.G Ballard is one such of those authors for me. 

My first introduction to J.G Ballard was with his critically acclaimed novel “Crash”, in which he postulates that we don’t actually fear car crashes but are instead very sexually aroused by them. I struggled through this book that was laden with references to very specific media that I didn’t understand, which only reinforced the idea that I am simply not cultured enough to enjoy an author of J.G Ballard's caliber. His book “Millenium People” went a little ways in assuaging this concern of mine, but not by much.

Ballard is remarkably obsessed with violence, first writing a novel that centers on getting off on the reenactment of celebrity car crashes and then following it up with a novel about the terrorist acts committed by the “new proletariat”- The dissatisfied middle class. He paints a hilarious and complex picture of this groups woes; A rather striking image is a Molotov cocktail formed from a Perrier bottle. 

We follow David Markham, a psychologist who gets sucked into the terror cell of a suburb in London. Strangely, he seems to be one of the most “normal” characters we encounter. Outside of him, there’s Sally, his wife who got in a car accident years ago and has since made a full recovery, but refuses to act uninjured until she determines why the universe singled her out for this injury. There is Kay Churchill, lecturer in film studies and leader of middle class rebellion who seems more interested in photo-ops than in actually affecting change. There is Richard Gould, a doctor who specializes in children with Down syndrome and also organizes mass terror attacks on the side. And there is David’s first wife Laura, who kicks off the novel by dying in a massive explosion at Heathrow Airport.

This explosion is what propels David throughout the novel, as his ostensible purpose is to search for the person behind his first wifes murder. For reasons I don’t understand, his wife is okay with him leaving for weeks at a time, just as he is okay with his wife openly having multiple affairs. Strange ones, the Brits. David finds himself becoming more and more wrapped up in the terrorist cell led by Kay Churchill, at first unwittingly before blossoming into a full fledged member. He is also seemingly entranced by Richard Gould, the mysterious mastermind behind the revolution who soon falls out of love with Kay Churchills ineffectual protests and facade of rebellion. Massive, random acts of violence carried out in senseless locations begin to terrorize London-  A film store is torched, a museum is bombed, a tv personality is shot dead on her doorstep. Inevitably, David discovers that it is Richard behind these attacks and he is unsure what to do with that information, mostly because he is still so enamored with Richard and his philosophy.

Richard’s philosophy seems to be that the only meaningful acts in a meaningless universe are senseless acts of violence that by their completely random essence defy the laws of nature and imbue a normally purposeless reality with significance. 

“‘Sadly, life is worth nothing. Or next to nothing. The gods have died, and we distrust our dreams. We emerge from the void, stare back at it for a short while, and then rejoin the void. A young woman lies dead on her doorstep. A pointless crime but the world pauses. We listen and the universe has nothing to say. There’s only silence, so we have to speak.’”

Another hint at my lack of intellect, though I do perhaps think this was an intentional effect by Ballard, is that it is difficult to tell what philosophy the novel is supposed to be endorsing. It presents Richard’s, Sally’s, and Kay’s- All are different in a way and none are particularly appealing. David, acting as our stand-in, seems to be most drawn to Richard’s but spends the majority of his time in Kay’s before opting to spend the rest of his life with Sally at the end of the novel. If Sally represents the status quo and Kay a meaningless departure from the status quo, then it appears Richard is offered as the only true alternative and yet all his philosophy offers us is more empty space. 

So if this novel is renowned for its presentation of ideas, I suppose that is something to be lauded. It is certainly unique. But it feels as though when you begin to search for meaning in the meaningless, you inherently lend it meaning and you fall down a rabbit hole of where meaning begins and ends until eventually, you learn nothing at all. I respect Ballard’s ideas. I think he has a very interesting perspective. But so far, I don’t enjoy his novels, and I don’t feel like I learn anything from them either. They seem to just be a difficult slog with one or two interesting ideas peppered throughout to keep you hopeful. 

This was the first book review I’ve written where I sought out other reviews first to see what they've said. I read one interesting quote suggesting that the novel “Dissects the perverse psychology that links terrorists with their innocent victims”- I think that’s partially true and partially not, since the motivations behind the acts of terrorism in the book feel quite far removed from the motivations behind the acts of terrorism in the real world. For the most part though, I thought that the ideas cited that are supposed to make the book so excellent were rather tired and that their reasons for liking the book so much come off as a little ridiculous: “It’s the point of the book to have completely ambivalent characters whose motivations are unclear and actions make little to no sense.” Alllllright. It feels a little as though these people are searching for meaning in a meaningless book.

I’ve never read an author that more effectively uses the word “Fuck” than Kevin Barry.

When I first heard about Night Boat to Tangier, I had Kevin Barry confused with Dave Barry, and so was left wondering how the guy who had written the silly Dave Barry Goes to Japan had somehow pivoted into writing a book longlisted for the Booker Prize. As it turns out, Dave Barry is a different guy completely, though I was a good bit into the book before I realized that. Maybe there’s something about the Barry’s that just makes them funny.

Night Boat to Tangier is a hilarious, beautiful, phenomenally written novel that is structured in a way that spins you across timelines and countrysides alike. It starts with two men sitting in a port in Algeciras, Spain, looking for a girl who seems to have fallen in with the Rastafarians. We jump backwards and forwards through time throughout the novel, following these men(more one than the other) as they tumble through their lives. There’s drugs, sex, romance, brotherhood, treachery, family… All of this while our present day main characters are waiting patiently in the port of Algeciras. 

Simply put, Kevin Barry writes fucking cool. He writes as though he were his own main characters: Tragic, storied men with a knack for the lyrical and a fondness for the crass. It shines in the dialogue, in the description, in the capturing of feelings that would otherwise leave you speechless. His prose is like poetry in all the best ways, but the steady rhythm lends itself to the story rather than distracting from it, a calligram that takes the complicated shape of a novel. He forgoes any quotation marks and instead separates each short bit of dialogue with two taps on the enter key. These unconventional choices reinforce the feeling that this is almost more play than novel, the characters leaping to life with each brief moment. A fair portion of the book's dialogue is Irish slang but it reads so naturally off the page that rather than the strange language alienating you it pulls you in, envelopes you in the world of Charlie and Maurice. 

The book is compelling emotionally but not overly so- it doesn’t bash you on the head with it but draws you a bath and lets you soak in the water. Everything Kevin Barry does in the novel just feels so effortless. The dialogue reads like an instrumental, like the slow crash of waves on the shore. I’m not really sure what else to say about it. This is easily the best book I’ve read this year, and perhaps one of my favorites ever. It would be impossible to choose a favorite quote or even to round out my top 5, but I’ll place a few below to give you the sense of it.

“You see it’s my daughter that’s missing, fella. Can you imagine what that feels like?

Charlie speaks as softly-

Do you have any nippers yerself, Ben?

Any sproglets, Ben? No? Any hairy little yokes left after you?

In Bristol or someplace? Charlie says. Any Benjamin juniors left behind you? Hanging out of some poor gormless crusty bird what fell to your loving gaze.

What you shot your beans up, Maurice says.”

______________________________________________

“These were fabled people. These were tricky times. They were in a moment of dangerous splendor. The men were lizardly, reptilian. They wore excellent fucking shoes. Nelson carefully with Jimmy Earls kept an eye on the confrontation. It was a smiling one, yet, and soft-voiced. These were deliberate people. Why should they meet just here, just now? Maybe it needed to be seen, and recounted.”

_______________________________________________

“How you doing big-picture wise, Maurice?

I’m fucked up, Charles. Yourself?

Shockin’ condition altogether.”

24 long years I have spent on this great earth and still I am plagued with questions surrounding the basics: Why are we here? What is the proper way to cook rice? Am I really sure I can’t move things with my mind? This week, I looked to Waking Up by Sam Harris to find out.

I originally bought Waking Up at the urging of one in my series of therapists(avid readers will recognize him as the ayahuasca fanatic). The charlatan also convinced me to utilize Sam Harris’ app of the same name to begin my meditation practice and to be fair, the app did make me more consistent. In fact, that period of my life was the only time I felt that I was really beginning to get meditation. I am currently trying to reclaim that glory, which is perhaps one of the many reasons I opted to once again turn to my guru Sam Harris.

Waking Up is subtitled as ‘A Guide To Spirituality Without Religion’ and boy, does Harris really want to emphasize that point. It is tough to make it through multiple pages without some sort of jab tossed at Christians, Muslims, Mormons, oh my! It feels to me like Harris has a very deep need to be taken seriously as an intellectual while still getting his point across on a subject that is inherently a bit ~weewoo~, which leads to him being excessively derisive towards religion. This need to be taken seriously can also be seen in some of his peculiar word choice… While I am a strong proponent of choosing precise words to say exactly what you mean, there is more than one instance where Harris seems to hit the thesaurus a little hard:

“We feel the position of our limbs in space; we see them at the appropriate locations in our visual field; and our experience of touching objects generally coincides with the sight of them coming into contact with our skin. An analogous synchrony occurs whenever we execute a volitional movement.”

Or, alternatively:

“Our body parts work together to get shit done.”

His sounds prettier, but I am not sure it is more useful. 

I’m not really knocking him for his vocabulary choices, even though they do feel as though he is putting on airs(“And in what sense can reality be ‘simply the loss of the ego’? Does this reality include quasars and hantavirus?” Okay, I’m done, I’m done). Nor am I denying that he can probably provide plenty of evidence for his thesis that the creation of organized religion is among mankind's greatest mistakes. I am just saying that his excessive insistence on both these things detracts from the message of the book, which I do otherwise find compelling.

What Harris puts forth, I think pretty successfully, is that regardless of whether or not you are a high brow, well-hung atheist or merely a devout Jewish rabbi, developing a stout meditation practice can lead to concrete benefits in your life. He cites several different proven effects that long term meditation can have on the structure of the human brain, including larger corpora callosa(connection between the two sides of the brain), larger hippocampi(center of emotion and memory) and thicker gray matter(movement, emotion, memory- Also, squishy). Long term meditators experience pain differently, adapt to it more quickly, and have overall improved responses to stressors. The downsides of meditation include the time required, the difficulty involved, and the scam artists that take up so much of the cultural space surrounding it.

I’m not sure how seriously the average person has ever attempted to meditate but I know from the probably hundreds of times that I have now sat down and tried that there are a countless number of  ways to go about it and no single one that is absolutely correct. Metta meditations focus on feeling love and kindness for all others. Meditations focusing on your inner child involve conjuring up an image of a time when you were still cute and having a conversation with your younger self involving forgiveness and understanding, among other things. Don’t even get me started on visualization exercises. In the time I was taking part in Harris’ meditation program, it was largely centered around separating from your sense of self by taking practical steps to do so. 

Trying to establish a geographic location for the ‘I’ within us all usually leaves us looking somewhere behind our eyes(Our I’s… Someone get a numerologist on the phone!) You then continually attempt to drill down at this concept with questions like: 

“If we are behind our eyes, why can we feel the back of our head? Why can you seem to move this locus of self throughout your body or even outside of it? Why do people who have lost their sight or their memory or their bodily function still seem to retain this sense of self?” 

Eventually, this leaves you confused and wondering if you’re doing this correctly. Taking a step back and noticing thoughts without judgment before recentering your focus on the breath will give you a slight sense of clarity, accompanied by a brief feeling of disgust with yourself for being so incapable of sitting without thought before this too passes by. The separation between the observer and the observable, between you and the thoughts that you have is the starting point but going beyond that seems almost insurmountable. 

As I write about this, I feel a bit more sympathy for Harris. It is not easy to put these concepts into words without sounding like a bumbling idiot, but he did quite well. 

Some of the most successful meditations I have had involve hyper-focusing on one thing to the exclusion of all others. This might be focusing on the sounds you hear and realizing that you cannot decide not to hear those sounds- They are simply a part of your experience. It might be truly feeling the weight in your chair, the itching in your feet, the breath in your chest. It might be taking notice of the colors that waltz behind your eyelids everytime you close your eyes. I remember being asked to take notice of the shape of my field of vision and realizing for the first time, perhaps rather stupidly, that it was an oval. 

Harris apparently spent his younger years following guru after guru- On whose dime, I have no idea- And desperately trying to become the elusive adjective ‘Enlightened’(™). He explains the different practices he learned over the years from Tibetan monks, Hindu gurus, Buddhist masters- And is able to pretty objectively pick apart what worked and what didn’t. He calls out scam artists, people who have deluded themselves into thinking they’ve had a breakthrough, and cultural practices that are insisted upon by these teachers but have no real bearing on the ‘success’ of your meditation. It is a thoroughly honest dissection.

I can’t say that I really enjoyed the book, but I didn’t hate it either. I think Harris is smart, particularly when it comes to this subject matter, but I’m also not sure he really relayed anything revelatory. I will keep meditating because I know that meditation makes me feel better about myself in a way that I have found no substitute for, not because it helps to decrease blood pressure, or because it is a non-religious answer to the spiritual vacuum of today's world. Meditation is often focused on what is not rather than what is; Waking Up was the same way, but I’m not sure sardonically attacking other answers to a desire for something larger really exemplifies the detached contentment that Harris insists his spiritual journey provided him. 

When a book is written particularly well, I tend to feel down about my own limited abilities as an author. At times like these, I look to Google for reassurance. With desperate fingers, I search for the author's birth date and the year in which they published the accursed novel. Oftentimes, I am reassured- It turns out they were 36, 42, even 55 by the time they completed the masterpiece- I have plenty of time to become much more innately talented. No such luck with Wormwood by Poppy Z. Brite; If I don’t have a comparable body of short stories in two years time, I’m finished.

Wormwood is a wonderfully grisly, creepy, and straight-up horrifying collection of short stories that I managed to finish around Halloween. Poppy Z. Brite, who since completing the collection has changed both their name and gender(I will refer to them by their new pronouns but not their new name, as Poppy Z. Brite is an inherently better horror author name than Billy Martin) is a genuine master of description. I think his writing really solidified to me the concept that describing how something feels is much more vivid than describing how something is. As a collection of short stories, I definitely feel that some stood out more strongly than others. I’ll cover a few in more depth: 

The first story, Angels, follows the only two characters who earn a repeat story late on in the collection, Steve and Ghost, as their car breaks down and they encounter a family with a peculiar set of twins. Also a bit of a shocker, the one named Ghost has a knack for the paranormal. As a story, I wasn’t particularly intrigued, but even at his weakest Poppy Z. Brite shines with a way of capturing things that feels so unfair: 

“They trailed through the cemetery, casting long shadows over the softly rotting gray stones and the bright patches of grass and earth and sunlight, still sipping from cans that dripped foam and amber sparkles caught by the sun.”

A Georgia Story was honestly a little bit of a tearjerker to me; It follows a group of four boys living together in the top story of a New Orleans church(New Orleans is a favorite for Poppy Z. Brite stories, the fantastical mix of different superstitions, cultures, and religions providing the perfect backdrop for some of his most horrific imaginings) as they try to make a living in music. There’s gay love and death and circuses and I won’t spoil it too much but I rather enjoyed this story a bit more than the first one:

 “Blood beaded his long dull dark hair, ran bright as watercolor paint down his thin neck and his chest like a box of bones stretched over with dry translucent skin.”

Next up we have His Mouth Will Taste of Wormwood, I assume the titular story of the bunch that follows a pair of friends who go deeper and deeper into depravity until they finally… Fuck death? Sex has always played a big part in horror and Z. Brite certainly is no exception. This is not the first or the last story that has sex, nor even the last that has sex with some sort of half-human, half-demon creature. When reading through his Wikipedia I discovered that Z. Brite was lauded for writing about gay relationships in the early 90’s, which I find hilarious because the last thing I thought when reading about the body that had resided in the grave they dug  up reanimating and visiting them at the nightclub they frequent to suck the life out of them in a way they both found worth it was “Gay!”

“With the first kiss his mouth will taste of wormwood. After that it will taste only of me- of my blood, my life, siphoning out of my body and into his.”

Xenophobia was a favorite of mine and not only because I am deeply racist; I find that Z. Brite has a truly exceptional eye for city streets, or at least my fantastical ideas of them that are so often let down by reality. Two white guys desperate for a drink wander through Chinatown until they are offered $10 by a man “who might have been a bonsai tree, shrunken and gnarled with skin the color of old wood” to sit vigil over the corpse of a dead woman. Naturally, they accept, use the money to get drunk, take something that may have been mushrooms and then pretty much freak out- As one does.

“The moment stretched out long, punctuated by the blinking of neon outside. On- and the inside of the shop was bathed in garish night rainbows. Off- and there was only the lamp behind its faded paper shade, and the soft web of shadows.”

How to Get Ahead In New York is the last one I’ll cover and also a favorite. There are just too many rich descriptions within it to not love it; As a story though, it’s probably one of the least frightening in the collection. Sure, there is the mass swarming of homeless people begging them for money in a slow yet aggressive manner so akin to zombies, and the horrifyingly organic feeling Ghost gets from the subway(That’s right- This is Steve and Ghost’s second appearance) that makes him think of worms burrowing beneath the city streets, and of course the human heads that a street vendor tries to pawn off on the pair before they can find the bar their supposed to be playing at but compared to the rest of the stories these things are childs play and maybe that’s why I like it so much. With so little constraint and lots of room to run, Z. Brite can come out with brilliant tidbits like:

“No, Ghost told himself. You did not feel their minds beating against the jars like dying insects. You did not feel the raw burn of formaldehyde against your eyeballs, the dead taste of it in your mouth; You did not feel the subtle breakdown of the molecular dream that was your brain. They were not alive. You could not feel them.”

Overall, I though the collection was excellent, varied, and exciting. I took away ideas that I have never had before, both terrible and lovely. Apparently Z. Brite took a near decade long break from writing and is only returning recently to write some sort of treatise on religion and spirituality in the work of Stephen King. I can’t say this catches my attention nearly as much as the idea of a graveyard flooding so completely that the recently buried bodies come to the surface to envelope mourning daughters in a cavernous embrace, but hey- Different strokes for different folks.

When These Mountains Burn by David Joy is the latest in a series of books I am reading on West Virginia and Appalachia in general. It takes place in northern North Carolina and is split between several points of view- An old man, his heroin junkie son, another heroin junkie, a high level federal officer, and an undercover police officer looking to bust the dealer behind all the dope. It’s an emotional action movie whose stakes are raised ever higher by the forest fires that are raging through the North Carolina countryside, coating the entire area in ash. 

The book begins with the old man, Ray, being robbed for what seems like the hundredth time by his son Ricky in order to get more money for heroin. Ray then receives an ominous call, letting him know that his son is in danger and if he wants to see him alive again, he needs to bring a certain sum of cash to a certain location. Pretty typical drug dealer-hostage situation; You know the type. Ray considers not bringing the money, but thinks of his dead wife and how ashamed she would be of him abandoning their son. This propels him to dig up the last of his savings and give it to the dealers. At the handoff, Ray warns the dealer that if he ever sells his son heroin again, he would regret it(it should be noted that Ray, canonically, is a physically massive man). He then picks up his son and drives him home, where he kicks him out and tells him to never come back before going to sleep like a baby. 

The POV switches to Dennis, another heroin junkie in the area who peruses newspaper obituaries to find funeral times that will let him know when certain families will be out of the house. He then goes to these families homes, robs them, and sells whatever he got to pay for heroin. It’s a neat little system and one that is serving him well until he witnesses Ricky overdose and is robbed and beaten when he tries to save him. 

When Ray finds that Ricky is dead he decides upon vigilante justice. Things go haywire, the hills are burning, and Ray contemplates the idea of letting the fires go until everything is burnt to smithereens, positing the idea that maybe it is easier to start from scratch than to try and fix something that is structurally broken. People on the Internet who think they’re smarter than they are will tell you that this is called accelerationism. 

Obviously I don’t want to spoil the whole of the novel; It’s an excellently written book and I'll include a few of my favorite lines below. The plot is simple, a bit predictable, and could probably be made into a fairly entertaining movie. In the final chapters, Ray pontificates on living in the middle of the end for a region that seems to be too far gone to ever be saved. He blames television and envy, brain drain and misguided good deeds, the loss of community and the birth of mistrust. Whatever has led to the current state of affairs is much more than just one thing but an amassing of factors over time, small allowances that build upon one another until you look around and the world you live in is unrecognizable to you. Maybe someone, somewhere has the time and the inclination to figure out what all these little changes will lead to before they happen but that someone never seems to be around to wrangle with the consequences when they finally do come to a head. It’s not clear what the way forward is, but it is clear that the path to the past is permanently grown over.

“He could not recall the last time a prayer was answered.”

“Light came through the window and seemed to evaporate in his eyes…Forty one years old closing in on a casket.”

“The world had become a series of fragments, little vignettes that didn’t piece together to anything meaningful.”

Jennette McCurdy has the writing skills of someone who took their high school English classes in the back of a TV trailer between shoots. 

That’s not really true, it was just fun for me to say. She writes well, if a bit simply. As my girlfriend puts it, “It sounds as though she’s just talking to you.” For an autobiography, and particularly one that is so centered around the author's life being stunted in childhood, this makes perfect sense. I’ll judge her then, not on her ability to use the clunky, performatory language that I enjoy so much on but on the depth and intrigue within her story; By these measures, she does wonderfully.

I’m Glad My Mom Died has a purposefully shocking title and the cover photo features Jennette with an urn I assume is supposed to be her mother’s ashes. The other issues in Jennette’s life- Her eating disorders, her difficult relationship with performance, her struggles within romantic relationships- All of these filter through the screen of her mother, a woman who takes the term stage mom to a seemingly incomprehensible level. One of the best written and most heart wrenching portions of the book occurs when Jennette takes a seat at her mother’s comatose side and tells her that she is down to eighty nine pounds- She honestly believes that letting the woman who has controlled her eating habits for her entire life know that she has dropped below ninety pounds as an adult woman will be the news her mother needs to hear to come back to life.

The strongest theme throughout Jennette’s life is lack of agency. From the moment she was born, her mother was grooming her to live vicariously through. She started auditioning before she even really understood acting, and when she does understand it, she hates it. Her mother pushes her, pushes producers, pushes agents, and lets her family slip into ruin and disrepair while her seemingly spineless husband stands by and watches it all happen(Another ridiculous complication to Jennette’s story: Her mother was a hoarder, which seriously affected the quality of life her and her siblings had. Apparently, rather than beds, they all slept on a tarp in the living room, the only area that allowed them to stretch out in the house). Her mother started her on her path to disordered eating, fed her mind with the ideas that she needed to stay small in order to continue being cast for roles, and constantly berated her for not being more grateful for success in a career path that she didn’t choose.

Jennette’s life is one long series of misadventures, a fact that could possibly be spun as comical if it were not a real woman that these things were happening to. She is lied to by producers, taken advantage of by boyfriends, abused physically and emotionally by her mother. There are the references to “The Director”, who is obviously Dan Schneider but who I assume for legal reasons cannot be directly referred to as such, abusing her and lying to her; In fact, abusing and lying seem to be the two favorite pastimes of just about everyone who encounters Jennette throughout her life. 

The part that really gets me, and I apologize for spoiling too many things for anyone still looking to read the book, is when Jennette is making a strong push to recover from bulimia. She has taken a step back from entertainment, is going to therapy, has distanced herself from her mother. To top it all off, she even has a strong relationship- Until her boyfriend confides in her that he believes that he is Jesus and is promptly diagnosed with schizophrenia. Talk about a downer.

There’s another shocking twist I won't reveal but is just another factor compounding how fucking crazy her life has been. There’s the fact that her family is Mormon, or that her mother forcibly wiped her ass for her well into her teenage years, or how excellent of a person Miranda Cosgrove turns out to be but in all honestly it’s difficult to review this book without just listing highlights. It’s certainly a personal account, biased and incomplete, but it feels as truthful as Jennette can make it and I really enjoyed reading it. It added a lot to the caricature of her in my mind, the same caricature we all have of the celebrities we 'know'- She’s no longer just ‘the second iCarly girl’, but a real, complex human being. I'm not sure what I can do with this information, but I'm glad I have it. Though, I could've gone without knowing she hated when fans would come up to her and ask to see her butter sock. How could anyone dislike that?

The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg is a blending of timelines; You spend half of the book in the 1980s with the inhabitants of Pocahontas County, West Virginia, an area notable for being a dead zone due to the Green Bank Telescope meaning that residents are forbidden from cell phones or local radio due to the fact that they may interfere with the Green Banks work of surveying the known universe for radio signals from other worlds. The other half of the book you follow the author's own  more modern journey into Pocahontas County- Her time spent in West Virginia as first a camp counselor, then a sort of social worker, and finally an author. The blending of timelines feels both clunky and seamless; A fitting dichotomy, being that a major theme of the book is the idea that no one thing just all the way is.

Two middle class free spirits named Vicki Durian and Nancy Santomero were murdered in Pocahontas County on their way to a massive hippie get-together known as a Rainbow Gathering. Rainbow Gatherings have happened all across the country for many years and are essentially a time for like minded people to get together, drink, feed each other, swim nude, and engage in other various stereotypically hippie activities. Although they apparently used to be quite conscious of the impact the massive influx of tourists(fifteen thousand were expected to descend on Pocahontas County in 1980) would have on the local community, in recent years the attendance has apparently dwindled massively due to criticism that the attendees drank too much, stole too much, and generally acted with complete disregard for their environment. 

The facts around the murder case are distressingly murky, and although I am grateful the author does not shy away from voicing her own opinion at the end of the book, I can’t help but feel it comes to a less than satisfying conclusion. There are multiple confessions, recantings of those confessions, eyewitnesses, hearsay, coercions, and to top it off everyone seems to be drunk throughout the entire thing. Emma Copley Eisenberg seems desperate to somehow help this community but is also hyper-concerned with approaching a culture from the outside in a manner that could possibly, by any conceivable metric, be deemed as offensive.

Copley Eisenberg is clearly an excellent and intelligent writer; I found myself noting down a few particularly pleasing turns of phrase: 

“In the morning, the valley was dunked in fog.”;

 “A face so pink it looked slapped.”;

 “I used it to inhale the day and exhale the night”. 

Although I did find myself rolling my eyes at her extreme fear of coming off as culturally insensitive, her repeated apologies for being privileged, and the comical number of conversations she recalled where people just happened to mention how attractive she was, other portions of the book forced me to actually stop reading and stare out the window at the rooftop of the adjacent apartments, trying to understand and internalize what it was I had just read. 

Copley Eisenberg, right near the beginning of the novel, comments on a West Virginian phenomena that I noticed almost the first week I moved here, though she experienced it more fully than I yet have:

“I began to notice that a certain twoness or bothness lived here. It was in the symbols displayed on the houses- here a white one with a small Confederate flag flying over its porch, there a yellow one with a sprawling garden in the back and a truck with a “No farms, No Food” sticker parked smartly in the drive… There were lifted Ford 150 trucks with signs that said ‘Rebel Pride’ and ‘You can pry my gun out of my cold dead hands’ and ‘Real women drive trucks’. But in equal or greater numbers there were Subarus and Toyota Tacomas that said ‘Birthplace of Rivers’ or bore stickers for the Human Rights Commission or that said FRACKING in an oval with a line drawn through it.”

That ‘twoness’, as she calls it, is less prevalent in liberal Morgantown but on my forays out into the country I see it just as she descibes- A steep mountain road turns me out into a hamlet where I see a MAGA flag hung in one yard and a gay pride flag challenging it in the neighbors. In fact, the only true constant I’ve seen throughout the state is that everyone, no matter where you look, seems to be some varying degree of poor. 

I haven’t been all over the state, far from it in fact(which I hope to remedy sooner rather than later) but from what I have seen even the richest houses here would be dwarfed by any middle class home in Texas. The main college bar street is run down and uneven; Front yards are small and overgrown and trash flavors the landscape everywhere you look. Combating this seems to be a fierce price resonating from the locals over the beauty of the landscape, the depth of the culture. They create wealth out of thin air; Murals and artwork cover everything from walls to trash cans. Rare is the car without at least one bumper sticker. 

The Third Rainbow Girl does an excellent job at giving a brief history of West Virginia right up front and lends me(and to be clear, I am still very uneducated about the state) a little bit of insight as to what has led to the current state of affairs. From West Virginia's awkward separation from ‘proper’ Virginia mid Civil War even after which, though they officially fought for the Union, many from the area still opted to fight for the side of their old state. 

“Neighbor against neighbor, et cetera, but in Pocahontas county, it really was”

To the fallout from this, in which the lack of experience at statehood showed plainly as control was given to Northern companies who ravaged the area for its natural resources from a distance, a fucked up version of interstate colonialism. That distance allowed for little attention to be paid to the massive ecological fallout from the actions of a few faceless corporations. 

“This was not a lumber industry in which trees were cultivated as a crop and cut as more were planted; This was mining.” 

Copley Eisenberg really shines here, perhaps even more so than when telling her own story and you can tell that she really does feel something for the area and its people. I was more than a little disappointed as I continued the book and found that most of the history lessons were situated at the front(albeit understandably). 

She writes of ‘the twoness’ as she sees it in the women in the area. In the Mountain View program that she helps to run, any girl who gets good enough grades is urged to get out while the gettin's good and any girl who doesn’t better find a husband quickly. One of the most interesting and touching parts of the novel to me were the serialized interactions she has with ‘the red-headed girl’, who more likely than not is a fictionalized girl standing in for her conception of womanhood in West Virginia as a whole. 

____________________________________________________________________________

“A redheaded girl took the seat beside me; I would braid her hair and decorate it with daisies. She liked me, I think, in the way that some like weak people in power they can get to do their bidding.”

“Her mood was different by that fall. When I worked with her on math, she cracked jokes, then cracked pencils, then refused to answer my questions at all, preferring to sit on the seventies-patterned cushioned chair and stare at her hands in silence.”

“I wanted the red-haired girl to answer the math problems I gave her. She could do them, I knew, so why wouldn’t she? Come on, I said, one Tuesday night, then repeated the phrase. I don’t want to, she said finally. Why? You make me feel dumb, she said. No one’s ever made me feel like that before.”

“She was enraged, I think. Enraged at me and at Mountain Views and at her family and the whole town, that whole swath of land, at a state of affairs in which she had a few different options, but none of them seemed liable to give her a good outcome.”

“The redheaded girl was there and I watched her face change as she realized that I was there as Jesse’s date. She looked at me hard and directly. ‘You have lipstick on your teeth’, she said, in a hostile way I still don’t understand. Did she know something about Jesse and his friends that I didn’t? Did she know something about Jesse and his friends that I did?”

“But this time I thought: both things were possible and likely happening at the same time. I had made a mistake thinking I knew what it looked like for myself to disappear or what it looked like when someone else did, and I had made a mistake thinking that hiding my truths from other people could keep me from doing harm. This woman-she wasn’t a girl anymore, I saw- may have just been a person who was loving the taste of a beer and the feel of her own body with many twisty years left to make the important mistakes and stay alive.”

____________________________________________________________________________

That last quote(sorry for including so many) comes from a passage where just previously she describes having seen the red haired girl all grown up at a beachfront party with her boyfriend. Throughout the novel, the author has struggled with this feeling of disappearing- Or said another way, of only appearing as an attachment to another(generally a man, though I think Copley Eisenberg is bisexual). I don’t believe that this feeling is isolated to women; In fact, I know it’s not having experienced it myself but I do believe it is more prevalent within the fairer sex and not without reason. There is some underlying attitude in wider culture that when a woman and a man are in a relationship they belong to one another, moreso her to him than vice versa. I can understand and sympathize with a deep desire to be anything other than an attachment, even if it means being alone. 

It’s a tricky problem to tackle however because in some sense, you do belong to one another in a relationship, an idea that the author seems to fail to grasp until her final sighting of the redheaded girl. There is a passage earlier in the novel in which Copley Eisenberg gets angry at the idea that a man might be uncomfortable with his significant other sharing a stage kiss with another actor. I can see how ridiculous the idea of being upset at this seems. I can hear very loud women telling me that it is not my place to tell women what to do with their bodies, even and especially if that woman is someone I am in a committed relationship with built upon mutual sacrifice. And I know that if my own beautiful girlfriend were to be cast in a theater production in which she had to do something of the sort, I would smile and clap and tell her how wonderfully she performed. But, and I apologize profusely to feminism in advance, I would be lying if I said I wouldn’t breathe a small sigh of relief at the curtains final close. 

All that being said, the book does an excellent job on touching on other women’s issues. I love the toughness of the Appalachian women that the author is able to convey- From the otherworldly ‘Director’ that runs the Mountain View camp to the stubborn lady who shows up at the murder trial day after day to keep an eye on things because women in court never seem to get a fair shake. The way Copley Eisenberg manages to talk about sexual assault and harassment thoughout the novel is both harrowingly detailed and chillingly non-chalant. For a man, it is a startling look into the experience of the average woman. In her eventual conversation with ‘The Third Rainbow Girl’, Elizabeth Johndrow, who escaped the grisly fate of her two traveling companions by sheer luck, Johndrow speaks on two of her other friends being gang-raped while travelling through Mexico in the same way I might describe my coffee being slightly too hot.

I find the distance between the genders fascinating. I always have. Men are chronically isolated; Women are constantly harassed. Social vulnerability versus physical vulnerability. Whenever discussions on the relations between the two come to a head, you can feel an underlying defensiveness radiating from each person, a strange loyalty we all feel to our gender that seems to arise out of nothing other than plain familiarity. Women scoff at the idea of discrimination against men, ending conversations before they even begin. Men lurk on Twitter like lions, waiting for a poor gazelle to come along and tentatively pose the idea that maybe its fucked up that women get sexually assaulted at such an alarming rate, before springing out of the long grass and roaring loudly about men's rights and what a good guy they are. I’m not smart enough to solve this problem- My IKEA nightstand ended up being held together by superglue and blind hope after I swallowed one too many wooden dowels- But I think this book does a good job at at least continuing the conversation. I'm just not sure I like where the broader conversation is headed. Maybe one day I'll sit down and really have a think about this but today I have to walk my dog.

Overall, I like the book, more for the feeling of connection it gave me to the West Virginian landscape than for anything else. The horrific murder of the two women almost felt like a back drop for the authors exploration of her own relationship with the area and a part of me wishes that she had forgone the pretext entirely and instead delved deeper into her life, her ideas, her experiences and love for the land. It was well written, easily read, and made me drive with the radio off for a week or so; I can’t imagine Emma Copley Eisenberg would give a shit about what I think about her book or what I do with my radio but hey- That’s women for ya.

This is a bit of a serious review, but the book is about life, which I consider to be a serious thing.

Iron John has long been one of my favorite books. It lies somewhere between self-help, mythology, and poetry- Written by poet Robert Bly, the book explores the myth of Iron John and how the meaning we can glean from that myth and others might help explain some of the struggles and pains that the American men of today are going through(and the subsequent effects of their pain on the women around them). 

The story of Iron John is the story of a prince and a ‘Wild Man’ who is locked up in the dungeon. The boy frees the Wild Man by stealing the key beneath his mother’s pillow, but cuts his finger in the process. He then follows the Wild Man into the wilderness, where he is charged with guarding a deep pool. The very first day, the boy's finger hurts so bad that he sticks it into the pool and when he takes it out, it is golden. The second day, a single hair falls in, and on the third day, every hair on his head is soaked through in gold. The Wild Man tells the boy he must leave him, but that the boy can call on him for power greater than he can imagine.

The boy searches for work but has no craft and so he starts in the kitchens of another castle(not the one he was born into). He keeps his golden hair a secret, a fact that infuriates the king of the castle(king of the castle, king of the castle), who banishes him to the gardens. There, the boy is working when his hair covering falls off and the princess sees a flash of light from his head before he can recover it. She sends for flowers from the boy, who brings them to her, and she then demands to see his golden hair. The boy resists, but gives in. The princess sees his golden hair and gives him three golden coins, which he gives to the gardener's children. This sort of thing happens three more times.

Finally, there is a great battle in the kingdom. The boy asks to go but is ridiculed and left only with a lame horse, who he hurries to Iron John in the wilderness. Iron John grants the boy not only a healthy horse, but a group of warriors who ride into battle behind him, just in time to turn the tide. The boy rides away before his identity can be revealed, and a tournament is organized in order for the King and the princess to find out the identity of the mysterious hero knight. The boy asks Iron John for another favor: Another horse. The tournament lasts for three days and on each day Iron John gives the boy a different colored horse and suit of armor: red, white, black. Each time, the princess throws a golden apple into the crowd of knights and each time the boy catches it and rides away. On the third day however, the King sends men after him who do not quite catch him but manage to wound his leg. The gardener tells the King that the boy arrived to work with three golden apples and a leg wound(not all that inconspicuous, considering his previous aversion to being known) and he is called up to the Kings chambers where he is promptly wed to the Kings daughter and reunited with his own parents from the previous castle, at which point the Wild Man comes out and reveals that he has become a King in his own right. Or summarized by Robert Bly:

“The young man in our story descended from courtyard to ashes, from ashes to earth, then to horses under the earth, and so on. The Wild Man passes him on the way up, having ascended from under the water to the courtyard, then to his own sacred spring, then to the Master of Horses and finally to the state of kingship.”

If it seems like he is glossing over some points and highlighting others that didn’t exist, don’t worry it seems that way to me too. But the message is still there.  

When I read this book my head feels heavy with the things I don’t understand, while my heart swells with the things I do. It’s a fluid sort of book, filled with very liberal metaphors and interpretations, references to time-tested tales of Shakespeare, myths from different cultures, and poetic works. At times it can feel as though Bly is including these simply to flex his own literary acumen, or maybe to provide an explanation for a claim that doesn’t really have one. 

But there is a feeling that this book stirs within me- A yearning and longing deep in my chest. I wish to meet the Wild Man. I see myself in the naïve man Robert Bly describes; I recognize close friends in the boy who is afraid of stealing the key; I hear the complaints of millions when he writes of ‘soft men’. 

I love how specific Bly feels the need to be regarding the symbols in the book- Iron John really is all about symbols. When he speaks of water and the spiritual pool that must be emptied, he makes a careful point that water in Western thought has most often been thought of as a feminine symbol. He is careful to explain that water is feminine(He does this sort of thing in several places throughout the book, but essentially cuts further explanation short by admitting that a woman would probably better expound on anything feminine) but that it can also be masculine- A wet, lowly masculinity that forces men to look at the darkest parts of themselves- Muddy, thoughtful, slow-moving water. I like this imagery almost as much as I like the imagery of going into the ashes.

Bly talks of going into the ashes as a time of turmoil and struggle in a young man's life. This can come in the form of poverty, homelessness, divorce, addiction, or even a genuine wound. For the hero of our story, it starts in the kitchen with the cook. 

“For young men who have graduated from privileged colleges or who have been lifted upward by the expensive entitlement culture, their soul life often begins with this basement work in the kitchen.”

I like this because it does not romanticize the hard work, or make it sound like it will be anything more than necessary. Bly compares it to the ancient Greek term ‘katabasis’ which was used to describe a hero's journey into the underworld.  The problem Bly sees with this very natural journey of going into the ashes, is the lack of older men and ritual in modern society designed to raise a young man out of the ashes.

I think of the ashes as a time of disillusionment; A young man, more often than not, thinks of himself as God's gift to the world. He is certain he is destined for greatness, maybe even believes he has already accomplished it in some form, and every step he takes is sure-footed and forward. This man falls into the ashes when he first encounters the reality of life: When he is made to get his first real job, or is rejected by his first real love; When his parents quash his dreams or he experiences true grief for the first time. The ashes are purposefully vague, as are most things in this story, but one thing is clear- They represent a conscious fall from the idealistic nature of a child. 

“What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult”- Me, quoting Bly, quoting Freud

It is Bly’s assertion that these men(he calls them ‘ascenders’) can fall into three different states of being: Passivity, naivete, and numbness. 

“Passivity increases exponentially as the educational system churns out ‘products. The average American child by eighteen has seen four thousand hour of commercials, yet very few televisions have been smashed by axes… When a man sulks he becomes passive to his own hurts.” 

A passive man is essentially someone who lets life happen to him, rather than through him. Instead, the passive man asks others to live his life for him- To do his learning, his parenting, his loving. He lives hardly a life at all.

The naïve man feels a pride in being attacked, a pride in his pain and the pain of others. He assumes sincerity in others even when it is obvious they lack it, and acts out strange, self-pitying fits of isolation. Bly essentially asserts that the naïve man exists due to a lack of knowledge as to how to put up boundaries:

“The naïve man will sink into a mood as if into a big hole.”

The numb man I can’t help but see all around me. Indifference, nihilism, utter spiritual bankruptcy and a lack of desire to search for anything greater. Bly writes the least about the numb man, I believe because he sees himself most closely in it, but I will include this excerpt and hope it makes sense.

“In high school a girl might ask, ‘Do you love me?’ I couldn’t answer. If I asked her the same question, she might reply, ‘Well, I respect you and admire you and I’m fond of you, and I’m even interested in you, but I don’t love you.’ Apparently when she looked into her chest, she saw a spectrum of affections, a whole procession of feelings, and she could easily tell them all apart. I looked down into my chest, I saw nothing at all.”

Going into the ashes is necessary and yet Bly believes that without initiators within our culture(older men and rituals that truly and distinctly separate the men from the boys), katabasis will eventually happen without warning and without control, through depression, grief, addiction, etc. Rather than being a ritualistic descent, it becomes an abrupt and harsh break from humanity that is often never properly recovered from. Boys don’t go into their wounds but rather sustain new ones. The active intervention of the older men means that the older men welcome the younger men into the ancient, mythologized, instinctive male world. 

It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly an older American man is supposed to do to fulfill this role, if he is even aware of its necessity. And, Bly comments, there is also the frankly combative attitude many younger generations have towards the older ones, particularly in recent decades, that makes the job of older men even more difficult:

 “Having all the suspicion in one place- toward older men- often leads to disaster in relationships and great isolation in spirit and soul.” 

There are massive obstacles when it comes to the media and the American culture in general as well. 

“In our time, when the father shows up as an object of ridicule(as he does, we’ve noted, on television), or a fit field for suspicion(as he does in Star Wars), or a bad-tempered fool (when he comes home from the office with no teaching), or  a weak puddle of indecision( as he stops inheriting kingly radiance), the son has a problem. How does he imagine his own life as a man?”

“...Disneyland means ‘no ashes’.”

So even if you are aware of the issue, it seems incredibly difficult to actually put into place a solution without that solution seeming and feeling ridiculous. What are you to do? Would yanking a young man out of his classes, slicing his palm just so and dumping him in the woods for two weeks with a handful of magic mushrooms really be to his benefit in the modern world? Maybe. I have to think that even that would do a better job of turning a boy into a man than getting particularly good at beer pong or having the wittiest Tinder responses. I have a feeling that all rituals seem ridiculous before they’ve aged. We must start somewhere; Becoming a man isn’t a rush, but it does seem to be a team sport. 

Sometimes I go about in a pity for myself,

And all the while

A great wind carries me across the sky