Lazarus, Come Forth!
Reading Roundup 6/11/24
I am going to make a promise to you right now. After having been a deadbeat dad to this newsletter for a while (blame chronic illness, blame midlife ennui, blame the general lassitude of the shiftless), I am undertaking a commitment here, today, before god, country, the unified field, and my cats that I will post at least a weekly reading roundup going forward, with more ambitious essays1 and reviews as they come. This entry is the first of such roundups, in which I’ll write about what I’ve been consuming words-wise along with addendums, tangents, riffs, and caveats.
Why the renewed sense of energy and purpose? Firstly, I’m in love and that makes all things creative and expressive flourish for me like silky blooms in a musty hothouse. Secondly, I’ve successfully navigated the labyrinths of Californian bureaucracy and I have health insurance again, which means that my diseased corpus is getting proactive attention for the first time in years. Turns out that doctors sometimes know what they’re doing. Thirdly, and finally, it’s just about summertime and since I am basically a fleshy vessel for emotional fragility, I’m happier and more productive when it’s warm outside and the sky is pretty.
Anyway, here’s what I’ve been reading…
You Like It Darker: Stories by Stephen King
Daddy is back, this time with a massive doorstop of a short-fiction collection. After last year’s dolorous slog of a novel, Holly, it’s a relief to have one of King’s occasional Whitman’s Samplers to pick at. And though I am the kind of psycho who reads short-story compilations in order, not skipping any, it’s comforting to know that even if one entry isn’t grabbing me by the neck and hissing, “Don’t look away,” it’s only a matter of pages until I get to the next one, which just might be magnetic. I’m midway through You Like It Darker now, and so far it’s roughly fifty-fifty in terms of peaks vs. valleys. “Danny Coughlin’s Bad Dream,” a longer piece about a contemporary Cassandra, was a hit. “Finn,” a misguided but mercifully short bit about an Irish kid being politically kidnapped, not so much. But I’ve been told—spoiler alert—that one story I’ve yet to get to is a sequel of sorts to 1981’s Cujo, King’s second bleakest novel (1983’s Pet Sematary being the first). That’s exciting. Even if it sometimes amounts to pandering fan service, the nerdy thrill of one King story overlapping with another is always satisfying. It’s a veritable universe this man has built.
Corrected Proofs: Previously Unpublished, Uncollected, Unwanted by Bob Nickas
Bob is, full disclosure, a close friend as well as a key inspiration to me as both a writer and an editor. I’ve told this tale before but here we go again, real quick: He was my first boss in magazinedom (at index, where he was the founding editor, and where I started working in 1999), he is a deeply influential curator and critic who has been championing the good kinds of art and culture for decades, and he’s also just a blast to talk with. This new compendium is typically wide-ranging and surprising. Covered here, in Bob’s typically lucid prose, are figures such as Lee Lozano, Cady Noland, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Ed Ruscha, Charles Ray, and more. Included are two pieces I was proud to publish: one on John Waters and Baltimore, which appeared in the fifth issue of Apology, and a review of a book about The Fall, which appeared a while back on this very Substack. If you care about art and want to keep up with one of its most gifted contemporary chroniclers, acquire a copy of Corrected Proofs.
Trophy Lives by Philippa Snow
This book-length essay grapples with celebrity culture by proceeding from the question: Can celebrities be considered self-authored artworks? Richly referential to both popular culture and the rarefied air of fine art, Snow traverses everything from Paris Hilton to Maurizio Cattelan; South Park to Walter Benjamin. The list of works cited is a dream syllabus itself. Philippa is an essential cultural critic, and I was grateful to edit another book-length essay by her (on the work of David Lynch) which will be released by Deeper Into Movies Books at some point in the future.
Happy Like Murderers by Gordon Burn
I thought I’d gotten my serial-killer reading out of my system years ago, but recently a new friend recommended this book, which is about the British monsters Fred and Rose West, who committed at least 12 vicious sex murders between 1967 and 1987. It’s really brutal stuff, and I’m finding myself more sensitive to it than I was as a callous youth, but what really compels me about this book is its documentary approach to the world in which the Wests operated. In Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, in a milieu of council estates and caravan parks, the Wests were embedded in a working-class Britain that sorely lacked in hope and humor. Gordon Burn writes with anthropological accuracy but also empathic kindness toward the blue-collar underworld of the United Kingdom. Happy Like Murderers is kind of like Mike Leigh taking on serial murder. It’s stomach-churning but it’s also illuminating. I plan on reading Burn’s book on the Yorkshire Ripper (ouch) next, and I’m also curious about his 1991 novel Alma Cogan, which is now on the to-read pile in my mind.
The Hour of Our Death by Philippe Aries is an exhaustive survey of Western attitudes toward dying. It starts with the Greeks, passes through the Middle Ages, and wends its way toward the later twentieth century (it was originally published in 1981). Funeral rites, conceptions of the afterlife, humanity’s previous daily closeness to mortality, which we’ve continued to push more and more away from us as the centuries accumulate… it’s all meticulously reported here in heavily researched, novelistic language. Sounds morbid, sure, maybe. But it’s also oddly fun.
Also being read, in various stages of completion, right now: Hell House and Mediums Rare by Richard Matheson (I'll touch on one or both of these in my next roundup), Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke (my first Clarke, can ya believe it?), Vox by Nicholson Baker (another re-read of this, which I’ve done a couple times already because I like to check back and see how it holds up—a subject I’ll also come back to in my next roundup), and I’ve only just started Steps by Jerzy Kosinski and Our Spoons Came from Woolworth’s by Barbara Comyns (to further tease some of my next installment’s topics).
And remember, as Nossis wrote: Ουδέν γλυκύτερον της επιθυμίας. Και άλλα ηδέα δευτέρα. Από το στόμα μου αποφέρω και μέλι2.
Currently in the outlining stages: essays on my beloved Mean Hippie genre and what it’s all about and a look at my obsessive research, over the past few years, on the topic of the occult in classical antiquity—you know, Ancient Greek necromancy, etc.
“Nothing is sweeter than desire. All other delights are second. From my mouth I spit even honey.”