Although I haven't really kept up with horror movies in the past 30 years beyond catching some of the more critically acclaimed releases and catching Although I haven't really kept up with horror movies in the past 30 years beyond catching some of the more critically acclaimed releases and catching the occasional guilty pleasure on some streaming service or another (who knows which one? seriously, cable was better than our current TV situation), as a child in the 1980s, I was really into horror movies. My mother used to drive my friends and me to rent them regularly from the local Video Time store down the street, and I saw some of the most dark and depraved films of the 70s and 80s before I was even in high school. That's how things were back then. Call it the typical negligence of Boomer parents leaving their Gen-X kids to their own devices. I call it an incredibly fun childhood that I still feel tons of nostalgia for. Which, I suppose, is why I decided to read Shock Value, a look at the careers of horror filmmaking royalty like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, Brian DePalma, Dan O'Bannon, and Roman Polanski. Personally, I'm partial to Carpenter, who directed quite a few of my favorite movies of all time, but I was familiar with every director and film referenced in this book. I do think the chronology and organization might have made more sense and that the few years covered in the book excludes many of the great films that would come just two or three years later, but it's hard to fault what's here. I enjoyed this as a walk down memory lane. A memory lane drenched in blood and gore, of course....more
Although the lawsuit by convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald against Joe McGinniss, author of Fatal Vision about the MacDonald murders and trial, is iAlthough the lawsuit by convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald against Joe McGinniss, author of Fatal Vision about the MacDonald murders and trial, is interesting, an important First Amendment case taught even today in law schools and college journalism programs, Janet Malcolm's book about the proceedings, The Journalist and the Murderer doesn't do the case or any of the parties (pun intended) justice. Although Malcolm presents an intriguing premise--that the relationship between journalists and their subjects is inherently exploitative and that writers should exercise some basic ethical principles to mitigate this exploitation--her book is ultimately bogged down in psychoanalytic psychobabble, Malcolm's self-righteousness toward most of her subjects, and her strange nihilism about the possibility of ever knowing the truth of any action through the rigorous study of evidence. Don't get me wrong: McGinnis is almost certainly every bit the lowlife he comes off as in pretending to support and believe MacDonald while writing a book that amounts to an extended character assassination against him. The issue is that McGinnis's behavior, while unethical and, well, dickish, requires constitutional protection. Otherwise, journalists would be prevented from effectively telling the stories of guilty or duplicitous subjects. So, yes, McGinnis doesn't come off very well in The Journalist and the Murderer, but interestingly enough, Malcolm really doesn't either. Chalk that up to a flawed approach to a very complex topic or just an unexceptional book that skates by on its fascinating premise....more
Although I don't really read these kinds of books--political jeremiads from a fixed position at the far end of the political spectrum--I was intriguedAlthough I don't really read these kinds of books--political jeremiads from a fixed position at the far end of the political spectrum--I was intrigued by the premise of watching people become warped and unrecognizable through political ideology. I felt this profoundly after moving back to the U.S. in 2021 after 12 years abroad and finding myself alienated by the beliefs and rhetoric of the political left. I mean, the political right was at least every bit as insane as I remembered, but the left now gave the right a run for its money. This feeling is the subject of Naomi Klein's most recent book, Doppelgänger in which she uses the example of fellow author Naomi Wolf, with whom Klein has frequently been confused over the years, as a case study for how driven to extremes everyone has gotten in the past decade. Wolf, once a leftwing feminist academic, now spews antivaccine rhetoric on Steve Bannon's podcast. To Klein's credit, she still espouses the same Chomskyian anti-capitalist rhetoric she always has. Also to her credit, she acknowledges how crazy some of her leftwing ilk have become in the years since Donald Trump.
Like I said, it's an interesting premise, and the execution is fine, even when the book reverts to Klein's usual schtick of assigning the blame for all the world's problems to capitalism, colonialism, white supremacy, etc. This isn't really a complaint--anyone reading Klein should know what they're getting into--but it all feels fairly rehashed and less interesting than the book's central premise. I'm curious about two topics she spends a lot of time on in light of recent developments. One is the discovery of "mass graves" at the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, which even some mainstream voices have begun questioning the reality of. The other is the recent surge of antisemitism among the political right, which in the months since the publication of this book has been eclipsed by even more widespread antisemitism from the political left (or at least from pink-haired left-wing college students). I'd love to hear Klein's take on both of these ideas, but I can't fault her for not being able to predict the future.
All in all, I liked Doppelgänger and enjoyed spending some time with the ideas of a political agitator that I don't completely share. She's a funny and talented writer, but I do wonder what a writer like Klein does when her ideologies about race and class have become fairly status quo. As for Wolf, I met her in the mid-90s when she came to Kent State University to speak after the publication of her book Fire with Fire: New Female Power and How It Will Change the Twenty-First Century and found her warm and friendly. But, yeah, it seems like she's gone off the deep end now....more
Peter Brooks's Seduced by Story begins with a pretty sound thesis: narrative has become the dominant epistemology in our culture at the expense of dirPeter Brooks's Seduced by Story begins with a pretty sound thesis: narrative has become the dominant epistemology in our culture at the expense of direct argumentation, description, exposition (facts and data), and this overreliance on storytelling increases the potential for the type's of propaganda and fake news that now permeates our discourse. I'm not sure, however, that this is actually what the book delivers. I'm not sure not only because Brooks's language is so abstruse and academic but also because the many forays into characterization, epistolary narratives, and even jurisprudence are never explicitly tied to this thesis, leaving Seduced by Story to feel more like a series of esoteric articles about narratology than any real examination of "the use and abuse of narrative". It's not that it's a bad book; I particularly liked Brook's digression into how characters should never be permitted to narrate their own deaths, which serves as an indictment of that The Girl on the Train book, and found a lot of Brooks's analysis of famous works of literature interesting. I just wish I'd read the book that was seemingly promised by its title and introduction....more
Andrew Doyle's The New Puritans is not the only book to persuasively link modern social justice activism to religious orthodoxy (see John McWhorter's Andrew Doyle's The New Puritans is not the only book to persuasively link modern social justice activism to religious orthodoxy (see John McWhorter's Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America). Nor is it the first to argue that its modern inscrutable stances on race, gender, etc. are directly linked to mid-20th century French postmodernism (see Helen Pluckrose & James Lindsey's Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody) or that the conflation of words with violence and dissenting opinions with tangible harm is melodramatic and disingenuous (Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure). Doyle's book doesn't present a novel argument at all, but what it does do is make its case better than any of these aforementioned books. Although it's not a perfect book--it's overly long and repetitive, for one thing--it probably is the one to read for left-leaning (actual) liberals, who have grown tired of the authoritarianism of modern social justice dogma, its Orwellian forays into thought control particularly on the subjects of race and gender, and the pervasive culture of fear that has kept regular people from failing to acknowledge what their eyes and ears clearly tell them: we are living in a deeply regressive and illiberal moment in discourse and desperately need to find a way out. Worth reading....more
I've been a big fan of the musician Mark Kozelek for a few decades now. We're from the same hometown, more or less, and I've followed his prolific musI've been a big fan of the musician Mark Kozelek for a few decades now. We're from the same hometown, more or less, and I've followed his prolific musical output since the mid-90s. In 2020 and 2021, he was accused of sexual misconduct by a handful of women and has taken a break from recording and touring since. My opinion is: if he's committed a crime, he deserves to be charged and, if convicted, punished, but I have not stopped listening to his bands Sun Kil Moon and Red House Painters and have no intention to do so. I have never had a problem separating the art from the artist because I have never particularly cared about artists or their biographies or held the belief that they wouldn't be as messy and contradictory as the rest of us. I realize this sounds callous and perhaps like a very male stance or at least a very Gen-X male stance, but I can only feel the way I feel about things.
Feel is the operative word here because as Claire Dederer insightfully demonstrates in her book Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma the question of what to do with great art created by monstrous people is one of emotion not reason. Dederer explores this through the examples of Roman Polansky, Woody Allen, J.K. Rowling, David Bowie, and many others and fails to arrive at a clear answer of whether or not we should continue to engage in the work of people who have done horrible things. This makes sense to me: disavowing artists for misbehavior has always seemed inconsistently applied and even disingenuous to me, based less on the application of a universal deontological principle of what should and should not be tolerated than just arbitrarily deciding to care about whatever transgression has become a major news story and not thinking too much about what hasn't. And, of course, giving rappers a pass. According to Dederer, this inconsistency is perfectly fine. As she writes late in the book,
There is not some correct answer. You are not responsible for finding it. Your feeling of responsibility is a shibboleth, a reinforcement of your tragically limited role as a consumer. There is no authority and there should be no authority. You are off the hook. You are inconsistent. You do not need to have a grand unified theory about what to do about Michael Jackson. You are a hypocrite, over and over. You love Annie Hall but you can barely stand to look at a painting by Picasso. You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. In fact, you will solve nothing by means of your consumption; the idea that you can is a dead end. The way you consume art doesn’t make you a bad person, or a good one. You’ll have to find some other way to accomplish that.
Naturally, I have a few issues with Dederer's analysis. It's weird for example that someone like J.K. Rowling, who expressed an opinion about an incredibly complex issue about which there is wide disagreement, would be in the same category as people who have raped children. It's weird that the violent crime of Valerie Solanas, who shot and tried to kill two people, would be intellectualized to the point of practically excusing it when, clearly, murder is the most monstrous thing a person can do. We all still agree on this, right? Despite this, I liked Monsters. I enjoyed the insight and honesty of Dederer's writing even when it gets a little too...well, bourgeois intellectual from Seattle. I liked her Marxist analysis of why capitalist consumer behavior (should I give this artist money?) is a facile solution to ethical and moral problems. Most of all, I was impressed by Dederer's nuance, a characteristic mostly absent from discourse on this issue....more
Issue 8 of Medium Chill is a bit of a change of pace. There's still a collection of poetry and short fiction (including my own story "Good Boy" inspirIssue 8 of Medium Chill is a bit of a change of pace. There's still a collection of poetry and short fiction (including my own story "Good Boy" inspired by watching too much true crime tv and having a dog who demands regular walks), but the majority of the issue is devoted to the publication's editor and primary contributor Rhonda Baughman's love of the 1988 horror comedy Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama, which she conveys through a series of personal essays and journalistic interview pieces. I've seen the film--hell, I probably rented it from the same Video Time store Baughman did when she and I were neighbor kids in the 80s--but I certainly have never thought so deeply about it or been so affected by it. For me, it was one of many horror films I watched as a preteen that kept my interest through a mixture of bloodshed and boobs like Chopping Mall or Night of the Demons.
For Baughman, a few years younger and female, it was something else altogether, and it's easy to feel the importance of this film to her in reading these pieces. My favorite piece in the book by far is a transcribed conversation between Baughman and writer Douglas E. Winter as the two sit down to watch the film together, Winter having not previously seen it. This is normally not my kind of thing. I'm not an esoteric film guy, I don't really read film criticism, and I never listen to director commentaries on DVDs or anything like that. I liked this piece so well because Baughman and Winter are free and comfortable enough with each other to reveal quite a bit about themselves. Even though I grew up with Baughman, I don't know that much about her life beyond Instagram pictures and Medium Chill issues, so it was nice to discover a few unknown things about the little girl down the street, who has grown up to be an accomplished writer, actress, critic, and professor. I'm also happy to be a contributor to this series and look forward to future issues....more
I enjoy Tom Breihan's "The Number Ones" column on Stereogum, in which he reviews every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. I haveI enjoy Tom Breihan's "The Number Ones" column on Stereogum, in which he reviews every #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart. I haven't read all of these, of course, but the ones I have are generally fun and insightful. His scathing review of Billy Joel's 1989 hit "We Didn't Start the Fire" is particularly memorable. I guess I'd sort of assumed that Breihan's book, also called The Number Ones would be a collection of some of his best writing for his column. It isn't. Instead, Breihan uses 20 specific songs to trace the development of rock and pop music over the past 65 years from the birth of rock-n-roll to the sidelining of that genre in favor of hip-hop and electronic pop.
Maybe I'm showing my age here, but although I enjoyed each of the chapters well enough, I went from really liking each of the songs right up until 1990 and then thinking each song was increasingly worse than the other. In fact, I didn't know the last three songs at all but assume they were every bit as abysmal as the three or four that preceded them. It's not uncommon for people in their mid-40s to think the music of today sucks, but I don't necessarily think that. I just think that virtually anything that makes it to #1 in the days of minimal actual sales of singles, streaming via Spotify, and (shudder) TikTok trends runs toward the vacuous. I could be wrong. I'm sure if I wrote this on Twitter, twenty-year-olds would appear to tell me how wrong and, of course, old I am, the ad hominem being the only acceptable way to discuss popular music in this day and age.
Anyway, I liked The Number Ones well enough. It was a fun reminder of some great songs from the 1960s through the 1980s and some interesting discussion of a whole lot of garbage music of the modern era. For pure enjoyment, however, I prefer Breihan's work for Stereogum, which is much funnier and more savage....more
My wife was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns recently on Amazon Prime. Buffy isn't a show I'd ever really watched, but I took a break from graMy wife was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns recently on Amazon Prime. Buffy isn't a show I'd ever really watched, but I took a break from grading papers and sat through a few episodes this time. Although my wife and I are roughly the same age, she laughed and regularly mocked the show's dated late-90s fashion as we watched while I thought everyone looked normal and pretty cool, actually. Obviously, she's got a better sense of style than I do, but maybe my positive reaction to the characters' outfits also reflects my nostalgia for all things 1990s.
Which is partially why I read The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman. I've read a lot of Klosterman over the years: four or five books plus most of his column in Esquire maybe a decade ago. I've gone to his readings a few times when he came back to Northeast Ohio, having previously written for the Akron Beacon Journal. I like his work, yet I always end up feeling the same way when I read him: that I don't care nearly as much about popular culture as he does and that his conclusions, while interesting, give weight to trivial media products they probably don't actually deserve.
But, the 1990s. I love the decade. I spent the 1990s in high school (class of '94) and college ('99). It was a decade when I spent much of my time in clubs, at shows, in girls' bedrooms and, yes, sometimes even in classrooms. Like most Americans, I began the decade without a personal computer and ended it spending notable amounts of my day online. By the end of the decade, I'd begun dating the woman I would marry a few years into the new millennium. So, I'm happy to have read Klosterman's take on this era and its events, entertainment and politics. Klosterman's perspective is very much that of a white Gen-X heterosexual male (as is mine), so what he covers is primarily the pop culture that mattered to this demographic. So, there's a lot missing. One thing that stands out is any discussion of the teen pop that supplanted grunge at the end of the decade. No Spice Girls, no Britney, Christina or Backstreet Boys to be found in this book. I mean, I hated all that shit at the time, but I'm surprised none of it warranted a mention.
I enjoyed The Nineties. The book and the decade. In the book's best moments, Klosterman contrasts how events like the OJ trial or the 2000 election were understood at the time with how they are thought about now, which brings to mind the author's previous book But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. The book is interesting. It's a nice reminder of some forgotten pop culture with interesting critical analysis. Even so, I still care much less about all of this than Klosterman does....more
I had no idea three of my favorite authors were classmates in the 80s at a small New England liberal arts college. I started reading Bret Easton EllisI had no idea three of my favorite authors were classmates in the 80s at a small New England liberal arts college. I started reading Bret Easton Ellis in high school, discovered Donna Tartt's masterful The Secret History in college and gravitated to Jonathan Lethem sometime in my twenties or thirties. I've read all three are authors extensively, yet I was completely unaware of this convergence in their life stories until I listened to this a week at a time during my long commute to work in Northeast Ohio over a few months this fall. It's a great podcast, easily the equal of last year's Once Upon a Time in the Valley, which covered Traci Lords and the Southern California pornography industry. Lili Anolik has an excellent voice: part endearing wise-ass, part adult chatline operator and infinitely less grating than the twee cartoon characters inhabiting so many podcasts and public radio programs. Whip-smart and funny too. If she keeps making these, I'll keep listening, no matter what they're about. The story is great too, involving not only these three authors but also an assortment of friends and classmates and a surprising number of people who became famous in their own right: Brix Smith of The Fall (who played on most of the band's mid-80s masterpieces), actors Don Johnson and Nicolette Sheridan, many assorted major and minor figures from late-twentieth-century literature. At 14 episodes, the season runs a little longer (4 episodes longer, probably) than it needs to, but Anolik is certainly exhaustive in her research into these important writers and their orbits. Very enjoyable and well worth listening to....more
Final Chapters isn't a particularly substantial book, but it does contain of a few brief biographies of famous poets, novelists, playwrights and, in oFinal Chapters isn't a particularly substantial book, but it does contain of a few brief biographies of famous poets, novelists, playwrights and, in one case, film critique as well as some succinct criticism of some of these authors' written words on the subject of mortality and religious belief. Truthfully, I immediately forgot most of the trivia I encountered about each author in his or her respective entry, but I enjoyed each one as I was reading it a little at a time over the past few months in waiting rooms and occasional free moments....more
Feeling the same sense of political fatigue that plagued so many of us during the four, interminably long years of Trump's presidency, I thought What Feeling the same sense of political fatigue that plagued so many of us during the four, interminably long years of Trump's presidency, I thought What Were We Thinking might make for a useful Cliff's Notes for the era's many polemics and general political discourse. And, it kind of does. Lozada, a book critic for The Washington Post analyzes an assortment of the many books written for, against and adjacent to Trump during the single term of his presidency, grouping them by shared themes and offering some sense of each book's overall strengths and weaknesses. It's an odd concept and an even odder execution, in which the books often seem indistinguishable and any literary analysis is interspersed with Lozada's own political beliefs and complaints about Trump. It's not that I expected Lozada to pretend to be unbiased--I'm certainly not one of those people who fixate on the concept of bias as a way of soothing my cognitive dissonance; also, I think Trump is an incompetent, bloviating simpleton--but I guess I'd expected this to be more of an impartial summary from some remove of how other writers were trying to make sense of the former president. In the end, I think maybe it's too soon for this kind of commentary on a period that arguably is still ongoing in how it informs our cruel discourse, divisive rhetoric and bewildering response to a global pandemic....more
It would be hard to write a biography of someone as well known as Edgar Allan Poe in 2021. You'd need an angle because a straight treatment of the autIt would be hard to write a biography of someone as well known as Edgar Allan Poe in 2021. You'd need an angle because a straight treatment of the author's life and works has been done (I assume) many, many times before. This isn't a criticism; a fresh lens or perspective can provide new, deeper insights into subjects seemingly already thoroughly examined. In The Reason for the Darkness of the Night, John Tresch makes the case that Poe deserves consideration as an important 19th century scientific thinker rather than simply as a poet and macabre short fiction writer. It's an interesting idea, and Tresch does an admirable job of contextualizing Poe's writings--his scientific treatise Eureka in particular--within the prevalent scientific discourse of the era. I knew little about Poe beyond his short stories, which I devoured in middle school, his tragic romance with his young cousin/wife and his reported drunkenness, so I actually learned a fair bit from this book. The only problem is that the science details are less interesting than the discussions of Poe's life and work. In other words, the book's raison d'etre is its weakest component, and the stuff that's been covered ad nauseam in previous biographies is the strongest. Still, if this is your first book about Poe, it does have a lot to offer about the interesting life and work of this seminal American author....more
I really enjoyed the subject matter here and have long been interested in the topic of literary hoaxes, probably since learning that Go Ask Alice bookI really enjoyed the subject matter here and have long been interested in the topic of literary hoaxes, probably since learning that Go Ask Alice book one of my high school girlfriends was obsessed with was actually just made-up just say no propaganda, the literary equivalent of Reefer Madness. I liked the idea of encountering many more of these hoaxes in a single volume and perhaps exploring the psychological and cultural forces that produce them. Unfortunately, with this book's encyclopedic format and...well, frankly, encyclopedic style, there's not much here that a reader couldn't gain by going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole from JT Leroy to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I also can't help notice that books like Michelle Remembers and Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities are absent here. Come to think of it, there are a lot of recovered memory abuse memoirs released concurrently with the satanic panic of the 1980s that would have worked in this collection. Still, the anecdotes in Telling Tales are interesting and many of the figures and hoaxes were unfamiliar enough to me to be entertaining. It's not a particularly great book, and it's easy to see how this topic might have been better served by something with a thesis and more contextual analysis, but taken strictly as a handy reference book, this works just fine....more
"I never wanted to be the old geezer complaining about the next wave of offspring who were supplantin
At one point in White, Bret Easton Ellis writes:
"I never wanted to be the old geezer complaining about the next wave of offspring who were supplanting his own, though certain people definitely thought that's exactly who I was. As someone who'd satirized my generation for their materialism and shallowness, and passivity in Less Than Zero that bordered on, and then crossed over into, amorality, I didn't think pointing out aspects that I'd noticed in millennials was a big deal."
On the one hand, this makes most of the reactions here on Goodreads ("Isn't it funny how he's old?!") to this blend of memoir, criticism, and polemic fitting. It also highlights the glaring problem with White. Ellis criticized the decadence of 1980s Gen Xers in works of fiction. He should do the same for millennials rather than complaining about them like some...sorry...disgruntled old geezer.
I've always been a fan of Bret Easton Ellis's novels. My favorite of his books is Lunar Park, believe it or not. It turns out, I also enjoy his film criticism, which comprises the first few pretty good essays in White. I'm less taken with his writing about culture and politics in the wake of the 2016 election. It's not that I'm offended by his views. I actually don't think they're interesting or sophisticated enough to be offensive. They just sound like the standard gripes everyone has about the political left/young people in the past few years: they're so fragile, Trump has driven people into hysteria, they have no tolerance for opposing viewpoints or free speech, cancel culture is illiberal, regressive nonsense. Sure, there's probably some truth to all of that. Ellis should channel his frustrations with the current state of things into a really good satirical novel. I'll eagerly read it. I won't, however, be seeking out any more of the man's reactionary hot takes on what he calls "Generation Wuss" in ways that bring to mind Clint Eastwood or some talk radio culture war profiteer....more
A good subtitle for this book might have been Why Trump Got Elected. I'm not joking. I'm from Ohio, one of those key battleground swing states in presA good subtitle for this book might have been Why Trump Got Elected. I'm not joking. I'm from Ohio, one of those key battleground swing states in presidential elections and have had many conversations on my trips home over the past four years. These conversations aren't about the economy or political platforms; they're about how "Everyone's a racist now and people are being fired for things they said 35 years ago and no one can say anything anymore without fear of the social justice mob coming after them and what the hell verb do I use if I have to refer to a singular person as they?" I'm not saying these people are necessarily right. I'm just suggesting that they represent a sizable portion of the electorate and that their perceptions of modern discourse being reduced to some kind of inscrutable thoughtcrime inquisition is informing their voting more than probably any other issue. These people identify with Trump despite the fact that he's an incompetent imbecile because he's both powerful enough and shameless enough not to be canceled by histrionic 20-year-olds on Twitter. You can't shame the shameless.
Anyway, about the book: it's dry and plodding and often written in the abstruse diction of the early postmodernists (Foucault, Derrida, etc.) whose worldview it indicts for planting the seed that grew into today's highly dogmatic critical theory influencing so much of our discourse on race, gender, sexual orientation, disability and obesity. I do feel like the link between Foucault and "Only white people can be racists because we've just now changed the dictionary definition of racism to preclude everyone except white people" is more tenuous than authors Pluckrose and Lindsay claim, but it's tough to argue that they haven't done their homework on each of the critical theories informing the social justice movement they analyze here. Chapters 3-7--devoted respectively to postcolonial theory; queer theory; critical race theory and intersectionality; feminism(s) and gender studies; and disability and fat studies--are kind of a slog, but then chapter 8, in which the authors demonstrate that the excesses and absolutism of modern social justice rhetoric represent the reification of abstract ideas previously confined to the ivory towers of higher education, is surprisingly effective in a way that would have been impossible without those previous esoteric chapters.
I still think there's a better book out there on this topic waiting to be written. Actually, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate is a better book on this topic, but I'd still like to see something close to the basic thesis of Cynical Theories written for a more general, less academic audience. This group is currently moving increasingly rightward as a hyper-reaction to the doctrinaire fundamentalism of today's social justice rhetoric (essentialism is simultaneously wrong and the only permissible way of viewing the world) and getting their talking points from culture war profiteers like Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. It might make for a more civil, less divisive and, frankly, less absurd kind of culture if more voices on the left were calling for more rational and less extreme ideas in the "intellectual marketplace" and reinforcing the idea that there's still room for nuance in our conversations and debates....more
It's fascinating to me that there was once a time when amiable middle-class suburbanites like my mom and her sisters were devouring piles of absolutelIt's fascinating to me that there was once a time when amiable middle-class suburbanites like my mom and her sisters were devouring piles of absolutely depraved books about incest and sexual abuse not to mention demons, monsters and sadistic serial killers wielding every murder implement imaginable. I remember them all passing those V.C. Andrews books around like Tupperware when I was a kid long before I knew they were about poisoner grandmas and forbidden sibling sex. The 80s was such a weird time to be alive, and Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks from Hell fondly commemorates this era and its largely forgotten literary output. The tone is a little dad-jokey, and although each chapter begins with a reference to some of the changes in society happening concurrently with the rise of pulp horror fiction in the 70s and 80s, it fails to make a larger point about how the novels of this era reflected economic inequality, skyrocketing crime rates, 2nd wave feminism, the AIDS epidemic or any of the other significant sociocultural aspects of the late 20th century. It's a fun read, though, the photo illustrations look great and, personally, I've now got a list of a few old genre classics to check out. Still, I'm not sure there's anything here a reader couldn't just discover by visiting the Too Much Horror Fiction blog....more
I'm a big fan of this hybrid subgenre: the history/biography/literary criticism book that analyzes the context and contemporary influences in which paI'm a big fan of this hybrid subgenre: the history/biography/literary criticism book that analyzes the context and contemporary influences in which particular literary masterpieces were written. Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World and Dorian Lynskey's The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's "1984" come to mind as particularly good examples, and, while The Lady and Her Monsters doesn't reach these heights it's a perfectly fine look at the lives of Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and other figures who moved in their orbit in the early 1800s with some forays into the pseudoscience of galvanism and the importance of medical dissection in 19th-century medicine. It's only real problem is that it fails to make all of the context it presents around the writing of Shelley's Frankenstein feel relevant or to make much of a coherent point about any of its subjects.
For one thing, there's way too much about body-snatching and too little about it in the novel Frankenstein too justify its prominence here. Sure, Victor Frankenstein robs graves to make his monster, and, yes, Mary Shelley would have been aware of scandals involving the abuse of corpses in the UK at the time. Nonetheless, Frankenstein is not a novel about grave robbing. I can't imagine more than a single chapter is needed on the subject in a book about Frankenstein. Likewise, galvanism--the attempt to reanimate the dead using electrical current--has some obvious connections to the novel, but, again, we don't need more than a few paragraphs about it to get the idea. What are relevant to Shelley's masterpiece are the tragic details of her life, the deaths of her mother and children and the "ghost story contest" in which the groundwork for Frankenstein was reportedly laid. All of these details are in The Lady and Her Monsters, but all of them seem to have been given less prominence than the goings-on of assorted graverobbers, condemned prisoners whose bodies wound up on the dissection table and medical doctors who staged gruesome exhibitions for their peers and a delighted, bloodthirsty public. In the end, this feels like two pretty good books about sort-of related topics rather than one unified great one....more
The Ministry of Truth really is more of a biography of the novel 1984 than of the writer himself. There’s a decent profile of George Orwell here, but The Ministry of Truth really is more of a biography of the novel 1984 than of the writer himself. There’s a decent profile of George Orwell here, but the book is really concerned with his life after the Spanish Civil War where he first saw the true nature of totalitarianism, which so informed his subsequent writing. From there, the book traces the creation of the author’s two most famous works, Animal Farm and 1984 before devoting its second half to the latter novel’s reputation and periodic coopting by some political cause or another in the years following Orwell’s death. In this respect, the book works very well. It’s hard to ignore the current context of Trump and Brexit when reading this, but Lynskey isn’t asking us to. Instead, he talks about fake news, alternative facts, cofveve, etc. through the lens of Orwell’s seminal and perhaps prophetic works.
Beyond analyzing Orwell’s work, however, Lynskey also devotes a lot of space to 1984’s precursors and successors in the subgenre of dystopian fiction, providing summaries and analyses of works by H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Ray Bradbury as well as the music of David Bowie (whose album Diamond Dogs began as an adaptation of 1984) and Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil. While that may sound like a lot of ground to cover, Lynskey ties it all together nicely and, in the end, comes up with the definitive work on Orwell’s timely masterpiece....more
Falling somewhere between biography and critical analysis, The Dawn Watch makes the case for delving into Conrad's work beyond Heart of Darkness and TFalling somewhere between biography and critical analysis, The Dawn Watch makes the case for delving into Conrad's work beyond Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent and for Conrad himself as the major English-language novelist of the early 20th century. Of, course Heart of Darkness is unimpeachable in literary merit (although not in its dated othering of Africa and Africans), but Jasanoff conveys the importance of Conrad and his larger oeuvre to understanding late 19th/early 20th century imperialism, European world wars, and even the rise of the United States as a world power. There aren't many scandalous revelations here and biographical literary criticism isn't the most rewarding practice, but the book is still enjoyable enough to consider giving Nostromo and Lord Jim a read....more
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