Buzzing Off #1: Aphantasia and the Beautiful Image (Eclipse, Hirano)

Introducing Buzzing Off, a new series where I talk about the books I didn't finish. I'm thinking of it as a sort of supplement to No! No Buzz, my now 3-year-old ongoing video series where I talk about every book I finish to an exclusive audiences of Bees. The plans is to write about everything I start and give up on. Let's see how it goes; it's good to have a writing project again, though.

I knew, and even said aloud, by around page five that I would likely not finish Eclipse by Keiichiro Hirano. The premise and history were all there; written in 1991 by an undergraduate, it became a sensation and won the Akutagawa Prize, which I generally find to be presented to interesting writers if not always great ones. The novel tells the story of a fifteenth century Dominican friar attempting, to paraphrase the character's words, to research pagan texts, excise them of their heresy, and bring them into the Godly fold. An alchemist and some sort of witch hunter are promised on the back.

Rays of the Gothic and Weird – of Walpole and Hope Hodgson, specifically – immediately break through the clouded, friarly tone. Images, like that of a wine cask in a venal priest's office, where,

Below the hole could be seen a small stain. Above a dull, copper-brown area of long standing, wine that had just now been drawn lingered, partially dried, like bloody pus. It was just like an incompletely healed abrasion whose scab had come off. (p. 27)

or of the "deaf-mute" son of the blacksmith('s wife?) swinging,

Two large trees spread their branches beside it, and there was something ceaselessly coming and going between them. When I looked closer, it was a boy swinging on a swing. For an instant, I was stricken with horror. The boy was laughing noiselessly, his mouth opened as wide as it would go. His hair was flying, his eyes were like saucers, and the sinews stood out on his neck. None of this suggested the slightest pleasure. And it was not only pleasure that was lacking. In some location strangely distant from human emotion, the boy's smiling face was shining cheerfully in splendid isolation like a reflection of the moon in water.
…After watching for a moment, I could stand it no longer and averted my eyes. The impossible thought that this game could go on for all eternity made me shudder all over again. (pp. 50-1)

are, if not wholly luminous, certainly well written and compelling fodder for theological spiraling.

So how did I know so quickly I'd likely abandon it? Despite 2024 being something of a personal banner year for historical fiction – from Karen Tei Yamashita's Brazil-maru, which I had somehow not read before, to my introduction to Sacha Naspini with the brilliant The Bishop's Villa, to the more generically dubious examples like the first half of Tommy Orange's Wandering Stars and the playful alternate literary history of Percival Everett's James and Nisi Shawl's The Day and Night Books of Mardou Fox – the genre is not one I tend to stick with. More prosaically, I have something like four books that have been recommended to me by between one and four people that I'm excited about; I mostly picked up Eclipse because it was short and seemed neat after I finished another book unexpectedly early.

The prosaic explanation is, of course, the more common experience. Working in a bookstore puts one in a situation where grazing is almost impossible to avoid, at least if you're the kind of reader(/dilettante) that I am. Used books hove into view; publishers throw sample darts that sometimes find you as their bullseye; advance listener copies pile up; recommendations, heeded and unheeded, linger. Book clubs are born and die.

Eclipse's loosening grasp on me turned out to be more interesting in the where, rather than the why. So I transcribed the specific passage. It's long, so I'll leave it at the bottom of this post where you can reference it now or when my description seems interesting.

To set it up: in this strange village between Lyon and Florence that a priest has advised the narrator to drop by, there is an alchemist. The narrator has seemingly gained an amount of trust with this Pierre Dufay, being allowed to watch his work and occasionally get questions answered; one night he sees Pierre wander off on one of his irregular perambulations and decides to surreptitiously follow. Cutting through the forest and across a stream, they enter a cave, where the narrator sees… skip ahead if you wish.

Thinking again of the comparisons made earlier, to Hope Hodgson and Walpole and the general trajectory of gothic/weird horror: this is the moment, it seems to me, where Truth is revealed. It's the basement of High Place in Mexican Gothic, the crumpled linen face of MR James' "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad" Admittedly, it's right at the two thirds mark of the novel; eighty pages have passed, about forty remain, whereas those examples are at or much closer to the end. I'll never know, unless I randomly pick the book up again some day. But it certainly feels like that quintessential gothic/weird moment, where the truth of the thing appears and is so fundamentally disconcerting it, in the Gothic tradition, destabilizes the seeming fixity of the moral universe, or in the Weird, the capacity to comprehend the world whatsoever.

Maybe it is the case, further into this novel, that this is not the marker but another piece of the path. I certainly won't be able to tell you. Because, well. It just super doesn't work for me.

It's rich, I know, for a person with aphantasia to complain that they just can't picture whatever the hell is going on with this stalagmite. I sort of definitionally can't picture. I can, and do, read images, though. Like I wrote on my blurb for Claire Keegan's Small Things Like These, "Claire Keegan has two of the greatest gifts a writer could ask for: an impeccable ear for dialogue and the ability to deliver a heartstopping image."

I don't know how to explain this, considering it's only been a couple years since I learned that phrases like Mind's Eye weren't exclusively metaphorical, or that the stereotypical hypnotist's invocation to "close your eyes, now imagine yourself on a beach" wasn't just about evoking feeling, but seeing. Suffice to say I've been reading images, even reading for images, my entire life without the mental aid of, you know, being able to see them.

As an example, let's stick with Keegan. The opening paragraph of Small Things Like These reads:

In October there were yellow trees. Then the clocks went back the hour and the long November winds came in and blew, and stripped the trees bare. In the town of New Ross, chimneys threw out smoke which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays, and soon the River Barrow, dark as stout, swelled up with rain.

There's a lot we could unpack here. The subtle and brilliant elision of the clocks and the long November winds; in that same sentence, the use of "went back the hour" to firmly root the reader in the spoken language; the deceptive simplicity of the bouncing rhythm of the first sentence; the cutting specificity of "hairy, drawn-out strings."

None of this helps me to "see" this image. Until not long ago, I was under the impression that this was true of everyone. But reading it, I know that it is right. That there is beauty in the language and that that beauty is, in part, its mellifluousness and diction and intricate syntax, and, in part, because it feels evocative and correct.

To be, maybe, slightly more direct: I cannot picture smoke "which fell away and drifted off in hairy, drawn-out strings before dispersing along the quays" in my head. But reading an image with such a vivid, evocative description, I can know that when I encounter such smoke in my life, I will comprehend it better. I will find beauty where I might have missed it, had I not read this sentence, even if I don't recall the line in all its specificity in that exact moment.

And, it is important to say: this is not always, or even often, a question of "beauty." It is often a question of aesthetics, but not even just that. Language communicates, but not always directly; when language is rendered into an image with dimension, it can alter perceptions more broadly.

Hirano can get there, sometimes. The images I quoted above, especially of "the boy laughing noiselessly," have an element of that quality – except, in the case of that particular image, it is more the feeling of wrongness that permeates. It's not quite as striking as Keegan, but I genuinely believe that there are few writers that can match her.

So what of these three pages that you may or may not have read, below? What about them broke me on Hirano's Eclipse?

The long answer is that it just doesn't work. I don't see it. Not in the mental-visual sense, but in the literal comprehension of what the narrator is describing. It's some rocks that got a hermaphroditic angel in them with an ouroboros and a caduceus or something? And some diamonds and circles. And it goes on forever. The economy of language is shot here, for something that is theoretically cool but ultimately incoherent.

Take the line: "It goes without saying that flowers are the last thing that one would expect to see inside a cave, and these roses were blossoming unaccountably in this one spot only. The buds all looked to be just on the point of bursting forth, and they were the scarlet color of freshly cut meat." The "unexpected roses in a cave" trope is something that certainly can work, especially in the context of a story about a Dominican friar a century before Milton wrote Paradise Lost. But the way the narrator undermines the image from the jump ("it goes without saying") coupled with the also-ran horror of roses the "scarlet color of freshly cut meat" takes what should be a sort of poetic moment of sublime revelation and renders it completely inert. There is no poetry here, in a moment that inherently cannot work in prose alone.

Or, to address the issue of the economy of language, a longer quotation: "At the tip, there was a knob about the size of a hen's egg. On the knob's surface, there was an emblem composed of a circle and diamond shape. The interior of the circle was hollowed out in the shape of a vertically oriented ellipse, and the diamond was positioned therein, in contact with the ellipse at its four corners. Further, the diamond itself was hollowed out in the shape of another diamond with its horizontal diagonal shortened and its corners truncated, so that the remaining wood became wider as it approached the right and left corners of the outer diamond. All these shapes were in contact only at their topmost and bottommost points, and those two points were connected by a line extending from the shaft that ran through them."

To not mince words: this is boring. One can see the arguments that the premise affords this kind of excessive description of minutiae. One might even argue that one of my generic frames (the Weird, with all its Lovecraftian detailed definitions of cyclopean etc and non-Euclidean blah, which I do love) requires this kind of attention to detail to achieve its ultimate ends. I would not just be receptive to these arguments, elaborated, I would hope they would be compelling enough to rush me back into this novel. "Further, the diamond itself was hollowed out in the shape of another diamond with its horizontal diagonal shortened and its corners truncated, so that the remaining wood became wider as it approached the right and left corners of the outer diamond…" though, is a high bar to clear, though. The words have no rhythm. They're inert.

Maybe I'm wrong. I've read it three times; once in the course of things, again when I realized it was likely my off-ramp, and a third when I transcribed it. I'd be happy to be wrong, honestly; and, lacking the context of that which comes after, maybe the structural importance of this bungled image is less than it appears from a genre standpoint. Maybe the genre signifiers themselves that I am reading into the book are the problem! If genre is, among other things, a frame for reading, there are likely things happening here that my frame obscures, excludes.

There are, to paraphrase a paraphrase of what is likely itself a paraphrase, as many reasons to abandon a book as there are books that have been abandoned by readers. But remember: here we are talking about where I quit, not why. There are maybe a thousand books I've read to completion that I could levy the same close readings against; hundreds, I'm sure, I enjoyed. Dozens I've loved.

This long quote below is where I didn't finish this particular book, and how it displays prose where only poetry could suffice. The why, fittingly, is much more prosaic.

...Standing motionless in the background, for a long moment I gazed not at the light's source, but at its penumbra—that is, at the portion of it that managed to escape Pierre's shadow.
And this is what I saw.
The stalagmite rose straight up from the floor, and after narrowing slightly three-quarters of the way to its tip, swelled again and then came gradually to a point. Its paired stalactite had almost exactly the same shape. They were each about three times as tall as a man. The two dripstones were just on the point of touching and melting together and were separated by no more than about two fingerbreadths. The gap between them glimmered with a premonition of existence. Approaching its time, it was pregnant with a plenitudinous tension that surpassed even that of existence itself.
The platform supporting the stalagmite, like melted wax, had congealed into an undulating pattern. Its surface, just manifesting itself above the water, was entirely covered in roses, from the stalagmite's root down to water level. It goes without saying that flowers are the last thing that one would expect to see inside a cave, and these roses were blossoming unaccountably in this one spot only. The buds all looked to be just on the point of bursting forth, and they were the scarlet color of freshly cut meat. Fragrance rose from around them, as if to announce the coming instant of efflorescence. And over them, light hung faintly like a veil.
It was an indescribably strange light. After a moment, regaining somewhat my presence of mind, I moved to one side and settled into a place in the rock wall in an attempt to see its source with my own eyes. And then, as my perspective shifted, the source of the light gradually began to come into view. Concerning what I am about to describe, and by extension everything in my account of the cave, if people were to claim that it was nothing but a hallucination, I would be unable to disprove their accusations. There is no question but that I saw it. Yet when all is said and done, if I were to be told, "You only 'saw' it," I would be at a loss for words. Or, given that, as the villagers say, there are demons in the forest, if it were to be alleged that I had been bewitched by one of them, I would have no objections to meekly acknowledging the charge and doing penance before the Lord for my weakness. Indeed, how much more desirable that would be than to believe that what I saw actually existed in this world.
An arm was visible at the top of the giant stalagmite. Breasts could be seen. A downcast face was visible, and, at the loins, a membrum virile. The figure wore not a shred of clothing, but on its head it bore a crown of thorns intertwined with a snake. The thorn flowers, like those underfoot, glowed scarlet and were on the verge of opening; the snake described a circle on the figure's head, and, on its brow, was biting its own tail. From the elbows forward, and from the knees downward, the figure was embedded in the stone, and the same appeared to be true of its back. Looking closely, one could see as well that stone appeared to penetrate the gap between the arms and the belly, and again the gap between the legs.
From behind the scrotum, and presumably entering at the vulva, piercing the flesh and emerging at the nape of the neck, there was a richly decorated staff or pole. Here too could be seen the motif of the snake intertwined with thorns, but on the staff there were two snakes, and they were biting each other's tails. The tip of the staff, after it emerged from the nape, presented the form of a spear, as if a stalagmite had been narrowed and sharpened. At the other end, on the tail of the shaft emerging from the vulva, more detailed craftsmanship was in evidence. At the tip, there was a knob about the size of a hen's egg. On the knob's surface, there was an emblem composed of a circle and diamond shape. The interior of the circle was hollowed out in the shape of a vertically oriented ellipse, and the diamond was positioned therein, in contact with the ellipse at its four corners. Further, the diamond itself was hollowed out in the shape of another diamond with its horizontal diagonal shortened and its corners truncated, so that the remaining wood became wider as it approached the right and left corners of the outer diamond. All these shapes were in contact only at their topmost and bottommost points, and those two points were connected by a line extending from the shaft that ran through them.
The figure's flesh was possessed both of a grace that could be seen most clearly in its ample breasts and of a strength that was most conspicuously apparent in its abdomen and shoulders, and the ever so delicate balance between these two conflicting qualities was maintained and secured only by the staff. The musculature was fiercely tensed. The whole body seemed to be just on the point of being born out of the stone and to be fighting against the forces that threatened to reabsorb it. At the same time, this aspiration toward motion was being restrained by the resistance of the fatty tissue, centered on the breasts. The furious muscle, embraced by the fat, had been brought up short one step away from action,, in accordance with fat's tendency to seek stillness and stasis.
This opposition could be seen in the figure's countenance as well. The eyelids were closed, whether from anguish or from sleep it was impossible to judge. The fine lines that could be seen faintly between the brows hinted both at distress and at pleasure, and they had entrusted that riddle to the region behind the straight line of the prominent nose, hiding it from view forever. The area under the eyes was taut, and the jaw line, like that of an unripe fruit, showed no slack. The hair that threatened to spread out over the face was like a throng of reptiles or like pure water spilling out of a jug.
And all of it was bathed in a golden light. (pp. 81-4)

Valentine's Compilation #9: End

 

The theme of this year's Valentine's Day Compilation is: End.

As always, the theme is unimportant. Use it as inspiration if it works that way, or ignore it if it doesn't.

This might be the last one. It might not, but that's less likely.

Some background: Since 2016, Fuck the Polis! have been organizing a compilation released on Valentine's Day. You can find them here: Pop, Solidarity, Extra, Digging In, Smash (b/w Pushing Through) Chorus, Set(s), and Cute. These compilations have been home to anything  that can be put on audio, but music is cool too.

To be on the comp, all you have to do is email me (uninterpretative [at] gmail) an audio file (preferably .wav or .aiff, but I can make anything work) before February 14th and I can probably include it. If you have any questions, hit up that email or @BeeGabberel or wherever you talk to me.

A war, a Myth, and a Genre: On More Perfect

Two of the best SF novels I read in 2023 happened to revolve around the Orpheus myth.

In Temi Oh’s More Perfect (her sophomore, after 2019’s nearly perfect Do You Dream of Terra-Two?) a young man named Orpheus and a young woman named Moremi trade point of view chapters in a near future Britain where a semi-voluntary implant (the Pulse) allows users direct cortex access to the Internet (the Panopticon, in the novel’s language).

Born to an off the grid freedom fighter of a father, Orpheus has a decidedly ambivalent relation to the technology; Moremi’s lightly Luddite-leaning mother drives her to its wholehearted embrace. The two navigate their relationships—to the tech and the surveillance state it enables, to their families or lack thereof, to their labor, to their bodies and dependencies, to their traumas, and (this is a dual-POV novel, you have to see this coming) to each other—in ways that are often profound and always propulsive.

I read Oh’s debut three times in fewer years, the first time I’ve reread a book that avidly since (well, her work was bound to come up eventually; here’s to ripping the bandaid off) the first three novels in the school saga of The Boy Who Lived. The Potter septology’s influence is worn fairly openly, with both of Oh’s books referencing it explicitly. In Terra-Two?, it is a dogeared Latin translation of the first book. In More Perfect, Orpheus sees a “gorgeous Gothic revival hotel” that reminds him of it as he’s going through withdrawals in a post-Flood London, “across the road from St. Pancras station.”

This reference to “The Harry Potter Shop at Station 9 3/4s” (from their website: “the first ever Harry Potter Shop to open anywhere in the world outside of a themed visitor attraction”) calls out the souvenir shop aspects of Rowling’s writing. Without attributing to Temi Oh any position whatsoever, this reference is, in my reading, clarifying. Specifically on the question of inheritance. Or, if you like, on the question of anxiety of influence, since I can’t imagine who would want to be in Rowling’s line of succession at this point. Without belaboring the point, Oh is the better worldbuilder, and that’s not her primary focus. As masterfully demonstrated in Terra-Two?, and as repeated in More Perfect, she writes primarily from and for character psychology.

Every character in her novels, from the point of view to the supporting cast down to one-scene plot movers, walks that fine line between being relatable and robust. None of them, not even the shitty ex-boyfriends who don’t show up once in a scene, feel like anything less than plausible people. But they also still function as characters in a story.

********************************************

Since Modernism, character and plot have been at war. And I think that war still wages.

But before we get to that war, a final note on succession. I joked earlier that I couldn’t imagine who would want to be Rowling’s inheritor. The joke is that there isn’t one. Like the demon, they are legion. Rowling’s inheritance is dead labor, witnessed in the style guides of every major publisher’s Young Adult imprint. Unlike her blockbuster forebear, Stephen King, who racked up so many hits so quickly (in a wildly different publishing landscape) that he famously became uneditable (see: The Stand complete and uncut), Rowling became editing itself.

If you feel inclined to test this hypothesis, here is an experiment: grab any book by a competent author who has written fiction and Young Adult since, say, the turn of the millennium. I have a couple authors in mind, and I suspect that some others would bear this out as well. Choose any chapter number. Read that same chapter in both of the books.

What you’ll find, I posit, is that the latter are never more “developmentally appropriate.” It will always express the same themes, or the ones on the authors mind. It will bear the same cultural and literary assumptions the author requires of any reader of their fiction, and will, though it may require squinting sometimes to blur the sanded-down edges, still be solidly-paced writing with some standout sentences. What you will also find, across the author function, is a thumb on the scale.

When I read Young Adult fiction, that thumb has a very defined affect. It is condescension. No matter the author, no matter the publisher (but mattering very much the genre), the Young Adult novel treats its reader as being as incapable of critical engagement with the text as JK Rowling proved herself to be when her biggest controversy was declaring that she always thought of Dumbledore as gay—despite negative textual evidence—in order to court those then-young millenials who would grow into the fearsome transgendereds she has since made it her mission to Just Ask Questions about.

The staggering closemindedness of the Potter series is old hat at this point, and its subsumption into industry has largely (of course not entirely) subsumed that as well. The style guides don’t demand goblins be anti-Semitic stereotypes or that you marry the man you once argued with about whether slaves were happy (or, y’know, the tokenized names straight out of Breakfast At Tiffany's). They do, at least as far as I can tell from a good chunk of reading, demand a homogeneity of diction that reflects the lived experience/vocabulary of no teenager I’ve ever known, been, heard of, or considered plausible. They impose these things in pursuit of the runaway success of Rowling, whose playbook they extrapolated from and return to like gospel.

(A second hypothesis: pick any four books in the Young Adult genre (really a marketing term, but what genre isn’t?) from the decades since its coinage in the 60s to the 90s, and any four from the front and back half of the 2000s and the 2010s. Absenting author overlap, I would be surprised if the same experiment—pick a chapter and read it all the way through in all eight books—didn’t show that the first four books, despite having way more similarity in subject matter, weren’t way more differentiated. One from it’s closest neighbor in underlying tone, than all four of the latter combined.)

Harold Bloom was wrong and an asshole when he claimed that reading Rowling would not lead to reading real works of literature for two reasons, other than the third reason, which is that Harold Bloom was overwhelmingly wrong and always an asshole. The first is that the simple, multigenerational facts have panned out. Millenials and Zoomers have grown up, and it turns out that we can teach the Classics as well as anyone ever has (when the neoliberal university allows us the chance, of course, as it so rarely does). The second is that for 20 years, the mode of production, that structure that organizes social relations, took Thatcher’s big TINA and applied it more and more locally.

Capitalism said There Is No Alternative. Not just to this mode of production, but even to books for young readers that aren’t by JK Rowling. If not in signature, then certainly in the spirit of the style guide. And wouldn’t you know it, at the same time it swallowed up bookstores with venture capital, libraries with budget cuts that were diverted to militarization of the state and specifically police, and schools with Left Behind Acts and bloated administrations that turned them into landlords and businesses.

With More Perfect, Temi Oh (and, to her absolute credit with the Binti trilogy, Nnedi Okorafor) points to a future where the deadlock between Young Adult literature and its generic counterpart might break. Take, for instance, this passage from pages 211-212:

It’s 2am, as quiet as anywhere ever is at this hour in London. But then she turns and raises her hands to set a filter that he accepts. The cracked pavement becomes the black-ice surface of a stage. The streetlamps are spotlights and behind her are ghost dancers. The curtain is drawn. Orpheus watches as it rises, and an imaginary orchestra starts to play. Already captivated.

She is in the centre of the stage; she raises her arms and begins to dance.

Orpheus sits on the hot stone step in front of his apartment block as she dances a part from a ballet of The Bacchae. At the climax of the dance, she tears her son limb from limb. Her holographic corps members spin around her like shadow puppets. In the dance, she is a maenad, manic initiate of the cult of Dionysus, the god of the grape-harvest and winemaking, ritual madness and religious ecstasy. Orpheus is shocked by the sight of her. On the street a moment before, in her leopard-print leggings and crop-top, plain and strange, but now she is dazzling, now she is setting the imaginary stage on fire in a virtuosic pas de deux. God-crazed ballerina, given over to her wildest instincts. The translucent maenades riot across a moonlit glade, pulling bones from flesh, dressed in fox-skins and bull-helmets, mouths wet with blood in mad celebration. They are like witches, wild with delight: one breast-feeds a wolf cub, another sinks her fingernails into the mud and milk bubbles out.

Moremi is playing the role of Agave, the mother of the King of Thebes, driven mad by Dionysus when her son refuses to worship him. In the hologram Moremi is crowned with ivy vines, in a flesh-coloured dress, dancing the wild dance of maenads. Orpheus can barely watch the climax of the ballet when the women of Thebes descend on King Pentheus. In their madness they believe that he is a lion. He dances a frantic pas de deux with Moremi, his eyes pleading, hoping for her to see him. It’s the most tense moment. Is that a flicker of recognition in her eyes? No. She grabs his elbow, pushes her heel into his ribs and wrenches his arm from its socket. The orchestra swells, echoing the howls of his torment. Which is when the other maenads descend on him in fury, tearing at his flesh. They process into the city, his head on a thyrsus present him to her father Cadmus and it is only then that Agave’s eyes are unclouded. Only then that she sees, to her horror, what she’s done. Orpheus cries with her when he watches it. And when the curtain falls at the end he feels terrified and in love.

Moremi, whose acute loneliness (alongside her mother’s distaste) drove her to get a Pulse, is able to synthesize her two loves: being connected, and ballet. She dances with the maenads, further entwining the novel with Greek mythology. And she does it beneath the eyes of a man—this is a chapter from Orpheus’ point of view—who she already feels herself falling in love with.

Orpheus asks her to dance because she has come to him to ask for a followup on dream therapy he has designed that helps her forget her trauma. He has recently had to take a sabbatical to detox from the drug, Nox, that he uses in order to facilitate other people’s dreams; he is worried that helping her will cause him to relapse. His condition is that she dance for him. She does. He helps her regain access to the world in which she never had any trauma to begin with. There is a lot in this, but one of the things that is happening is that Orpheus is playing analyst to Moremi’s analysand; what we have here is a bit of upgraded talk therapy.

This science fictional psychoanalysis even has it’s own term for transference, the psychoanalytic concept of the person receiving therapy falling in love with their therapist when they displace onto the therapist feelings of growth that they themselves achieved (nb: transference is more complicated than this): More Perfect calls it Inversion Syndrome (314).

This passage is full of allusion and action, tension and release. There is nothing in it that couldn’t be found in the prose of post-Azkaban Potter, when the books seemed to fill themselves with nowhere-going incidental detail.

Earlier, I referenced Poppy’s well-loved Latin translation of Sorcerer’s Stone, which functions as a symbol that must be embraced or overcome repeatedly over the course of her own journey. Does she return to the (dis)comforts of home, cradling the object she previously used to escape from there in her mind? Does she plunge forward, carrying the complicated past into the unknown? Poppy makes her choice.

More Perfect is Oh’s push toward the future, carrying the complicated past. Not just of Rowling herself, but of the style guides that subsumed and buoyed her to billions. In Terra-Two?, she showed herself capable of miracles; with More Perfect, she cements her style. It is post-young adult, having moved through it. Oh has developed a voice which takes what really worked in the septology and unchained it from the condescension that has plagued this particular industrialization.

There was a war to attend to, though.

********************************************

Despite being published a half century earlier, this is no return to the past. The other Orpheus myth I read this year shares almost nothing in common with Oh’s—both are propulsive, yes, but the earlier is as poetic as anything Woolf ever wrote, as deliberate as Proust, as unafraid to play with form as your favorite postmodernist. And, crucially, even in that barely post-pulp moment, it is as unabashedly critical of gender as (say goodbye, friends, as we welcome her for her last appearance) the author of the school saga of The Boy Who Lived and her reactionary friends claim to be.

In 1967, Samuel R. Delany published his 2nd Nebula Award-winning novel The Einstein Intersection. The biggest page-turner of his I’ve personally encountered, it tells the story of Lo Lobey, a man with opposable feet and a flute machete, as he mourns the loss of a lover, fights a massive beast, and travels to confront Kid Death and bring her back. Lo Lobey as Orpheus is made very explicit early on, and it isn’t the only interpellation Delany engages in; the story is scaffolded with Greek myth, mortared by apparently-true diary entries from the “Writer’s Journal,” and painted in—of all things—thematic, structural Beatles references (eat your heart out Stephen King).

The Einstein Intersection juggles swashbuckling pulp adventure with deep meditations on the human in ways I don’t know that I’ve ever otherwise seen managed. The scene where Lo Lobey, having bested a factory-sized bull with human hands and confronted a computer that confirms that humans died out a million years ago and the people we are dealing with are something else,

I took up my machete and blew out the last of the blood. The tune now winding with me lay notes over the stone like mica flakes that would do till light came.

Stubbed my toe.

Hopped, cursed, then started walking again alone with the lonely, lovely sounds. (31)

is written with as much passion and literary flare as any of the more typically Delany moments where characters converse or fuck or think about how language bears down on and structures us, or what “us” even constitutes. He dives into the fundament with every sentence in his short novel, and communicates it with the reader in prose just slightly askew enough to catch the light and render that communication beautiful. A move that, one might argue, is the constitutive aesthetic maneuver of the literary Modernists.

By one might argue, I of course mean that many have—academically, colloquially, in praise, in dismissal, in disgust. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time might structurally be about memory, but in any given moment the narrator is thinking about pink hawthorns, a leitmotif in a sonata, a painting of the sea (or the many beautiful women (wink) that he keeps falling in love with), and doing so in sentences so artfully, musically crafted that one still stands as a Linguists party game—pin the diagram on the Proust sentence, as it were.

Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway might be about a day in the life of an upper class Londoner, but it wouldn’t be hard to argue that it is about the abrupt, filmic cuts it makes between characters’ interior lives and, specifically, how language affords that kind of cut where film might not. Especially when the level of sentencecraft is as high as Woolf’s. And that’s just sticking to books I’ve also read this year.

Broadly speaking, the Modernists were so interested in people—in individuals, even, and their interiority—that you might say that they forgot about characters. The M.s de Norpois, the Doris Kilmans exist in these books, of course, those people who, incidentally, describe broadly a type, embodied; narrative drivers. But these are not books interested in plot, where events accrue over simulated time in order to reach a conclusion, and so their characters cannot fire shots or man drones or trenches in its service. The war, then, is between fiction with an end goal of a satisfying story, and fiction with an end goal of illuminating people.

These aren’t the only two possible end goals of fiction, of course. In the same interwar period where the bulk of Modernism flourished, Georg Lukács is arguing in Das Wort that the claims of Expressionism and Surrealism being revolutionary are overstated. In Lukács case, the real goal of literature is to be found in works of Realists like Thomas Mann, and their ability to synthesize the social order: the goal, in a word, is neither plot nor person but reality. Other examples of end goals abound.

At the turn of the twentieth century, or, perhaps more precisely, in the interwar period from the late teens to the early 30s, literature bifurcated in a way no amount of coinages like “slipstream” have been able to resolve.

On the one hand, the Modernists (eventually absorbing and splitting off into other names) who became literary fiction, representatives of the side of the war dedicated to showcasing people. On the other hand, a weird old quasi-conman who wouldn’t shut up about his new coinage, “scientifiction.”

I’ll spare you my thoughts on Hugo Gernsback because (...but I really want to...) the point, I think, is clear enough: for the last century, literature has taken it as fact that it is about plumbing the depths of what it means to be Human; or that it is about telling a satisfying story, in genre. Other exigencies burble constantly, occasionally bursting. The pornographers and the didacts and the moralists and the minor literatures and the experimentalists and many more foment. But at the end of the day, you’re shelved in Fiction or Speculative Fiction, or you’re not shelved at all.

In some writers, this war reaches something of a détente, on occasion. Delany might be the foremost among them. When I point to the fact that Lo Lobey blowing blood from his flute is as beautifully described as any moment in which he contemplates, this is what I mean. It is of both camps. Since the dual blows of Gernsback and Freud, the writer has been forced to pick a side. And, it is I think safe to say, Delany ultimately did. But in The Einstein Intersection, he sent his head singing down the river, unconcerned with the mortars screaming overhead.

********************************************

And so we have our interlocutors. Oh, transcending the Young Adult style guide; Oh, engaging (if only in shared referent) with a self-consciously critical moment in the history of speculative fiction. She sees, at least in my reading, eye to eye with neither.

Her deep and seemingly intuitive sense of character psychology clashes with the propulsive narrative movement demanded by the former, to the point where readers trained only to see plot movement might find stagnation in her books’ most dynamic moments. At the same time, her psychology never transcends character; the formal commitments to plot preclude that swerve into interiority.

To try to illustrate: every character Oh introduces evinces thought processes, desires and sensual commitments that are irreducible to other aspects of the text, whether formal, literary, or functional. Aria does not leap into the Thames early in Terra-Two? In order to allow Jesse onto the ship, or to force Elliot to be an avatar of grief; she does it for her own reasons, clearly felt. Any reading of More Perfect that simply enumerated the ways in which Orpheus was actually Orpheus might unveil some neat easter eggs, but it would also impoverish the novel. The wildly different twins in both books certainly have many things to say about twinness beyond who the characters are, but they never dissolve wholly into questions of the uncanny or doppelganger myths—and nor do they become single-note refutations thereof.

At the same time, we never quite experience that transition to full interiority. Oh does not try to convey to us the full internal lifeworld of her characters in the same way, for instance, Woolf describes Septimus’ discovery of ASMR:

“K...R...” said the nursemaid, and Septimus heard her say “Kay Arr” close to his ear, deeply, softly, like a mellow organ, but with a roughness in her voice like a grasshopper’s, which rasped his spine deliciously and sent running up into his brain waves of sand which, concussing, broke. A marvellous discovery indeed—that the human voice in certain atmospheric conditions (for one must be scientific, above all scientific) can quicken trees into life! (22)

The whole of Septimus in this moment is open to us; when we sit in the heads of Temi Oh’s characters, they retain autonomy. They have privacy.

It is fitting, I think, that the author who demonstrated this facility with character in Terra-Two? would go on to write a novel that more perfectly dovetails with her fundamental concerns. That privacy, that autonomy explode out into the world with the Pulse, turning the social world into a literal referendum on those very concepts by putting them in tension with the technological overdetermination of the individual, simultaneously through surveillance, expression, state-sanctioned and funded trauma repression, consciousness-sharing, and basically any other consequence of plugging one’s brain into the Internet, good or bad, one can readily come up with.

Beyond fitting, even. What we have in this book might be a genuine magnum opus, that singular synthesis of an artist’s concerns, their preoccupations, the social moment, and their skill in delivering on their prose and chosen subject. What could be more apt than wondering what a world where the final privatization, with the commons long gone and the biopolitical hegemonic, when even private thoughts become private commodities? What could be a more apt mode than the only truly popular novel form, the Young Adult, but freed of the style guide? What writer could be more apt to tackle these things than Temi Oh, with her deep well of character psychology mixed with her remarkable talents for worldbuilding and plot development?

A magnum opus, then. It is declared. History can let the rest shake out.

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Despite the occasionally materialist method, this essay has largely stayed in the relatively limited discourse of aesthetic history. (And the even more limited discourse of my own preoccupations and reading history in 2023, mostly.) Which leads to a question: is the magnum opus enough?

One answer, self-evident: no. It never has been, so why would it be now, especially in the long tail of literature’s importance? The novel was, once, a critical component of bourgeois class formation and could therefore at least index what an ascendant class thought of itself. These days, when the biggest publishing house in the United States is blocked from buying the second-biggest of its four rivals, said rival gets sold to the private equity firm that saddled Toys’R’Us with billions in debt upon and acquisition and slowly squeezed the still-successful retailer to death for their own gain.

Which isn’t to say the entrenched bourgeoisie have abandoned the form entirely; we can all thank one of the scions of the Koch fortune for Catapult press, and Orrin Henry Ingram, whose “systematic deforestation” of Chippewa Valley in Wisconsin in the mid-19th century funded, through the generational wealth it generated, his great-great grandchildren’s ability to maintain their position as one of very few viable distributors for independent bookstores.

There’s a more generous answer, though. The magnum opus can matter, according to your frame. And they can matter greatly.

For the individual, obviously—whether author or reader, the joy of experiencing something indelibly its own can be a transformative experience.

For communities, as well. Though they’re largely a commodified joke now, book clubs help with the real work of reading together something that cannot have been produced except in this singular way. In doing so, the reading group can forge bonds, lead to clarifying arguments, open up new aesthetic in political avenues in ways that few other things can.

For platforms? Absolutely. The subsumption of a genuine magnum opus can lead to that most precious commodity of all: engagement, to be sold to advertisers and venture capitalists in that most delicious way of all: quantifiably.

But that brings us back to our initial answer, in some way. Is a magnum opus important to the world? To our collective struggle to move beyond capitalism and the ecological apocalypse it has revealed as its inevitable telos?

No. No, it isn’t.

Unless it helps.

Valentine's Day Compilation #8: Cute [Call for Submissions]

The theme for this year's friends of Fuck the Polis! Valentine's Day Compilation is: Cute.

It's not that we aren't already, we know this. But I think we could use some more. Whether that's looking, getting, making, being, appreciating. It could be about bringing a certain softness to a life wracked with strife, or it could be about saying Don't Get Cute With Me, Pig. It could be pure aesthetic appreciation or just thinking about getting cute with a cutie. There's cute in the hard and unyielding, as well, and the darkness that a smile might hide.

Here's a little photoshoot I've been doing, something of which will end up being the cover, probably:

     

As always, the theme is unimportant. Use it as inspiration if it works that way, or ignore it if it doesn't. And as always, we're open to just about anything as long as it's an audio file. I don't think I have had to execute my curatorial powers once yet?

Some background: Since 2016, Fuck the Polis! have been organizing a compilation released on Valentine's Day. You can find them here: 2016 (Pop); 2017 (Solidarity); 2018 (Extra); 2019 (Digging In); 2020 (Smash b/w Pushing Through); 2021 (Chorus); and 2022 (Set(s)). These compilations have been home to experimental, noise, plunderphonics, bedroom pop, poetry, folk, punk, country, darkwave, and a whole lot more.
To be on the comp, all you have to do is email me (uninterpretative [at] gmail) an audio file (preferably .wav or .aiff, but I can make anything work) before February 14th and I can probably include it. If you have any questions, hit up that email or @beegabberel or wherever you talk to me. I'm happy to support, whether with words or sounds or whatever I can manage.

A Ranked Paragraph About Every Book I Read in 2021 (part 2: pre-2021 books edition)

51) The End We Start From (Megan Hunter)

Nah.

50) Bee People and the Bugs They Love (Frank Mortimer)

I think I would actively dislike Frank Mortimer if I met him in person, and I didn't get a ton out of this book, but it was mostly fine.

49) All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy)

This story of two boys who run away with some horses genuinely did nothing for me. I didn't even really connect with the language. The plot kind of did something, but I don't really like plot, so that's kind of bottom of the barrel. Someday I'll understand McCarthy.

48) The Corona Crash (Grace Blakely)

Another in Verso's weirdly demsoc series on the covid-19 pandemic. Much better than last year's The Care Manifesto, but also weirdly invested (if I'm recalling correctly) on pseudo-Keynesian responses to the pandemic.

47) I Am Cuba (Stephen Langdon Cost)

Probably more on the historical fiction end than the literary nonfiction, I ended up feeling about this similarly to how I felt about a much better book by Miéville that comes up much later, although on a different subject.

46) The Silence (Don Delillo)

A slim Don Delillo novel about how bad phones are, probably. No, that's not fair. It's about a power outage and an escalating series of philosophical discussions with some weird hetero shit thrown in. It's apparently classified as Humor in my libro.fm app? That's a choice. Solidly written and completely forgettable, honestly.

45) Death in a Promised Land (Scott Ellsworth)

I feel like I read this a century ago. Ellsworth is an academic focusing on the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, and this is written in reportage style. It's hard, with moments of resistance. It's similar in many ways to Les & Tamara Payne's The Dead Are Arising, especially in the pacing. I am glad to have read it.

44) Angelica's Smile (Andrea Camilleri)

I'm going to be honest: this one kind of left no impression on me other than that I remember it being unfortunately horny and I was into the fact that the people were robbing rich folks' vacation homes.

43) The Track of Sand (Andrea Camilleri)

Another one that left little enough trace on my memory that even reading summaries doesn't really bring anything forth other than the image of the dead horse in the show version. I'll be honest: it could be good, it could be bad. I did read it! I just have no memory.

42) The Paper Moon (Andrea Camilleri)

One of the less great Montalbano books sees the Inspector contemplating his age and getting hit on by a bunch of hot young ladies. Never a womanizer, there are moments that are fun but overall it ends up feeling a bit all over the place.

41) The Secret of Red Gate Farm (Carolyn Keene)

The first four words of this book are “That Oriental-looking woman…” so yeah. There’s some shit about perfume. A really bad one.

40) Treasure Hunt (Andrea Camilleri)

While the explosive opening (two old religious jerks firing rounds onto a town square in a house filled with crucifixes and a sex doll) ends up overshadowing the actual mystery, it is a really good opening. One of the better examples of the way Camilleri starts playing with metafiction later in the series (as the television show version of Montalbano begins eclipsing the books, at least in parts of Italy) despite paring back some of the other literary devices, and the mystery itself isn't bad.

39) Phoenix Extravagant (Yoon-Ha Lee)

Another casualty of brain fog, Yoon Ha Lee's Phoenix Extravagant is a book I will need to revisit again at some point down the line. My overwhelming feeling is that he is being pigeonholed or incentivized to write things that are more in line with Young Adult fiction than the Machineries of Empire series, and I find that to be a bummer. Maybe in 2022 I will try to do a full read-through of his work. I think he's one of the best authors writing, and I'm bummed I haven't connected with his last two books.

38) Rounding the Mark (Andrea Camilleri)

Still fairly early in the series, Rounding the Mark sees Montalbano disgusted with the pseudo-fascist response of the Prime Minister to the G8 protests and prepared to resign. He gets caught up with Ingrid again, as well as inadvertently leading a refugee boy to some human traffickers. One of the more tumultuous in the series, it's also a fairly solid case study in the movement from the more complex early novels toward the later, breezier ones.

37) The Clue in the Diary (Carolyn Keene)

Having flipped through it, I still remember absolutely nothing about this mystery. Which is a shame, because I literally don’t know if it was any good. I don’t think so, though, really.

36) The Bungalow Mystery (Carolyn Keene)

One of the less interesting mysteries, but it does start with a bang in a storm on a ship. I also remember the Donnelly’s being likable.

35) The Mystery at Lilac Inn (Carolyn Keene)

A Nancy Drew doppelganger and something called “charge plates” are most of why this mystery is fun. There’s a marriage too I guess?

34) Tentacle (Rita Indiana)

Rita Indiana is a Dominican genderfucky songwriter. Tentacle is about a full-transition shot and the fulfillment of a prophecy and time travel, I think? It's a good time if you dig a really fucked up book that rings real through speculative elements. Also their songs are very good.

33) The Revolution of the Moon (Andrea Camilleri)

Another piece of historical fiction centered on the 27-day reign of a queen in Sicily in the 18th century. It's a cute, zippily written political thriller about a woman being in power and providing things the people actually need - like bread and reproductive rights - right up until the moment that the larger power structure gets rid of her. Like The Sacco Gang (more on that later), it's probably more Camilleri than real history, and as with that book I'm pretty fine with that.

32) Breasts & Eggs (Mieko Kawakami)

I think this, along with Detransition, Baby, were the two books I was most disappointed I didn't like more from authors that were unfamiliar to me. There are some exceptional moments here, descriptions of sweaty nights and intergenerational conflicts that barely breathe a word. There is also a scene in a spa that involves a possibly trans character. That scene really took the wind out of my sails.

31) The Patience of the Spider (Andrea Camilleri)

This 2004 novel is another example of a really solid early entry in the series, with the closest I think Camilleri ever came to a genuine supervillain/rival style antagonist. While not quite up to the mark of the great books in the series, it's a real good one.

30) The Age of Doubt (Andrea Camilleri)

Another one of the stronger late books, The Age of Doubt has a rock solid opening that puts his aging issues, his relationship doubts, and his dissatisfaction with his job into a hypnagogic cauldron and sets things boiling. The luxury yacht juxtaposed with the speedboat (which themselves, in the port, are juxtaposed against the many refugee stories throughout the series) and the poisoning are fun.

29) The Hidden Staircase (Carolyn Keene)

Nancy Drew does haunted houses, Scooby Doo-style. In my memory this is actually one of the more elaborately-plotted books of the ten I read this year, including the abduction of Carson Drew, Nancy’s lawyer father. It’s a good one of these.

28) Password to Larkspur Lane (Carolyn Keene)

The tenth book in the series is a pretty pleasant one as well. A mysterious wheel of fire is showing up at her friend’s family’s house. There’s an old lady being held against her will. I barely remember how it ends, but I remember enjoying the ride. I also just dig any goofy supernatural shit, so maybe that informed my take.

27) The Secret of Shadow Ranch (Carolyn Keene)

Fucking cool-ass ghost horse. I remember this one really positively, but I also remember reading that it was one of the ones more heavily edited for being hella racist. So there’s that. I think this is the one that introduces love interests for the gals, who are wildly uninteresting.

26) The Dance of the Seagull (Andrea Camilleri)

The titular dance - Montalbano sees a seagull swoop and plummet and spin in strange circles before expiring - is one of the more powerful images in the series. Most Montalbano books rely on their propulsive prose, your interest in the mystery, the landscapes and the exquisite descriptions of food, with only a soupcon of interest in the surreal or poetic movement of things. The mystery is a little less compelling, although Fazio's twists make up for some of that. A good piece of texture for the rest of the series, but maybe not the best starting point.

25) The Wings of the Sphinx (Andrea Camilleri)

Another entry in the mid-late period Montalbano books sees the Inspector obsessing over senescence. Which isn't bad or good, necessarily - I enjoy, to a degree, the fact that he ages along with the author instead of staying Bond-young forever and which paid off greatly in the last two stories (see my 2021 books of 2021 list for those) - but it can get a bit samey. Of those, this story might be my favorite as Montalbano looks for a girl with a sphinx moth tattoo and encounters some real weirdos.

24) Nancy's Mysterious Letter (Carolyn Keene)

Nancy Drew is going to inherit a bunch of money! But it’s actually a different Nancy Drew, who is an actress. This one is honestly probably the best on a pure popcorn level, imo.

23) The Potter's Field (Andrea Camilleri)

If there were a Hollywood movie in any of the Montalbano books, it's almost certainly this one. A(n apparent) mob hit in a Potter's Field (effectively unmarked graves) leads Montalbano on a Judean goose chase that sees him interacting with Dons and academics. Published in Italian in 2008, it's almost like a rewrite of The Terracotta Dog but with more dialog than history. For my money, that means it doesn't rate quite as high; but then, I'm not like other girls.

22) How Long Til Black Future Month? (N.K. Jemisin)

Reading the story summaries on Wikipedia conjured a feeling or memory in my brain for almost every one of the stories in this collection, which I kind of wasn't expecting given the lifetime I feel like I've lived since I read it early in 2021. I think the thing I said at the time to people was that it was quite good, but it does feel like Jemisin really excels at the novel (or, perhaps more accurately, trilogy) length. That's probably true. It's also true that the broad range of genres Jemisin tackles here within speculative fiction is exciting, considering what she is capable of when working in longer form.

21) Backflash (Richard Stark)

Parker is the kind of noir protagonist I can get behind, even if I haven't read a ton like him: steely, ready to kill, but mostly interested in getting the job done. In Backflash, the job is robbing a casino boat for an anti-gambling politician. I'm curious about continuing my mystery tour after Carolyn and Andrea grabbed my heart and my head in 2021. I don't know if it will be soon, but Stark's Parker is definitely going to rattle around until I get to him eventually. More on No! No Buzz.

20) The Colorado Kid (Stephen King)

Stephen King at his Most, in some ways. A mystery from the perspective of a new newspaperwoman, with the state stamp on a pack of cigarettes as the central complicating factor. It turns out to be nothing exceptional except in the ways it isn't; there's genuine ambiguity and ambivalence in this in ways I rarely associate with King, and a curbed storytelling impulse that instead focuses on inessential relationships.

19) The Dealings of Daniel Kesserich (Fritz Lieber)

Leiber Does Lovecraft. Specifically, the Horrible Document version of Lovecraft. It's no Our Lady of Darkness, but what is. Pretty good, from what I remember.

18) Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency (Malm)

My main memory of this is that it's the best of the pamphlets in Verso's coronavirus series (excluding Dean Spade's Mutual Aid, which I don't know if is technically in the series but it far, far outstrips the rest), and that it gets a little Lenin Bro-y in bits. Plenty of salient points throughout, though.

17) The Deep (Rivers Solomon)

Inspired by a clipping. song about mermaids who were descendants of the slaves tossed overboard in the Middle Passage, The Deep is about the one of them who remembers and the toll that takes. Like Sorrowland, it's about flight from a supposedly utopian community to find the fucked up reality of the outside world. It's also about care for the individual and care for the collective, and how those things can come into conflict without any conflict rearing its head. And it's about cool mermaid shit. So it's good.

16) The Visitors (Clifford D. Simak)

Obelisk aliens land in Simak's beloved landscape: a picturesque midwestern small town (probably in Wisconsin). Newspapermen try to piece it together. The aliens are Roadside Picnic levels of inscrutable. They're also metaphors for industrialization. It's quite good.

15) Cemetery Boys (Aiden Thomas)

Definitely the best YA book I read this year, as a hater of YA. I expected this to be another thing I read and kind of enjoyed, but the ending really caught me off guard. The story of a young trans brujo whose culture doesn't quite accept him and whose attempt to prove himself goes awry when he summons the wrong ghost. It's kind of the thing I might recommend for people that aren't in the headspace to read the density of Summer Sons or the visceral heartwrenching of Sorrowland, but want some version of their themes and storytelling polished, like a rock, in the editorial and publishing tumbler of a book marketed as Young Adult.

14) October (China Miéville)

An early-in-the-year read, and (I believe?) the only one of Miéville's books (excepting his dissertation) that I hadn't read previously. An account of Russia's revolution(s) written in a really solid literary nonfiction style, I was most impressed by his acknowledgment of the failures on the part of the revolution to respect the anarchist cadre. Probably a lot of things to say about this, but I mostly remember appreciating the verve with which it was told, Miéville's incomparable ability to focus in on particular details and resonances, and the feeling of reading a pop history that might not exactly reflect my poltics but didn't outright disagree with them from the jump.

13) The Housekeeper and the Professor (Yoko Ogawa)

I fell in love with The Memory Police last year, and finally saw another Ogawa book cross my path this year. On some level, I think I might like this better. The story of a single mother who works as a housekeeper to a mathematics professor who suffered a traumatic brain injury which means his short term memory ends after 80 minutes, this is a decidedly non-genre take on disability and care work and the beauty of math and the beauty of language. I kind of adored it.

12) The Dead Father (Donald Barthelme)

This is the book that got me to start No! No Buzz near the end of this year. It's an interesting bit of experimental fiction, and I'm curious to read more Barthelme because so much of my reading has been of the fairly light variety, and there are things here that challenged me (and others I found challenging). Anyway I said what I wanted to say in the video.

11) The Only Good Indian (Stephen Jones)

Among the best horror novels I've ever read, definitely, The Only Good Indian is about four men who commit a crime that comes back to haunt them. It fits in the model of John Carpenter, to me, as a powerful example of homosociality in horror. That Carpenter was heavily influenced into this by John Ford, the Western film director, is an irony not lost. With powerful scenes of men expressing emotions, genuinely fucked up moments of horror, and an unflinching look at historical atrocity, it's another one I feel really confident calling special.

10) The One-Straw Revolution (Masonobu Fukuoka)

A good chunk of the reading I did this year was in preparation for some Island Demeter games that didn't quite pan out as I'd hoped, and this sort of memoir, sort of philosophy, sort of farming polemic was one of them. It tells of Fukuoka's experiments in what he sometimes calls Do Nothing Farming, where he cultivated land without use of any plows and, in doing so, invented the seed bomb. The technicals were a little beyond my comprehension, but his productive nihilism really struck a chord with me.

9) Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer)

This was one of those books that I picked up mostly because people just keep buying it? And I was curious. I really enjoyed my time with it. It felt a bit overlong and repetitive in parts, but the central thrust is really strong, Wall Kimmerer is an excellent storyteller, and it was overall just really positive. More on No! No Buzz

8) Princess Bari (Hwang Sok-Yong)

Hwang Sok-Yong is apparently one of South Korea's most well known authors, and I'm pretty embarrassed to have just learned that. I'm excited to hopefully read more of his work. This novel is about the seventh daughter of a North Korean family, named after the titular character of folklore, a seventh daughter of a royal family. Both were left to die and survived; both experience harrowing travels that clarify the world and reveal that the healing waters are the waters that give life to us and what sustains us. Princess Bari stands out to me as a story of the abandoned and vilified that unflinchingly tells stories of people who, despite being singled out for truly harrowing experiences, continue to act in solidarity. More on No! No Buzz

7) The Sacco Gang (Andrea Camilleri)

My introduction to Andrea Camilleri, and one I'm happy to have been my first. Published by Europa (unlike the Montalbano books, which are handled by Penguin Random House), it's a sort of historical fiction about a family of leftists called the Sacco gang who tangle with the fascist police and the mafia in the late 1800s (I think that's right). I think it's ultimately more clarifying of Camilleri's positions and interests than it is a historical document, but I have no problem with that.

6) The Secret of the Old Clock (Carolyn Keene)

The very first Nancy Drew mystery begins “Nancy Drew, an attractive girl of eighteen, was driving home along a country road in her new, dark-blue convertible.” Which upended a number of assumptions I’d had, including her age (apparently she was originally sixteen, but was aged up in the 1950s rereleases, which I learned later were the ones I read). I really didn’t expect her to be driving. The mystery here is about a will hidden in an old clock, which a rich family denies exists so they can become richer. It’s one of the more fun entries in the series, and does a good job introducing Nancy and the style of writing (The Most Cliffhangers Imaginable).

5) The Shape of Water (Andrea Camilleri)

The first Montalbano book introduces the inspector and his crew, but most importantly it introduces Ingrid, the Swedish race car driver whose flirtation with Montalbano is one of the series' hearts. A mystery involving a politician found dead in a field notorious for Mafia-run sex work leads Montalbano to uncover corruption in the halls of power. Camilleri's prose develops a lot over the course of the series, but not in a good or bad way, necessarily; here there are a number of chewy, long sentences and a sense of history that get pared down in the future, and it's nice to see the development.

4) The Sign of the Twisted Candles (Carolyn Keene)

My favorite of the Nancy Drew stories. It does the will trick again, but the candles and spaces are actually really evocatively described. I believe this is by a different ghostwriter than the bulk of the previous books, and I’m unfortunately pretty into his way of keeping things moving while focusing on images.

3) The Mushroom at the End of the World (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing)

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's critical investigation into the matsutake mushroom is one of the best things I read this year. It's somewhere between academic tome, journalistic travelogue, and extended personal essay on race and capital. Lowenhaupt Tsing embeds with matsutake pickers and buyers, examines the moment the undomesticatable mushroom becomes a commodity (in the air, shipping between Seattle and Japan), ruminates on the ways it refuses commoditization by developing a gift economy, and touches on the weird, cool world of fungi. Not just one of the best things I read; one of the coolest. It reminds me of Christine Yano's work on Hello Kitty or Nisei Stewardesses. Well told, straddling the line between popular and academic, thoroughly cited, and sticky.

2) The Old Drift (Namwali Serpell)

If The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu wasn't the best surprise of 2021, then this was. Different lists, though, so both count. I found Namwali Serpell through Transit Books' Undelivered Lectures series (see my brief thoughts on Preti Teneja's Aftermath from the same series, also in the other post, or my post from last year) and then her previous novel (this one) came by. I'm not in the practice of reading big intergenerational epics these days and thought I would bounce off. I really, really didn't. The story of Zambia from the late 1800s through the early 2020s, it weaves elegantly between colonial history, magic realism, literary fiction, and science fiction. And the thread is a sentient mosquito swarm. I really can't speak highly enough of this book.

1) The Terracotta Dog (Andrea Camilleri)

The second Montalbano book, and my personal favorite. Being early, it still has Camilleri's more yarn-length sentences rather than the drumbeats of the latter novels, and because of that it has more going on in terms of developing the history of fascism in Italy as a player in the present than, say, the punchy joy of a Cook of the Halcyon. With interwoven mysteries about a grocery truck, a mafia hit in police protection, and two World War II-era bodies buried in a ritual fashion, everything here propelled me forward and really cemented that I love this goofy series.

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Plus, some bonus rereads! (unranked)

How Much of These Hills is Gold (C. Pam Zhang)

As I'll say a couple times throughout this, a good chunk of my reading this year was inspired by the fact that I thought I was going to be running some games for Island Demeter; one was a Nancy Drew-inspired detective game that involved a farm, the other a Weird West cooking game. I still hope to run them. I reread Zhang's incredible novel in service of the latter, and it only redoubled my opinion that it is a really special thing, full of gorgeous sentences and complicated in the most bountiful ways.

Do You Dream of Terra-Two? (Temi Oh)

I started this year on my third reading of Do You Dream of Terra Two?, a fact I would have called auspicious if I didn't have this year. It's still an exceptional thing.

A Ranked Paragraph About Every Book I Read in 2021 (part 1: 2021 Books edition)

36) My Annihilation (Fuminori Nakamura) (2022)

A mystery about identity, electroshock therapy, subliminal messaging, and revenge. I was not fond. More on No! No Buzz

35) Grievers (adrienne marie brown)

I have not been a fan of adrienne marie brown's writing since reading Emergent Strategy. I think this book is clunkily written. (way too much) More on No! No Buzz

34) Everybody has a podcast (Except You) (The McElroys)

Maybe it's my fault for having started over a half dozen podcasts already, but I found this book pretty useless. Which is fine. They're fine to listen to talk. Honestly this short post is way more useful, however many years later.

33) Ida B. the Queen (Michelle Duster)

A sort of YA biography of Ida B Wells written, I believe, by her daughter. I found it peculiarly unilluminating and weirdly centrist? It's been a while, but I don't have a ton of positive vibes about the experience.

32) An Elderly Lady Must Not Be Crossed (Helen Tursten)

This slight mystery was super forgettable, honestly. The kind of thing that seems like it is playing on expectations that are completely alien to me.

31) Chlorine Sky (Mahogany L. Browne)

A young adult book-length poem about basketball and high school. It was fine.

30) Blood on the Fog (Tongo Eisen-Martin)

Eisen-Martin's third collection of poetry didn't hit as hard for me as his second (or even his first, honestly), but some of that is a headspace thing. The major theme seemed to be prayer, or theodicy. The man can still write an incredible line and wrench your head right around with an image. Definitely on a list to revisit at some point when I can process poetry again.

29) Comfort Me With Apples (Catherynne M. Valente)

A slight story, in the style of those feminist retellings of Disney/Brothers Grimm fairy tales. From what I recall, it's The Bible meets Wayward Pines. In all honesty nothing about it particularly stands out to me, in retrospect.

28) Detransition, Baby (Torrey Peters)

The popular trans book of the year, as far as I can tell, is about trans girls in NYC - one currently living her life, one who has detransitioned - who broke up. It's about family and bugchasing and queer community and navigating complex gender dynamics. I found it kind of insufferable, honestly.

27) A Spindle Splintered (Alix E. Harrow)

A slight story, in the style of those feminist retellings of Disney/Brothers Grimm fairy tales. From what I recall, it's Sleeping Beauty meets the multiverse. In all honesty nothing about it particularly stands out to me, in retrospect.

26) The Death of Francis Bacon (Max Porter)

I listened to this as an audiobook and know basically nothing about Francis Bacon except the screaming saints, so I probably have the worst possible take on it. It plays in the same space as Eternal Sonata, though it's more experimental fiction than High Anime. I can't say that it did much for me.

25) Kill The Mall (Pasha Malla)

An overeager narrator gets a residency at the mall, and shit gets weird. Told mostly in book report-style summaries, it has heavy "critique of consumerism" (as opposed to capitalism) vibes, which I generally find offputting. The hair that sprouts from the narrator's tongue, that floods the mall, that mind controls people? That part I was very cool with.

24) Remote Control (Nnedi Okorafor)

Sankofa (née Fatima) is a fourteen year old girl who, after a seed dropped from the sky on her favorite tree, gained power over death. She wanders Ghana looking for the seed that was stolen from her, pacifying those who are at their end and sometimes killing those who threaten her. There's something here that I expect I would have appreciated more had I read The Book of Phoenix & Who Fears Death, which share a world, and there is a solid emotional throughline which connects technological expansion to colonialism and the ravages of capitalism.

23) The Color of the Sky is the Shape of the Heart (Chesil) (2022)

A Zainichi Korean is about to be expelled from school in Seattle. She goes to a cabin and writes about her experiences about her first expulsion, from a Korean school in Japan. A fuller thing is this episode of No! No Buzz

22) Victories Greater than Death (Charlie Jane Anders)

A big goofy space opera trilogy-opener about a girl who knows she was born with an alien inside her getting called up to duty in a galactic conflict. Like a lot of YA the themes feel sometimes insultingly on the nose. The action is mostly good, the emotional moments tend to pay off, and mostly it's just kind of there, honestly.

21) Colorful (Eto Mori)

A spirit gets a second chance at life after dying through a lottery system that puts them into the body of a boy who recently attempted suicide. I don't read for plot and even I saw the turn coming in the first ten pages. It's a pleasant thing that touches on, well, the things I just described, and it has lingered with me more than I thought it would after reading it.

20) Matsutake Worlds (Faier & Hathaway, eds)

The only academic book I read this year, and I did so under the impression it was something similar to Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World rather than an essay collection (she is a member of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group that put this together and a contributor). I can't say I fell in love with it, or that it was equally compelling the whole way through, but I am glad I read it and hope I do more reading like it (in format if not in content) in the near future).

19) Rabbits (Terry Myles)

A spinoff of a podcast with aspirations of being one of those popular postmoderns, most obviously The Crying of Lot 49 without any of the fun shit (or pretension, if you dislike it). A gamer gets caught up in an Alternate Reality Game called Rabbits which is kind of like Michael Douglas' The Game, but more speculative by the end. I organized this list around this book, because it needed to be dead center. Neither good nor bad, just there and readable.

18) Aftermath (Preti Taneja)

Transit Books' Undelivered Lecture series is cool. This book was really complicated to read. More on No! No Buzz.

17) The Last Fallen Star (Graci Kim)

I unfortunately found out this year that the Rick Riordan Presents books are kinda solid. The way they scream #Representation made that seem really unlikely. In this, an adopted young girl named Riley Oh tries to trick her way into magic and ends up leaving her sister on the precipice of death. The prose sometimes hovers at the edge of grating (to someone for whom the YA Voice has grating as a default, which I attribute more to editors/publishers than authors), but it manages to stay on the right side of the line and tell an affecting story.

16) Heaven (Mieko Kawakami)

Kawakami's second book translated into English in as many years is, for my money, better than the widely-lauded (not wrongly!) Breasts and Eggs. A slim volume about a young boy with a lazy eye and an unkempt girl, both 14, who exchange notes and philosophies on the brutal bullying they both face. The central conflict seems to be between Kojima's martyr obsession - she is unkempt because her mother remarried a rich man and is seeking to reflect her father's poverty and struggles and finds weakness holy - and one bullies right wing nihilism - he bullies because nothing means anything, effects and causes are decoupled, so the strong cull the weak because they are able. As a left nihilist I tend to read books as being refractions of the mode of production, every one of them capable of showing us how social relations are structured by the material conditions that underly them. To that end, this is a pretty successful one, full of what we might call (un)sympathetic characters who have recognizable motivations that speak to the ways in which society amplifies those motivations. Plus I think I remember the sentences being super clean.

15) Hao (Ye Chun)

A collection of short stories that I remember feeling pretty high on at the time that I read it, but which seems to have slipped away from with a lot of other things from this year, among them my ability to communicate with loved ones. Which is relevant, I guess, because the titular story is about a grad student who suffers a stroke and as a consequence can only say Hao, meaning good or well. I remember, vaguely, that Ye's writing has a kind of honest lyricism. I remember also that none of the stories felt extraneous or lacking in emotional weight. I wish I could remember more.

14) A Country of Ghosts (Margaret Killjoy)

I keep meaning to read more Killjoy, and this one somewhat suffers from my general dislike of Le Guin's The Dispossessed. Which is mostly about style, to be clear. I did quite like this despite that for other reasons, though. More on No! No Buzz.

13) Velvet Was the Night (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

This was probably the novel I was most disappointed I didn't like more, given how brutally hard I fell for Mexican Gothic in 2020 and how much of 2021 was defined by me finally exploring mysteries as a genre. I think in part that's because this book relies a lot more on character work, the aspect of Moreno-Garcia's writing I find the weakest, and probably just timing. The story of Elvis and the missing girl never really clicked for me. Which doesn't mean it isn't great; Moreno-Garcia is still an impeccaple stylist and genre chameleon, and can work her way through a sentence and a scene in a way I find joyous and surprising. Maybe on the reread.

12) Small Things Like These (Claire Keegan)

A morality tale in the Dickensian tradition that takes on a particular kind of systemic abuse of women in Ireland. All of the pieces are there for me to have not enjoyed this. I did, though. Quite a bit. More on No! No Buzz.

11) Folklorn (Angela Mi Young Hur)

I meant to read more Erewhon books this year, but. I'm glad I read this one at least. A woman at an Antarctic Research Station sees a ghost. The bulk of the novel traces her through her feelings of being haunted by folklore. It's an enjoyable read, full of melancholy and serious inquiry.

10) I'm Waiting For You (Bo-Young Kim)

A collection of four short stories, where the middle two are linked and the first and final are linked. The bookends are about a couple who use space travel as an attempt to time travel to meet each other, the first from one perspective, the final from the other. The middle stories are about gods and reminded me a lot of Ryu Mitsuse's 10 Billion Days & 100 Billion Nights. Maybe the only genuinely novel piece of SF I read this year.

9) The Swimmers (Julie Otsuka) (2022)

This book is pretty special, I think? More about it (and the ways it shifts perspective) on No! No Buzz. The rough idea: an underground pool develops a crack in it. An older Japanese woman's senility progresses.

8) The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu (Tom Lin)

Maybe the best surprise of 2021? I picked it up because I'm (theoretically) running a Weird West game for Island Demeter and because I wanted it to sell. The story of a man getting revenge across the West, it isn't quite as much of a standout as How Much of These Hills is Gold but it did, for me, capture and convey some really striking images of blinding landscapes and circuses and moments of action. The kind of book I found real joy in reading on a scene-level, which is pretty rare for me.

7) The Animorphs: The Visitor (K.A. Applegate)

A graphic novel adaptation of the second book in The Animorphs. H approved. I was genuinely happy to see that they got an artist who was not just willing to explore the horror of the transformations, but seemed excited about them. The best body horror I've read in years.

6) Under A White Sky (Elizabeth Kolbert)

Elizabeth Kolbert is new to me - as is most popular science, which I have been cursed to get into since becoming a cooking nerd - but I thought this journalistic travelogue of the anthropocene was well put together and engagingly written. Kolbert tells a handful of stories of travels to significant sites, whether of water rehabilitation, underground lake species preservation, CRISPR lab or atmospheric engineering facility, and walks through what people are doing in the face of, and against, the rapid acceleration of human-propelled climate change. She picks interesting stories to tell and tells them well, which is nice.

5) The Cook of the Halcyon (Andrea Camilleri)

In the second-to-last Montalbano book, Camilleri goes full Bond and Montalbano fucking hates it. A really good, though coincidental, precursor to Riccardino, these two books closing the door on an Inspector I kind of fell in love with this year felt really gratifying.

4) Summer Sons (Lee Mandelo)

Slow burn queer Appalachian street racing horror in the academy. It caught the horror of medium-sized college town perfectly, in my experience, although I'm not from Appalachia or anywhere near. Mandelo's style can be a little dense at times and it took me almost a hundred pages to really dive in, but once I did it held me revenant-tight until the very satisfying ending.

3) My Heart is a Chainsaw (Stephen Jones)

The best Scream since 2 (I mean the second season of the TV show, obviously). Small town metafictional horror with an excellent ending and a genuinely excellent protagonist that also happens to be really smart about horror film and convey that in a way that is believable from a protagonist who is of high school age? A special book, honestly.

2) Riccardino (Andrea Camilleri)

Montalbano's final mystery, written some decades ago and lightly revised not incredibly long before Camilleri passed. It's pure metafiction, with Camilleri pitting himself as Montalbano's ultimate antagonist and collaborator. The writing feels (appropriately) somewhere between the early Montalbano books, with their dense depictions of history and food, and the later books that read breezily and imply much more than they say. Both styles work for me surprisingly well, and seeing both ends represented as Montalbano says goodbye was a real pleasant surprise. With an ending on par with Calvino (I assume, never having read him) or Borges, it made me happy to have fallen in love with this series in this particular year.

1) Sorrowland (Rivers Solomon)

I fucking adore this book. The Deep didn't quite hit for me, but this story of a young albino Black woman who escapes from her utopian cult with her twins and discovers love and superfungal powers absolutely fucking wrecked me. It does my favorite thing in the world - utilizing the flow and signifiers of genre fiction to address complex, systemic realities - so well that I still kind of don't believe it can possibly be as good as I remember. It also does my actual favorite thing (putting words into sentences on a page in ways alternately compelling, evocative, frustrating, and reflective) excellently. Genuinely masterful.