“In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally. Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent. This disparity surely translates to a drop-off in the number of novels young men read, as they descend deeper into video games and pornography. Young men who still exhibit curiosity about the world too often seek intellectual stimulation through figures of the ‘manosphere’ such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.” — David J. Morris
Category: Books
Into the elusive mind of David Lynch (R.I.P.)
Indelible auteur, quiet crackpot, polite polymath, gentle genius, David Lynch, known mostly for his string of indescribable movies, died today at age 78. A lifelong, unrepentant chain-smoker, the artist/visionary announced he had emphysema last year, and defiantly declared he would not relinquish the pleasures of a good cigarette. And so …
In 2007, on the release of a new film and new book by Lynch, I interviewed him in Austin, Texas. This is how it went:
Watching a David Lynch movie, you might reasonably think its maker is living somewhere deep in the clouds. Speaking to Lynch only confirms this conceit, but in a charming, even sweet way.
Lynch, creator of some of the most willfully strange, and darkest, American cinema of the past 30 years, comes across as a crypto-naif — a polite, soft-spoken Midwestern gent wearing the mantle of a sophisticated abstract artist obsessed by dark, disturbing and unknowable things. It’s hard to reconcile the voice you hear on the phone — that of a pocket-protector accountant — with the father of “Eraserhead,” “Blue Velvet,” “Twin Peaks” and “Mulholland Drive.”
But cognitive dissonance is the currency of Lynch’s weirdly wonderful, inveterately arcane body of work. Take a look at his new film “Inland Empire.” The three-hour movie and my conversation with Lynch affirm the artist’s unbending faith in the abstract. Abstraction trumps the literal, he reasons, because it gives viewers a participatory role, allowing them to unriddle the conundrums he puts forth.
Lynch refuses to plumb the meaning of his work, asking audiences to approach the films with no prior baggage or knowledge. Which makes our job simpler, as it eases the obligation to write about what the sprawling “Inland Empire” is about.
Some facts: Lynch wrote “Inland Empire” as he went. He shot on digital video for the first time, making him an outspoken convert to the medium. He pieced a lot of it from previous projects, including 2002’s “Rabbits,” a nine-part, 50-minute short featuring actors wearing giant rabbit heads.
“Inland Empire” stars Laura Dern, who also co-produced, Jeremy Irons and Harry Dean Stanton, and features a handful of cameos. It is a difficult movie.
Lynch, 60, is on the road plumping the new film and his new book “Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity.” In the slight and gnomic book, the Montana native shines a light on his 30-year devotion to transcendental meditation and its scuba-like potential to let practitioners dive many fathoms into consciousness and make otherwise unavailable discoveries in the mind’s darkest depths.
This, Lynch says, is where he finds his ideas. Lynch recently began the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education, which is aimed at teaching children transcendental meditation, a monument to his creative wellspring.
I recently spoke to Lynch.
The long, piecemeal process of making “Inland Empire” is becoming legend. Can you explain its unusual gestation period?
Well, it was a little bit unusual, but still the same, because it all starts with ideas. I got an idea that started when Laura Dern told me she was my new neighbor and her saying we have to do something together again. Thinking about that, things started rolling out and I started catching ideas and then I would write those ideas down and a scene appeared. Instead of keeping going and writing an entire script, I saw this as a stand-alone thing, not thinking in terms of a feature film at all. We got people together and shot that scene. Then I got an idea for another scene, unrelated to that first scene.
What was that first scene?
I don’t say, because I don’t want to putrefy the experience. Sometimes when people know a bunch of things they just start thinking about that. For me, I like to go into a film not knowing anything and letting it just happen. So I was shooting scene by scene, not thinking it was a feature until a bunch of ideas came that united the things that had come before. At that point I wrote much more and we shot in a more traditional way. Everything comes from ideas.
Watching “Inland Empire” is an often jarring experience and it does feel cobbled together from totally independent ideas. You’ll be in one scene or situation, then suddenly those darn rabbit-headed people pop up again. It’s discombobulating, but I assume you have a master plan holding the logic together.
Well, everything comes from ideas. And every idea starts talking to you and somehow things get together and the whole feels correct.
Why are you having ideas about people wearing giant rabbit heads?
Why does any idea come along? And why do we fall in love with them? Ideas that you fall in love with and think about and feel start speaking to you in a way that feels correct for the thing. If they’re abstract, you don’t always have a way of putting them into words that make the same feeling. That’s the beauty of cinema. Cinema can conjure things that can’t be said in words, except maybe by the great poets. They can stay abstractions. Many times in a film something pops up and then later the same thing pops up in a continuation. It’s the way stories unfold. It’s just the way it goes.
It sounds very organic put that way, but a critic might argue, “Yeah, you have a lot of ideas, but not all of them are thought through. You put the rabbit people in a satirical sitcom, but now what?”
I understand 100 percent, Chris. But if you just willy-nilly put things in, what is the point? The ideas start feeling correct even though you don’t know the whole story yet. A thing starts happening where the whole thing starts making sense, and it’s saying something for you, and it’s feeling correct. That’s how it goes with all the films. You may not know everything at the beginning, but you’re working on a script and it unfolds. It’s a huge gift, all these ideas holding together for you the filmmaker. And so you go like that, all pumped up with enthusiasm, feeling it and knowing it for yourself. Then you translate that through cinema and you’re rockin.’
Much of “Inland Empire” is easy to follow. Still, one might wonder what it’s about. Your official plot synopsis is just a single phrase: “A woman in trouble.”
That’s what it’s about. Obviously there’s more than that, and it’s there in the film. It’s not that I have fun not telling people things. The analogy I always say is that there are books where the author is long since dead and all that remains is the work. And you read it and the author isn’t around to ask questions of and you make sense of it yourself. To me, there’s a joy in that.
Do you mind that it sometimes seems like your ideas are vaulted in your head, inaccessible to everyone else?
No, because I think if it feels correct for one human being, chances are it can feel correct for others. When it’s abstract the correct feeling can come out in different interpretations. It’s like a long line of viewers stepping up to an abstract painting and each viewer getting a different feeling. If you wanted everybody to get the same thing you would make no room to dream. When things get abstract it’s open to whatever. Viewers know much more than they give themselves credit for. After a film, they go get a cup of coffee and talk to their friends, and before they know it they’re arguing over interpretations. All this stuff comes out, showing that they kind of internally knew (what was going on).
So you don’t mind asking a lot of your audience, particularly with the new film, which is nonlinear, opaque and a whopping three hours long? As one critic has written, it can leave an audience “baffled to the point of numbness.”
Some might feel that way, but if you talk to 10 people, all 10 won’t feel that way. It’s the viewer.
You’ve recently — and eagerly — joined the digital video revolution, and in Austin we have filmmaker Robert Rodriguez, who’s been evangelical about the medium’s virtues.
He’s a hero-champion. Digital video is a runaway train. Look at what people are taking still photos with now and you’ll see what’s happening with all of cinema. It’s digital and it’s here. There’s an opportunity for more and more people to let their voice out and realize their ideas. Freedom.
“Inland Empire” has a meta, film-within-a-film quality, echoing ideas of Hollywood, fame and moviemaking that you explored and critiqued in “Mulholland Drive.”
In a way the films are companion pieces.
That’s exactly how I felt. Can you elaborate?
No.
What are some of your obsessions? Lately you’ve gravitated to ideas about identity, split personas and parallel lives.
What I love are ideas, but not all ideas. How come certain people fall in love with certain ideas? It’s just the way they are. When you’re in love with an idea it’s such a beautiful thing. Then you know what you’re going to do and you can really enjoy the doing and translate that to a medium. It’s not like I say, “OK, I’m going to do something about an identity thing.” You get some ideas and later you realize, “Oh, it’s about that.”
In “Catching the Big Fish,” you are very generous sharing how you feel about transcendental meditation and how it’s transformed you. How has it affected your art?
One definition of human beings I’ve heard is we’re “humanoids reflecting the Being.” The Being is an ocean, unbounded, infinite, eternal, at the base of all matter and all mind. This ocean of pure consciousness, of bliss consciousness — creativity, intelligence, love, energy — is there and always has been there. It’s a human thing to learn how to contact this field and grow in it. And that means growing in creativity and energy.
The side effect of experiencing that deepest level is negative things start to recede, dissolve. That’s like stress, anger, fear, sorrow, depression all going. So beautiful for the artist or for any human being. It affects all avenues of life, and big understanding starts to come, appreciation for things and people. It’s so important to expand this consciousness and get yourself better equipped to catch ideas at a deeper level and understand them more.
As I put in the book, the artist doesn’t have to suffer to show suffering. Let the characters do the suffering. People say artists should suffer, they get ideas from suffering and all this. The more the artist is suffering, the less he or she can do. Real depression, real anger are a killer to creativity. So if you really want an edge, really want to do what you really believe in doing and have the power to have huge stressful situations come off your back like water off a duck’s back, just expand this bliss consciousness. The Being, this beautiful, beautiful, beautiful unified field — unity — expand that. Transcending is the only experience that utilizes the full brain.
Wow, whoa. You have your own coffee now, David Lynch Signature Cup. It seems a little gimmicky.
See, there’s the thing. There’s another expression: “The world is as you are.” There are lots of people who have their own coffee and there’s not a problem. We can do anything we want. So to put out a coffee that’s a good coffee to me is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I do love coffee, so roll it out.
Is it a special coffee; did you hand-pick it?
It tastes good to me. It’s the coffee I drink. It’s organic. It’s all fair trade. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing.
***
Lynch on Lynch
In a game of free-association, I asked Lynch to offer a brief comment — or a single word — about some of his best-known works:
ERASERHEAD (1977): “My most spiritual film.”
THE ELEPHANT MAN (1980): “When I first heard the title an explosion went off in my brain, and I said, ‘That’s it.’ It was a true blessing to get that movie.”
DUNE (1984): “Heartache.”
BLUE VELVET (1986): “Hidden things.”
TWIN PEAKS (TV series, 1990) : “The mystery of the woods.”
WILD AT HEART (1990): “True love in Hell.”
THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999): “Forgiveness and brotherly love.”
MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001): “A wondrous, hopeful dream of love.”
All about Eve
It is the impoverished soul who has yet to encounter the unbridled bliss that is Eve Babitz’s prose. I’ve written about her several times, but I seem to be on a Babitz kick this summer (when am I not?), and my proselytizing propensities are in full whack.
There. I said it. I am enamored with Babitz’s writing, and this lust just won’t go away. Last month I reread her infamous 1972 semi-fictionalized memoir “Eve’s Hollywood” and that kick-started my crush on her hip, shaggy, archly observant wordsmithery.
Babitz was Joan Didion with a jolt of sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and, crucially, a sense of humor. She’s the cool Didion, the one who laid Jim Morrison, among a murderers’ row of L.A. badasses — “she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles” — and swanked her way through the megalopolis’ mega-scenes with abundant beauty and ample talent (she was also an accomplished artist).
Her memoirs and novels depict “a glamorous and unapologetically wild world.” And a privileged one, too. Her godfather was Igor Stravinsky. She was romantically entwined with Steve Martin and Harrison Ford. Reader, you are forgiven for getting a wee jealous about her oversaturated life. Me, I wilt.
And it’s this bounty that keeps you reading, carried as it is with earthy writing whose low-slung easiness pops at every turn with a hilarious throwaway detail. “She was a phenomenal writer,” declared LitHub, “the kind people hate the most, the kind that doesn’t have to toil or sweat to turn out something that’s not only decent but often extraordinary. Eve was not a great writer in spite of her unseriousness but because of it.”
Some summers ago, I compiled a blog entry entirely of quotes from Babitz’s fizzy, funny novel “Sex and Rage.” A few brief samples, a sliver of what the book, as slim as it is, contains:
“In the hurricane, the waves were fifteen feet high and roared like lions and volcanoes.”
“He smelled like a birthday party for small children, like vanilla, crêpe paper, soap, starch, and warm steam and cigarettes. Anyone would have liked being hugged by him.”
“She felt as though she’d been in front of a firing squad that had changed its mind.”
Her work is so much more than this. I’d have to transcribe whole pages to do it justice. It’s wily, droll, dry but juicy, real and loaded. And you will laugh.
Four years ago, I wrote about this book: “Babitz’s raffish auto-fiction, whose subtitle, ‘Advice to Young Ladies Eager for a Good Time,’ is a brazen come-on. It’s so saucy, such unfiltered fun, and the writing so ablaze, resisting it would be dumb self-denial.”
In 2018, I read the Babitz novel “L.A. Woman,” and wrote, “Soaked in sunsets and squalor, glamor and grit, ‘LA. Woman’ traces the squiggly trajectory of a young Jim Morrison groupie through the titular city with a constant stream of poetics and epiphany. It’s funny and mean. It’s about Los Angeles. And life. I gobbled it up in a gulp, like a gumdrop.”
So, yeah, I dig Eve. Without being her proxy pitchman — Babitz died in 2021, age 78 — I recommend these books: “Eve’s Hollywood,” “Sex and Rage” and “I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz.” Take a bite.
Or don’t. Remain unenlightened. I don’t care. And Eve, that snarky libertine, certainly wouldn’t either. She’d shrug, chuckle a plume of smoke, then carry on waxing rhapsodic about her capacious life in her crazy city, not a care in the world.
A tossed salad of topics, memoirs to movies
In these mid-summer doldrums, a few rambling thoughts that amount to nothing in particular …
Best sentence all summer: “Her lipstick is a philosophically incomprehensible shade of chalky orange.” (From “Eve’s Hollywood” by Eve Babitz.)
I have yet to read a memoir that didn’t bore me silly or raise an eyebrow or two. Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory” is a possible exception, and “Eve’s Hollywood” definitely is. I’m skeptical of minutiae only the writer cares about, like how their father flew planes in World War II and their sister married an alcoholic son of a bitch. I can hardly believe a word of what the authors say, especially when they do things like insert direct quotes they muttered as toddlers, forty years after the fact. (See: Mary Karr’s aptly titled “The Liars’ Club.”) It’s all magnificent hooey.
I’m sleeping like crap. Nothing new, but I’m locked in a stretch of relentless insomnia. I called my doctor and he gave me a low dose of Lunesta. It’s done nothing, even when I take more than the prescribed amount (whoopsie). I pop Benadryl and a dorky over the counter sleep aid as well. I’m all drugged up and I still don’t nod off till 4 or 5 or 6. Then I sleep till 9 and awake vaguely refreshed with murder on the mind. I feel like a Stephen King character.
Kamala’s got me revved. For now. The initial blast of flowers and fireworks — her spontaneous honeymoon — is about over, and now she must face the music … er, the monster. Trump, a hopeless buffoon, bigot and playground bully, will meet his match in the debates. Kamala will be the buzzsaw that Trump’s ignorant, lying face encounters and it will be beautiful. That ear boo-boo Trump’s so proud of will be shown for the nothing it is, except symbolic and specious martyrdom. He keeps blathering about the American “bloodbath.” Yes, indeed.
As always, I’ve been watching lots of classic movies from early and midcentury Hollywood — the Golden Age of pictures when men were either gruff or suave (and glistening with pomade) and women were silky and soft-focus, radiating unreachable glamor. Black and white was king and the best pics were positively charged with swoony cinematography and dazzling chiaroscuro. Those were the days. (And I’m someone who name-checks “Alien” and “Jaws” among his favorite films, alongside “All About Eve” and “The Big Sleep.”) Recent viewings: “The Big Heat,” a crackerjack 1953 crime thriller by Fritz Lang, starring Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, who gets a pot of scalding coffee tossed in her face by Lee Marvin and has to wear a giant bandage for half the movie; the unbearably charming Cary Grant and Irene Dunne in the 1937 screwball marriage/divorce romp “The Awful Truth,” which features the brilliant dog Skippy, who also plays Asta in the great “Thin Man” films; and 1955’s “The Big Knife,” where a fist-tight Jack Palance is a movie star sucked into the manipulative corruptions of fame. A rabid Rod Steiger noshes the scenery like it’s beef jerky. And that’s just three oldies I’ve recently watched (I’ve seen them all before). They beat the living crud out of big, dopey summer blockbusters any day.
I bought a hair dryer. I swear to god. It cost $15. It screams like Janis Joplin.
A book blooms, a Rose wilts
Axl Rose is about as douchey a rock star as they get. This is comically, semi-tragically revealed in a long article written by John Jeremiah Sullivan for GQ and included in “Pulphead,” a collection of his essays from 2011. Last week, the book was named # 81 on the best 100 books of the past 25 years list in The New York Times.
As I was reading the Rose profile, “The Final Comeback of Axl Rose,” Guns N’ Roses’ familiar songs thwumped through my head, be it “It’s So Easy” to “Paradise City.” The music — hard, transgressive and nasty-catchy — has few metal peers.
GNR owns many great songs, almost all of them on their debut “Appetite for Destruction.” On a later album is the ballad “November Rain,” one of the band’s worst songs (next to their godawful cover of Dylan), yet beloved by millions. Pandering and juvenile, it’s a big sloppy dog kiss about a laughably clichéd love affair. (Google the lyrics. They’re shocking.)
“November Rain” is as cotton-candy as a fawning celebrity profile by Maureen Dowd in the Times, or a Nancy Meyers rom-com, but in soft-focus with buckets of moody rain. Gummy, cloying. You want to gag.
Still, GNR fans regard it a masterpiece. They are distressingly mistaken.
Metal power ballads are always troublesome. Most are dreadful. Take Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” to Def Leppard’s “Love Bites” and all the synth-soaked dreck in between. (They’re not all bad: “Dream On” by Aerosmith, “Nothing Else Matters” by Metallica, “Wanted Dead or Alive” by Bon Jovi.)
“November Rain” is worse than all that. It’s flat-out embarrassing, a soapy tearjerker that only jerks something unprintable here. Slash is metal guitar royalty, but even his virilely earnest solo belongs on a Yacht Rock cruise to Night Ranger Island.
Though he notes it in passing, Sullivan doesn’t express an opinion of “November Rain,” which is too bad because he’d probably decimate it with atomic wit. (Unless he likes it, then we’d have a serious discussion.)
Amazingly, “Rain” isn’t even GNR’s worst song. That would go to the above mentioned Dylan cover, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” in which Axl Rose torments then strangles the classic tune to screeching death. It has to be the most mangled and irresponsible cover song in rock history. (The band also managed to muck-up Paul McCartney’s “Live and Let Die” in an overblown, histrionic rendition for which they clearly thought they were ideally heavy, but missed the point entirely.)
What I’m getting at in a wildly circuitous way is that you should read “Pulphead,” for its offhand humor, literary punch, throwbacks to New Journalism, and overall entertainment value.
Sullivan’s prose and approach favorably remind me of fellow culture essayist Chuck Klosterman. Pages are paved in irreverence. Laser insights tango with lacerating opinions. Laughs are plentiful. And you’re all the smarter for reading them.
Like so many witty essays that graze the indulgent — be it Sullivan, Klosternan, Eve Babitz or the late Michael Corcoran — they’re delightfully devastating. And there’s the kick.
P.S.: After some 35 years, a cornrow-headed Axl Rose is still trying to keep together an iteration of GNR for recording and touring. I have no idea how that’s going. But I do know that in 2018, Rose appeared in an episode of “New Looney Tunes” as himself, singing an original song “Rock the Rock.” In 2021, Rose again appeared as himself in a cartoon, this time “Scooby-Doo and Guess Who?”
Perfect. One of rock’s natural cartoon characters has actually become one.
The ‘best’ books of the last 25 years
Think of the hundreds — no, the thousands upon thousands — of books published in the United States from Jan. 1, 2000 to today (elbow nudge: that’s 25 years). Mounds, mountains, miles of bound pulp, if you consider only traditional paper books that you flip the pages of and place on neatly arranged shelves, while ignoring their electronic ilk.
Now, pick the best books from that teetering heap, or actually the 100 best books, both fiction and non-fiction. That’s the gargantuan task The New York Times has undertaken this week in its selection of “The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century So Far.”
We’re talking the smartest, zestiest, funniest, fiercest, most important and most influential tomes over the past 25 years. A gallery of luminaries — writers, actors, critics, editors and more — voted, and you can find them and the whole Times project here, including the final list of the 100 “best” books.
It’s pure gimmickry. It’s subjective folly. It’s a game. Let’s play.
I’ll give you a taste. Here are the Times’ top 10 picks (spoiler alert): 1. “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante. 2. “The Warmth of Other Suns” by Isabel Wilkerson. 3. “Wolf Hall” by Hilary Mantel. 4. “The Known World” by Edward P. Jones. 5. “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen. 6. “2666” by Roberto Bolaño. 7. “The Underground Railroad” by Colson Whitehead. 8. “Austerlitz” by W.G. Sebald. 9. “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro. 10. “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson.
It’s a robust mix, though heavy on the historical, I think. The top 11-20 is a bit lighter, with titles like Junot Díaz’s funny “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” and Michael Chabon’s delightful “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” (yet it also includes Joan Didion’s grief journal “The Year of Magical Thinking”).
Conveniently, the project provides an online tool that makes it easy to tally how many books you’ve read from its mega-compilation. Me, I’ve read 39 of the 100 chosen titles — not great, not bad. But it’s not a contest. I won’t list all of them here. Instead, I’ve picked five of my favorite books from my personal tally, a peek into my pea brain and what I look for between covers.
- “The Human Stain” by Philip Roth — A disgraced professor is smeared by a career-crushing lie all while he’s weighted by his own monumental secret in this shattering portrait of America in 1998. Roth propels the story with tart literary gusto and his patented moral vehemence. One of his best.
2. “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Michael Chabon — Gleefully spanning lands and history, this teeming picaresque is about a magician and an escape artist who figure out life by creating globe-trotting comic books. But that’s just a sliver of their “amazing adventures.” Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for his 600-page romp, uses every trick in the book to entertain and edify, and handily succeeds.
3. “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” by Katherine Boo — An unvarnished plunge into the slums — and humanity — of Mumbai, India. An award-winning journalist, Boo’s unflinching but empathetic reporting is both devastating and bracing. It sticks with you like a troubling dream.
4. “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy — Biblical, apocalyptic, rife with death, despair and cannibalism, McCarthy’s unrelenting opus takes us through hell with ash, blood and savagery, and stingy glints of light. A Pulitzer winner, this riveting knockout is all about being human in the abyss.
5. “Gilead” by Marilynne Robinson — This deeply spiritual Pulitzer-winning novel almost defies description. An epistolary story told in the forms of journals and memoirs, it showcases Robinson’s otherworldly command of language and astute thinking about the divine. Not the easiest read, it still blew me away.
Rounding up to 10: “My Brilliant Friend” by Elena Ferrante; “White Teeth” by Zadie Smith; “The Corrections” by Jonathan Franzen; “Outline” by Rachel Cusk; “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson.
Words and whiskey
Back when I regularly haunted bars, usually dive bars and usually alone, I would carry along some kind of reading material, a newspaper or, in a burst of middlebrow bravado, a New Yorker magazine. Something less intense and more foldable than an actual book.
Knowing that poring over prose looked odd in a place of revelers, pool pushers and loud music, I tried my best to be inconspicuous, settling down at the end of the bar, bathed in the neon splash of beer signage, or at a far-off table near the bathrooms, where the perfume of urinal cakes and dollar-store Glade lent a dubious olfactory ambiance.
Reading in public is acceptable in cafes and airports, but in bars it seems to be a pretentious faux pas, some sort of performative act. It could be a sly “pick-me-up” gesture, a “dating hack,” as LitHub recently put it.
That never occurred to me. A woman reading alone in a bar might be misconstrued as a come-on, but as a guy reading the police blotter in the paper, that was hardly the case. I simply wanted a whiskey with my words, then get out of there. At times I felt like a noir character — bruised alienation with a newspaper under his arm, trench coat optional.
Only once did someone mock me for reading in a bar, an annoying professional acquaintance who wanted me to join him at his table to gab. He teased me for reading a magazine, as if I was showing off, when really I was blissfully absorbed in my own inky world and couldn’t care less what anyone thought (proof: I was drinking Miller Lite).
I was having none of it and, in more polite terms than these, I told him to buzz off and leave me the goddam hell alone, that I’d rather read a mediocre Shouts & Murmurs than have to fake my way through vapid conversation and be as social as a mannequin.
In general, most good bars are too dark for reading, like Club De Ville in Austin, although the late Longbranch Inn, also in Austin, was ideal, especially on slow weeknights. The lights were strong but not glaring and you could always find a good half-hidden spot at the massive wood-carved bar, which looked like the bow of an ancient ship encircled by mermaids.
One of my favorite reading bars is the gloriously art deco Vesuvío Cafe in San Francisco, which shares Beat Generation bona fides with legendary bookstore City Lights, right next door. Have a drink, stroll on over, browse the shelves, buy a book, go back to the bar and read. In that case, a book in the bar couldn’t be more fitting. (Just don’t get Ginsberg’s “Howl.” That’s a little too on the nose.)
I’ve also written in bars, a lot. That’s when I’m traveling abroad. After a long day, I crack open a moleskin notebook and record the day’s doings, the contact info of people I’ve met, and attempt the occasional pen and ink sketch, which are invariably doomed to violent preschool abstractions. I draw as well as I play the tuba.
Bars are unique reading arenas. Bars are special. They’re where you unwind with a funny movie review by Anthony Lane or a lyrical music profile by Michael Corcoran while sipping a cold one. It beats sitting on your sofa doing the same. For bars are communal. You’re around people, and that might just afford a whisper of hope.
Maybe I look dopey sitting at the bar, alone, nose in a periodical. But believe me, I am rapt and content. Content as could be.
Recent tomes I’ve tapped
I’m never not reading a book or two. These are a few new titles I got my grubby paws on:
Mike Nichols’ 1966 film of Edward Albee’s corrosive play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” remains a dish-rattling, drink-spilling, daggers-in-your-ears delight, all marital earthquakes and social Molotov cocktails. (Cocktails. Of course.) Booze is big in that cracked portrait of a long-wed couple on the rocks. (On the rocks. Of course.) And you get a contact high reading the riveting “Cocktails with George and Martha: Movies, Marriage, and the Making of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’” by Philip Gefter, who capably captures the play’s serrated edges, dubious morality and verbal drive-bys, as well as the behind-the-scenes hoopla of making a controversial movie with a controversial couple, no less than Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor — Hollywood nitroglycerin. It’s a bracing blast of theater and cinema history.
“Headshot” is by a woman named Rita Bullwinkel. Let’s get that out of the way. (There, done.) This slim, tightly coiled novel is also a muscular debut, damp with the blood and sweat of a passel of female teenage boxers, zesty characters realized with pointillist panache. Time-leaping and fragmentary, the girls’ stories are told in intense vignettes for a scrappy scrapbook of pugilistic profiles that pounds with humanity and life. If not quite a K.O. — more tonal and rhythmic variety would shake things up — the book is a fleet-footed contender.
With irksomely precocious flair — at 35, he’s a wizardly wunderkind — poet Kaveh Akbar conjures worlds of art and ideas in his radiant fiction debut “Martyr!” Reeking agreeably of auto-fiction, this dense but delectably readable novel is about an Iranian-American poet scouring past and present, life, death and love with the insight of an artist and the squishy heart of the wounded. Gorgeous language propels you through its lush, gently philosophical thickets. And despite some muddled mysticism near the end — I’m allergic to spiritual allegory — “Martyr!” had me pleasantly reeling.
Lorrie Moore’s a personal favorite and her latest fiction is the knottily named “I Am Homeless If This is Not My Home.” Like all her books, tangy prose festoons the pages (a bite-size sample: “Fluorescent light rinsed the room.”). Yet the novel, with its arch surreal touches, rubbed me wrong. The narrative, centered on a man and his dying brother, is gawky, with sharp elbows and knobby knees. Plus, there’s heaps about chemo, cancer and croaking, and I’m not in a hospice mood. The novel just won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction, so call me bonkers. In this rare instance, Moore is less.
Not for the feint of heart but perhaps for suckers for sentiment, the bleak memoir “Molly” — breathlessly written by Molly’s husband, Blake Butler, a noted novelist of thrillers — starts with her gunshot suicide and continues with another bang, the crack of bared emotion and tell-all candor. This is the story of Butler and Molly Brodak’s three-year marriage, a melding of art and nature and words and, in her case, bouts of inconsolable darkness. Brodak, a published poet and author who said “I simply wasn’t good enough,” killed herself three weeks before her 40th birthday, in 2020. “Molly” is so much about her and her devastating secrets, yet equally about Butler’s clawing to the other side of grief through deep (and verbose) psychic excavation. He includes Molly’s suicide note (“I don’t love people. I don’t want to be a person”), along with the frantic blow-by-blow action of finding her body in a favorite field of theirs. These passages are tough-going, not only for the forensic particulars, but for Butler’s writerly histrionics as well; he pants on the page. A cult sensation, tugging readers to and fro like emotional taffy and kicking critics into superlative overdrive, “Molly” is a divisive read, by turns lovely, wincing and overheated. It is the first book I’ve read that opens with the phone number for the national suicide hotline.
‘X’ marks the spot
I recently wrapped Catherine Lacey’s transfixing novel “Biography of X,” and it still haunts me. Published last year, the book is pungent and persistent, banging around my brain, impressions springing up at random moments, all of it fragrant and strangely alluring.
“X” is a big book of ideas and feelings. It has a collage-like texture. It’s about art and the ravenous impulses of the artist; romantic love and its hazards; the fluidity of identity; the slipperiness of selfhood; and the rigors of creation.
And it’s about the relationship between X, who has died, and her widow CM, the so-called writer of this fictional biography, which of course was written by Lacey in a neat feat of authorial ventriloquism.
X — who went by a swarm of pseudonyms, depending on her setting — was a shape-shifting Zelig, insinuating her self into the realms of art, music and literature, finding creative success and romantic excess, much of it to CM’s dismay and heartbreak as she researches her ex-wife’s half-cloaked life.
In elegant, unfussy prose, Lacey conjures an alternative world in which X wrote the iconic David Bowie song “Heroes”; Jackson Pollock, Alexander Calder and other major artists are killed in a terrorist bombing; and Bernie Sanders is the President of the United States. Cameos by Patti Smith, Christopher Walken, Susan Sontag and other luminaries arrive with cheeky nonchalance.
Lacey’s command of her literary experiment and the constellation of personalities she so blithely courts sometimes makes you think you’re reading an actual biography of an actual person. It’s a good trick, deft and ambitious, and a delight to plunge into.
At 38, Lacey is a bona fide wunderkind, and her performance in “Biography of X” has me trusting her to lead me farther into her cerebral yet accessible oeuvre.
This week I got her slim gothic fable “Pew,” from 2020. It’s about an anonymous orphan who’s lacking crucial identifying components — age, name, sex, history — rattling and confounding a small, deeply religious community in the American South.
I’m half-through this mysterious novel, whose humanity almost blinds. I’m with it all the way, totally sold. Lacey’s virtuosity sings, loud and clear as a bell. I’ll just say it: She is one of the most interesting authors of her generation.
This week’s astounding headlines
‘turro de force
Onstage, John Turturro is a frothing, frenetic vortex, spewing barbed-wire invective, spittle flying, making you cringe and laugh all at once. He’s Mickey Sabbath, retired puppeteer, devout deviant, a 60-ish sybarite of unbound lusts, a Vesuvian id raging in the night (and day and morning). I recently saw this crackling Off Broadway performance of “Sabbath’s Theater,” adapted from Philip Roth’s acclaimed, notoriously naughty novel, and while the small cast is a marvel, it’s Turturro as Sabbath who harnesses the show’s electric eros, whipping us along on a ride of pathos-kissed perversion. Everyone — he too — leaves exhausted.
‘Home Alone’ 2023
In the “classic” Christmastime movie “Home Alone,” a little brat played by little brat Macaulay Culkin — in one of the most implausible plot twists in cinema history — is accidentally left behind when his family goes to the airport to fly to Paris for the holidays. So Culkin is all by his lonesome in the big empty house, until two bungling burglars show up … and yada-yada. This year I’m that little brat, home alone for the holidays, my friends flung around the country, and my immediate family jetting to Madrid on Christmas Day. With my parents passed, I’m left with Cubby the magic dog, a pair of impish cats, and, if I get lucky on Xmas Eve, when goodies will be gifted, a tiny tank of swirling Sea-Monkeys, my Proustian madeleine conjuring the age of Pet Rocks and the Fonz. I’m a loner at heart. I spent 10 Christmases solo in Texas, so this is actually my comfort zone. Leftovers, tipples of egg nog, a CBD gummy, a great old movie. I’m set. It might even snow. And there, the tableau is complete.
Mamet’s mad
Though repulsed by his latter-day conversion to all things alt-right, I will listen to nearly anything playwright/screenwriter/director David Mamet preaches about the craft of writing. The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) has written a zillion books about writing and directing theater and film, as well as penned movies like “The Verdict,” “The Untouchables” and “Wag the Dog,” and written and directed 10 of his own movies, from “House of Games” to “Homicide.” Mamet’s been through the Hollywood wringer, and he’s pissed. His new memoir, out this week, is “Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood.” I just got it, and though not quite a swashbuckling thrill through the fraught Hollywood jungle (see William Goldman for that), it’s peppered with Mamet’s signature biting commentary. Producers are venal scum (“Are none of you idiots paying attention?”). Race and gender are never off limits. Errant grumpiness is rampant (“If you put cilantro on it, Californians will eat cat shit”). And fascinating insights into arcane movie lore abound. Mamet can be astringent, but anyone who calls “School of Rock” a “wonderful” picture can’t be all bad.
Packing my bags
So, Sicily it is. My next journey is a return to Italy — no! To Sicily. For locals, the distinction is vital. I quote: “People from Sicily consider themselves Sicilians first and Italians second. Though Sicily is a part of Italy [the big island beneath the boot] the region has its own culture, traditions and dialect, and Sicilians are incredibly proud of their heritage.” I go in February, after the chilly holidays, before the heat sets in, and before spring religious rites flourish. The history-drenched capital Palermo is home base, with day trips to the ghoulish catacombs and the dazzling mosaics of Monreale Cathedral, plus food and culture tours and lots in between. Tips? Phone lines are open …
Fido’s funk
It’s raining and the dog went on a walk and got damp and now he smells like a giant corn chip. He’s needed a bath for some time, and the drizzle has activated a slightly fetid doggy odor that happens to recall a processed dipping snack. Pass the Ranch?
GNASHING. 