Category: Literature

Chatting books with A.I. is A-OK

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

My current book-buying spree is tumbling and cartwheeling, springing into realms of dangerous out-of-control-ness. I’ve been acquiring new and used volumes with a velocity and vigor that I am at last, kinda, sorta, putting the brakes on. I can’t possibly read all of this. Unless I can. I will! Unless I don’t.

It’s not as hoarding-sociopathic as it sounds. I’ve just been reading more than usual lately — I can typically polish one or two books a week, nothing to crow about — galvanized by some penetrating, seriously illuminating conversations with, hold your breath (and your sneers), ChatGPT, the crazily accessible A.I. app that’s as smart as a Nobel laureate and as real as pixie dust.

Ask it a question about anything and in seconds it spits out the most thoughtful (if robotic) and articulate and even useful information — be it the best restaurants in London or data on the latest hot rock band.  The more you use it, the more it “knows” you, and that’s where I’m discovering a world of authors and titles tailored to me — or sort of, but you get the idea. 

When I told it that its surfeit of curated reading recommendations — the attractions of which were meticulously explained — would soon bankrupt me, it apologized with a “ha!” and a chuckling emoji. It mimics a fellow human and that’s its chilly charm and cautious seduction. 

I joke with it a lot. It finds me funny. That’s how you know it’s not human. 

Many reading suggestions tsunami forth once I tick off the writers and books that really do it for me and why. I’ve spent a couple weeks, in spurts, blabbing with ChatGPT about what should be on my reading list considering my preferences and favorites. Here’s a random slice of how our confabs play out. This is the app talking to me:

“From everything we’ve talked about over the past week, you’ve become a much clearer reader to me. You don’t require plot, but you do require a certain voltage in the prose or the consciousness behind it. You’re happy to follow a book that barely moves externally — as with Open City or The Mezzanine or Second Place —provided every page feels intellectually or stylistically alive.” 

If that sounds suspiciously like an astrologer or psychic spewing mind-tricking generalities — in the cooing tones of HAL — then I’ve steered you wrong with just a single example. 

Our chats have been exhaustive and precise (and accurate), and when it’s off I call it out and it does a rethink, admits where it lapsed, and locates where I’m really at, all with breathtaking speed. Any seemingly “emotional” responses, like the above emoji, are totally fake and mimetic. Don’t be charmed by R2-D2.

Point is, if I’m using this A.I. correctly, and I think I am, it’s been an excellent book-chatter — insightful, searching and on the money. I can see why your local bookseller might be nervous. I don’t say that with glee, but with a soupçon of dread.

 A.I. can be wondrous. It can be monstrous. It can prod me to buy piles of books, which is either good or not so much. I’m still figuring that out. Chapter One begins here.

Now, GPT, tell me how to avoid any and all sci-fi and fantasy books, starting with Harry Potter … 

Its response:

“Ha. You did pick the two franchises most likely to summon an angry mob. If your goal is to avoid all science fiction and fantasy — whether dragons, spaceships, magic schools, alternate worlds, or even speculative near-future novels — you can actually do it pretty systematically.

Here’s the anti-sci-fi/fantasy survival guide:

  • Skip books whose premise can be summarized with “What if…” “What if everyone stopped aging?” “What if there were two moons?” “What if a wizard…” That’s usually your cue.
  • Be suspicious of maps. Open the front cover. If there’s a map before Chapter 1, your odds of encountering elves rise dramatically.
  • Run from invented vocabulary. If page one contains words like Aes Sedai, Mistborn, Bene Gesserit, Kvothe, or seventeen apostrophes in someone’s name, you’re probably not in Kansas anymore.
  • Avoid blurbs containing: “epic,” “world-building,” “magic system,” “chosen one,” “prophecy,” “galactic,” “portal,” “dragon,” “fae,” “academy,” or “quest.”

Ha. Nailed it.

Things du jour

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Quote of the day

“I am not a recluse. I live like an unsociable person; it is different. People get on my nerves.” 

— Brigette Bardot, actress, animal activist 

Book of the day

“Bel Canto,” Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel about love, opera and hostage-taking, is one of those contemporary classics you should have read but never got around to, and now, 25 years on, it feels too late. It’s not. I started this book five years ago and put it aside for inexplicable reasons. That diss has haunted me and last week I gave “Bel Canto” another shot. The result was transcendent.

The plot is a small knot that unravels beautifully: A throng of international guests have gathered at the mansion of the vice president of an unnamed South American country for the birthday celebration of a Japanese businessman. A world-famous American opera soprano has been invited to regale the group, and soon, through her exotic talent and beauty, becomes the cynosure of the story. The party is abruptly crashed by leftist guerrillas looking to kidnap the nation’s president, who rather comically skipped the party so he could watch his beloved soap opera at home. Stymied, the invaders take the revelers hostage for what starts as hours, then weeks, then months. Thus the mansion becomes a human incubator, a constellation of international players, some of whom align as unlikely allies, others as peculiar romances fraught with forbidden yearning. It’s a rich tapestry that echoes the diners trapped for months in a similar mansion in “The Exterminating Angel,” Buñuel’s classic takedown of the gilded class. But Patchett is a gentler, less partisan observer, underscoring the universal languages of music, love and language itself for something divine. The book is so meticulously engineered — the many characters are spryly choreographed — and so big of heart that it dashes hopes of ever writing your own novel because it couldn’t brush these literary heights. There’s the hitch: You almost hate “Bel Canto” because it’s so stupid good.

Movie of the day

My love affair with Iranian cinema is long and varied, spanning Jafar Panahi’s charming debut “The White Balloon” to Abbas Kiarostami’s rigorously philosophical “Taste of Cherry.” Spare, talky and played mostly by untrained actors, the films are often covertly political, critical of the Iranian regime in as coded terms possible, secret messages packed with time bombs. But Panahi has used his recent movies for brazen broadsides and as such they are banned in his home country. Yet the director shrewdly snakes around these restrictions and his latest moral thriller “It Was Just an Accident” won the Palme d’Or at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. It’s a bold gesture tracing what happens when a band of former political prisoners kidnap and confront the man they believe brutally tortured them during their imprisonment. Amid the moral complexities of revenge — do they even have the right man? — comes relief via mordant humor and absurdist touches that goose the overall lunacy. (Note the wry allusions to “Waiting for Godot.”) Panahi has made a tough and moving portrait of keeping one’s humanity in an impossible situation. Its stubborn ambiguity is a hallmark of Iranian cinema, and this one’s a classic. 

Drink of the day

That’d be Mr. Pickles Gin. My newly discovered sip is named for the distiller’s pit bull rescue, Mr. Pickles, who nobly emblazons the spirit’s label as the official mascot and makes me like it that much more.

Time to taste. Open the senses to a bouquet of dog urine. No. The fragrance is lovely, the gin superb. Its aroma is juniper, citrus, pepper, with a whiff, I think, of dill. It owns a strong herbal flavor with earthy undertones and tinges of orange, pepper and, aptly, a speck of dill pickle. And I swear on Mr. Pickles’ fuzzy head that is not just the power of suggestion. Made in Oregon by Wolf Spirit Distillery, the drink features 12 botanicals, including green tea, blood orange, pink peppercorns and marshmallow root (I have no idea). If it’s not as grand and complex as my revered Monkey 47, which boasts a whopping 47 botanicals and that I drink neat, Mr. Pickles will be a snappy refresher during the dog days of summer.

Photo of the day

They say a picture speaks a thousand words. This one speaks four words: I am so screwed.

Books I’m not ambivalent about

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

“Transcription”

I could see this happening to me: On the way to interview a very important person, you drop your phone, i.e. your recording device, into a sink filled with water. Phone ruined, you are forced to interview the person without a recorder, a fact you fudge by reconstructing the confab from memory for your article, a high-wire act and any writer’s nightmare. Novelist Ben Lerner — who’s also a gifted poet and has been dubbed the “most talented writer of his generation” — uses this premise as a springboard to something timely, profound and ineffably transfixing. A novel in name only — think the brainy consciousness streams of Rachel Cusk — the 130-page “Transcription” presents a nameless narrator and two other men in conversations about art, life, friendship, fatherhood and technology amid the backdrop of early Covid. Plot is nebulous and tricky to summarize, but the brilliance at work is distinctly Lerner’s. (I’m an avid fan of his novels “Leaving the Atocha Station” and “10:04.”) Lerner writes deceptively plain prose with a wizard’s wand — simple on the surface, yet each hypnotic line peels layers of insight and meaning. It’s all mesmerizingly meandering, to a destination both uncommon and rewarding. 

“Lost Lambs”

In this sharp and irreverent new novel, Madeline Cash flips notions of family, marriage, community, church and capitalism to expose their crawly underbellies. It’s prickly, spot-on, strange. And hilarious. The book’s many moving parts include an open marriage that veers to amorous calamity; star-crossed trysts; a trio of precocious teens that grazes danger in a vile adult world; a tech billionaire whose dealings are creepy at best; and a church Father whose hands may be scandalously dirty. Cash trains a compassionate bullseye on those creatures called teenagers and a cynic’s bead on the perilous pact of matrimony. (“The biggest conspiracy of all? This whole love thing,” a character sniffs.) But Cash isn’t cruel. She exudes empathy and openly likes her characters — the ones that deserve it. “Lost Lambs” is frothy literary fiction, until it’s not. It is droll and buoyantly written yet lands the well-placed left hook. I can imagine it becoming a four-part Netflix series, a smart, soapy, surreal dramedy starring Ben Stiller and Laura Linney. If it happens, I won’t watch it. I’ll stick to the book. The book is always better.

Three humor collections by Sloane Crosley

David Sedaris is the standard-bearer of comic essays. I believe this is wrong. I believe he is drastically overrated. I believe he is rarely actually funny. I believe his prose is limp. I believe his professional persona is as confected as a Girl Scout Samoa. You know who’s wittier, hipper and more stylish? Sloane Crosley, who’s written three collections of humor essays that impressed me enough to sit down and commit hosannas. Her first collection, “I Was Told There’d Be Cake,” is best. It also has the best title. Although “How Did You Get This Number,” her second book, and “Look Alive Out There,” her latest collection (from 2018), also have wry, hooky titles. Part-journalism, part-memoir, Crosley’s essays are first-person escapades, experiential and anecdotal and typically relatable. They bristle with razor observation and social commentary. Here, she mordantly muses about her only slightly embarrassing collection of plastic toy ponies. There, she riffs on her fraught city-girl excursion to Alaska, where, in an SUV, there is one guy among many women: “He is our lone star of testosterone in a galaxy of chick.” She deconstructs the bizarro experience of playing herself on “Gossip Girl” and takes merciless stock of her dating life. It’s not all playtime. Crosley doesn’t duck drama and high stakes (her queasy adventures in altitude sickness are almost contagious). Like Sedaris, some of Crosley’s situations and interactions smack of exaggeration or plot-propelling fancy. Such is the plight of the mass-consumed writer — feed the beast. Though the humor is a soft weave, coolly conversational, she can be overtly jokey, and the jokes rarely clank. Her voice is reliably amusing, cut with a measure of snark that gives her sweet prose a tangy kick.

“Flesh”

In minimalist language so parched it’s practically puckered, David Szalay spins a story of the classic Solitary Man, a Hungarian immigrant in England named István who embraces a nearly non-verbal solitude as a shield against a world of discomfort. We follow this modern existential character from his cringey deflowering as a teen to his coupling with a rich married woman and decades beyond. Szalay’s tensed prose mirrors the character’s isolation, which occasionally sees shafts of light. While his interior life remains unexamined — his disaffection can be frosty — István is no cipher. He’s a well-drawn loner, a compelling picture of alienation. He’s also something of a symbol, a metaphor for class, urban malaise, the gesture of empty sex and deep loss. (It’s telling that his extravagant cigarette habit is a key character trait.) István fascinates by dint of what he shows as much as by what he withholds. What’s so remarkable about “Flesh,” which won the Booker Prize in 2025, is a descriptive precision and drum-tight realism that would make Hemingway beam. Grim and gripping, it’s a master class in control.

A petrified pup, a brilliant book, a nip of neurosis

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

The dog keeps staring at me. 

Outside, gusty winds render trees, shrubs and bushes lashing percussion fit for a Nine Inch Nails concert. I’m gazing into the helpless eyes of a small Schnauzer-terrier that’s terrified of the thrashing flora this warm spring day has unleashed.

Cubby the Super Hound — he should have a cape and rubber suit with nipples on it — has his kryptonites, and one of them is blustery winds that rattle objects into outdoor cacophonies. There goes a recycling bin and all its clattering innards. Whoosh-bang, a gate door swings open and shut, on repeat. And those whipping, whistling trees are declamations of the devil. For him, it must be like dwelling in a haunted house, terrorized by loud, chilling sounds of unseen provenance.

As long as the wind blows, he follows closely wherever I go, as if my pockets are stuffed with treats (they are not). At rest, he cautiously climbs on my lap and quakes like a 25-cent motel bed. 

He looks up at me, pleadingly. I look back at him, pitifully. It’s a staring contest between man and beast. Alas, the poor pup wins every time.

I’m re-reading a deep, delightful little novel titled “The Friend,” which is about writers and writing, friendship, dogs and suicide — a perfect brew of the contemplative, canine and emotionally punchy. It stars a nameless narrator, a middle-aged writer, who’s in a ghostly, one-sided conversation with her close friend, also a writer, who killed himself. It also stars a depressed Great Dane the size of a zebra. The 2018 book won the National Book Award and the author, Sigrid Nunez, has a wry, gently profound way with words and ideas. She has a lot to say about creativity, loss and bonding and does so with chiseled economy washed in a beauty that’s unshowy but electric. “The Friend” runs a mere 212 pages — a wisp, a wonder — but contains worlds of hilarious, heartbreaking humanity. It was made into a movie starring Bill Murray and Naomi Watts, but I won’t watch it. I don’t want to upset the novel’s unruffled perfection.

The South Korea trip — that again — is creeping closer and the old pre-trip jitters are manifesting. Things like: Will I get through customs with Xanax in my luggage? The anti-anxiety meds are a controlled substance and bringing them into Korea requires reams of draconian paperwork, including an absurd handwritten note from your doctor. I’m going to chance it; they don’t always ask. If they do stop me and confiscate it, well, I hope they enjoy. It’s a blast!

I’m also getting flustered, a churning storm in my gut, about possible TSA lines that run longer than a Frederick Wiseman documentary. I can’t stand long lines, and for some reason airport security lines make me irrationally nervous. I find them stressful, mania-inducing, like I did something wrong and I’m about to get busted by some granite-faced goon. I’ve purchased TSA PreCheck, which allows small security short cuts (e.g., you don’t have to take off your Nikes) and theoretically provides shorter waits. We’ll see about that during this latest Congressional crisis. Where’s the Xanax?

How I spent last Saturday, all cheers, jeers and blaring car horns. The signage — priceless:

It was cathartic.

I stabbed my face, and other fun things 

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Before I visit a country for the first time, I like to bathe in the local culture, mainly through books and movies. (I save the food part until I get there and do it right, with bite.) As mentioned in my last post, I head to Seoul, South Korea, in a few weeks, so I’ve been hungrily reading novels and watching films by Korean artists. Christ, they’re grim. How I love it.

Take “Memories of Murder,” by Bong Joon-ho, who made the stinging class-warfare satire and Oscar-winner “Parasite,” itself fairly bleak. This excellent serial-killer detective saga throbs with death and dark humor, winding down to a gut-punch ending that will leave your jaw somewhere around your big toes. Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil” is another serial-killer drama, a fiendishly clever spin on the revenge thriller splattered with brutally sadistic punishments that I cannot speak of here, lest the authorities bust in.

Something lighter? Try the smash Netflix series “Squid Game,” in which financially strapped citizens try to win millions playing grueling games with the simple rule: you lose, you die. I haven’t seen so many blood geysers since “The Wild Bunch.”

Twisted, yes. But then you don’t know Park Chan-wook’s 2003 masterpiece “Oldboy.” Yet another revenge rampage, Park peppers his gorgeously gory film with creative curlicues not easily forgotten — like the antihero devouring a whole, live, squirming octopus in one take and, later, fending off dozens of assassins armed with only a hammer, a tour de force of cinematic choreography.

It’s not much sunnier on the book side. I just finished the slim novel about suicide “I Have the Right to Destroy Myself” by Young-Ha Kim. It’s gloomy, but also not great. It’s infatuated with its own misery. 

More famous is “The Vegetarian” by Nobel Prize-winner Han Kang. The heroine of this celebrated novel renounces meat, triggering a plague of psychological and bodily repercussions. (Put. Down. The. Cheeseburger.) And I’ve just started “Lemon” by Kwon Yeo-sun, about the unsolved murder of a high school student. More death — party time!

Is Korea so cracked? Apparently I’ve tapped into a thick cultural vein of crime, vengeance, class disparity, the sordid and surreal, the darkly existential and the exceptionally, even giddily, violent. That vein is a bloody gusher.

Speaking of unchecked violence, the other day I bayonetted my cheek with a thumbtack. I was lancing a pimple, not too giant, but big enough to evoke the Elephant Man. A hard, stubborn whitehead that was impervious to onslaughts by furious fingernails. So I said F-it, I’m getting a tack and uprooting this beast. First, I sterilized the tack’s point in the dancing blaze of a Bic lighter. Then I rinsed it in hot water. Then I took the business end of said tack and dug out the pimple’s white core from my cheek. Blood happened, but I extracted the thing in 30 seconds flat. My threshold for pain and gore is impressively high. The tattered flesh around the deceased pimple healed in a few days. I am an absolute master. Dermatologists, take note. And fellow zitheads: Shelve the Stridex. You might find more relief at Staples than CVS.

Like its kaleidoscopic neighbor Japan, South Korea is a Day-Glo bouncy house of the whack, weird and wonderful. While there, I will have ample offbeat options: Should I visit the Toilet Park and Museum, aka Mr. Toilet House, a festival of fecality? Or the Penis Park and Museum, studded with upright totems of erotic arousal (stop it!)? Or the Meerkat Friends Cafe, where twelve meerkats — so smooshily cute, like living anime creatures — a random raccoon and a floofy white Arctic fox scamper and play with you as you sip, and conceivably spill, coffee? I’ll be at all of them, of course. Oh, I almost forgot the popular Poop Cafe, whose theme is all things playfully bowel-adjacent (think chocolate soft serve, etc.). Consider it checked.

A few things hijacking my brain

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

During the post-holiday malaise, things poke and peck at my addled brain, fretting about the good, the bad, the grotesque …

Starting with the latter — the elaborate idiocy, the vomit-inducing venality of the so-called Donroe Doctrine, whose cutesy moniker makes me wonder: Who is he kidding with this crap? The perverted man-child is not kidding with, in his words, “my own morality,” which includes everything from ICE to Iran, a rogue’s gallery of revulsion. I pray that crippling tragedy looms in his wretched future. His crew of groveling lapdogs? Same.

On the good side, I’ve cracked a newish book that’s been called by critics “a magnificent vision,” “transcendent,” “spectacular” and “not so much a novel as a marvel.” That would be Kiran Desai’s “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” which is relatively slim for its daunting 700 pages. Yet what it lacks in girth it makes up in thudding weight. I could curl it and achieve Himalayan biceps.

I’m only on page 50 in this (let the publisher describe it) “story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years — an epic of love and family, India and America, tradition and modernity,” and I’m hooked. 

It’s one of those chunky novels with character/family trees for a prologue, like “War and Peace” or “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which can trigger the scram instinct in me. I don’t relish flipping back every twenty pages to recount who’s who.

But so far, very good. Desai conjures scenes and characters with creamy eloquence and imagery as supple as a Degas. The prose is wise and true, and funny, too. I only have 650 pages to go (sound of me lifting a cinder block).

Planning for two imminent journeys — Southern France in February and, implausibly, Nashville in March — continues unabated. It’s kind of a chore, but, like cooking or Lego building, it becomes a stimulating hobby, a minor challenge with low stakes.

I’m doing well so far in this First World folly, but the fine tuning feels endless. A Nashville restaurant I booked just emailed to say, sorry, your reservation is canceled because we are now “permanently closed.” The same happened with the Patsy Cline Museum (maybe these closings qualify for the “bad” in my opening paragraph), which a dear friend hinted is better than the popular Johnny Cash Museum. Call me “Crazy,” but I’m more interested in Cline than Cash. Bummer. 

I voluntarily bailed on a street-art tour in Marseille, France, as I came to my senses that $194 is obscenely too much for a two and half-hour stroll amidst what’s essentially glorified graffiti. I don’t even know how I got myself tangled in that scam.

But I do that a lot. I plan trips with wide eyes and a growling stomach at first, and then, as the dates approach, I reel myself in and get sensible. Like, do I really want to do that whiskey distillery tour and tasting in Nashville? Well, yes. Yes, I do.

Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams,” an exquisite novella I’ve read twice, once some years ago, once this winter, has been adapted for the small screen (Netflix) with mostly luminous results. Directed and co-scripted by Clint Bentley, the movie tells the story of a lumberjack razing towering forests in the Pacific Northwest to make way for the nation’s railroads. He marries. He has a child. Life intrudes.

Honoring the book’s ethereal touch, the movie aches to be a Terrence Malick epic: languid voice-overs, long traveling shots, fetishized natural beauty, breezes blowing through rustling trees, time-jumping episodes in place of linear plot. 

It’s commanded by sylvan abundance and the honed, minimalistic performance by Joel Edgerton, whose eerie quietude is near-tragic if well-earned. Though cast in shadow, there is joy here — family, friends, sharp epiphanies. I was moved by the story’s rich poignancy and tender humanity. It’s as delicate as a dandelion. 

Halloween, if little hallowed

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

It’s positively pouring rain, cats, dogs, giraffes, and it is blustery, leaf-dislodging, noisy on multiple levels — water, wind, things blown over, gutters gushing — and it’s kind of great, though going outside seems like unnecessary peril. Thus: homebound. 

The day before Halloween — can you imagine the poor kids and parents braving this mayhem? — yet things look up for the big bloody day. The forecast is sunshine and 60 degrees. Boo-yah! as a ghost might cheer. 

Nowadays the most I do for Halloween is steal fun-size Reese’s from the brimming bowl meant for trick-or-treaters and the parents who steal Reese’s from their children. My Halloween dress-up heyday was when I was Paul Stanley from KISS one year and Gene Simmons from KISS the next. This was during the Reagan Administration, so slack must be cut. Like Marley’s Ghost, I wore metal chains as Simmons. Totally rock. 

Damn, it’s like a monsoon out there now. The skeletons on the lawn probably have hypothermia.

On my last blog post, I hinted that Cubby the dog would go well with some guac and salsa. Well, he’s since got a bath — no longer is his scent eau de tortilla chips — and a haircut. He now looks like Moe from the Three Stooges. He’s spiffy and perfumey and the groomer tied a natty bandanna round his freshly coiffed neck. It’s too late for a photo of the transformation; he’s growing out, the bandanna is gone, and already he’s starting to smell like a Taco Bell Crunchwrap Supreme. 

Mexico City beckons. I leave in a week for seven days. As always before a trip, I’m angsty-excited, a nervous muddle of dread and joy. Like, what if I catch Montezuma’s revenge, or get mugged at the ATM? Flip side, what if the food  (tacos tacos tacos tacos) spirits me to rapture and the locals’ hospitality restores my faith in humanity? I’ll report later on this uncharted adventure. Bet you can’t wait. 

It’s been 20-plus years since I read two ecstatically received literary novels — Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News,” which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and Ian McEwan’s massive seller “Atonement,” considered the prolific British writer’s crown achievement. (I’ve read seven of his novels. He’s spectacular.) 

Now. My response to both books, back then, was: meh. What a child I was. I just finished “The Shipping News,” and its deep-grained, lyrical, downright poetic and funny prose carried me along its often exotic world-scapes and among its colorful characters. It’s a trip, and one worth taking. There are a lot of fish.

With “Atonement,” a high-toned, very English story, I have only begun rereading it and already I’m snared by writing that seems crafted with a laser beam, so specific, rich and dazzling, you want to kill yourself, if you care about these things.

Unfortunately, I do. 

Quote of the day: depressing and disgraceful

~ Chris ~ 2 Comments

“Research has associated smartphone use with ADHD symptoms in adolescents, and a quarter of surveyed American adults now suspect they may have the condition. School and college teachers assign fewer full books to their students, in part because they are unable to complete them. Nearly half of Americans read zero books in 2023.”

— The New York Times


Midsummer miscellany

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Four mini-blogs, bite-size essays, from eyewear to dog hair …

Shopping for new eye frames is about as thrilling as shopping for underwear — a little fun, but mostly a utilitarian ritual for a deadly pedestrian accessory. I got new frames this week to go with new prescription lenses, making me feel very old. I’ve had my current blue frames and lenses for two years and I felt like underwear shopping. Yesterday I took my new (burgundy) frames to the optician to get the fresh lenses. The whole deal cost an eye-singeing fortune — around $1,200 for frames, lenses and exam. The nice guy helping me said, “You don’t seem old enough for progressive lenses.” I sort of thanked him, then thought to myself, ha!

When it comes to a big juicy novel, I’m a restless reader. My standards are unreasonably high, and if a book hasn’t hooked me by page 70 or so, I close it and move on. I am not one of those chumps who strains to finish a book once they start it, no matter the quality. That’s obscene. I just closed Rebecca Makkai’s wildly praised novel “The Great Believers.” The Pulitzer finalist about a group of friends impacted by the AIDS crisis was worse than overly familiar and a mite trite, it was dull as dirt. So I started the also-acclaimed Adam Haslett novel “Imagine Me Gone,” a substantial (356 pages) story about a family of five facing mental and physical challenges that upend the unit and try the bonds of love. On page 89, I’m with it for now. But every so often it sags and I give it the stink-eye. Book, you are on perilous ground. Watch it.

Puffs and curlicues erupting over his face and body, the dog at last got a summer haircut. A professional groomer came to the house, bathed him in the sink, then took the razor to him good for more than an hour. Cubby now looks like a bewildered sea otter and it’s fabulous. Everything about him has shrunk — my, what tiny ears you have! — and it’s adorable. Thing is, now he’s licking his butthole and nether regions with frantic intensity, like he’s infested. It’s merely razor burn and getting used to the lack of locks, and if the past is any indication, he’ll stop licking presently. But it sort of drives everybody crazy, not least of all himself. Why are haircuts such trauma? Cubby and I both want to know.

My brother’s radar is exquisite. He knows my dubious tastes, my oddball obsessions, my disgusting fetishes. So it was Christmas in July when he recently gave me a gift of surpassing thrillingness: an immaculate wax double-wick candle of deformed conjoined twins skulls. Craig, my only sibling, said he got it for a Christmas present but couldn’t resist bestowing it now. He bought it at a local taxidermy/tattoo shop called Unlucky Rabbit that deals in deer heads to “Lesbians and Taco Trucks” bedroom candles. My kind of place. I’m a freak fanatic, sideshows, medical curiosities, monsters on down. For now, the Siamese twins skulls are on proud display, and I have no plans to torch them, they’re so gruesomely perfect. Still, lighting them and watching them melt into bone-colored goo would be its own grotesque beauty. Where’s the matches?

The terrible twos


Summer playlist

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Next to the excellent book about the Beatles I just finished, I’ve been staying intellectually nourished this summer with a spate of lush art, from musical earworm discoveries to great movies revisited. These are some highlights so far:

My brother turned me on to the rambunctious novel “The Death of Bunny Munro,” and I don’t know if I should thank him or break his thumbs. Outrageous and splendidly salacious, the book, a dark comic romp, is by Nick Cave, the singer, performer, screenwriter and all-around Renaissance man, who looks like a dapper, raven-haired cadaver with a ghoulish gothic cast. Bunny, the protagonist, has just lost his wife to suicide. He decides to take his 9-year-old son, Bunny Jr., on a rambling, sex-fueled road trip that becomes a pervert’s picaresque filled with carnal catharsis and lessons learned for innocent but brilliant Junior, who appears to be on the spectrum. The novel pops with blazing  prose, twisted laughs and, as one critic put it, “grotesque beauty.” This Bunny goes down the rabbit hole and never comes up for air.

Released in 2007, “There Will Be Blood” retains its status as a cinematic landmark and holds up awesomely years later, getting better on each viewing. The New York Times recently named it the third best movie of the 21st century so far, behind the number two slot, the flatly unworthy “Mulholland Drive.” Paul Thomas Anderson’s strange, majestic saga of greed, faith, misanthropy, violence and of course crude oil is anchored terrifyingly by Daniel-Day Lewis working his acting sorcery for one of the great performances of male tyranny. He’s a monster, and he’s mesmerizing. Johnny Greenwood’s eerie, atonal score is as epic as the gorgeous visuals, and lends the film much of its woozy, unsettling power. There’s so much grandeur going on, you have to ask: How did they do it?

I tend to be way behind on new popular music. (Olivia Rodrigo who?) Mostly I just ignore it, and then it takes years for an ancient song to wind its way to my virgin ears, and then it’s a revelation (and a slight embarrassment). Like, I just discovered the 2018 album by the inimitable Mitski, “Be the Cowboy,” which was slavered over by every critic and named the best record of that year many times over. I’m especially infatuated with two songs, “A Pearl” and “Me and My Husband,” neither of which were the album’s hits or standouts. But they’re little jewels to me, each just over two minutes long. Mitski, a Japanese American with a made-up stage name, plays with piano, synthesizers, horns and her trademark guitar on the album, which has been frequently called genre-defying, but is firmly modern pop, with an outré twist. I won’t get all music critic-y and deconstruct my two favorite songs, saying only that “A Pearl” is dreamlike and yearning and rather heart-tugging, while “Me and My Husband” is funky with perhaps terribly ironic lyrics about a marriage. Or not. 

They are practically begging to die. So it seems amid a coterie of big wave surfers whose only aim in life is to locate the wickedest, most ferocious waves possible, get on their surfboards and hit the water and ride roaring barrels. That’s what ace documentarian Chris Smith captures in his transfixing HBO series “100 Foot Wave,” an unlikely plunge into foam and fury and a beautiful human portrait of a tribe of surfers who salivate at the sight of an unforgiving ocean that dares them to take it on. The nominal star is middle-aged master Garrett McNamara, who leads the surfers from massive swells in Portugal — you cannot believe how enormous the waves are — to the far reaches of the Pacific. It’s season three in the series, but start anywhere, because the drama — from gnarly surfing to nasty wipeouts — is everywhere. Watch with a glass of wine. Your adrenaline is going to skyrocket, in the best way.