An odder entry in the kobek.com hierarchy is jarett.kobek.com, a page dedicated entirely to the great, late British noir writer Robin Cook, alias Derek Raymond. Cook’s bio can be found in richer detail on the aforementioned site, which links to more thorough discussions of the man and his work, but in brief: he was an upper class toff turned criminal who wrote novels of varying quality in the 60s and early 70s, disappeared (so to speak) for a while, and then reemerged in the 80s as Derek Raymond, and wrote 7 books before he died in 92.

Five of these constitute the so-called Factory Series, following an unnamed Police Detective investigating the deaths of the world’s destitute and abandoned in Thatcher-era London. Obviously some of the grimmest books ever written.

Anyway, I was doing one of my twice-yearly updates of the site, and I came across this review of He Died With His Eyes Open, which identifies me as an obsessively dedicated fan. At first I bristled at the suggestion that I– one of the world’s most important people– could ever be counted as another’s fan, but then I decided that what it really indicated was how useless the web has become as a resource for anything other than shopping & getting half-correct information off Wikipedia.

I put it up the Raymond page only because no one else had. Not even a legacy Geocities page. Someone else could do a far, far better job than me– I barely put in any effort, and I think Cook/Raymond deserves an online presence far more significant and informative than what I’ve got up. To be honest, I know very little about the man beyond having read his books (including his peculiarly uninformative autobiography, The Hidden Files.)

I’m also sure there must be someone out there who is a much bigger aficionado of his work. I’ve read every book the man ever wrote, and I’m conflicted about much of it– including the Factory Series, which is his best work. At their height, they are some of the finest English (both as a country and a language) writing of the last 30 years. But they have some very dodgy moments. The plot resolution of How The Dead Live has to be one of the worst things done by a great writer, and as much as I think I Was Dora Suarez is a kind of masterpiece, it’s significantly marred by certain plot points (revealed in the autopsy) that reveal an ignorance of reality on Raymond’s part, and his inclusion of these details says, unfortunately, a lot about his willingness to believe the worst of people. Dead Man Upright is just… bizarre. It’s neither bad nor good. It’s barely a novel, in truth.

But that does leave us with the first two books: He Died With His Eyes Open and The Devil’s Home On Leave, both of which I recommend with a full throat.

Anyway, Serpent’s Tail is finally putting out the whole series (along with other books by Cook/Raymond) and so all should be in print shortly.

Hopefully this’ll inspire someone else to do a better page.

This afternoon, I looked at Poppy Z Brite’s Livejournal for the first time in god know’s how long. I definitely looked at it in the aftermath of Katrina, because I wondered how Brite, a writer seriously identified with New Orleans, had been affected by the hurricane.

As of today, it’s safe to say that something is desperately, horribly wrong with Poppy Z. Brite. I’m not being glib. I’m hard pressed to think of Internet reading as consistently shocking as her last few months of entries, in which she admits to being unable to eat, having her weight drop to below 100 pounds, being unable to sleep, trying to kick her addiction to prescription painkillers (while retaining some tramadol use?), semi-involuntarily abandoning fiction, SMOKING CRACK THAT SHE FOUND ON HER NEIGHBOR’S PORCH and, finally, doing very serious damage to her career.

Brite is an interesting case– for years, she’d been one of my rhetorical bete noirs. There was something truly offensive about her early-to-mid 90s cutesy, gothy interviews, her pictorials in Propaganda, and how her sexualized persona turned the elder statesmen of SF/Fantasy/Horror into (unknowingly) creepy perverts. She seemed to relish the attention, although if the last 5 or so years are any indicator, she’s been trying really hard to get away from the image that she created.

With good reason. Talent of real merit was buried beneath her self-inflicted caricature. (There’s a lesson for the kids.) Her first novel, Lost Souls, centered around a relationship that was genuinely felt and real; a feat doubly amazing because it takes place inside a novel about sexy goth kid vampires. More than a few of her short stories were pretty good, as far as short stories go. She is, as far as I know, the only writer clever enough to equate the non-Euclidean geometry of Lovecraft’s Yuggoth cycle with the abysmal & nightmarish New York Port Authority Bus Terminal building, my personal vision of Hell on Earth. I assure anyone who has not read Lovecraft or not suffered through a wait in the terminal that this is as keen an insight as horror fiction has ever produced.

I haven’t had a chance to read her latest series about the lives of gay restauranteurs in New Orealns– but as she has (finally) dropped the horror and focused in entirely on relationships, which was always her subject anyway, I would imagine that the books are, at the least, pretty good. I would be surprised if they were bad.

Anyway, I’m a little concerned that her persona as the laughing, sexy madcap is again doing Brite an injustice– from her journal, which is an admittedly very limited view, and from the response amongst her fans, it doesn’t seem as if anyone is concerned that this behavior is unhealthy and self-destructive. So let me just give everyone a little primer: if you can’t eat and as a result, you’re losing weight rapidly, something’s wrong. If you’re so addicted to painkillers that you think you need rehab, something’s wrong. And while I ain’t gonna be all anti-hard drug hysterical and say that smoking crack, in itself, is wrong, I absolutely have no hesitation in saying that DRUGS YOU FOUND ON THE STREET DO NOT GO INTO YOUR BODY. They just don’t. It’s a recipe for disasters untold.

I have no idea how the hell to get in touch with Poppy Z. Brite, and honestly, if I could, I wouldn’t– what a person on the downward spiral needs the least is a total stranger being like YO WHAT’S WRONG SNAP OUT OF IT– but I would ask that anyone with sway over the woman to get in touch with her and have a long talk about the possibility of, at the very least, counseling. Something is terribly wrong, and I would truly prefer a world where Poppy Z. Brite was not another casualty of Katrina.

For reasons bizarre & untold, I’ve been trying to make sacrifices to the Book God via the purchase of  books at full cover, an almost unheard of sin. A few days ago, I acquired the newly released unexpurgated, unedited hardback of Jack Kerouac’s Original Scroll of On the Road. Even now I find this choice inexplicable & can’t explain my actions– I have bad feelings towards the work of all the Beats (except Burroughs, and even then I find his 60s work nearly intolerable) but none so much as Kerouac’s, which I find a mixture of the boring & the offensive.

His personal history– ah, now there’s another story.

Kerouac was a New England boy made on the mean streets of Lowell, MA. He went to Columbia on a football scholarship– and while there, fell in with the dissolute crowd of junkies, queers and 8th Avenue hucksters who contributed mightily to the creation of the Writer of Renown. He died a delusional alcoholic, apparently thinking that Allen Ginsberg was a Nazi agent and trying to fight Kurt Vonnegut’s son, but for a while, Kerouac was the American Dream, what another now-deceased American Writer would have described as “pure Horatio Alger.” He was also French-Canadian; part of an ethnic group of New England immigrants that are often overlooked and forgotten.

So while there’s the Mythic Kerouac, there’s also the Lowell working-class kid who ended up dubiously labeled as a generational spokesman. In previous posts, I’ve written about poor Bob Dylan, Kerouac’s heir in this questionable honor. It’s fascinating that the two midcentury figures saddled with that terrible weight both were of ethnic & family backgrounds as far from the American mainstream as you get could get. (While, of course, remaining a “White.”)

I haven’t gotten through the 100+ pages of critical apparati of the Original Scroll, but the image on the back of the dustjacket is amazing. The most frequently circulated photos of Kerouac play up a young rough with an indistinct, James Dean glamor. The image in question, coming from later in the man’s sad life, was chosen, I assume, because it depicts Kerouac holding one of his famous scrolls. Fair enough, but it’s also the only image I’ve seen of the man (and admittedly I am no student of his iconography) where his ethnic, social, and geographical origins just spill out all over the picture. You can see Lowell, you can see the French-Canadian, you can see the football scholarship.

A great picture:

Last week’s New Yorker featured a review by Adam Gopnik of the Library of America collection of Philip K. Dick’s 60s novels; I read it with much fascination– say what you will about Gopnik’s longer, personal essays, there’s little doubt that he stands (and has stood for some while) as one of the most insightful working critics of books and literary matters. Amongst his many insights is an another attempt to wrestle with what has been one of the overarching concern and bugbears of Dickean studies: yes, there’s something brilliant here, but what is it and is it Literature?

Gopnik’s answer is a tacit yes, with reservations, and done in the best style: he suggests that if any of Dick’s work is to be counted as Literature, then first we must count VALIS. This is the only time I’ve seen, in print, an analysis of VALIS identifying it as a work of profoundly wounded emotion. Yes, there’s a lot of weirdness about pop stars and David Bowie surrogates, but an honest and engaged read turns up the terrible pain of the Horselover Fat/Phil Dick split, with an attempt to wrestle with the consequences of death and sex in a mature, if mad, style.

In a word, Literature.

I’d add A Scanner Darkly (thankfully I’ve not seen the movie) and the dark horse candidate of We Can Build You. (We might also throw in “Faith of Our Fathers,” a novella which first appeared in Dangerous Visions, edited by uh… Harlan Ellison.) The former is pretty self-explanatory; the latter I have found consistently more human and aware than almost all of Dick’s other work. I am probably alone in this: I recall an essay by Jonathan Letham in which he dismisses the novel as not doing Dick’s reputation any favors.

Que sera sera, pal.

Whenever questions of Literature or Good Writing arise, I think back to the American 19th Century. By this late date, there’s hardly any argument that its four greatest writers were Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. (”What about Hawthorne!” cries Arafat Kazi.) Yet at the end of the 19th century, only Twain had been anything like a success– Melville would not be rediscovered until the 1920s, Dickinson’s body of work was effectively a trunk full of papers, and as demonstrated in David S. Reynolds’s excellent book, Whitman was known but had few readers.

This suggests that the only real judge of Literature is time, and that Good Writing and Literature are furthermore hugely expansive ideals. Despite the four being a product of the social ferment of the 1850s and its consequences in the 60s, these writers are so dissimilar it’s hard to figure out how any concept could be wide enough to encompass them.

I think about this a lot– especially in relationship to Phil Dick– because if I were to give an assessment of my favorite 20th Century American writers, at least three would come from the pulp/pop world. These are: Dick, Dashiell Hammett, and the long and dread spectre of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Hammett’s status as a Great Writer was decided almost as soon as he started publishing– the similarity of his hard boiled writing served as a presumedly unintellectual and effortless shadow to the muscularities (so-called) of Hemingway and the modernists. On the other hand, Lovecraft, like Dick, has been subject to a large number of inquiries and weighed many times on the scales of Literature, and most times found lacking.

While it’s pretty egotistical to suggest that My Favorites from the pulp world will end up enshrined in some imaginary Canon of the future, I do think it’s likely to happen– and I think it will happen on their own terms. Every writer creates not only his or her predecessors, but also his or her heirs. There will be a time, say 50 years from now, when the mad world of Philip K Dick is so culturally ingrained that what we now find to be his excesses are going to be common tongue.

And the common tongue is merely a way of describing a universality. And that, kids, is how you end up as Literature.

Faithful commenter Todd C. Murry calls me out on my last post:

I can’t believe you would call Lovecraft one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, but give an “undisputed” list of the greatest of the 19th that leaves off Poe. Anything bad you can hurl at Poe that would dock him off the list is 10 times as true of HP, and he was undoubtely more influentual in that inescapably broad power-of-ideas way.

Please reconsider Poe (I’ll let someone else like David Fiore defend Hawthorne).

I don’t disagree– although it wasn’t my intent to call Lovecraft one of the Greatest Writers of the 20th century. It was more like trying to figure out how these figures which I consider very significant will eventually be incorporated into the Canon. (If any of the three writers that I mentioned will end up being one of the True Greats, I presume it would be Hammett over either Lovecraft or Dick.)

It’s interesting that I, like almost everyone compiling their arbitrary list of the 19th Century American True Greats, forgot about Poe.

I think Poe gets left off these lists for two reasons: #1 is that he was, above all else, dear Edgar Allen, a creature so weird that it’s often hard to consider him as anything other than a being emerged fully formed from the forehead of Zeus. Even when writing about his contemporary period, Poe is always there in his own mind– he seems far more concerned with his own inner landscape and surrounding circle than his exterior world. In short, it’s hard to imagine Poe being of any century, let alone his own. (This is not to reinforce unjust and negative images of Poe as a delusional dipsomaniac; merely to say that, some people, by their natures, are more insular than others.)

The second reason, and one to which I alluded yesterday, is that Great American Literature of the 19th Century can almost be viewed as a genre centered around the unfathomable turmoil of the 1850s and the American Civil War. Seemingly it took a while for this critical opinion to form, but once it did form, it hardened and stuck. Personally, I’m not in disagreement. I recognize that prior to this 15 year period there is work of great quality and significance, but none of it can stand up to the writers trying to hold together a country ripping itself apart. Or trying to piece that country back together with the impotent tool of literature. Sometimes the world does end with a bang.

Poe, not insignificantly, died in 1849. Having missed out on this period of our history, his works, already detached, only seem more so by comparison. One of my favorite Poe stories is “The Murder in the Rue Morgue.” Both the setting of the story– a locked room in Paris– and its conclusion (NO SPOILERS) seem astonishingly disconnected from anything other than Poe’s world of himself. Even its sequel, the Marie Roget story, based on the famous Mary Rogers case– an actual event in New York history– seems somehow of another place. This says nothing of the more fantastic pieces. This is, of course, opinion. No doubt many fine theses have been written making excellent cases for the exact opposite.

Incidentally, compared with Lovecraft, I think there’s no doubt whatsoever that technically, and aesthetically, Poe was the far, far superior writer. Good ol’ HPL himself would have been the first to admit it. However, good ol’ JK would argue that a lot of Lovecraft’s significance comes not from his technical construction but from his distinct, and often prescient, awareness of his period’s big issues. Yes, there’s a lot of crap in there about monsters, but Lovecraft was riding early waves (and was very often on the wrong side) of issues that would come to dominate the 20th Century: racism, class warfare, sexuality and its malcontents, the failure of religion in the face of expanding scientific discovery, paranoia, and the profound alienation of the individual through modernity. These are the Lovecraftian bread and butter.

I would further argue that what I consider to be Lovecraft’s most realized work– The Case of Charles Dexter Ward– has as much insight on the awful influence of money, status and family over a child’s development as any other work of fiction. Again, Lovecraft ends up seeming really of his time and exceptionally prescient of things to come. I’m not being glib when I say this: if you want to know about what creates something like Paris Hilton, you only have to look at Charles Dexter Ward, take account of how little his family even notices what’s happening to him as the novel progresses and ask why.

Okay, that’s enough of this!

–

Incidentally, the main site of KOBEK.COM has two Poe related PDF files:

The first is Poe’s Helen by Caroline Ticknor, a biography of Sarah Helen Whitman, Poe’s Providence girlfriend, all around interesting lady of the 19th & a poet in her own right.

The second is the 1853 edition of Hours of Life, a book of poetry by the very same Sarah Helen Whitman. Caveat emptor on this one– some of it is a little dreadful.

I first read of Derek Raymond in 2002 while camping in Glastonbury, burning through Iain Sinclair’s endlessly rewarding Lights Out For the Territory. It was raining. I couldn’t get over my jetlag. There was nothing to do but read and go for soggy, half-awake walks up the Tor. Sinclair’s book convinced me that once I returned home, I must read Raymond. This is exactly what I did. Having procured an Internet copy of He Died With His Eyes Open, I cracked it open and it blew me away.

A few weeks ago, back in RI, life determined fit to remind me of the incredible distance between now and 2002. Since then, my opinion of Raymond had taken a beating. The last three novels of the Factory series, including the praised & reviled I Was Dora Suarez, are significantly flawed. I was curious if my judgment would hold– so I broke out the books of yesteryear and re-read He Died With His Eyes Open and The Devil’s Home on Leave, respectively the first and second books in the series. I’ll write about the first.

So, in short, yes. He Died With His Eyes Open is still great. I’m not going to give a huge amount of plot summary, but basically: each of the Factory books is told in the first person by an unnamed Detective working out of a police building, the Factory, in the Department of Unexplained Deaths, or A14. The setting is the bleakest time in recent English history: London in the years of Thatcher. The protagonist catches cases of murders with no Fleet-street potential– killings of the dispossessed, the poor and the apparently meaningless. But the protagonist is dogged in his job and in his devotion to the dead, an attitude with confuses his colleagues. This sounds like standard GOOD COP IN A BAD DEPARTMENT cliche, but Raymond confers a strange, almost Messianic quality on his protagonist who comes across as a near-annointed avenger of the city’s forgotten and broken-down, an unstoppable force cobbling together a form of inadequate justice. All five of the books feel like they’re happening in another world and the whole series can be summed up thusly: there is no worthless person, there are no meaningless lives.

Although the Factory series was initially, and continues to be, sold as Detective/Mystery Fiction, a feature of the first two books (and possibly the rest but my memory for plots is spotty) are their complete lack of a Mystery. I’m not giving anything away by saying that you know who’s committed each book’s murder(s) by 40 pages in; what the Detective investigates is the identity, and life story, of the murdered, and, to a lesser extent, the murderers. It’s an inversion of the genre– rather than tracking clues and trying to solve a crime where the victim is a plot device, each Factory book is an investigation of the dead. Of who they were, what they done and how they suffered.

In He Died With His Eyes Open, the murdered man, a failed writer who once lived in France, has left behind a series of autobiographical audiotapes recorded on very dark nights of his soul. Throughout the narrative, these tapes are used by the protagonist as his guide through the underworld into which he has descended. Parallels with Dante and Virgil, anyone?

What I missed in 2002, having no real knowledge of the book’s author, is the similarity between the murdered man and Derek Raymond himself. Raymond eventually published a strange autobiography, The Hidden Files, but I don’t wonder if the story isn’t found here in the transcripted audiotapes.

Some word must be written about the quality of writing, which is top notch and above and beyond what is usually found in any novel, let alone genre work. Raymond seems to have ended up a crime novelist almost by default. Under the name Robin Cook, he had a career in the 60s and 70s as a mainstream novelist, but I suspect exiling one’s self to mainland Europe and coming back an alcoholic is not the best way to stay in the upper echelon. Of course, Cook was born upper class and threw it away to become a Chelsea morrie, so who knows if being in the genre ghetto wasn’t what he had long desired.

In summary: this is a novel in which the Protagonist, a nameless, quasi-religious figure bent on avenging the hopeless dead, spends about 50% of the narrative trying to piece together a vaguely-fictional version of the author’s life. Another way of describing this is: True Art.

Spending halfway of your life halfway insane isn’t a bad way to live– reality has a way of knowing who can handle the weirder stuff and you end up with a greater amount of bizarre experiences than most. The downside is that, very occasionally, you’ll do something that really does qualify as nuts.

Letters can be read symbolically or as words– i.e., one can see words and recognize them from their shape as an identifiable symbol, or read them and gleam their meaning from context; I confess that I often slip into the former, especially when looking at a glance, so when I saw the words “Jane Austen” on the marquee of my local crap movie theatre, I was fairly interested– I’d heard good things about this movie, a biopic starring Anne Hathaway as the famed author. So I go and buy a ticket for the “Jane Austen movie.” I sit myself down and suddenly I’m getting this weird vibe off the rest of the audience– I’m the only male and everyone’s over 50. But that’s fine, I think, who else is going to go see a movie about Jane Austen?

Trailers and advertisements roll. The film begins.

“How odd to use a sans-serif typeface for the credits,” thinks I. “But perhaps this is the way of things.”

The first shot rolls and it is clear, very very clear, that the narrative is not in the Romantic Era; good lord, it’s not even Edwardian. It’s 21st Century Southern California. What the hell has happened?

I’ve bought a ticket for The Jane Austen Book Club thinking it was Becoming Jane.

Like I said. Crazy.

Don’t you believe the bad reviews & merciless critiques of this week’s Elizabeth: The Golden Age. I assure one and all that it is a glorious, splendid mess.

In its luridness, the film comes very close to mirroring the sensationalist and gory popular entertainments of the Elizabethan era. These were the years that gave the world The Spanish Tragedy and Kit Marlowe, a man who penned Tamburlaine braining himself against his bars and the Jew of Malta boiling to death. Decades later and John Ford, the last great playwright in the tradition, would author The Broken Heart, in which our protagonist opens his veins and bleeds out on stage. There’s a whole spectrum of red hues and coagulate gore in them years and I would argue that Golden Age functions exactly and properly along those lines.

Once one gives up cherished notions of What a Costume Drama Should Be and accepts Golden Age as something else then it’s easy enough to like. I shall be interested to see how it plays in jolly old England itself– another analogue to the film is perhaps the bounty years of Hammer Studios, a style seemingly still cherished on the distant island.

Best news in forever. As of right now represents the best chance for the rediscovery of works lost for roughly 1500 years, give or take a few centuries.

Hey, I just received email noting that Chasing Hairy by Michael Fleisher, former writer of the Spirit Spectre 70s revenge stories, has come back into print.

Gossip folks will recall that this book was described by long-time friend of the blog Harlan Ellison as “bugfuck” in a Comics Journal interview, thus sparking a lawsuit which would ruin relations between Ellison and Journal publisher & editor, Gary Groth.

Publisher’s description:

CHASING HAIRY is a brutal, profoundly disturbing portrait of two young men who meet as college students and develop a close, complex friendship whose underlying basis is the shared but unconscious hostility they bear toward women. Thrown together in the dormitory, they become friends as they try to cope with the freedom that comes from living away from home for the first time. The novel depicts their wild college days as their friendship grows, nurtured by their mutual devotion to the “pursuit of the elusive hairy,” which leads them into frenetic episodes that are both reckless and hilarious. As they grow older, each surprises himself by settling down with one woman and begins to experience the gritty reality of a day-to-day relationship. The unresolved sexual tensions inexorably boil to the surface and generate remorseless, unrelenting momentum that sends both characters hurtling toward one of the most traumatizing climaxes in modern fiction.Written in a taut, naturalistic style evocative of the best of Jack Kerouac and Henry Miller, CHASING HAIRY unflinchingly explores some of the frightening undercurrents pervading—sometimes dominating—our sexual lives and will leave the reader stunned and shaken.

And now for something completely different:

UPDATE: Special correspondent Dave Asselin points out in the comments that I’m crazy– Fleisher did the Spectre, not the Spirit, which I swear I knew. But pardon the error.

One of the better tracks off the great Dead City Radio LP. Much of the material on the record ended up printed in Tornado Alley. They still make the CD. The book is long gone. So’s Bill, for that matter.

Happy thanksgiving, everybody!

We’ll get back to where we was, I promise, but flash forward a couple of days and too much to contain, explain or detain. I’m in a Castle in Newport where Senator Whitehouse was born. It has become clear– considering the connection of the 1974 Robert Redford movie, filmed in and around the mansions of the city– that the defining narrative of this trip is Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. We have long been within the imaginary confines of West Egg, old sport, but now we’re acting out the novel’s climax– five jerks in a drawing room. But there’s no argumentation, no great reveal and no hearts broken, though as someone is trying to kiss me, I have to point out that she’d been making out my friend 2 minutes earlier.

And then, as always, there’s this:

This New York Times article discusses the resonance of Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby with first and second generation Americans. Readers of the blog might recall the hypomanic episode of two months past, when the novel began an invasion of the lives of myself and my erstwhile chums. Since then, I haven’t stopped thinking about Gatsby– like, every day– and in this exact context: first generation Americans on the hustle-hustle for dollars dollars. After all, I’m one of their number. They is me. Me is they.

I ain’t dissing on kids 15 years younger, but by focusing on high school students, the article offers a pat distillation of every pedestrian and obvious interpretation of Gatsby. The fleeting Green Light, the limits of class, money, social-climbing and the American Dream. I suppose that’s all in the novel– they were Fitzgerald’s obsessions– but reading Gatsby for insights on these topics is like looking for milk in a pint of ice cream.

If the book has any power– and I think that it does– it isn’t as a morality tale about money, but as a series of interlocking portraits of the most repugnantly stupid and shallow characters in American Literature. A casual read will be dominated by the obvious repulsiveness of Tom and Daisy Buchanan, those careless people, but probing with any depth leaves the reader with the irredeemability of the novel’s other figures.

In the first few pages, Nick identifies himself as an Andy Warhol kind of guy– someone who’ll listen to your problems in silence, appearing to offer sympathy but is storing his queeny contempt for later judgment. His relationship with Gatsby is that of a Distinguished Gentleman and a rough trade rentboy– Gatsby humored as long as he’s amusing. Even Nick’s final comment– “You’re better than the whole damned lot!”– is offered not to establish a sympathy between the two men, but as a kindness given by Nick to himself. Everyone feels better when they pretend that they care about other people. But no one does. Nick is the devil, sheer evil. Hence the name.

But Jimmy Gatz. Wealth obscures truth. Even after Fitzgerald’s 30 page epilogue in which the false identity of Jay Gatsby is demolished, the money continues to hide his character. Reactions are usually about the American Dream or the impossibility of crossing class boundaries. Very rarely do you hear anything about Gatsby himself. So, lemme just say it: Jimmy Gatz was an idiot. That’s the point of the book.

Gatsby had a desperate smarts born of necessity but no wisdom and no ability to see a thing for its own nature. Not Daisy, not Tom, not Meyer Wolfsheim, not Nick and not his own self. The great line (later quoted by Bob Dylan in “Summer Days”), “What do you mean you can’t repeat the past? Of course you can.” is Gatsby’s unknowing epitaph– he dies because he does not understand Daisy. Some people, some women, are no good. But Gatsby can’t see it and returns to her, arms and wallet open, and she destroys him a second and then a third time. Even in his grand enterprise– climbing way up the social ladder– he’s a failure, and not because he’s nouveau riche non plus ultra, but because he’s stupid. His idea of wealth is throwing house parties and calling people Old Sport– dime novel fantasies of a school boy. He appears to Nick as what he’s fashioned himself: a freak.

Oddly, the only character that I find likable is Tom Buchanan. He’s as bad as the rest, but he never pretends that he isn’t– there’s simplicity in his acceptance of himself as a selfish, racist brute. Everyone else is a thief and a liar, but only Tom might admit it.

For reasons beyond cheapness, I prefer my books used. The transfer of knowledge and experience from owner to owner is a thing unique to the grey market, and makes one believe in an Iain Sinclair/Grant Morrisony idea that books, in their layered pages of information and content, are mystical objects radiating power outwards. (The one downside that I’ve encountered was olfactory. My first edition of Alfred Watkin’s The Old Straight Track reeked like an unembalmed corpse. I kept it outdoors and most of the odor dissipated– it remains a noxious volume, but only when opened.)

I bought Blake Nelson’s Exile in 2004– I had either read, or was about to read, his first novel Girl, which turned out amazing despite the atrocious film adaptation, and I was in the Connecticut Book Barn when I saw Exile’s partially lime green cover. It bore hideous ad copy: A DOWNTOWN BAUDELAIRE FOR THE ’90s.

“Well, self,” sez I, “This surely must be awful. You must give yourself over.”

And so I did. I paid $3.

Exile sat for some time. I read it months later, almost 3 years ago, in March of 2005. This was during the first or second week of a ridiculously painful break-up. It’s a far stronger book than Girl, an unsung masterpiece– a third person, year-long and present tense account of a writer’s life. 85% of it felt like reading my biography through vaseline. Like Girl, it’s a true book. Rare enough to write one, let alone two.

It was heavy enough reading Exile, but as I moved through its pages, I was confronted by the marginalia of its previous owner. Poetry and nonsense at first, but then notes directed at the person to whom she had given the book. It was like a second narrative layered on top of the first, what Arafat Kazi, scourge of the Dhaka Theatre community, would have Knowingly called a palimpsest. The second story took shape as one high school girl’s scribblings and lovenotes to her girlfriend, oozing the innocence of being 16 years old and thinking that her Love would last forever. It was almost too much.

The notes have a terrible fatalism. Someone had sold the book. Either the girl who’d written or the girl to whom she’d been writing. It isn’t hard to imagine their relationship crashing and burning, and the ruination and heartbreak that had followed. The book itself remained, a relic and a time capsule that was cast out into the wider world. It waited to consume an unsuspecting sucker with its implicit drama.

Thanks to the wonders of the Internet and Myspace, I located a person that I believed was one of the girls. I thought about writing to her, to ask what had happened, to discover why this thing had been inflicted on me, but even in the low ways of 2005, I had a sense that this idea was awful. So I didn’t. But I’ve thought about those notes almost every day.

All I wanted was a crap book about a downtown Baudelaire for the ’90s.

When I was on the Winter Tour, I re-read my copy of Exile (and Girl too), and I decided that I’d scan the pages with marginalia. I’ve only omitted two: one was redundant, and the other was minor, but allowed a person to identify, in total, one of the girls.

And I ain’t that bad. Not yet.

Page 25, First Strike: “one day I was a princess / wearing a golden dress / (14 carat jewel gown) / don’t worry about me / I’m still a princess / I’m just a little tarnished / just a little rusted”

Page 43, Falling: “falling / i’m not sure / where i’m supposed / to be / except maybe / here? / i think so / i think so / i think so”

Page 61, First Note: “Hi / Katy / you / are / reading /my / book / (+my / writing / in the / margin / s”

Page 127, The Heartbreaker: “Katy… i’m writing you a note so that when you get to page 127, you can read a note from me beautiful me. I’m a rose, I’m a thorn growing off of myself. And everyone is talking about the burning sun. Birds fly south in Summer and my star is shining for you, always. 6/10/98 Gina”

Page 156, The Ephemera: “la di la di la”

Page 203, The Absolute Best: “I wanna sink to the / bottom with you”

Page 243, Stupidity: “VANDALISM OH DEAR”

Pages 273 & 274, We’re Definitely in High School: “FOR CHRISSAKE –> YOUR A POTATO”

Page 288, Last Page, The End: “lets drive forever / lets never forget / one day I will know everything”

The Book Gods have interrupted my jaunty 19th Century kick– forcing a repeat engagement with the Odyssey of Homer. This is the fourth or fifth reading and the only time that I’ve liked it. I suspect that this has something to do with translation. The last two go-rounds were with Fagles and Chapman. Both men did fabulous work on the Iliad (only about 400 years apart), but their Odysseys left me cold. This time I wanted Lattimore but ended up with Fitzgerald, who turns out to be up my alley, stuffy midcentury-isms and all.

I presumed that when the Book Gods demanded my return to the Odyssey, this was with a reason in mind. I have yet to find it, not even mustering an association of my own distance with the wanderings of the eponymous Hero. I will say, though, that it’s extremely interesting to read the poem after nearly seven years of contemporary continual military action– one notices how much of the poem is concerned with the cost of war. None of Iliam’s conquerors get away clean. They take the war home. Another random thought: if the Odyssey is about learning to deal with women, does the Iliad then tell us that men create war to avoid the fairer sex?

I’ve developed a fascination with the incident in which Odysseus and his men land on the island with the cattle of Helios, the sun god; this comes after Odysseus and his men have traveled to the underworld and been warned by Teiresias to stay away from the cows, and after Circe has repeated the warning. The significance of this event in the narrative can not be underestimated: of all the adventures and wanderings of Odyssey, it is the only one to be mentioned specifically in the epic’s introductory lines:

The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way
Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay;
That wandered wondrous far, when he the town
Of sacred Troy had sack’d and shivered down;
The cities of a world of nations,
With all their manners, minds, and fashions,
He saw and knew; at sea felt many woes,
Much care sustained, to save from overthrows
Himself and friends in their retreat for home;
But so their fates he could not overcome,
Though much he thirsted it. O men unwise,
They perish’d by their own impieties,
That in their hunger’s rapine would not shun
The oxen of the lofty-going Sun,
Who therefore from their eyes the day bereft
Of safe return. These acts, in some part left,
Tell us, as others, deified Seed of Jove.

(taken from Chapman’s translation. Italics mine.)

When Odysseus and his men land on the isle of Helios’ cattle (or Chapman’s oxen), it’s Eurylochus, second in command, who takes advantage of Odysseus’ hideously inopportune slumber to convince the other men to slaughter the cattle, giving the following speech:

‘Hear what I shall say,
Though words will staunch no hunger, every death
To us poor wretches that draw temporal breath
You know is hateful; but, all know, to die
The death of Famine is a misery
Past all death loathsome. Let us, therefore, take
The chief of this fair herd, and offerings make
To all the Deathless that in broad heaven live,
And in particular vow, if we arrive
In natural Ithaca, to straight erect
A temple to the Haughty in aspect,
Rich and magnificent, and all within
Deck it with relics many and divine.
If yet he stands incens’d, since we have slain
His high-brow’d herd, and, therefore, will sustain
Desire to wrack our ship, he is but one,
And all the other Gods that we atone
With our divine rites will their suffrage give
To our design’d return, and let us live.
If not, and all take part, I rather crave
To serve with one sole death the yawning wave,
Than in a desert island lie and sterve,
And with one pin’d life many deaths observe.’

(again taken from Chapman)

The reader or listener knows that this is a funeral oration. All the men serving under Odysseus die; only Odysseus lives. But he doesn’t escape vengeance. Right after, he gets stuck for seven years– the vast majority of his voyage home– with the nymph Calypso.

If you’re willing to accept the idea that both the Iliad and the Odyssey are didactic works intended to instruct their contemporary audiences in ways and customs, then one can’t help but wondering about this episode’s underlying meaning. Its paramount placement in the poem’s opening lines, plus the fact that Odyssey has been explicitly warned twice (once by a dead man, once by a witch) against this action only deepens the mystery. As I see it, the most likely interpretation is thus: there are some things and some Gods with whom one does not fuck, and Helios, who lights the whole of the human world, tops the list. Homer specifically notes the joy that Helios takes, each day, in seeing his cattle. Eurylochus and the other men could, conceivably, be screwing with the natural order of things and, thus, the whole of civilization. And the Odyssey is, if nothing else, about one’s duty to civilization.

But here’s the rub: Eurylochus accompanied Odyssey to the underworld. There are a finite number of mortal men in the Odyssey who know the whole truth of death, and Eurylochus is one. Even without this knowledge, his reasoning would be sound enough: in theory, all the men are going to die. Better to be struck down instantly than wither away with starvation. It’s entirely reasonable. The knowledge of Eurylochus makes this even more potent; he’s arguing three possibilities. Death by starvation, death by the Gods or the remote possibility of survival. But he knows to whence he goes. He’s Napoleon in rags– he’s seen too much and ain’t got nothing to lose. I wonder if there isn’t a reading here of a very Platonic idea: having the hoi polloi know how things work creates individuals independent of their duty to the state.

Tone and feel– for lack of better words– are key distinguishers between the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Odyssey feels as though it could’ve been written yesterday– meanwhile the Iliad is like a thing stolen from the dawn of time, a wild poem where the baneful wrath of Achilleos (Chapman) transforms a mortal to a beast and then a god. Both epics reflect customs and belief of their time. This is, I suspect, the final meaning of the herd of Helios. It’s not just that Odysseus’ men offended the gods or that Odysseus himself did not– it’s the Ancient sense of the total irrational unfairness of things, of a natural order over which man has no grasp and of which the gods themselves are barely in control. And some people have the right friends and listen. Others eat the oxen.

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Here’s an hilarious youtube reenactment of the above mentioned incident:

Horace McCoy is my favorite writer of the early 20th Century; his first book, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is the single best novel of the Depression– a bleak, short dose of hell centered on a Dance-a-thon– and his last proper novel, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye is equally remarkable, though less compact, and achieves the kind of dense Freudian tapestry that (our hero) Dashiell Hammett aimed for in The Glass Key. The other books are variable, but I’m particularly fond of I Should Have Stayed Home, a slight, pre-Day of the Locusts look at life as a Hollywood loser; if nothing else, it has the most applicable title of any book ever written about this here city of Los Angalayze.

I’ve never been comfortable with McCoy’s classification as “hard boiled”; he certainly wrote for the same pulps as the originators and best known practitioners of the style, but I’m partial to the idea that “hard boiled” has connotations as an off-shoot of the mystery genre. Throughout all of McCoy’s work, the only mystery is this: “Why are people so awful?”

In my mind, his work fits more clearly into a tradition of near-hallucinatory, vaguely inchoate narratives of indirect, brutish emotion being kept at bay through force of will and repression.

It is a sub-literature, adapting the developments of genre and modernism to describe the basic inability of the lower class American male to express his desires, and more truly, his pain. When bored, I often taunt women by accusing them– facetiously– of never being able to understand the “awful pain of being a man.” Novels within this school are quite serious about the idea; the shame and the misery of frustrated masculinity are their building-blocks.

The staccato rhythm of the 1920s and 1930s is employed as a distancing mechanism– a way of keeping the male narrator from revealing himself; this mirrors the sexual inadequacy of the protagonist, which is, of course, the source of his many shames. The only question is climax; and when it comes, the novel ends, usual in bloodshed and tears.

Fun fact: of this tradition, one of the most interesting books is You Play The Black and The Red Comes Up, by Eric Knight, the man who went on to create Lassie.

McCoy is an interesting case; clearly his genre designation only came with time, after the failure of his work to catch fire within the mainstream. Below is a collection of varying cover art– arranged by novel and vaguely chronologically– where one can see the passage from novelist to crime writer.

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THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON’T THEY? (1935)

NO POCKETS IN A SHROUD (1937)

I SHOULD HAVE STAYED HOME (1938)

KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE (1948)

SCALPEL (1952)

CORRUPTION CITY (1959)