Notes on Blood Meridian (2013) by John Sepich

Book Review 

Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition 

(Southwestern Writers Collection Series, 

Wittliff Collections at Texas State University)(2013)

John Sepich and Edwin T. Arnold

   Here are my highlighted quotes from this book:

Meanwhile, Blood Meridian‘s readership continued to grow, as did academic interest in the book and its author. Harold Bloom’s proclamation in 2000 that Blood Meridian was “the authentic American apocalyptic novel” and that “Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner” was the imprimatur that finally ushered the book into the realm of the modern classics.

Two possible influences on Outer Dark, apart from the obvious spirit of Flannery O’Connor, are Eudora Welty’s Robber Bridegroom (1946) and Madison Jones’s Forest of the Night (1960).

Bartlett writes of the New Almaden cinnabar mine located thirteen miles from the bay of San Francisco.

  Mostly what I harvested from Notes on Blood Meridian is a better idea of the primary sources that McCarthy likely used in preparing to write this book.  One of the issues that McCarthy clearly faced was the potential demystification of his work.  All artists face a potential "disenchantment" process that is linked directly to the production, evaluation and consumption of art-products by different audiences.   The classic posture of this art production dilemma is the artist who rails at false critics and later lives to regret it when there are no critics, not even false ones, describing their art.

  McCarthy managed to side step this problem by never talking to anyone about his work.  But that doesn't mean the work remained undone.  I was able to locate a host of primary sources- most related to the violence between American settlers and Native Americans in the American west and southwest in the mid to late 19th century.  Blood Meridian is very much about this world- the American southwest of the 1850's/60s/70s and McCarthy appears to have approached it much as a historian would. He pulled many ideas and minute details from the historical sources and then accreting is own artistic inspiration.

   I found many of these inspirational titles available in the LAPL and checked out a handful, but unfortunately they are almost all uniformly long and hard to read, so not sure how far that will go, but I'm very interested in the later history of the wars between the American Government and Native American tribes in the west in the 1860's and 70's.

Show Review: Gamma World & Total Pleasure (Wisteria Residency 1) @ Zebulon LA

 Show Review

Gamma World &
Total Pleasure

(Wisteria Residency 1)

@ Zebulon LA

   Man, I would go to Zebulon more if they booked more shows that weren't the indie/underground equivalent of legacy acts.  I mean, I get it, they are going for diversity in their programming, not trying to replace the Echo.  But the regular shows are so good at Zebulon!  So I found myself at night one of the Wisteria Residency in February- every Monday night!  

    The bill started with Gamma World- they were cool- a two piece with a drum machine- that's all you need! They had some anthemic song writing, some political lyrics.  It was fun- I can see a path to a real career for those two, but they've only got one release on Spotify and its "Demo" from 2019 on "Unsigned" so there is work to do there.  Every act needs to make a physical product, tape, cd, vinyl, whatever and then sell it at live shows.   When I looked up their socials I saw my like minded contacts in the world of music were already following these guys, so I would say, worth checking out, hope they do more shows.  Didn't love their look!  I bet they don't care!

    The second band was Total Pleasure.  This is a trad post punk outfit, with a rhythm section that sounded like the Cure, a pair of guitarists that sounded like the Smiths and a normcore singer who looked like one of the neo-shoegaze front men you see out there in recent times.   It didn't quite hang together- the rhythm section sounds like it needs to play more shows together and the songwriting was uneven- some of the cuts really jammed, others felt awkward and flat.   But you know, ever since the pandemic, I've really begun to appreciate EVERY local band- god bless them all, each and every one.  Just the fact that they are playing shows on a Monday night- god bless them.

       Didn't stay for Wisteria- I was curious to see whether Zebulon was mighty enough to keep a three band Monday night bill on schedule and the answer, sadly, no.   Gamma World didn't play till after 9 PM, and I left at 10:30 with Wisteria's set no where in site (they were supposed to take the stage at 10:20 PM).  Here's a tip for Zebulon, or Wisteria- don't book a three band bill on a Monday night if the first band isn't willing to take the stage at 8:30, as was the case last night.  Still was a good time and looking forward to next week.

The Orchard Keeper(1966) by Cormac McCarthy

 Book Review

The Orchard Keeper (1966)

by Cormac McCarthy

    

  This was Cormac McCarthy's first novel and if you don't think it sounds like Faulkner then you have not read Faulkner.  I'm not a huge fan of Faulkner but I'm generally appreciative of his influence on American literature.  He is, first and foremost, a literary modernist in that his books are difficult to understand in terms of the narrative/temporal techniques he deploys.  He is also the first and arguably only great modernist of the American South, which is not a region that generated a ton of modernist artists.  Literary modernism represents a kind of apex of the divide between an artist and their prospective audience. If you want to find readers of difficult modernist authors in 2024, you are going to have to go to an American university- and not an undergraduate class, but the graduate school, to find people who are "into" any kind of 20th century modernist author. 

 On the other hand, these writers have had a huge influence on the audience of future authors of literary fiction.  In fact, it is fair to say that "serious" literary fiction in 20th century America came to be synonymous with the deployment of these complicated narrative techniques to a greater or lesser degree. However, in the terms that this blog uses, The Orchard Keeper was clearly not a hit.  It was an interesting first novel by a promising young writer, but there is nothing necessarily in this book to indicate that the author would go on to write his Western Trilogy, The Road and No Country For Old Men twenty years later.  If you've read those books, you know that he abandoned complicated literary modernism in favor of a spare brand of prose that is more like literary minimalism.   I don't think he gets enough credit for that shift.

   That doesn't help The Orchard Keeper, which I found just as incomprehensible as any of Faulkner's books.  Certainly not a good pick for an Audiobook since the modernist technique practically requires interlineation on a page of text to keep track of the plot.  Like, when I read the Wikipedia description to prepare for this post I recognized what had happened but wouldn't have been able to tell you that as it was going on.

  On the other hand, if you have some kind of interest in the prose style of Cormac McCarthy, The Orchard Keeper is invaluable because it is the point of departure.  The reader can already pick up his trick of using simile and metaphor to elevate the description of a bleeding hillbilly to something approaching biblical reverence. 

       While there are some feints at the later McCarthy heart of darkness, The Orchard Keeper is a pretty light hearted affair.   There's no sense of the mythical in The Orchard Keeper and it weakens the impact of the prose.  Also the story is confused because of the literary technique- which is clearly something he figure out later in this career.

North Woods (2023) by Daniel Mason

 Book Review

North Woods (2023)

by Daniel Mason

1,001 Novels: Revised

  Like the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die project, I believe the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is best conceived as a project that is meant to be revised.  In the 1,001 Books to Read Before You Die, the first revision (2008) was to go back and introduce additional diversity via increased representation of women authors, authors from the global south and generally reducing the number of picks for those authors with more than one book.

  So far, I haven't come across any duplicated authors in the 1,001 Novels project.  Editor Susan Straight is clearly on top of representation in a way the original editors of the 1,001 Books project were not.  Thus, I think the primary concern in revising the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America is simply to make it better.  That brings me to North Woods, a novel about a patch of woods in Western Massachussets that made several year end best lists- I finally checked out the Audiobook after it made the New York Times books of the year list.  The fact that this is a book about a piece of land in the United States makes it particularly relevant for the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America since it is an approach not embraced by any of the books I've read thus far.

    The book was critically acclaimed, and I enjoyed the Audiobook, though the episodic approach- switching from character to character over the course of hundreds of years, necessarily made it a choppy listening experience.  I'm sure that this would be a book to select for any revision of the 1,001 Novels: A Library of America project... specifically, one of the books from the Massachussets portion of the list, which looks like this:

1)Moby Dick by Herman Melville

2)The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood

3)The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn

4)The Wedding by Dorothy West

5)The Parking Lot Attendant by Nafkote Tamirat

6)Mystic River by Dennis Lehane

7)Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

8)Promised Land by Robert Parker

9)The Good Thief by Hannah Tinti

10)We Love You Charlie Freeman by Kaitlyn Greenidge

11)White Ivy by Susie Yang

12)Unraveling by Elizabeth Graver

13)Leaving Pico by Frank X. Gaspar

14)Born Slippy  by Tom Lutz 

15) Beyond That the Sea by Laura Spence-Ash

16)Union Dues by John Sayles

17) Faith by Jennifer Haigh

18)April Morning by Howard Fast

19)An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England(2007) by Brock Clarke

20)Caucasia by Danny Senza

21)Vida by Marge Piercy

22)Mermaid in Chelsea Creek by Michelle Tea

23)The Wishing Hill by Holly Robinson

24)Father of the Rain by Lily King

25)The Thing About Jellyfish by Ali Benjamin

26)The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud

27)Don't Ask me Where I'm From by Jennifer de Leon

28)Meeting Rozzy Halfway by Caroline Leavitt

29)The Giant's House by Elizabeth McKracken

30) Illumination Night by Alice Hoffman

  My natural inclination is to just pull one of the books out of the bottom three- I think Meeting Rozzy Halfway  by Caroline Leavitt makes sense, but that also moves the place for that slot from Boston to the west of Massachussets.  Not much of an issue in this case, but I'd be concerned about dropping a more geographically underrepresented region of the country.

Enterprising Elite (1987) by Robert F. Dalzell, Jr.

Book Review

Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (1987)

by Robert F. Dalzell, Jr. 

Harvard University Press

   I go to Boston twice a year because my partner is from there and she fucking loves it.  I don't like it as much as she does but there is plenty to appreciate.  First off, the history- which- even in the shittiest, nothing small town in New England typically extends back to before the American Revolution.  There's Boston itself, which is a world-class city.  One of the things I've found interesting about the city is that Boston is like this shining crown jewel and then you go 30 minutes out of town and there are these super sad industrial suburbs- Lowell, Lawrence that are like caricatures of depressed-working-class towns.  What happened, exactly?  

  Fortunately I found this book on the shelf at the Boston Library and was able to check it out from the LAPL.  Voila, all my questions answered.  It turns out that the first wave of industrial capitalism in New England was started by a small group of interlinked family members who then relocated to Boston and turned their fortunes to improving the civic institutions that bore their names.  The lives of the people living in the towns they founded to put their factories- not so much.  Not at all, in fact.  One of the major points that Dalzell makes is that these guys (they were all men) were interested in community welfare but had a narrow definition of "their" community.  At its greatest, that encompassed everyone in Boston before the Irish showed up.  

   A later chapter on political involvement shows how narrow their appeal was- with men from the Lawrence family losing elections in Lawrence, the city they founded for their textile factories.  Dalzell points out that this was nothing close to what one would consider a "modern" industrial operation even though they were pioneers in the use of the corporate form to limit liability among owners. Most notably these textile factories didn't retain much capital instead handing out large dividends rather than reinvesting in the business.

The Modocs and Their War (1959) Keith A. Murray

 Book Review

The Modocs and Their War (1959)

by Keith A. Murray

University of Oklahoma Press

Civilization of the American Indian Series #52

   American Indian history has been pretty risible until very recently.  The Civilization of the American Indian Series from the University of Oklahoma Press represents the longest running effort in this genre, but most of the books, while well meaning, are dated in terms of attitudes and approaches to Native American history.  This book is pretty good from a 1950's perspective, in that it isn't openly racist, but it still reads as one sided.  All the sources are white people who were fighting the Modocs or contemporaneous accounts written by white journalists.  There is a brief mention of the ghost dance phenomenon but the Native characters are poorly drawn and one dimensional.  Captain Jack, the leader of the band of Modocs who gave the US Army their greatest beating in an Indian War- and killed a US general to boot, is portrayed as a vacillating coward.  Considering the Captain Jack Modocs were actually removed to Oklahoma, you would think that Murray could have talked to someone there and gotten a different perspective. 

   There's also no context about the Native environment prior to the arrival of the whites, which, to me, anyway, seems relevant to describing the Modoc experience.  But, if you are just looking for dates, names and a general description of how this war went down, Murray's book is an inoffensive starting point.

Gunflower by Laura Jean McKay

 Book Review

Gunflower (2023)

by Laura Jean McKay

   Australian author Laura Jean McKay won the Arthur C. Clarke award for her debut novel, The Animals in That Country in 2021. That win caught my eye, and I promptly checked out a copy from the library.  It was good, not great, but interesting enough to merit attention to the author going forward.  Late last year she published her follow-up, an entirely predictable book of short-stories compiled from her previous 20 years of writing.  Some of the stories echo the themes of The Animals in That Country, an early story delves into the family dynamics of a cat ranch (Yes, a cat ranch.)  Other subjects are prosaic/banal- like the lengthy story told from the perspective of supermarket clerk who makes a stand for the rights of smokers to take their hourly smoke break.   The Guardian called this collection virtuosic but the New York Times didn't even mention it.  It did get a US release back in October but with essentially no press- the Amazon product page only has seven reviews and Goodreads has 70 ratings, basically the equivalent of many books that haven't been published. 

    

A Man With Two Faces (2022) by Viet Thanh Nguyen

 Book Review

A Man With Two Faces (2023)

by Viet Thanh Nguyen

   I was late to The Sympathizer (2015), which was Nguyen's debut novel AND the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winner.  I didn't actually read it until 2021, just after its sequel, The Committed, was released.  Unsurprisingly I loved The Sympathizer- which is like, the perfect work of literary fiction- combining an interesting point of view (Vietnamese immigrants in Southern California) with an interesting plot (immigrant sent to spy on anti-Vietnamese government activists) and plenty of action, set pieces and dynamic plot mechanics.  You put all those elements together and you have a winner!

  Similarly with the The Committed, which is just as good as The Sympathizer, which is rare/unheard of for a sequel in the world of literary fiction.  But what, one might reasonably ask, does Viet Thanh Nguyen REALLY think about the immigrant experience in America?  A Man With Two Faces is his answer to that question- containing the kinds of truths that only Pulitzer Prize/MacArthur Genius grant winning types get to share over the platform of a major publishing house.   Unfortunately, Nguyen's publicity campaign was derailed by his pre and post 10/7 support of the Palestinian people.  As a supporter of Israel and a Jew, I have to say I didn't find anything offense in his comments, revolving around the general issues with bombing children and abject treatment of the non-Hamas Palestinian people. I mean, don't we all kinda feel that way?  Not, I guess, the people who book literary appearances. 

  A Man With Two Faces is what you call real talk- Nguyen coming to terms with his complicated relationship with his immigrant parents and the white supremacy he believes lurks in the heart of the American Dream.  Nguyen is only a few years older than me and he also grew up in the Bay Area, which is not considered to be a racist part of the US, but, as Nguyen and other writers have shown, can be just as racist as the rest of the US and often in shockingly casual fashion. 

   I found A Man With Two Faces to be a thought-provoking read, certainly not as fun as his two novels, but a great book for those grappling with the role or racism in American society.

Show Review: ZZZahara & Cold Gawd @ ElCid

 

Zzzahara

Show Review

Zzzahara &

Cold Gawd

@ El Cid

Goldenvoice promoting

  I know this sounds totally nuts for a blog that averages under 100 page views a post, but sometimes I feel like promoters book shows specifically for me to go, and if I don't go, and if I don't write up a little review, someone, somewhere will be disappointed.  I'm not saying that's true, in fact, I'm sure it's not, but it just feels that way, which is how I found myself at an early show (Doors 7! Headliner at 8!) at El Cid featuring Zzzahara and Cold Gawd.

  I simply had to see Zzzahara (Pronouns: They/Them)- Mario, my partner in Dream Recordings, has been booking her for a while now down in San Diego and her manager, Gary Walker, works with Amy (my girlfriend) at Monotone.  I genuinely like Gary and his wife Chantal- who is a force in her own right, and Gary has genuine deep roots in the DIY scene in London.  This show was, I found later, sold out- it felt sold out during Zzzahara's set.  So anyway I've been hearing about Zzzahara for months and I was anxious to see the live show.  I was also interested in seeing Cold Gawd (Dais Records), they of the "ABOLISH WHITE SHOEGAZE" t-shirt.

   Both bands were fun to watch- Cold Gawd put out quite a vibe and I was impressed at their professionalism, cranking out a hot set at 730 PM on a Friday.   They are obviously part of the Shoegaze revival that Pitchfork saw fit to comment upon last month.  Cold Gawd also has a dude who does nothing by plays tambourine (the meanest tambourine I ever did hear- clearly audible in an already noisy mix) and scream which made the overall sound more of a shoegazemo (copyright me 2024)- and I was struck, more than once, that this band is one gig away from getting signed to a major label- that's not a good or bad thing, I'm just saying, based on my prior experience, that this is the kind of band that gets signed to a major label when a trend resurfaces (shoegaze) because they have a good vibe, an interesting look and a definite sound.   I'm interested to now go back and listen to their records. 

   Zzzahara is a genuine phenomenon-  an artist Pitchfork has managed to ignore while she is signed to a cool label (Lex Records UK), has close to a million monthly listeners.  She's Eyedress adjacent- another international phenomenon that Pitchfork ignores- with 16 million monthly listeners- I surmise that they may have grown up together. Anyway- she put on a great set- her fans love her- she plays the kind of goth inflected bedroom pop that is super scalable- an artist like her could go from 800k monthly listeners to 8 million overnight if I understand the dynamic properly, because she sings about topics that young people can easily relate to.    And let me tell you, Lex Records knows exactly what they are doing.   As a 45 year old dude I don't exactly relate to the life is tough here in my bedroom lyrics like I used to when I was a kid, but the appeal is easy to understand, and I saw plenty of their fans and I can see them having tons more fans.  They both sound like winners to me, well poised to take off in the revival of the indie scene post-covid.

   I'd never been to El Cid before in 20 years of going to shows in LA and close to a decade of living less than 20 minutes from the venue.  I was intrigued that Goldenvoice was promoting this show, and that was part of the reason I came- to see the venue.  I loved the early start time though I understand it's not typical- El Cid has early and late shows, I was told.  I though the sound was great but the vibe was a little strange- the preshow music was a 2019 dubstep compilation which is fine but not in keeping with the sounds of the artists.  The staff was just the regular El Cid staff- they obviously were flummoxed by these sort of bands and it showed on their sour faces.  Which, you know, is fine- it didn't bother me or anyone else, but I noticed.  I would come back- though dress warm- this is basically an outdoor venue.

Yellowface(2023) by R.F. Kuang

Author R.F. Kuang

 Book Review

Yellowface (2023)

by R.F. Kuang

   I love fiction about the writing of fiction, particularly the business side of writing fiction.  The ideology of the romantic artist-creator is so entrenched in the western culture of creativity that finding fiction that talks about the publishing process is rare, the major exception being roman a clef type books written by young women who have worked in said industry.  Yellowface, then, is a rare treat- a wickedly funny satire(?) about the writing and publishing of literary fiction.

    At the start of the book we are introduced to June Hayward, a recent Yale graduate struggling to make it as a writer.  She's put out one book of YA fiction and... it wasn't a hit.  Her only tie to literary success is her university classmate and frenemy Athena Liu, an R.F. Kuang type (both author and character wrote their first novels while undergraduates) and the opening chapters recounts their troubled "friendship."  Everything take a turn when Athena, giddy about the recent optioning of her first novel for a prestige television/film adaptation, chokes to death on pancakes inside her apartment, with June as the only witness.  June doesn't struggle that hard with her decision to swipe Liu's just completed manuscript, a work of historical fiction about the Chinese Labor Corps during World War I.   

   June submits the manuscript as her own, and we are off from there, as the book is picked up  and June is left to deal with the consequences of her actions.  Kuang is often wickedly funny- I found myself laughing out loud, but I also found myself cognizant of the fact that Kuang's publishing material feels more like what her audience expects than what actually occurs.  But the book is a huge hit, and it's good, so that's really all one needs to observe.