Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities

 So before I read this, I read another, wholly unrelated novel, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, by Carlo Emilio Gadda.  It's considered one of the great Italian novels, or so they say; a sort of existential murder mystery.  I ended up not caring for it that much; you can see what people see in it, but there is just SO MUCH endless digression to god knows what point, that in the end I thought it was just okay.  

But my point is, it's also a very dense novel.  So before I started I thought; self, if you're going to tackle this, you've gotta be disciplined about it.  You  can't just fuck around and take six months to finish it and get little out of it.  So, I was: I read it in a week or so, and I felt quite good about that, because I feel like my literary interest, for whatever reason, was waning a bit; now I feel good about it again.  So anyway, feeling thus refreshed, I decided, what the fuck, I will tackle this German novel that is seventeen hundred seventy-four pages of small, densely-set text.  It's one of those books I knew about and vaguely wanted to have read for quite a while, but after Proust, I wasn't sure I had it in me to tackled another meganovel.  But it turns out I did!  In almost exactly two months.  Boom.

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G.F. Gravenson, The Sweetmeat Saga: The Epic Story of the Sixties (1971)

I'll tell you one thing: I'm pretty sure I've never read a novel in this physical format before.  The book is large; slightly smaller than an 8 1/2'x11' paper, but about the size of an academic workbook.  I guess I don't really have anything to say about that; it's just an interesting thing.  To me.  Though to nitpick, I have to admit, I'm not a huge fan of that eyeball-searing neon-green-and-salmon-pink color scheme.  The original was like this:

I kinda do prefer it like that in every way.

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Andy Prieboy, White Trash Wins Lotto

So after Prieboy released his second solo album, Sins of Our Fathers (1995), he kind of disappeared for a while, so far as the casual bystander could see, until he started releasing his own material in 2009. Interesting career path. One thing we knew was that in the late nineties-ish, he created this musical, about an Axl-Rose-esque figure making his way in LA's burgeoning metal scene, but this was very tantalizing, because there was almost no evidence online that it ever existed: a few archived contemporaneous newspaper reviews and a clip of an abridged version of one song as performed by the cast on the Conan O'Brien show (O'Brien had seen and liked it). You sort of think something like this would HAVE to be available somehow somewhere, and the fact that it wasn't made it seem like lost media--and indeed, was, until just this spring Prieboy gave everyone an amazing surprise by releasing a painstakingly cleaned-up and remastered version taken from aging tapes--so now we can all hear what we were missing.

For whatever reason, I didn't get around to actually listening to it a week or so ago. With something like this there' always a certain amount of tension: this is SUCH a long-awaited thing, but what if I don't like it? What a dang let-down that'll be. But HOLY GOD IS THIS GOOD. I must've listened to it, I don't know, a dozen times at this point? And I feel like I want to talk about it in detail.

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The Untitled Post

I always feel the need to preface posts about politics by noting that anything could happen in November, but holy shit, the way we're breaking conservatives' brains by calling them "weird"--I am SO there for it.  Matt Walsh is one of the worst people to ever live, so I take unalloyed joy at him beclowning himself here:

Uh...hey, Matt?   You're doing the thing again.  You know, the thing we're calling you weird for?  I mean, I get that you think that shrieking about "cross dressing fetishists, mentally ill transgenders, and naked degenerates" is a normal, healthy thing to do, but you must understand on some level that THIS is what we're talking about when we point out what a repellent little freak you are.  Mustn't you?  I know you're trying to flip the script, but I don't think that doing the thing we're attacking you for EVEN HARDER is really going to be an effective response.  I'm trying to think of what an effective response WOULD be, and the only thing I can come up with is "stop being weird."  And I think that might be...a bit of a lift.  So, have fun tangling yourself in knots.

So, do you want me to admit I was wrong that Biden should stay in, hell or high water?  Okay, I was wrong, although really, how was I or anyone supposed to know that the Democrats would come together in an orderly and disciplined fashion?  'Cause like half the people who wanted Biden out also wanted some sort of horrible reality-show speed-primary, and if THAT had happened, we'd be looking at a VERY different picture now.

Longlegs (2024)

 So here's the solution to the murders in this movie: in exchange for not killing her daughter, Nicolas Cage's Satanist character got the FBI agent protagonist's mother to agree to go along with his evil plans: specifically, dressed as a nun, she visits families and gives them giant, creepy-looking dolls ("a gift from the church," she unhelpfully explains).  Then these dolls have a malign influence that causes them to start murdering one another.  For reasons too dumb to go into, these murder sprees all take place on or around the birthdays of the children.  So in the final scene of the movie (I can't bring myself to call it a "climax") our FBI agent protagonist goes to her boss's daughter's birthday party, and oh no, there's her mom, and there's the giant creepy doll!  Oh noes!  And they're all already acting all fucked up and shit so we know it's on.  FBI agent protagonist (if you expect me to remember anyone's name here, you can keep expecting) is pleading to no avail with her mother to stop it, while the boss says to his wife, hey, let's go into the kitchen, and CUT the cake.  CUT CUT CUT.  And it is extremely obvious that he is going to stab her to death with a kitchen knife, and you think, hey, FBI agent lady, maybe you should, I don't know, intervene or something?  I mean, I don't want to tell you how to do your job, but...?  But no!  She keeps arguing with her mom as we hear in the background the sounds of a knife being drawn and then stabbing noises, and you think: is this schlocky-ass horror movie supposed to be funny?  Because this scene isn't...not funny.  And I did briefly entertain the possibility that some things in this movie are supposed to be dark jokes.  There are a handful of other moments, where you think, hey movie, are you taking the piss?  Just enough to make you consider the idea, but far too few humor was the goal, though I don't think it was, it didn't work, and really, who are we kidding?  All the positive reviews see it as a straightforward horror film.

There's this one scene early on where FBIap is trying to figure out these secret notes written by Cage's character in, I guess, Satanic script.  These murders have been going on for twenty-some years, but apparently she no one else was able to do what she did, until she does it super-easily (in fairness, if that's the right word, there is some vague suggestion later on that FBIap may be psychic--yes, that's as dumb as it sounds--to try to semi-justify some of the goofier shit here, but it's really never much of a thing).  Then, she makes a chart of the days the murders happened (I said this was too dumb to go into, but that's what you GET for trusting me), and consulting a helpful reference book called A Guide to the Nine Circles of Hell, which she has just lying around (as you do), she figures out that they're meant to spell out some sort of Satanic sigil.  Well...that's that solved then, I guess.  

Seriously, how does this extremely terrible movie currently have a rating of eighty-six on rottentomatoes?  I will grant you that seeing Cage Caging it up in full-on camp mode will never not be entertaining, but one other thing it won't ever be is scary.  It WILL be extremely tonally weird, though, at least here.  And forget these big idiotic plot twists; the regular, everyday dialogue is bad enough.  All the characters are just total cyphers, there as the plot necessitates, the whole thing really, really uninvolving.  This is a super-weird comparison, but in some ways it reminded me of some of the weaker late-stage Gottfredson/Walsh Mickey Mouse stories, where there's no sense of there being any kind of logic and Mickey's just kind of staggering around in a vacuum (h/t to David Gerstein for that phrasing).

I'll grant that the movie does have a handful of striking images.  But it really is dogshit.  Very occasional moments of accidental levity do not, on the whole, make it any less boring and amateurish.  I rarely if ever have this reaction to bad movies, but this one actually made me angry.  How the fuck do you think it's acceptable to take people's money for this?  Blah.

Milorad Pavić, Dictionary of the Khazars (1984)

Fun fact: the internet or my computer or someone does NOT like c-with-an-acute-accent.  The normal way of typing diacriticals didn't work; I had to copy and paste from the wikipedia page.  Anyway.

So there was this ethnic group called the Khazars--like, in the real world.  They had an empire in Western Asia from the seventh through the tenth century, before being conquered by who knows who-all.  Apparently they were fairly insular and not that much is known about them.  

Okay, so that's reality.  Then, there's this book.  The idea here is that the Khazars were REALLY unknown, so someone assembled this book, which consists (aside from some inevitable appendices) of information about the Khazar from, respectively, Christian, Muslim, and Islamic sources.  The book posits that the Khazar Empire fell after the emperor (okay, not the "emperor," I know he's called the "kaghan," I READ THE BOOK, it just seems like an irrelevant detail) converted to one of these three religions, though nobody knows which one and its a subject of some contention for modern scholars.  The central event of this book, to the extent that there is one, is called the Khazar Polemic, an event in which representatives of the Abrahamic religions were asked by the emperor kaghan to present their best cases for their religions so he can decide what the empire should convert to.  The upshot of this varies according to the religious affiliation of the accounter.  But really, calling that the main thing is probably giving the novel more credit for coherence than it deserves; it's really just one thing after another, and not always just people who lived in putative Khazar times; there are long entries on people involved in the assembly of the book in the seventeenth century, ones about contemporary scholars, and some where it's sort of hard to discern any relationship with the history.  

I mean, this stuff is obviously all cool as fuck.  This is a book that I've LONG known about, and constantly recommended by amazon, but now I've finally gotten to it.  So what's the experience of reading it?  Well...I'll say, not that this is the book's fault, that going into it, I thought it was going to be a much more grounded sort of affair.  Obviously the history is fantastical, but I thought that within that framework, it would be "realistic," like a Borges story (I'm aware that me using the word "realistic" to describe Borges could use some unpacking, but this is not the time or place!  Get rid of it!  Not so, at all.  It's all casual surrealism.  The back cover copy describes it thusly:

...featur[es] three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a set of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.

And yes, obviously, that sounds great.  But the reality of reading the book is a lot of utter nonsense that only occasional sort of seems to add up to something.  "What's your problem?" you say.  "You love shit like that."  Well, kind of, but it has to be done right.  Look, let me just give an example:

It is believe that at one time Satan lived under this name [Nikon Sevast] in the Ovchar gorge on the Morava River, in the Balkans.  He was unusually gentle, addressed all men by his own name: Sevast, and worked as the head calligrapher at the St. Nicholas Monastery.  Wherever he sat, however, he left an imprint of two faces, and in place of a tale he had a nose.  He claimed that in his previous life he had been the devil in the Jewish hell and had served Belial and Gebhurah, had buried golems in the attics of synagogues, and one autumn, when the birds had poisonous droppings that seared the leaves and grass they soiled, had hired a man to kill him.  This enabled him to cross over from the Jewish to the Christian hell, and now in his new life he served Lucifer.

You may or may not find that amusing, but let me clarify that you will see A LOT like this, and a lot of dreams, and a lot of theology, with a lot of different people, and none of these fantastical details actually have an impact on the book.  Now, you can argue, and I guess I wouldn't disagree, that this all creates a certain mood, and...you know how postmodern novels work.  There's not going to be an easy, concrete meaning to come to.  All true, and I DID want to like this a lot more than I did, but I'm not gonna lie: that shit got old, and I found large parts of this a bit of a slog.  For a while I tried comparing it to Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino, but I don't for a minute believe that the aimed-for effect here is Sorrentino-esque hermeticism.  I'm reminded more of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, which I also found a bit labored and tedious.  There are things to appreciate here!  Don't get me wrong (I did appreciate the sort-of murder mystery at the end, which at least seemed to lend the text SOME level of cohesion)  But it's not my favorite thing.  That is all.

That's why I say "hey man, nice shot."

 See, this is what I'm saying: Trump almost getting killed just isn't a real thing.  Obviously, that's not to say it didn't happen in a factual sense; I'm not a false-flagger.  But it might as well not've.  If Trump were an actual person--not a good person, I mean; just a human being capable of human feelings--even ardent liberals would react to this with shocked sympathy.  But not here.  Any empathy expended on Trump is wasted; he has no interest in it, no capacity to accept it, and indeed no understanding of the very concept of such "soft" emotions.  And so, we react with at best indifferent disgust.  Don't like that, Repubs?  Well, maybe in that case ya shouldn't've chosen the single worst person in the country as your nominee, djever think of that?  I mean, yes, of course you did; and you did it in large part because you knew it would horrify and enrage decent people.  So, you know, reap what you sow.

But how about Trumpists: at least THEY care about this and take it seriously, right?  Well, no, clearly not.  I mean, they wouldn't any way; they don't have that kind of relationship with him and never had.  But beyond that, they've been thunderously hollering for so long about how oppressed they are by trans people existing or whatever that when they're faced with an actual, real thing that they should by all rights care about...they can't.  They are utterly unequal to the task.  They can't experience a genuine emotional response; they've rendered such thing impossible.  All they can do is frantically try aestheticize the event.  As you know, they're already flogging t-shirts; you'd THINK that maybe people might want to sleep on it a bit before getting the "Trump with blood on his face" tattoo, but...well, you'd think a lot of things.  But they just can't make it mean anything, it's just another piece of kayfabe, because they've created a world where NOTHING means anything; where they're constantly faking everything.  They damn well know in their hearts of hearts that they're just play-acting all of their alleged deeply-held beliefs. 

(Of course, it doesn't help them that the would-be assassin seems to have had no discernible ideological motivation, but even if he HAD been the crazed leftist of their wet dreams, their response would be different in degree but not in kind.  They just don't DO "real."  Either way, though, this is why you should've waited on the "fight fight fight" tattoos.  If he was just "fighting" a disaffected twenty-year-old, they might--hard as it is to believe--look a little bit silly in hindsight). 

As an example, look at this from Candace Owens:

Yes, Owens is perhaps the most blatant grifter on the right--as we can see from the hastily-thrown-together t-shirts!--but you can still get a sense of where the right is from this.  I guess she's joking about throwing away her kids' things (and what kind of fucking alien refers to superhero toys are "memorabilia," seriously?), but she's kidding on the square, you know?  She is trying WAY too hard to make this a thing, and it's just not becoming a thing.  Fuckin' bummer, eh?  If you can't profit off of attempted assassinations, what CAN you profit off of?

Anyway, this is why, whatever happens, I don't think any of this is going to make any material difference in November.  You've made a postmodern world; now you've gotta live in it.

Induhpendance Day

Happy, uh, Holiday.  Look, I just want to say one thing to Democrats: what the fuck is wrong with you?  I mean, look, I've never been particularly partisan in the sense of just mindlessly rooting for Democrats.  My rooting is purely based on the fact that I'm not stupid and they're the only possible alternative to our upcoming authoritarian nightmare.  You take what you get!

But the point is, that very fact is why I'm sort of uncomfortable giving strategic advice to Democrats, but here we are, so listen up, shit-for-brains: all this wailing and hyperventilating about Biden's debate performance was the stupidest fucking shit you could possibly have done, and it boggles my mind that even people I'd thought were savvy commentators talking about replacing him.  This is very fucking simple: if anyone asks you about it, spout some boilerplate about how Biden is telling the American people the truth, and then as quickly as possible pivot to the malignant lies of that utter psychopath.  This shit is RUDIMENTARY, and yet instead you've run around like headless fucking chickens, and at this point you may have shat the bed so badly that there's no coming back.  You certainly did our possible non-authoritarian future no favors.

Obviously a younger candidate would have been preferable, although as an erstwhile Sanders supporter, I don't have room to complain.  But I'm of two minds: on the one hand, these memes creating equivalency between the two--oh, the one's old and the one's evil whatever shall we do--are facile bullshit.  Obviously there's no meaningful comparison between the two.  On the other hand...we do live in a world defined in large part by image.  That's just the way it is, and as such, it might be better to have an election season that doesn't look like the "Two Tribes" video but with less gravitas?  Maybe?  Are we really THAT into being an international laughing stock?  Bah.

To end this on a patriotic note: if Americans cared about FREEDOM as much as we claim, right now we'd have Supreme Court justices hanging from lampposts as a very fucking clear and unambiguous message about what we think about people who try to create American kings.  Just saying.  Our commitment to democracy seems skin-deep.