Heimito von Doderer, The Demons (1956)

Okay, so I read this!  Let's not pay any heed to how long it took.  I mean, I suppose it's not that bad, comparatively, but dude, I read all of Proust (which is something like four times as long) in less time than this.  Still, it IS long--this two-volume edition is about sixteen hundred pages, though it's worth noting that that's with a surprisingly large font--with one more like The Man without Qualities, it'd probably be more like thirteen hundred.

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Heimito von Doderer, The Strudlhof Steps (1951)

Look there's an elephant in the room, so let's get that over with first: yes, Doderer was a capital-N Nazi. This, unfortunately, is true. He joined the party in 1932, for reasons that seem a little obscure; no one seems to be able to say whether it was just because he wanted to get in with the Nazi establishment to benefit his nascent writing career, or whether it was actual ideology--but at any rate, a whole lot of people who would know testify to his disillusionment with the party as of 1940, and his remorse for getting involved, so, I mean. When his work started to appear in English, a lot of reviewers seem to have started from one point--"Nazi"--and used that to basically make up narratives for his work that simply aren't there. If you would prefer to disassociate yourself from anyone who was a Nazi, I understand. But to me, personally, this he's too interesting an author to pass up.  Also, I DO believe in redemption, even for three-time Trump voters, in the extremely unlikely even that they're repentant and willing to do their best to make amends, so come on.

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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.