Category: books

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Terry Southern’s THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN

Terry Southern
The Magic Christian
1959, Grove Press

I know that we’re all supposed to hate Louis CK now–and I certainly agree with anyone who says that his admitted exhibitionist masturbation fetish stuff isn’t much fun to think about–but none of that changes how funny he’s been before. One of my favorite old bits of his is the one in which he wonders why more billionaires don’t use their resources to prank everyone.

“Buy every baseball team and make them all wear dresses.” Open up the world’s worst pet store, where every can of food costs $1 million and where the groomers tell you point-blank that they will have sex with your pets, and keep it open for decades just to confuse people.

The first time I heard it, I hurt myself laughing and, because I’m perpetually behind on my reading, I didn’t realize until this week that Terry Southern had the exact same idea way back in the 1950s when he wrote this still-hilarious novel. It’s about Guy Grand, a perfectly nice and fabulously wealthy fella who has money to burn and so he burns it by relentlessly fucking with the world.

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Getting CLOSER to Robert Pollard

Matthew Cutter
Closer You Are: The Story of Robert Pollard and Guided by Voices
2018, Da Capo Press

The rock star fantasy rests on the myth that none of it is hard work. Maybe a musician’s early starving-artist days provide some strife to talk about, but even that’s often told as a romantic story of young, untethered bohemians who can afford to scrape by on disposable dayjobs and stay up all night in pursuit of their art and/or fortune.

If you can make it to the next level, life becomes a permanent vacation. Go on tour to applause every night. Tell your life story to journalists. Be on magazine covers. The kids all think you’re cool. When you’re feeling exhausted, take a year off. Play golf with The Red Hot Chili Peppers. Take up a drug habit, even. Some of these big rock bands nowadays go three, four, five years or more between their next album of twelve measly songs. Hell, anybody could do that… some regular schmoe like me might think while we punch the time clock, straighten our tie for the office or put on our hardhat.

The refreshing thing about the story of Robert Pollard is that it’s the opposite of all of that. It steps square on the myth’s head.

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A Few Modest Thoughts about MODESTY BLAISE

Peter O’Donnell
Modesty Blaise
1965 (1984 reprint, Mysterious Press)

In the 80s, there had to be newcomers to the long-running Modesty Blaise series who picked up the Mysterious Press reprints and were disappointed that the books were not the pornography promised by the outrageous new covers. I don’t think a publisher could put out cover art like this today, which is why I collect them. They’re true relics. I guess the editor just hired a model to stand in a black leather bikini (with holster) while the photographer shot detail images of every hill and valley on her body and then spread out the results over several volumes. Man, from the looks of it, these books must be just full of flesh and fluids, right?

Nope, they’re just regular old spy novels full of gunplay and globetrotting. There’s exactly one sex scene here and it’s short and “she used her splendid body to give joyously and without restraint, ranging from glad submission to urgent demand” is as steamy as the prose gets.

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The Meaningless Fun of THE MEANDERING CORPSE

Richard S. Prather
The Meandering Corpse
1966, Pocket Books

Reading a Richard S. Prather novel is like eating steak while drinking bourbon, smoking a cigar and playing with a loaded gun as you place a long-shot wager on a boxing match. There’s nothing healthy going on here. You don’t learn anything. You didn’t get here by following good advice.

No, all that these books have going for them is that they’re crackling, fast-paced entertainment and that’s that. They’re from a time when trash was trash and no one, neither the writer nor the audience, ever needed to apologize for it. No one came to these books looking for a message.

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Dorothy Parker on Robert Benchley and Bookstores

My copy of The Portable Dorothy Parker never stays on the shelf. It travels from room to room in my home, picked up often and read and then moved again back and forth, mingling with anything else that I’m presently reading. I rarely look for it. I always just stumble upon it. One day, it’s on the bedside table. Maybe the next day, it’s on the floor by the living room couch.

Her theatre and book reviews for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Esquire that make up most of the last two hundred pages (pieces written from 1918 to 1962) are particularly good when I need a quick dose of wit. They’re the best reviews of anything that I’ve ever read and are a steady source of inspiration, including when I needed a name for this website. Her New Yorker book review column from 1927 to 1933 was called “The Constant Reader”, which I used about two brain cells to bend to my own purposes here. (Mrs. Parker would probably roll her eyes over it.)

Though I can be hard on my books, I don’t like to mark them with highlighters or pens, but I do like to remember and recognize great and/or interesting passages in what I’m presently reading, so why not do it here? What else have I got going on? Absolutely nothing.

So, haunting me at the moment is the opening paragraph of Parker’s May 1958 book column, in which she tells a brief anecdote about the dearest friend in her life Robert Benchley, before she celebrates a volume of Edmund Wilson’s Jazz Age essays, shrugs her shoulders at Jack Kerouac and smirks over Edna Ferber’s latest potboiler:

The late Robert Benchley, rest his soul, could scarcely bear to go into a bookshop. His was not a case of so widely shared an affliction as claustrophobia; his trouble came from a great and grueling compassion. It was no joy to him to see lines and tiers of shining volumes, for as he looked there would crash over him, like a mighty wave, a vision of every one of the authors of every one of those books saying to himself as he finished his opus, ‘There–I’ve done it! I have written THE book. Now it and I are famous forever.” Long after Mr. Benchley had rushed out of the shop, he would be racked with pity for poor human dreams. Eventually, he never went anywhere near a bookshop. If he wanted something to read, he either borrowed it or sent for it by mail.

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Quick Takes: PRIDE OF THE BIMBOS

John Sayles
Pride of the Bimbos
Little, Brown, 1975

I’m not a fan of baseball so if I’m going to read a book about it, it helps if the main character is a dwarf who used to be a private detective and is now in hiding from someone who wants to kill him so he joins a baseball team who play in drag as a novelty act on the small town carnival circuit. That spices things up a bit. This is a novel about hating life though, not loving a game. Its characters are all grotesques worthy of Flannery O’Connor and whose alcoholic, dysfunctional presences could wilt flowers from ten feet away. It’s a tall glass of bleakness, but John Sayles knows humor when he sees it. He just usually finds it on the gallows. Sayles makes a comedy act (the drag baseball team) depressing and makes a humorless beast (the killer out to put a bullet in our dwarf’s head) funny as he has his own misadventures with bizarre characters and a car with serious radiator problems as he speeds through the rural American south on a murder mission. What makes it great is that Sayles loves all of these people, even the bad guy. He inhabits each of their psyches and spends time in the dark corners. He tells us things about these characters that they probably don’t tell anybody. If he doesn’t excuse them, he at least explains them. When you close the book, you’ve got their germs all over you.

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Vampire Brats

Poppy Z. Brite
Lost Souls
Dell Publishing, 1992

At my advanced age I felt like a real drip reading (and enjoying) this novel of angst-ridden vampires and goth kids.

On the other hand, I’m glad that I didn’t read it when I was a teenager because I would have been INSUFFERABLE afterward–and I was annoying enough already back then. I know how obsessive I can get. This book would have effected me. It would have changed my life. I would have started to wear all black. I probably would have gotten into eyeliner. I would have dug deep into Sisters of Mercy B-sides. I would have spent my senior year prom night hanging out in a cemetery. There’s not a doubt in my mind, no sir.

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The Pretty Good PIGGS by the Pretty Great Neal Barrett, Jr.

Subterranean Press, 2002

Battered, Ebay purchased copy.

In literature, I love dirty, sleazy, white trash Texas.

I love sweaty, bloody, cum-stained Texas.

Barefoot, whiskey-breath, evil-eyed Texas.

Strip club, gun rack, conceal carry Texas.

Big-talkin’, neon sign, tornado warning Texas.

I love books that make all us Texans look like felons with barbecue sauce stains on our shirts. Or good Bible-thumping people just one cool breeze away from scandalous sex with the church organist.

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Calder Willingham’s TO EAT A PEACH

Calder Willingham

To Eat a Peach

Mayflower-Dell, 1966 reprint (original printing 1955)

Calder Willingham is a sarcastic creep and that’s why I like him. This is a novel of summer camp sexual tension as written by the biggest jerk this side of Pluto and it’s deeply funny. No “couple” here belongs together (I put “couple” in quotes because most of these pairings never quite get the plug to reach the socket). The thirtysomething married woman who lusts after a 19-year-old slab of brainless beefcake who merely thinks that she’s acting like his mom could be the most hopeless case. Then, there’s the 46-year-old camp second-in-command who can’t stop thinking about the shapely teenage girl who’s there to mind the horse stable. Meanwhile, when that girl isn’t riding horses daily (double entendre alert!), she’s got an adversarial-slash-flirtatious thing going on with a frustrated bohemian kid who writes the camp newsletter and suppresses his godless, anti-authority, ticking-time-bomb personality for the job. When sex does happen here it’s… nothing much. Just meat slapping against meat. It’s a climax that isn’t much of one. How things change (or not change) afterward is what matters. It’s what Willingham, that jerk, leaves us trying get a grip on at the end.

This is one of the good “dirty books” of the 1950s. It was too puerile to be seen as serious literature, but too well-written, too full of character and with not enough raw sex to be pornography. Some readers in the 1950s probably kept this hidden from polite company. In 2017, its wicked sense of humor keeps it readable. I blew through it in two days.

 

 

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Internet Explorer is FAKE NEWS (also, a word on Jack Clark’s novel NOBODY’S ANGEL)

WEBSITE PROGRESS UPDATE:

Things are coming together. I’m feeling good. How about you? Did that spot ever clear up?

For about three hours each day, I do what’s essentially a data entry job on this site, linking pages, uploading images, copying, pasting and editing. I fire up a Blu-Ray commentary track or some music (the TURBO KID soundtrack is doing me good lately) for background entertainment and I chug along. The film portion of the site should be done in about a week, likely sooner.

The ONLY problem I’ve noticed is that in Internet Explorer, random images here show up as very tiny. An image that’s normal-sized in every other browser shrinks down to something less than a thumbnail on IE. I don’t get it. Research hasn’t helped. I’ll look into it more, but I have a half a mind to just decide that Internet Explorer sucks and forget about it.

I’m a Google Chrome man. Chrome is the browser of cool people, I say!

Only dorks use Internet Explorer! Let’s spread this around.

And speaking of life and death problems…

Jack Clark

Nobody’s Angel

Hard Case Crime reprint, 2010

I’ve never driven a taxi in my life, but this novel makes me feel like I’ve been doing it for ten years. And I mean that in a good way. This story of one sad cab driver who stumbles into TWO different murder mysteries while he makes a living on the streets of Chicago is a travelogue of the city, as well as of the job and of the narrator’s frayed nerves. Jack Clark writes prose full of coffee and misery and moonlight. He was a taxi driver for thirty years and as in all of the coolest fiction, this is a writer writing about his own life, just under the thin guise of the crime genre. Meanwhile, you don’t care much about the murder mysteries. One involves a standard prostitute-snuffer who prowls the streets in a van at which our narrator only got a quick glance (barely remembers a thing); the other is someone who’s out killing cab drivers. Jack Clark builds no house of cards, nor does he intend to do so. There are no compelling clues. And our narrator is no detective. His idea of sleuthing is driving past a murder scene a few times and most of his ideas turn out be wrong. It’s no matter, though. Here, the dead bodies are less important than how our narrator feels about them. The investigation, like a taxi, is a vehicle for traveling the byways of his soul and it’s not the nicest neighborhood. To his great credit, Jack Clark also brings in one more brave and important dose of reality here: Sometimes some mysteries go unexplained.