Collected Screenplays Vol 1 (Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink) by Ethan and Joel Coen

Reading these screenplays, I felt like what I suspect people who know Shakespeare well and have seen the plays over and over again must feel when reading him on the page. I have seen all four of these movies many, many times. The Coens are my favorite filmmakers, and Miller’s Crossing is one of my very favorite movies, and the others are all beloved. What first drew stood out to me in the Coen’s work was the dialog; delightful lines that sound like no one in real life. These read nearly as well as the experience of watching the films themselves.

Having Roderick James (the pseudonym under which they collectively edit most of their films) write the introduction was a great in-joke. James tells tall tales about the tangled way that he ended up with editing credits, despite his editing decisions being ignored. He even says the scripts were better than the movies! The basis of this opinion was that it didn’t suffer from the editing that the films were after they were taken out of his hands.

Speaking of editing, it was interesting to see several scenes that were taken out of the movies. One that stood out was a scene at the end of Miller’s Crossing in which Verna tells Tom about Bernie’s funeral. It seems mainly designed to demonstrate why Verna is so angry at Tom despite knowing that he didn’t actually kill Bernie. The scene would have worked, but was condensed to one line spoken by another character in the film.

Blood Simple and Miller’s Crossing would have worked just as well as crime novels. The dialog and stage directions could easily be adapted that way. In all three the dialog stands on its own. I love that Raising Arizona references both Flannery O’Connor (warthog from Hell!) and Faulkner (the Snopes brothers). All three have lines that I think about and quote regularly from having seen the films so many times. The Coens are masters at all aspects of their craft, but the writing was what drew me to them in the first place and is still my favorite aspect of their work.  I will resist typing out thirty of them now.

The scripts are Canon-Worthy, no surprise since I would consider the latter three films represented as canon.

Moby Dick by Herman Melville

I could tell that Moby Dick has settled into the mulch of my brain over the past few years when I was in a terrible mood at work recently and actually had the thought that I needed “a strong decoction of Seneca and the Stoics to enable me to grin and bear it.” I was amused, but after time I was pretty happy about that. I want Ishmael’s voice and the mood of this novel in my head like I want the dialog from Deadwood or a Coen Brothers movie there, or the poetry of  Auden, Yeats, Jeffers or Porter.  Whatever else Moby Dick may be, it’s a five or six hundred page poem to madness, obsession, the implacability of death, the ocean and the whale. I heard a preacher say once that looking at vast things “gets the smallness out of you,” and Moby Dick serves a similar purpose; it very much gets me outside of my head.

The Seneca bit was a surprise to me, but there are lines and images from the book that I think about regularly. In reference to a rival whaling ship captain who went in chase of un-catchable Fin-Back whales thinking they were the more valuable Sperm Whales the narrator says, “O, many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dereks, my friend.” This I apply liberally to many discussions both in person and online when I or someone I’m talking to has lost the plot. There’s an image of Captain Ahab toward the end holding a flaming harpoon as he tries to calm his men that haunts me. I think of Stubbs saying, "I wonder, Flask, whether the world is anchored anywhere; if she is, she swings with an uncommon long cable, though." I think about the image of the clam looking up through the water and not comprehending the world above the water. I think of tiny Ahab threatening Moby Dick even as he’s being destroyed. I think of how perfectly the first chapter captures the mood of restlessness that possesses me at times. I think about the line, "There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody’s expense but his own” which is as good a one line summation of existentialism I’ve heard outside of the TV show Angel* despite having been written nearly a century before Existentialism proper came along. He undercuts that a bit in the next few lines in which the joke is portrayed as a nudging joke among friends. The overall arc of the novel restores it to the level of existential quandary. I could go on. Like Middlemarch, which I read for the first time this year, every page is quotable.

Moby Dick has many of the same strengths and weaknesses as science fiction and fantasy. It evokes a sense of wonder, one of the many stated goals of SFF. It plunges you into an unknown world and builds that world out for you. This is especially true for a modern reader, but Melville seems skeptical that even his contemporaries would get it. That world is used to reflect upon and make observations about the world in which the reader lives. There is a prophecy that came true after a fashion. There’s a monstrous creature that is imbued with mythical significance. There is also a lot of exposition, often in chapters that could fairly be called what genre readers refer to as info-dump. The extended chapter on Cetology, the study of whales, is famously tedious as is the chapter on the color white. I was reminded, this time through, of Neal Stephenson going on for pages in Cryptonomicon about how computer monitors work. I usually skip the Cetology and white chapters on my annual reread of Moby Dick, but this year I pushed through then, and was glad I did. Even those chapters have several lines that made them worth reading. In the case of Moby Dick, as in the case of a lot of (though certainly not all) SFF, the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses for me. I will not begrudge the person who bails on the novel during the Cetology chapter; I will say that once I pushed through it and reread the whole a couple of times it became one of my favorite novels despite those sections.

Moby Dick is a book that it is very easy to project onto; the reader will likely find what they want in it. What is Moby Dick? A story about the implacability of death? Of obsessive madness? An attempt towards a liberal (by the standards of its time) theology? A secretly atheist parable? A disguised gay romance? A hifalutin version of a Boy’s Own adventure tale? A precursor to existentialism?  A story of a far more diverse cast than the time usually produced with relatively positive portrayals of people from a variety of ethnicities (excluding Fedallah, and to some extent Pip)? An extended prose poem to some or all of these? I’ve long held that authorial intent matters more than the current discourse, at least on the internet, allows for. This book confounds that to some extent. I don’t know a lot about the circumstances that Melville wrote in, so I’m left to textual clues and to my own experience of the book. This is further complicated by a scene that reads almost as a series of monologues in a play as several characters in turn muse on the symbolism of the doubloon that Ahab has nailed to the mast and promised to the person who first sights Moby Dick. Melville seems to quite literally be goading the reader into multiple readings, or at least illustrating the way that different people will respond to it differently. I think that all of those readings, and many I haven’t thought of can plausibly be read into the story.

It’s clear that Melville conceived this as a shot at greatness; he says at one point, "To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it." To my mind he has achieved that. He obviously went to great pains to render the events of the book believable to those who have not been on a whaling voyage in the first half of the 19th century. Beyond that I won’t make claims about his intentions. I will fall back on my experience of the book, which is one that I want to repeat annually, and occasionally lives in my mind between readings. As one of my annual rereads, it is clearly a favorite. With this reread, and one of Peace by Gene Wolfe and a first time read of Middlemarch this year, Pale Fire is not as secure in the spot of my favorite novel as it has been for the past several years. I’m ok with that.

Canon.

* The line from Angel is “If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do.”

The Drowning Girl by Caitlin Kiernan

This is the second time I”ve read The Drowning Girl, my first reread among the eight Kiernan books I’ve read. Her hallmark is mashing any and all genres, primarily the dark, bleak ones, into unique works of art. The strongest influence (evident across all the work I’ve read) is Lovecraft. But she’s also seems to be heavily influenced by the Modernists in some books, the Postmodernists in others, Lewis Carrol, William Blake, Herman Melville, 40’s noir, Le Carre, the splatterpunk subgenre of horror and so on. I’m sure I’m missing a lot. She focuses less on plot than on mood, prose, and aesthetics, though she plots well given that stance. Her prose is consistently excellent. Her work often veers closer to erotica than my taste and comfort usually allow for. She is incredibly upfront about depression and mental illness; often uncomfortably so (one of the things I most love about her work). Hers is a dark vision of the world. People are cruel, but every once in a while people can be good as well. She does not flinch from portraying incredibly gruesome acts. It’s a world where depression wins sometimes. I have to offer so many content warnings to various people when discussing her work, that it seems like I’m waving people off. I’m not, unless one of the content warnings lands for you. But she is the author among my favorites who unsettles me most and who I have the hardest time figuring out to whom to recommend her. But she is solidly among my favorites. Her books and their atmosphere

This book wrecked me this time through. It is narrated in the first person from the perspective of India Morgan Phelps, Imp to her friends, an artist who suffers from severe mental illness. She meets a woman on the side of the road, Eva Canning, who in one telling of the story (and there are at least three here) is a mermaid or siren; in another she is a werewolf; in the third she is a victim of a suicide cult that worshiped a sea goddess. In all versions, Eva wrecks Imp’s relationship with her girlfriend. Things spin out of control from there.

Hauntings, the appearance of ghosts and other apparitions are presented as possibly (probably?) being memes in the Dawkins sense of the word; ideas that propagate themselves almost like earworms or songs that get stuck in your head (one of the best explanations of the word meme used in this sense I’ve heard). In the world of the story certain types of mental illness can make people more susceptible to these memes. There is a distinction drawn between the factual and the true. Finally Kiernan uses a quantum metaphor makes it possible that the various versions of the story, drawn from myth, memes themselves, can all be true; particle and wave. This is a horror novel about a woman assaulted by a werewolf, lured by a siren and who, while suffering from mental illness, has enough awareness to realize that she doesn’t know exactly what is happening, all of those narratives are possible. The prose plays into that structure as well. When Imp goes off her meds, the prose gets much more jumpy and deliberately disjointed. This is a perfectly structured novel.

And it is incredibly entertaining and affecting. My own anxiety and depression have never reached the heights of the narrator here, but I have experienced enough of it that this resonated very strongly. I appreciate that it ends as hopefully as a story this dark can. It doesn’t flinch, but it offers a path. You get the sense that Kinbote wrote Pale Fire almost as a suicide note; The Drowning Girl is more in the vein of Walker Percy’s idea of an ex-suicide. Someone who has stared down the barrel, knows that’s an option and chooses to keep going, at least for now.

It’s a legitimately great novel.

Canon.

Slade House by David Mitchell

I’ve been a David Mitchell fan since I first read Cloud Atlas in 2009. That book is brilliantly structured, exciting and moving. I subsequently read the next three books he published, the best being The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet, which is sorely in need of reread. That book had the first appearance of a character named Marinus. Marinus was a major figure in his next novel, a fantasy called The Bone Clocks, and in Slade House, a very effective horror novel.

I heard an interview with Mitchell (also including Neil Gaiman, with whom Mitchell seems to be in a well deserved mutual admiration society), in which he said his natural length for a piece of writing was novella length. This is evident in Cloud Atlas which is structured as a series of nested novellas. The Bone Clocks uses a similar technique, except that the novellas are placed linearly and each represents a decade in the life of the protagonist. I think this structure is one of the reasons I love Mitchell’s work; grouping related stories that reflect on each other into a whole (a la Fifth Head of Cerberus or City of Saints and Madmen) is one of my favorite modes of fiction. Mitchell is adept at capturing a wide variety of voices and this structure allows him to put that to good use in a single volume.

Slade House is a house that shouldn’t exist; it was destroyed during the war. But every nine years it (and its inhabitants) show up to claim another victim. Each chapter, save the last, is essentially a novella told first person from the perspective of the victim. I won’t summarize past that, to avoid spoilers. I will say that each character is well realized, and the book is effectively eerie. Given the array of genres Mitchell has written in the past, it should not be a surprise that he can do horror as well.

I really like that Mitchell is building a body of work that shares a world and shares characters between seemingly unrelated books. Cloud Atlas is the only one I’ve read multiple times, and it and Jacob de Zoet are still the best if memory serves. I’m hoping to get to the only two of his novels I haven’t previously read, number9dream and Ghostwritten by the end of the year and to revisit De Zoet and Bone Clocks next year. Slade House sits comfortably on the shelf with those, and reminded me how much I enjoy Mitchell’s work.

Highly Recommended.

Best Movies of the Decade (First Draft)

Here's my first stab at making a top ten movies of the decade list (and of course I could only narrow
it down to eleven). I will likely revise later this year:

1) The Lighthouse

2) Calvary

3) Annihilation

4) The Witch

5) Mad Max Fury Road

6) Winter’s Bone

7) Hunt for the Wilderpeople

8) Night Moves

9) Hail Ceasar

10) Once Upon a Time In Hollywood

11) Arrival

Here are the runners up, or rather the other movies I considered, in alphabetical order, and on
another day one of the top 11 might slip and be replaced by one of these:

Bad Times at the El Royale

Ballad of Buster Scruggs

Bernie

Blade Runner 2049

Boyhood

Black Panther

Cloud Atlas

Coco

Crimson Peak

Death of Stalin

Destroyer

Ex Machina

Faces Places

First Reformed

Get Out

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Her

Hereditary

Inherent Vice

The Invitation

Lady Bird

Leave No Trace

Life of Crime

The Lure

Mission Impossible Fallout

Moonlight

Noah

Only Lovers Left Alive

Phantom Thread

The Social Network

Spiderman Into the Spiderverse

Thor: Ragnorak

Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri

Three Identical Strangers

Tree of Life

Weiner

What We Do In the Shadows

Get In Trouble by Kelly Link

Kelly Link has become a favorite over the past few years. I had read an odd anthologized story here and there, but I really was sold when I found a used copy of Magic for Beginners in 2015. The title story of that collection is perfect as were several of the others. Her blend of believable relationships, out there fantasy/scifi/magical realist/absurdist ideas and the excellent prose make for indelible reading experiences. Most of her stories create a world as well-realized as any novel.

This collection opens with a strong one-two punch. The Summer People is a fairy tale grounded in the reality of impoverished rural life and being stuck in a job you hate. It’s about betrayal and escape and relationships. The ending is very sad, but there is a whimsy to it and a determination that keeps it from being too grim. The second is about an actor who is typecast as a vampire and his lost relationship with an old costar. I won’t summarize further, but it is very funny, scary and pulls the rug out at just the right moment and in just the right way.

“The Lesson” from later in the collection is perfect. A gay couple who have hired someone to be a surrogate mother go to an old friend’s wedding as complications arise in the pregnancy. There is a wishing well on the island. On this framework Link builds an eerie and fully realized story about choices and fate and love and contentment and fear. Granted I was sitting down as I read it, but I was frozen in place for some time after reading it.

I could keep pointing to standouts, but there were only two stories that didn’t work for me on the first pass. Link, though, is a writer who has earned a second look and rewards rereading, so I will withhold judgment until I read the collection again. Which I will. I wanted to add one of Link’s collections to my read every year list.* But now, having read all four, I can’t decide which one, so I will likely rotate between them. I can’t recommend her stories highly enough.

Canon-Worthy.


* Currently comprised of Pale Fire by Nabokov, Moby Dick by Melville, Wild Seed by Butler, Prater Violet by Isherwood and moving forward, Peace and Fifth Head of Cerberus by Wolfe, Holy the Firm by Dillard and Middlemarch by Eliot. This could do with some pruning, and there likely will be at some point (The Moviegoer, Till We Have Faces and Godric used to be on the list), but I’m not willing to let go of any of the current batch go at the moment.

The Visible Filth by Nathan Ballingrud (and Wounds (2019) directed by Babak Anvari)

I saw Nathan Ballingrud on a panel at the North Carolina Literary Festival in 2014 and picked up his first book, North American Lake Monsters, on the spot. It is an amazing collection of literary horror stories, and is due a reread. I picked up a standalone copy of this novella (also collected in his new book Wounds) a year or two ago and haven’t gotten around to it yet. They’ve adapted it into a movie, Wounds (on HULU), so I thought I’d read the book before watching.

The novella is excellent. Will, a bartender at a hole in the wall bar in New Orleans finds a phone left behind by some college students. The students (who were underage) ran off after a brutal fight involving a man who lives in the apartment above the bar. Will starts to get texts from the phone depicting some type of gory ritual and gets drawn into some dark places. The strength of the book is the combination of the supernatural and Will’s descent. He is revealed to be an utterly empty person. One of my favorite types of stories is a person realizing that they are not good, or at least having all the information needed for that realization even if they continue to lie to themselves. This fits that bill.

The movie is a very faithful adaptation. If anything it makes things a little more clear. At first I thought that it over-explained, but I think that I was just anticipating what would happen because I had just read the novella. The texts on the found phone give a little more information, and a couple things that are implied in the book are outright stated in the film (though I suspect I might not have caught them had I not just finished the book). The movie’s strongest scene is the final one. It captures the horror of the book very well.

The Visible Filth- Highly Recommended
Wounds- Recommended
(heavy content warning for both)

I would also like to put in a plug for North American Lake Monsters. It’s very very good.