David Leo Rice splashed through town recently promoting his latest Whiskey Tit novel The Berlin Wall and delivered a very intriguing presentation. I was pleased to relieve him of a copy of the novel, which has turned out to be incredibly fertile with ideas, or maybe febrile’s a better word? To the degree that I feel like I need to sort them out! And maybe this place (Internet Heaven) is a good place for that sort of thing. To be clear, this post, as per usual from my lame brain, shall constitute a jumble of thoughts, not a coherent “review” or whatever. I thought the book was TERRIFIC, that’s my review. Buy it right away! Now for my mental mishmash:

First of all, I hope I’m correct in thinking of this novel as an “allegory”: I’m terrible with all these fucking literary terms, but I’ve read several of David’s books at this point, and it seems to me that his entire oeuvre is an allegory of Eternal Recurrence overwhelming the deluded linear intentions of all we wistful daydreamers of humanity. We’re constantly forgetting (then remembering, then forgetting, etc.) that it’s all happened before, and it’s all going to happen again, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Indeed, it’s a RELIEF. If the future is only a replay of the past, then I know exactly what’s coming next. No surprises, thank you very much. On the other hand, it’s also a TRAGEDY because everything that happens is horrific and painful, the only sane response to which is REGRET. So you have to alternate infinitely between RELIEF that it’s out of your hands and DESPAIR that there’s nothing you can do about it. (That’s my take, anyway.)

Birth is life’s first abuse. The heart of a reactionary is an abandoned child longing to return to the paradise of the womb, in which the world was Love and every need was met before it was even known. This desire to go back, impossible to fulfill, of course, is the inexhaustible fuel for fascism. A charismatic father figure shows up promising an amniotic restoration, and homey’s like SIGN ME UP. In this case, we have the character of György, a Hungarian youth studying in Germany, but losing focus as he is drawn to online rhetoric around “the Living Wall,” a doctrine that the Berlin Wall was alive and that when it was torn down, its still-living pieces dispersed into a revenant diaspora seeking to reunite into a new and better Wall in a new and better future. (And right on cue, we are soon introduced to one of those Wall fragments, Ute, who indeed wanders Europe searching for her lost wholeness. She seems to be a woman of human flesh, yet also composed of stone and grout and barbed wire. There’s a very Cronenbergian cast to this novel—a lot of creepy conceptual hybrids of “flesh”—which makes sense because the first time I saw David Leo Rice, he was promoting a book of essays on Cronenberg. What goes around comes around!)

Early in the novel, György salutes a poster in his room of Yukio Mishima’s severed head on a plate, “its lips frozen halfway between agony and exaltation” (p 27), a fantasy of masculine apotheosis and the triumph of the will. Late in the novel, György approaches that apotheosis from another angle, encountering a headless sculpture entitled ARCHAIC TORSO OF MISHIMA, which tells him, “You must change your life.” Rilke famously heard these words from a torso of Apollo because every star in the universe was watching him expectantly, which made him feel kinda special, you know; for György, the words are only a seduction, a cheap and cynical pickup line intended to entice a weak-minded incel into sacrificing his precious life essence to the appetite of an avaricious demiurge—in this case, Anders Breivik, the neo-Nazi who shot up that Norwegian summer camp back in 2011. Having escaped from prison by mystical means, this ghoul has emerged to invigorate a right-wing insurgency in Germany. György resists Breivik’s influence by summoning his own Hungarian avatar of a romanticized past, Arizstid Huszár, but this resistance is truly only a recapitulation of Breivik’s extremism. EVERYTHING is Eternal Recurrence, after all. (There’s a bunch of complicated stuff in which György is impregnated by Breivik with the perfect future race that will populate a risen Atlantis, that I’m not going to begin to tease out here and that I’m sure I never fully grokked, but I hope that’s at least some of the gist! Read the book!)

As a kind of foil to Breivik, we have the Chancellor of Germany, with whom the novel opens, delivering a speech that declares the “end” of the 20th Century while promising an eternal Golden Age to come, bog-standard, self-congratulatory, neoliberal schtick: “Germany faced its worst self and, alone among nations, triumphed” (p 19). There is one direction, and that direction is PROGRESS. Gotta love those politicians! Where Breivik looks to a romanticized past, the Chancellor looks to a romanticized future. No one lives in the actual goddamned present, ha ha! Actually… maybe it’s Ute, our very confused and roving avatar of the Living Wall? Makes sense structurally… the Wall might be the membrane between Breivik and the Chancellor, who hold each other across it in a sort of yin-yang embrace bound within a sac made of the dead skin of old Europe that seems to be wrapped around everything in this novel. (There’s that mischievous Cronenberg again!)

György’s liberal foil in the novel is Anika, a professor who has written scholarly work debunking “The Persistent Myth of the Living Wall,” and now at the behest of the Chancellor is writing a new work on “Normal Life in Southern Germany,” which is a propaganda piece justifying the Chancellor’s claim on power by reifying into an official narrative some alternative, more pastoral, mythos—what amounts to Breivik’s formula from the Establishment side, academic, institutional, acceptable. Anika, installed in the Chancellor’s cottage in the Black Forest, immediately dissipates into an inchoate depression, unable to work on the project as she herself lives out a perverse, dimly perceived version of that myth when György gravitates into her orbit to form a family unit of surrogate mother and son, soon enough joined by Ute as grandmother. They enact together a false idyll, which they understand to be fraudulent, but from which there is no escape, in which their roles are mandated and eternal: “[…] the possibility that they’ve entered an airless, lunatic loop, a smothering string of Sundays linking the world’s outset to its culmination, plays through all of their heads, freighting the question of cherry strudel or apple with a weight it can hardly bear” (p 249). The unbearable HEAVINESS of being, contra Kundera! (I’m proud of myself for picking that up, by the way, which is why I clipped it. The Rilke thing, too. I mean, this guy knows his shit! He references a million billion authors and thinkers throughout ALL his novels, half of whom I have NO IDEA. Maybe someday… I’m like the Chancellor, wrapped in the dead skin of the past, dreaming of the disembodied radiant future when I’ll have read all the books in the universe….)

What else? Well, a TON. I’ve only scratched the surface here, and I don’t have the wherewithal to dig further, but I already spent a few hours on this…. I’m sure I’ve made it seem confusing, but it’s all conveyed in clear and beautiful prose in the book. You’ll have no trouble following along where David Leo Rice leads. (Trust me, it’s not nearly as disorienting as The Obscene Bird of Night, through which I am STILL struggling, after many months… Of course, the more you struggle with a text, the more hopelessly entangled and immobilized you become. The trick is, you just have to LAY BACK AND ENJOY IT, as so many Old-World mothers have advised their nubile but reluctant daughters down through the generations of Man. It’s the story of Western Civilization in a nutshell, really. Would we even BE here otherwise? I’m thinking of you… my Obscene Bird… lurking so feral, so ferocious over there on the coffee table…)

The upshot of this post that shall not be construed as a review, is that The Berlin Wall is a humdinger of a dream novel, endlessly stimulating, and FUN—read it, damn you! If you’re someone who enjoys following literary breadcrumbs and descrying allusions to other texts, by the way, then you’ll LOVE this book. They’re everywhere—and oftentimes DOUBLED. You’ll see Joyce’s “nightmare of history” TWICE, Yeats’ “slouching” TWICE… the TWO Mishimas, obviously, head and torso, very clever…. That Kundera bit does rhyme back again later in a subtler way, but no spoilers HERE. I wasn’t even on the lookout, frankly, so who knows what I missed. Probably DOZENS of allusions I skated right past. You’ll have to read it yourself to find them, asshole! Like I said, this isn’t a review!

I have done the unthinkable, which is to activate a Goodreads account in order to manage my Authorhood over there, such as it is…. to, you know, exercise some modicum of control over my public image qua “author.” Here, in fact, is my Author Profile. If you are a Goodreads maven, please do, hmm, I have to find out what people do over there… maybe “follow”? I have “followers,” after all, they must’ve “followed” me at some point! Thank you, followers! And you, reading this, I bid you, go forth and follow!

Obviously, I’m doing this in support of Divine In Essence. Go ahead and preorder it. I’ll wait for you. Cool, thanks! On with the post!

I am not a social media guy—I ran screaming from Facebook a decade ago. The closest I got to social media since then was lurking on Reddit and watching YouTube videos. The few occasions when I was tempted to comment or post on Reddit, I was quickly pummeled into submission by the maladjusted troglodytes that so fecundly populate the crevices and crannies of that platform, for which I was GRATEFUL each and every time because it reminded me of my place in life, which is OFF OF SOCIAL MEDIA. Same with YouTube videos: you can develop a nice, uh, normal “parasocial relationship” with a persona who has no idea you even exist, and on those rare occasions when you slip up and leave a comment, you will promptly be put back in your place by the Infinite Armies of Conformity. I’m hoping against hope that this is basically what Goodreads is going to be like… something functional and enjoyable that I can maintain at some kind of emotional distance, and not get jacked in to some horror dystopia like Facebook. If it does turn into that, then I will have to deactivate it, sorry! (Not sorry, as the kids say.)

The other thing I did was to create an Author Page for myself at Amazon itself. (As you may be aware, Amazon owns Goodreads, surprise.) The theory being that if I have control of my identity directly on the mothership, maybe they’ll be less inclined to suppress my books. I think I’ve mentioned already on this blog the various means by which Amazon has fucked over my books, so I won’t go into it, but I’m being STRATEGIC this time around. For one thing, I’m allowing an ebook to be released. I have this suspicion that it was the absence of an ebook edition that doomed my other books in the algorithm. And for another, I’m establishing this Author Page, from which I shall “claim” my books and from this Olympian perch, I will DEMAND to BE SEEN. Something like that.

Currently, the page is displaying only I, No Other, but that’s because I haven’t been “verified” yet. Once the process is complete, I should be able to add the others. But as you can see, I, No Other is readily available from this page. (As opposed to searching for it, which continues to turn up NADA.) That being said, DON’T BUY IT! Miette plans to release a Second Edition, hopefully VERY SOON, which will be far spiffier and superior in every way to the one currently available on Amazon. I mean, if you’re reading this post in the Future, the situation may be different, but for now, if you want to purchase I, No Other, do it from the Whiskey Tit site, and she will treat your order as a preorder for the promised Second Edition.

It appears that Amazon is another place where you can follow me! Go for it, if that’s your thing. Seems like a bit much. I basically ignore all Amazon emails aside from the ones concerned directly with orders I’ve made.

We now have a preorder page for Divine In Essence.

Here is the description:

After God created the Prison of the World, he threw away the key. In this collection of uncanny and disconcerting stories, a few unfortunate but charismatic innocents seek to find it. Any luck? Read Divine In Essence to find out!

You will encounter:

-a young boy captive in his stepmother’s glass eye,

-the engrossing diary of a sassy and intrepid girl-ghost,

-an “impudent” woman consigned to a passive life in a mirror,

-a mutilated Fury ransacking the dream world,

-Icarus mired in Brigitte Bardot,

-and many more!

The release date will be September 24. Presumably, that will be the day your preorder will ship? Or will it ship so as to arrive at your mailbox on the release date? I have no idea, and does it even matter? These are important questions for the Publishing Industry to answer right away.

There is also the matter of the Second Edition of I, No Other to attend to. I can’t remember if I’ve even mentioned that on this website, but probably not. Oh good, looks like I DID mention it! I AM so GREATLY improving, amn’t I? I’m going to say that if you order I, No Other from the Whiskey Tit website when you order Divine In Essence, that order will be treated as a preorder for the Second Edition.

Watch this space!

I should finally be announcing sooner or later the release of Divine In Essence, my second full-length fiction collection from Whiskey Tit. You might call it a follow-up to I, No Other, my original collection, although it certainly differs in key thematic and stylistic respects, albeit both are unmistakably MINE. I’m not sure exactly when this will be happening, but my guess is Fall/Winter? Honestly, no idea, but I actually went through a proof recently, and there should, I’m told, soon be BOOOOOOKS for me to look at, so IT MUST BE SERIOUS, right?

Concurrent with this release, I also plan to release a second edition of I, No Other, which will fix certain egregious design issues and tighten up the story selection. If you already possess a first edition… well, it’s up to you! Do you want to be a completist? I THINK YOU DO. I will be removing a few minor pieces that only, quite frankly, served as filler and, to my now somewhat more mature literary eye, rather weakened the structural integrity of the whole, so there may be people in the world who also fancy themselves “completists” and wouldn’t wish to see stories removed from a second edition, I get it, but if you already have the first edition, you’re golden, don’t worry about it, here’s a dime, get yourself a little sumpin’, don’t bother me, kid.

Anyway, I’m working on that project as we speak. I just feel myself to have wantonly ignored this website and wanted to pay a visit, kinda pro forma. Look at that Cormac McCarthy post, by the way, wow, I must’ve been in some kind of mood to start blathering about Cormac McCarthy, just shows you how desperate I was for something to put up here. Ha ha!

I sometimes wonder whether I should get myself into a more normal sort of website. I just find all the marketing intimidating whenever I look into it, not to mention the expense. I don’t want anything fancy, I just want exactly what I have, only reliable and safe. It’s always been easier to just let this barebones thing I’ve had for over a decade at this point keep coasting along as it is—it’s easy enough to add a post when I so desire. But the browser tells me this site is “not secure,” meaning they want me to make it https, and I don’t know how to address that unfortunately highly technical issue, and what if I just signed up with some sort of company that handles all those under-the-hood details FOR you? Yeah, what if I did that?… Or maybe I could just buckle down and figure out how to get an SSL certificate and whatever other things it wants?…

Aeons having drifted past since last I posted here, and yet with nothing much to justify a post, I thought why not poke my head in briefly with some bookish sorts of thoughts? I used to do that occasionally! I read Cormac McCarthy’s final two books last week, so that seems like a decent pretext for some Book Talk, eh?

I prepared for this reading over a couple months by going through most of his earlier catalog in the form of audiobooks in my library app. All the pretty narrators were EXCELLENT, by the way—I was mightily impressed! Especially the guy who did Suttree. McCarthy’s prosody is meant for the ear, anyway, methinks. Whether he’s in his ornate, biblical mode or his just-the-facks-ma’am mode, doesn’t matter, they both benefit from that auricular vibrato, an enhancement of mentation with sensation.

The Passenger and Stella Maris, however, I read with my eyes. Having imbibed most of his output now, I have to say his UTTERLY BONKERS Southern Gothic novels are by far the best work. The Westerns are great, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t hold a candle to the Southern novels.

I read and enjoyed Blood Meridian, his first (and best) Western, way back in college and always kept him in mind afterward as someone I would have to get back to, and I guess it took his passing to finally prompt me to follow through on that urge. I did watch and read The Road at some point in the past, but wasn’t much taken with it. Pretty anemic for a post-apocalypse scenario. My theory on that book is that he read Stephen King’s The Stand and wanted to kick back against the religious garbage in there, the literal hand of God reaching down and choosing the winners and losers of humanity after having wiped everyone else out for some reason or other. McCarthy was like, nope, no reason, no God, no externally bestowed Grace, there’s no final battle between Good and Evil, bullshit, whatever happens to us is our own damn fault, and whatever Grace there IS in us is fragile and contingent, ergo, IT’S ON US to safeguard it against destruction and loss. So I appreciate that message, but the vehicle of it was just another tired old nuclear apocalypse, like I haven’t seen a million of those already in this supersaturated entertainment culture of our’n.

But this was going to be about The Passenger / Stella Maris. Ahem. (Before I commence upon my whine-schrift, however, I want to make it clear that I LOVED the books. OKAY? All of his books are amazing, including these ones, even though I’m about to mildly complain about certain aspects. I’m just one of those assholes who complains about shit, but it doesn’t mean I don’t also praise, because I do that, too, when the mood strikes, and the evidence is all over this website if you ever feel like poking around!)

First of all, why was this TWO books? Fucking filthy lucre, that’s why. Two books costs twice as much as one. Artistically, it’s ONE book, straight up, and it wouldn’t be “too long” if it were all in one volume. This isn’t like Lord of the Rings, where it really would’ve been a 1,500-page door stopper heavier than a human child. These two books together aren’t even as long as Suttree. Should’ve been one book. My guess is he was trying to set up his heirs.

Second complaint. Look, he’s an incredible writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed the prose, of course—I sailed through these books, scooped up and gobbled down those rhythms and locutions like gobs of your chef’s finest yogurt concoction. And I loved the science-y stuff, these are all topics I think about constantly myself, but he never USES it for anything more than adornment. Every time Alicia brings it up with her doltish psychotherapist, the conversation just sidesteps away from it, you just get a taste of the good stuff, a soupçon of New Physics here, some flakes of non-Euclidian geometry there, a dash of Kekulé’s dream and maybe some Word Virus for spice, a whole series of glancing disquisitions on incredibly exciting ideas disconnected from any actual events or relationships in the novel… and that’s about it. It’s like somebody’s got a mouthwatering bowl of gigantic gleaming red strawberries, and they offer you ONE bite of ONE strawberry, and that’s it. Taking it back! No more for you!

If you want to see Math and Science successfully integrated into a literary novel, read Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. He deals with many of the exact same subjects, but they’re actually substantiated and integrated into the plot, the characters, the imagery, the motifs… you know, the LITERARY SHIT. (It’s even got, pace McCarthy, a perpetually horny and superhot female mathematician who’s obsessed with non-Euclidian geometry—an oddly specific fetish among these elderly white male authors, don’t you think?) Furthermore, I DO DECLARE that one of Pynchon’s Perennial Preoccupations is exactly the same as McCarthy’s: how do you protect that fragile flame of Grace (that establishes our humanity) from destruction by the forces of mechanization and abstraction (that emerge from our humanity)? But Pynchon elaborates almost infinitely on this theme—you can’t staunch the flood—whereas McCarthy just kind of wallows around in it. (I’m exaggerating for effect, I don’t deny, just making an observation, don’t SWAT me.)

I promise, I did like these books, I thoroughly enjoyed the act of reading them. McCarthy is full of gorgeous prose and profound musings. But I do have to issue forth with a third complaint. Next to Suttree, The Passenger, its spiritual sequel, is glib, pallid, and insipid. Both books are written from the same formula: a sophisticated, high-born, well-educated fella has turned his back on ALL THAT and taken to living instead (LIKE A MAN) among the romanticized riff-raff, the low-born, just-plain-folks (yet also charmingly eccentric) troglodytes of Society’s lower rungs (who are really the Wise Ones what with them living so close to Nature you know they’re not ANIMALS per se but pretty close), whose rude, alchemic life juice he desperately cultivates to sustain his own vitality. (Constantly “smiling to himself” whenever he has a conversation with them. That smile, that’s his vampire’s kiss: it’s in both Suttree and The Passenger.)

It’s just done so much more colorfully, enjoyably, and expansively in Suttree. The characters have so much more charisma, the events are developed so much more immersively, and the literary rendering of the world is so much more entrancing. The Passenger is skeletal by comparison. My theory is that he started The Passenger around the same time he wrote Suttree, but threw it in the trunk when it didn’t go anywhere, and then he resurrected it more recently when he had the idea of splitting the male character into a dyad: two halves, a brother and a sister, who would be incestuously in love with each other. This is a GREAT idea, I just feel like he didn’t do very much with it. You barely get a sense of their actual relationship. You really only get signals here and there, often just murky and morose reflections in flashbacks, whether from Bobby or Alice, but very little direct light. I think what he was mainly interested in was using Alicia as a vehicle to discuss the math and science ideas that he was apparently obsessed with in his later years.

I found it very intriguing that he imbued Alicia, the female half, with the hyper-rational, disconnected, emotionally alienated, wrathful sky-father qualities, while Bobby was given the intuitive, oceanic, emotionally intelligent, nurturing earth-mother qualities. Maybe he was going for a Yin-Yang deal? Where each contains something of the other? I’m not sure, but it’s certainly worthy of rumination. One thing that’s clear to me is that there is only one protagonist: that brother-sister dyad. Just as there’s only ONE BOOK, you greedy fucks. (When I was a kid, Guns & Roses released a double album in the form of two separate albums: Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. What a money grab—and most of THEIR fans were children! What made that sad episode linger for me was hearing Axl Rose in a radio interview explaining that he was actually SAVING these children money because one friend could buy #1, while the other friend could buy #2, and then they could make tapes for each other. And I’m thinking, “That means I’d have a good quality cd with actual cover art and a shitty cassette with handwritten song titles and tape hiss… and it’s not like blank tapes are exactly FREE. Does he really believe what he’s saying?” Of course, nowadays, I understand, Taylor Swift has innovated this grift to another order, with her multiple variations of the same album, a kind of Sierpinski Gasket of an album, just short of requiring her fans to sign loyalty oaths in which they’ll never spend another nickel on the work of any other artist, essentially docking their paychecks in perpetuity to keep her infamous private jets fueled. At least Use Your Illusion was good music. Imagine being stuck with a lifetime subscription to Taylor fucking Swift!)

Complaints and digressions aside, I want to be clear one more time, I love McCarthy’s writing. Why else would I read his entire catalog, right? I’m telling you, I had to CONSTANTLY be rewinding my audiobooks just so I could hear those majestic passages repeated. And he’s got plenty of lovely passages in these last two books, too…. I just get cranky when things fall short of my needs, and none of the reviews I looked up online mentioned any of these issues, so SOMEONE had to say it. Every word McCarthy ever wrote is eminently worth reading, however, if that’s your thing. Not that anyone’s looking for recommendations from ME. Ha ha!

Okay, well, shit, I was going to talk about Don Quixote, too… but I went way overboard on the McCarthy, so maybe some other time. I was VERY surprised by Don Quixote, however, so I hope I manage to come back here and write about him!