Reading Report, August 2026
Acquired:
The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler
Galactic Pot-Healer, Philip K. Dick
A Beginner’s Guide to Japan: Observations and Provocations, Pico Iyer
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, Earl Mac Rauch
Buckaroo Banzai Against the World Crime League, Et Al: A Compendium of Evils, The Reno Kid with E.M. Rauch
The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, Stanley G. Weinbaum
Offloaded:
John Buchan, The Courts of the Morning
Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick
Progress Made:
The Dark Frontier, Eric Ambler
We Can Build You, Philip K. Dick
Vineland, Thomas Pynchon
Finished:
Here Lies, Eric Ambler
The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick, Kyle Arnold
Another Green World (33 1/3), Geeta Dayal
Deus Irae, Philip K. Dick & Roger Zelazny
Late one sunny, ennui-laden August afternoon, I decided to finally tackle the project of rereading Vineland. Ever since One Battle After Another came out last year, I’ve been mildly vexed by the question of what on Earth it had to do with Pynchon’s book, upon which it was supposedly based.
So far I see nothing, save maybe a vague resemblance between Leo DiCaprio’s burnout dad character and Zoyd Wheeler, Vineland’s hapless hippie protagonist. But it’s a fun read, definitely in the “Pynchon lite” category with Inherent Vice and Shadow Ticket. I don’t mean that as a knock on those books — in fact I prefer them to the doorstoppers. I’d read more of them; does 88-year-old TP have any left in him?
Here Lies did indeed pick up the pace with the advent of WWII. Most of Eric Ambler’s war stories involve moviemaking; he served in the Army Film and Photographic Unit. There are numerous entertaining tales with appearances by the likes of David Niven, Carol Reed, and John Huston (the latter was apparently a maniac who casually risked his own life as well as other people’s). After the war the book just kind of stops. Ambler lived another 50 years after that, but apparently he found none of those years worth writing about. (Here Lies was published in 1985.) Or maybe he was planning a second volume that never materialized?
read more…Good News for People Who Like Bad News
(With apologies to Modest Mouse, who I stole that phrase from. I never liked their records, but they had some great titles.)
I always assumed our eventual climate-change-related deaths would be due to heat and/or fire, but this week a new possibility presented itself: melting glaciers that create titanic flash floods.
On the plus side, that’s a pretty fast way to go, and some people say drowning can be peaceful… though nothing about that fucking tidal wave looks peaceful.
Some TV pundit opined that maybe this would The Thing that finally got people to take their heads out of their asses and start taking The Problem seriously. But you and I know better, don’t we?
If you can ignore the fact that thousands of people died, it’s some spectacular footage. Between the fires and the floods, the coming cataclysm is going to generate some amazing visuals.
This is how the world ends: Not with a bang or a whimper, but with a whoosh.
Native Dog of the Golden West
For some reason I can’t really explain, I like to take pictures of dogs that people have left in their cars. This one is real Art I think: the facial expression, the kayak, the “Native Sons of the Golden West” sign in the background. It all fell into place.
They Want You to Run
Taken on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus yesterday:
It Ends with a Curse
I was searching for Velvet Underground instrumentals just now, and one of the top results was this:
If you click through you get to this:
The actual audio isn’t music at all, but some gibberish about affiliate marketing. I regret having accidentally increased its view total, but there’s nothing I can do about that now.
At least as AI nonsense goes, this has the asset of being obvious. As one of the commenters noted:
read more…Nothing about this video or its existence is natural or organic in any conceivable way, and it is evidence of humanity’s ability to create monstrosities of which we no longer have any control over, and which no single person can wholly comprehend. The force that brought this video into existence is more terrifying than anything that our imaginations could ever conjure up.
Summer’s Almost Gone
You could sense it today: a little change in the slant of the sun, a little hint of nip in the evening air. Summer is on the wane,
It’s a bittersweet time. In truth this next part of the year — late summer slipping into autumn — is my favorite. But it’s hard not to feel a bit of a loss as the days get shorter and the inexorable march continues.
The weeks to come are the ones we want to spend basking in the sun — or if you prefer, writhing on a rock like a lizard in leather pants. Morrison got it.
Pixies Redux
Recently it became time to start listening to the Pixies again.1Today I pulled this off the shelf:
This is the only piece of Pixies vinyl I own. (Back in the day, I thriftily got both Surfer Rosa and Doolittle on cassette from other people. Then I started buying CDs.) It came out three years before a certain other band put a picture of a baby boy with his willie hanging out on their album cover. Curious, that.
This was a period of transition, after Surfer Rosa made them indie darlings and before Doolittle, their major-label debut. The label for this one was the goth-adjacent 4AD, on which the Pixies sort of fit and sort of didn’t.
read more…Yet Another Green World
This week, as previously mentioned, I’ve been listening to Brian Eno’s Another Green World. This is generally considered one of Eno’s “song” records, though it’s halfway to being an ambient album. In truth it’s a mutant that’s not quite like anything else he or anyone has ever done.
Geeta Dayal’s 33 1/3 book was a good read but at barely 100 pages only scratched the surface. One thing she never talked about was the title, which is an absolutely perfect three-word distillation of the album’s contents. It’s an alien planet to be sure, but a lush and verdant one, so you feel safe there.
You could say the same thing about Discreet Music, which was recorded around the same time. And here I’m talking specifically about the title track, a piece of “automatic music” where Eno set up a couple of slightly-out-of-sync tape loops and let them run. Shortly after starting, he says, “people started knocking on the door, and I was answering the phone and adjusting all this stuff as it ran. I almost made that without listening to it.”
read more…On the Rack
Saw this in front of Eureka Books, where they have a shelf of used stuff they’re just trying to get rid of. Somebody had a thirst for knowledge, and a few issues to deal with, and I guess a desire to cloud the minds of men and/or women. I wonder how that all worked out for them.
On Eating a Peach
You don’t eat a peach just because you’re hungry.
I mean, sure — the hungrier you are, the better that peach is going to taste. But that’s the wrong reason to do it. The right reason is that it’s time for the peach to be eaten.
You can’t just pick up a peach and stuff it in your mouth. There is a process — equal parts art and science. There are elements of seduction and of mutual consent. Many are the times I have let a promising-looking specimen go bad because I waited too long. (Story of my life.)(I like to think that when I die, all these lost peaches will be restored to me, sort of like the 72 virgins — which, I know, aren’t real either, don’t @ me.)
Do I regret this? Well, what do you mean by “regret”? Certainly I wish things would have worked out better. But in this as in so many areas of life, decisions must be made, and the results are not always the desired ones.
And when it does go right — ideally a peach should be eaten outside, in the blazing sun, with the juices trickling down one’s bare chest — few things in life are better. There’s one on the table in front of me right now. Later.