Books Acquired:
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
The Old Devils, Kingsley Amis
Dead Babies, Martin Amis
Success, Martin Amis
The Last Good Kiss, James Crumley
Radio Free Albemuth, Philip K. Dick
VALIS, Philip K. Dick
Under Pressure, Frank Herbert
We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
The T-Shirts I Love, Haruki Murikami

Progress Made:
Dead Babies, Martin Amis
VALIS, Philip K. Dick
The Beautiful and Damned, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Black Count, Tom Reiss
And So It Goes, Charles Shields
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer

Books Finished:
Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
Not Exactly a Brahmin, Susan Dunlap

So, yeah, um… a Very Bad Thing happened this week. I don’t want to talk about it. This clip from Aliens pretty much sums up how I’ve been feeling:

So let’s talk literature instead.

The two books I finished in October could not have been more different. Not Exactly a Brahmin was a murder mystery set in Berkeley that was far from high art, but served its purpose. I picked it up from the free box at the Arcata airport, read it in airports and airplanes and AirBnBs, and put it back in the box after my return flight.

Mother Night, meanwhile, is Vonnegut’s darkest, harshest, least whimsical book. There is humor along the way, but it is the blackest sort of gallows humor imaginable. MN is the only KV book I can think of that has no science fiction element whatsoever; the focus is strictly on the human being and all that it is capable of. Which I guess is a sort of horror.

Here’s a passage I flagged that feels dreadfully au courant:

“We all cling to something,” I said.

“To the wrong things–” he said, “and we start clinging too late. I will tell you one thing I really believe out of all the things there are to believe.”

“All right,” I said.

“All people are insane,” he said. “They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.”

In the anxious weeks leading up to the Clusterfuck I spent too much time thinking about the aesthetics of my library. For instance, the copy of Mother Night I had in my library looked like this:

It’s a great design but I am leery of walking around with anything that has a big swastika on it; you never know what people are going to think. So I got another copy that looks like this:

Which is also a nice design, but misrepresents the contents of the book. You’d think it was a Cold War novel, not a WWII one. But tradeoffs have to be made, I guess.

At the same time I was fretting over the cover of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, which was completely dominated by an even bigger swastika. At first I covered it with a local artist’s image of a naked lady, but that turned out to be creepy in a different way, so I partially obscured that sticker with my “I Voted” sticker. Now the book looks like this:

That’s still creepy, but feels right for this moment in time. If you zoomed way in at the top-right, you might notice another weird detail. I was reading down on the Arcata Plaza when I found a passage I wanted to flag. The office supply store there is no longer in business, but the art supply shop remains, and the only flags they had were dinosaur-themed. So here I am carting around a heavy tome about Nazis with little dinosaurs sticking out of it. That also feels right for this moment.

On a different track I’ve been reading and enjoying Martin Amis’s Dead Babies, which looks like this:

In this case the cover reflects the contents fairly well, though there is a noticeable absence of booze, which plays a significant part. To wit:

Giles had been lying on his bed, bent double with psychosomatic toothache. His strangled shout had been a semi-delirious reply to Quentin’s courtly knock. By 12:30, Giles had consumed five gin-rickies, four gin-and-tonics, three gin-and-its, two gin-and-bitters, and one gin.

“Oh, hello, Quentin,” said Giles when he had unlocked the door. “I’m sorry I cried out at you like that, actually I was just having a sort of daydream.”

“Sorry to disturb you. Only we’re all off to a picnic and I’ve come to get you.”

“Literally ‘all’?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

“Ah.” Giles didn’t want to go anywhere, but he knew that being alone in the house was something he would never even be able to contemplate. “I see. Well, I think I’d better come then.”

From behind his back Quentin produced two vast cardboard boxes. “Celia has prepared lots of food,” he said. “We’ll need some drink, however.”

Giles expressionlessly accepted the two boxes and turned to his open his teak cupboard. He knelt. “Hang on. Mostly red or mostly white?”

“Let’s see,” said Quentin. “We’ve got beef, steak sandwiches, chick—”

“Stop! … Uh, sorry. But actually – could you just say the wines, actually. O.K.?”

“Of course, Giles. Mostly red, please. Why not half a dozen St. Emilion ’74 and half a dozen Chateauneuf-du-Pape ’77,” Quentin said simply. “Oh, and some Poilly Fumé for the girls.”

“There… we… are,” said Giles some minutes later. “Now…” he took a litre of Napoleon Brandy from the lowest shelf and (after a silent consultation with Quentin) two of Glenfiddich Irish from the one above. Finally, having gone over to the desk to establish that his bottle of gin was at least half finished, Giles included a fresh Gordon’s. “That ought to do it,” he said to himself.

In its delirious depictions of decadence, Dead Babies feels like a somewhat updated version of Amis pere’s book Take a Girl Like You, which was discussed in this space a couple months back.

I was rolling along on DB, I had momentum, it was like a train on greased wheels, and then I lost it. I mean literally I lost the book, or at least I thought so, so I got on eBay and bought what appeared to be another copy of the same edition. What showed up was this:

Horrible, no? This was a tragic development, but then lo and behold, the original copy turned up in a neglected corner of the universe. If anyone reading this wants the lesser copy, I will be happy to send it to you. The insides are still the same.

There is more I want to say, as writing this is successfully keeping me from thinking about the Other Thing. But I should probably wrap it up.

The pile of unread books has grown again, partly because my darling wife wanted to do some shopping in Portland, and I am a drag on progress. So she suggested I spend some time in Powell’s City of Books, and we all know what’s going to happen in that situation. I’m not entirely to blame.

I’m especially looking forward to James Crumley’s The Last Good Kiss, which is blurbed thusly on the back cover:

Tough, hard-boiled, and brilliantly suspenseful, The Last Good Kiss is an unforgettable detective story starring C.W. Sughrue, a Montana investigator who kills time by working at a topless bar. Hired to track down a derelict author, he ends up on the trail of a girl missing in Haight-Ashbury for a decade. The tense hunt becomes obsessive as Sughrue takes a haunting journey through the underbelly of America’s sleaziest nightmares.

OK, I’m really going to stop now. Gotta face reality sometime. If you’ve read all of this, or any of it, I thank you. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on literally anything that’s not politics. Over and out for now.