Things They Say
Ken Nordine, the Dicks, Screamers, Charlie Parker & Razorcake Donation Drive
It feels like a million years have past since I signed out from Twitter on my laptop and removed the app from my phone, but it’s only been a week.
The day after I logged off I texted my friend Josh Mohr (hi Josh!), who quit Twitter at least a year ago, and told him it felt like there were more hours in the day. His response has stayed with me. ‘They’ve convinced us we “need’ social media. We don’t.”
I don’t know if by “they” Josh meant the capitalist techlords that drive society or the marketing departments at publishing companies, but I’m not sure it matters since it amounts to the same thing. I’m giving publishing too much credit here but stay with me because the weird thing is it really does feel like there are more hours in the day, and it’s wonderful.
Please don’t think I’m some high and mighty tech purist. I like social media. I might even like it too much. There have been many times in my life when I was obsessed with things that weren’t good for me (Irish whiskey, South Orange County punk, the New York Knickerbockers.) Do you know how many times I’ve clicked the Twitter icon in my browser since I signed out? At least two dozen times. And even after a week I still do it multiple times a day every day. So I’m not pointing the finger at anyone.
I’ve never thought I was someone who was on social media too much because it doesn’t interfere with my work, but I may have to revise that thinking. Have I read more books in the last week? Yes. Watched more scripted entertainment? Yes. Cooked more and better meals for my family? Yes. I made grits, biscuits, and vegan jambalaya from scratch yesterday for fucks sake, and I didn’t use no beans from a can, no.
I’m beginning to think that I “use” Twitter rather then I “enjoy” it. Substitute “Twitter” with “alcohol or drugs” and this line of questioning starts to resemble those forms you have to fill out when you go to rehab. Who knew logging off a website could be so dramatic?
But Let’s Talk about Books
One benefit of being off Twitter? I finished three books, read parts of others, and started some more last week. (I may be off Twitter, but the pandemic still has me scattered.) But, as I promised in last week’s newsletter, here are some thoughts on some books I’ve read recently.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
I’ve wanted to read this novel since Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize 4,000 years ago. (Actually it was last year.) Although I read it during the warmest October on record, it would be a good book to read by the fire while the snow is falling. Set in a remote mountain village in Poland during the dead of winter the story is told from the point-of-view of a woman who looks after the summer homes of her neighbors whom she doesn’t really know and would prefer to keep it that way.
The novel is deeply housed in the mind of its narrator, who is consumed with all many of things: astrology, wildlife, past grievances. So it takes a while to discover that she’s regarded as something of a kook in her village, and a bit longer to realize that she may very well be one. There are only a handful of characters that we come to know and they go by the names that she gives them (Big Foot, Oddball, etc.), which gives the book the feel of a fairly tale though it is set in a contemporary setting.
The book opens with a death of a neighbor, one of the few people who stay in the village all year round. This forces the tiny community to come together to deal with the situation and officials from the city who’d rather be anywhere else to intrude. Although the situation is stark and cold and slightly absurd, Tokarczuk’s prose is none of these things. She’s a lot like Kafka this regard. (Apparently, when Kafka read his work aloud to others, he laughed throughout; I can see Tokarczuk being an absolute riot.)
It took me a while to warm to this book, which I suspect is by design, because after a certain point I couldn’t put it down. We read novels not because of the stories they tell us but because of the way the stories are told. (Or at least that’s why we read novels in translation.) Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is a pleasurably strange read that’s full of surprises.
Recommended for fans of Kafka and Fargo.
The Abstainer by Ian McGuire
I loved McGuire’s novel The North Water: 19th century heroin addicts, Arctic explorers, and misadventure on the high seas. It’s like Andrea Barrett meets Cormac McCarthy. What’s not to love? The Abstainer is another novel full of nasty men doing nasty things to each other. The premise concerns a Dublin policeman disgraced by drink sent to Manchester, England just as Fenian tensions are coming to a boil. Disliked by the English, despised by the Irish, Head Constable James O’Connor is stuck between the proverbial rock and the hard place.
I’ve never been to Manchester and I imagine those who have would appreciate the specificity of Maguire’s setting. Where The North Water combines the squalor of sailors at sea with stunning descriptions of seacapes and arctic ice, Maguire’s novel locks you into a Manchester that feels cloistered and claustrophobic. The world’s first industrial city, and it’s not pretty. For a crime novel that’s a very good thing and The Abstainer has a dreadful body count.
However, when the action does leave Manchester it feels like some of the air goes out of the novel. You know that part in Knives Out when they leave the house for a few scenes and it kinda of feels like a cheat? It kind of feels like that even though I think these scenes are my favorite part in the book. They have a wild Faulknerian sins of the father catching up with you when you least expect it vibe. Perhaps tightly plotted procedurals aren’t Maguire’s forte. Perhaps setting murderous weirdos loose in the world is.
Recommended but not as highly recommended as The North Water.
Please Bee Nice: My Life Up ‘Til Now by Gary Floyd with David Ensminger
Punk memoirs all have one thing in common: they’re stories about outsiders who find their community in punk rock. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a more unlikely punk rocker than Gary Floyd, the large, loud, anti-racist, outspokenly gay man from a tiny town in Arkansas who somehow became the frontman for Texas punk legends the Dicks.
I was charmed from the first page with this description of Floyd’s hometown of Gurdon:
“Two railroad tracks full of dead men still spooking people with their lanterns ran like rough zippers through town.”
Not all of Floyd’s writing is this elegant and as a book it’s terribly inelegant. (The kind of slapdash, print-on-demand layout that makes you wonder if the person who made the book has ever read one.) Please Bee Nice is full of stories of Floyd’s struggle for acceptance, his discovery of punk rock, and the journey that led to putting out records with both Alternative Tentacles and SST.
My favorite story concerns Floyd getting drafted to fight in Vietnam and declaring he was a conscientious objector. I never knew that conscientious objectors were given non-combat assignments. Floyd’s was to work at a mental hospital in Houston, Texas, where he was one of the only white people at the facility. That experience opened his mind and his work and put him on the path to Austin and eventually San Francisco.
Gary Floyd is precisely the kind of larger-than-life person whom all too often becomes a footnote in the larger story and I’m glad he wrote this, but I wish a little more care had been put into the book itself.
Recommended for Texas punk obsessives.
The Queen’s Gambit
I caught a weird bug over the weekend that laid me out on Monday. No fever, no headache, no cough, no shortness of breath, but I was freezing cold, extremely tired, and terrified that I’d caught the coronavirus. I slept most of the day and the next day I felt fine. Also, hallucinations. Very strange. But during my lucid moments during my day of sleep I watched several episodes of The Queen’s Gambit, a limited series on Netflix, which I can’t stop thinking about.
It’s the story of an orphan who becomes a chess prodigy and I’m really impressed with the way the filmmakers have dramatized material that isn’t terrible exciting. Chess isn’t bullfighting. It’s two people staring at a board with 64 squares while not talking to each other. Nevertheless the matches are thrilling.
It’s a period piece that begins in the ’50s and continues into the ’60s and the visuals are stunning, especially the scenes set in the early ‘60s when Beth is adopted and leaves the drab orphanage for a gloriously tacky suburban home. I’ll bet you the set designers had fun with that scene.
The Queen’s Gambit is dark but not nearly as dark as it could be. Its use of flashbacks is intriguing. They’re used sparingly, are extremely brief, and seem to be building up to something, particularly those that involve the protagonist’s mother. I’ll save my opinion on how The Queen’s Gambit handles brain health for when I finish the series. No spoilers please!
The Screamers at Camarillo
I recently stumbled upon this article about a live performance by the great L.A. synth punk band the Screamers at Camarillo State Hospital, which was a mental hospital. Charlie Parker went there to treat his addiction and wrote “Relaxin’ at Camarillo” there, but it wasn’t always a great experience for those committed against their will.
The hospital was eventually shut down and began a second life as Cal State Channel Islands, where my friend Sean Carswell teaches. (Hi Sean!) He’s something of an expert on the university’s past and didn’t know about the show so I thought I’d share it with you. Plus, it’s always a good day to watch this video of “122 Hours of Fear.”
No matter what they say.
Razorcake Donation Drive
It’s the annual end-of-year fundraising drive for Razorcake Fanzine. America’s only nonprofit independent music magazine. The next issue will be #120, which is impressive on its own merit, but it’s also the zine’s 20th anniversary, which means in 20 years Razorcake has never missed its publication date. That is fucking incredible. Razorcake is a genuine nonprofit and you can totally write off your donation. They have a cool Sponsor A Space program where for $150 you can send 25 issues of Razorcake to your favorite bookstore, record store, coffee shop, etc. every year. You get to pick the space and it’s totally tax deductible.
Obviously, there are challenges this year because we’re not really hanging out in those places. That’s why I’m matching every donation from readers of Message from the Underworld. Whether it’s $15, $150, or more just let me know after you donated and I’ll match it. Plus, depending on the level of your gift you can get some cool swag like this…
Thanks for spending part of your Wednesday (or whenever you read this) with me. Next week I’ll review some records. I have been listening to lots of new records and will continue to do so, but not on November 21. November 21 is no music day.
Or so they say.