Monthly Top Ten July 2022

1. Denton Welch, In Youth is Pleasure (Routledge, 1945). "Parents should understand that their young kids are not like them and need to have the privacy to fantasize both their good and bad desires," wrote John Waters in Role Models about In Youth is Pleasure, "maybe...no better novel in the world." Welch allows his fifteen-year-old protagonist, Orvil Pym (an obvious stand-in for Welch), that privacy. On a summer vacation in a small English town, Orvil gives vent to an indelibly etched queer disaffection. He engages in perversities that render the novel just as shocking today as it was 80 years ago. But to catalogue those would be to ignore his vivid interior life where he holds forth on the superiority of stairs over elevators and feels "small and lectured" when in contact with humanity's impoverished life options. Best line: "He hated the man because he had talked to him." A true punk in the making. 

 

2. Henry James, Washington Square (1880). James burrows deep into the psyche of his characters because that's the battleground where this story plays out. A man of unimaginable disagreeableness who would be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder today, Dr. Sloper wants to control the very thought processes of his nondescript daughter Catherine so that she forsakes her happiness by rejecting marriage to the attractive but irresponsible Morris Townsend. This is a novel in which keeping things to yourself can get you only so far. With a bit more antagonism, anyone can access and thereby exploit your dignity or locate the reproachments behind the veil of your silence, especially James himself who can detect even what you're not thinking. And even though James can come off as nasty as Dr. Sloper in his assessments of Catherine's average-at-best intelligence, she gets her revenge by refusing Dr. Sloper's demand that she never marry Morris even after the doctor's death. Single and comfortable with her mother's money, she self-actualizes at last and gains stature as a den mother to younger women. I can feel her influence on the 1993 Joan Jett/Kathleen Hanna summit "Spinster" which realized the punk potential in spinsterhood.  

3. Hal Clement, Mission of Gravity (Doubleday, 1954). If you're one of the eggheads who get off on hard science fiction, "a category of science fiction characterized by concern for scientific accuracy and logic," then bless your heart. This gave me flashbacks of my Mac geek friends discussing BinHex at dinner or my grad school days when stats bros would talk about slapping a P value on something. My eyes glassed over about 80% of this although I did chuckle at such representative science-before-character-and-story passages as, “Say, what did you mean a little while ago by that remark about permanent seas? What other kind do you have?” Oh please don't ask. 

 

4. Henriette Martin and Gita Lewis, The Naked Eye (1950). This was misdescribed on an intriguing ILX thread about obscure books as a "[w]eird hardboiled sci-fi novel...that won't stay on track, like they want to talk about fine art or something instead of write a hardboiled (sci-fi) novel." First of all, it's not sci-fi. Second, it's not weird but rather, a cookie-cutter whodunit. Third, the fine art diversions are brief. I grant that "Far from recalling the appealing grace of the post-Rosetti era, a woman seated at a harp usually epitomized the vapid hypocrisies of Victorianism to me" aches for something beyond pulp fiction. But the main character making such an observation is an artist so the swerve seems apt. And once expressed, it's back to the dreary mystery. Will fans of detective fiction not countenance any diversion from the path towards solving the crime? P. S. Henriette Martin and Gita Lewis have got to be pseudonyms, right?

 

5. G. S. Marlowe, I Am Your Brother (1935, Valancourt reissue, 2016). Now this is a book of diversions. In a sense, it's nothing but diversions. Cover and title will trick you into thinking it's a horror novel. And indeed, for the first forty pages or so, a woman feeds offal to her botched experiment of a son hidden in the attic. But mom gets hit by a bus and dies and Marlowe (né Gabriel Beer-Hoffman, pix below) forgets the monster upstairs for a good 100 pages to focus on his brother Julian, a vaudeville pianist longing for a more elevated career as a composer. At which point the novel cannot sit still, floating from stream-of-consciousness eroticism to thick, staccato descriptions of grimy London life to walk-on characters who seem to know Julian's thoughts to an almost comic pileup of narrative roadblocks. It's possible that all of this takes place in Julian's head with the monster-brother symbolizing his unconscious drives. The result may be dollar-store Freud. But Marlowe's florid flights and unprincipled sense of structure make I Am Your Brother the fiction equivalent of that dorky kid eating alone in the high school cafeteria who proves far more intriguing than the popular kids will ever be. 

6. Akiyuki Nosaka, The Pornographers (1963). Dispassionate accounts of violent pornography and abortion mitigated by the attention paid to secondary characters left behind in the Japanese economic miracle, even if their stories turn out to be lies as they frequently do. 

7. The Pornographers: Introduction to Anthropology (Shohei Imamura, 1966). The subtitle is more appropriate to Nosaka's studious novel since Imamura approaches his adaptation as if he were in a food fight. Drunk on new wave possibility, he splatters the celluloid with freeze-frames, gorgeously cramped compositions, and a dead husband reincarnated as a huge carp that keeps popping up in the frame. 

8. The Bear, "Season 1, Episode 7: Review" (Christopher Storer, 2022). Yet another television serial that loses sight of its larger narrative arc. Renowned chef Carmy (Jeremy Allen White, a doe-eyed wonder) returns to Chicago to take over his recently deceased brother's beef sandwich shop. He cannot get his ragtag crew to work in sync and the enterprise reaches destruction with this climactic episode. 20 minutes where the other episodes are 30, shot mostly in one take with Wilco's "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" motoriking on the soundtrack, every person is for themselves and they fail to open the restaurant for the day. It's a masterpiece of tension; 20 minutes is about all anyone could take. But then, in the next and final episode of the season, the blows are absorbed and it's as if the meltdown never occurred. How they still have customers at this point is never made clear. Why don't the creators take these moments as opportunities to generate more stories rather than inconsistencies to ignore?

9. David Hepworth Deep 70s (Underrated Cuts From A Misunderstood Decade) (Edsel, 2022). This four-disc, 71-track box comes from a bad place. Born in 1950, author of 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year, Hepworth in his godawful liner notes claims he's not nostalgic for the 1970s. But several paragraphs of generalizations and strawmanning about this "uniquely febrile period of popular music" prove that nostalgia is exactly what he's pimping. He doesn't even explain why the decade is so misunderstood, his only argument "some kind of counter-argument against those who think the 70s were just about flares and long guitar solos." Next time, he should forego liners because he's managed to fashion a consistent compilation that makes its own argument. Listen as capital-R Rock settles into maturity with all the compromises and minor drama that implies, instantiated here by well-made songs from mostly white singer-songwriters which must be why the worst track of the 71 is by a Black artist (Valerie Simpson, far from the greatness of Ashford & Simpson, although a plodding Montrose horror provides serious competition). Peaceful, easy feelings abound with country and blues usages in service to self-expression and women shunted off to the fourth disc. As befits someone who treats "indie" and "alt" as dirty words, Hepworth has little use for post-Velvets critics' bands. The canted angles of Big Star are ironed out by the Loudon Wainwright and Crazy Horse songs surrounding it and the punkiest moment comes courtesy of poseurs Eddie & the Hot Rods. But the most decisive factor in the comp's consistency is that these cuts aren't all that deep. Almost every track started life as a single or some sort of focus cut, whether a side opener/closer or a cover. If that means the Hall & Oates or Ellen Foley selections won't tempt you further, then stick around for those that will - Tony Joe White, Freddie King, Bridget St. John, more.

10. "Energy," from Beyoncé: Renaissance (Columbia, 2022). With the initial shock of Beyoncé's best album worn off, it's time to dive deeper and get shocked anew. At 1:57, "Energy" transcends its function as a transition between the P-Funky disco of "Cuff It" and the flagship single "Break My Soul." It extends the warm, summery feel of "Cuff It" on the strength of Beam's calm rap before it moves into an unexpectedly creepy chorus with distorted horns blowing like elephants in the background. Bey's next verse is spiked with demented radiator pings which foreground the references to voter suppression and terrorist Karens on subsequent listens. If the sun is still up during "Cuff It," it's definitely setting during "Energy" and fully down as it slams into "Break My Soul." Oh and even though my copy has the Kelis sample, I still can't make it out through the murk.