A techno EP and what I've been reading
Autumn brings my techno EP, a new Bookshop wishlist, and thoughts on recent reads and views!
Hello and welcome to autumn. In this newsletter I explain why I created a Bookshop wishlist and share some thoughts on what I’ve been reading and viewing.
But first three updates:
I released a hard techno EP title Transit on Sept. 23. It’s free to listen to on Bandcamp. The title comes from the Anna Seghers novel about WWII refugees trying to leave Europe via Marseilles as well as Christian Petzold’s 2018 film adaptation of that novel. And the song titles (sans the Epigraph) form a quote from the film. I will admit here that the title was originally just to have a title, but the further I got into the project the more those two works actually inspired the music. Most notably, several of the tracks were missing something, some element of storytelling, and as I thought about the novel and the film, I decided that we needed voices—not vocals, but sounds that are voice-like—and so I added synth parts and used various effects to make them more voice-like. This EP is my most listened to release so far, which makes me happy. I think it’s my best mixed release so far, and I also feel like I’m starting to better understand how I as a limited but enthusiastic music producer can bring storytelling to the music I make.
I wrote a short story over the summer and submitted it to a SF&F magazine. This is notable only in that I’ve largely stopped chasing short fiction pro sales. My primary goal these days is to produce interesting work at whatever length suits the work itself. But I also don’t want to stifle the short story impulse should it arise, so when an idea popped up, I ran with it. I really like this one—it’s speculative and metafictional and simmering with anger and hope and weirdness—and I’ll make sure you get to read it should the SF&F market not want it.
I failed to write a lit crit essay over the summer. Or rather, I wrote it, and it didn’t work because I was trying to cram too much in and so I’ve disentangled everything and now have two essays to write instead of just one. I’m going to commit here to bring you at least one of them before the end of the year: it’s on The Saint of Bright Doors.
Speaking of writing literary criticism. I have a new way to support my work:
My Bookshop List
Here’s the deal: I’ve created a wish list on Bookshop. This is for titles I’d be interested in writing about but likely won’t purchase for myself because other titles (and household, etc. costs) take priority.
Now, I may write about some of these anyway because I can check some of them out from my local library. But library waitlists and return times are a hassle and interfere with my ability to sit with a title as long as I tend to need to in order to write about it.
So if you purchase a book on the list, it will be sent to me, and I will read it, think about it for awhile, and then write about it.
There are so many more important, better places you can spend your limited resources. Please do that first.
But if you do have extra funds and see a title on the list you really want me to tackle, this is a way to commission a response from me (likely either in this newsletter or as a post on wmhenrymorris.com).
For example, from the wish list, I’ve already read Becca Rothfeld’s essay collection and currently have Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice checked out from the library. I’d like to collide the two of them together because while they’re very different books, they’re both about minimalism and pleasure, and I think Repeating Ourselves can provide some interesting critique to Rothfeld’s approach while, conversely, some of her essays are important to think about in relation to what’s happened in culture since Repeating Ourselves was published.
What I’ve Been Reading & Viewing
I’ve tried to weave some thoughts on several of the titles I’ve read or viewed over the past five months or so into a running theme. I don’t know that I fully pulled it off. At the very least, it demonstrates the virtues (and pitfalls) of an omnivorious approach to media consumption.
The 2007 film adaptation of Northanger Abbey does a decent enough job of condensing the events of the novel and capturing the tone of Austen’s silliest novel, but it falls down in one major area, the area, in fact, that is the most Austenesque: it doesn’t fully depict the closing of the loop on the financial issues that are raised as a major barrier to the union of Catherine and Henry. Austen (and the novel as a form) is always about money, and so the resolution of an Austen novel is not the romance—people fall in love all the time—it’s the successful execution of the romance within a financial framework (wealth) that will insulate the happy couple from the horror of not having money.
Money is what the kdrama The Player 2: Master of Swindlers gets right. It’s a decently plotted series, but one stuffed with thriller/action film trope silliness—the red wire getting cut with one second left on the clock; the villain’s crypto wallet stolen out from under his nose; the hero who is able to head back into action even though it’s been less than a day since he was stabbed in the stomach. I don’t know that it’s worth the time commitment to watch it (twelve episodes each over an hour in length), but like many kdramas (of many different genres) it is not shy about the link between money and power, and unlike the U.S. series Leverage (which I’d bet is an influence), it gets heavy into the politics of it all. Specifically, it draws the line from how all sorts of scams/illicit ways to make vast quantities of money (from real estate fraud to drug smuggling/distribution to televangelism) can then be laundered into political power to perpetuate the even more lucrative, even more damaging neoliberal scheme of privatizing public services, and it shows how all of these activites harm normal citizens along the way (and it involves the victims in the swindles that take the bad players down).
Okay, I’ve changed my mind: although it’s quite silly and probably not worth watching, it does a decent job of portraying the way modern life extracts money from the poor to enrich the rich and it’s a decent example of the strengths of genre storytelling even if scene by scene it’s clichéd and episode by episode it’s melodramatic.
Also invoking the shadow of neoliberalism but neither clichéd nor melodramatic is Opacities by Sofia Samatar, which is partly another entry in her publicly documented literary friendship with Kate Zambreno, partly about Samatar’s journey through publishing (including SF&F) and academia, and very much about literature and identity and the impossibility of both. Amidst the Rilke quotes and expected but still always beautiful Samataresque descriptions that lull you with their perfection, Samatar occasionally slips a thin, sharp blade between your ribs with a keen observation, often a personal anecdote, about the precarious cultural and material conditions for writers and literary critics, especially adjuncts and those without lucrative literary prestige (some literary acclaim is lucrative and some is not at all), and especialy women and people of color. This does not so much ground the text as do something more important: ties the marginalized/those in precarity more firmly to the world of literature in a similiar way that Samatar’s novella The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain does for academia. I’m not entirely sure what Opacities is as a gestalt (obviously that opaqueness is right there in the title) even as I appreciate what it does, which is not a condemnation but rather a celebration or perhaps simply a fitting thing for a book that quotes Blanchot (and Lispector and Kafka, etc.).
Speaking of sharp blades (both those made from words and those made from steel) and neoliberalism: I almost left it out of this round up because I’m not sure how I feel about it other than to say the Donald Glover and Maya Erskine Amazon series Mr. and Mrs. Smith is both empty and excellent and way more funny and more hollow than the reactions I’d seen to it had led me to believe (send me links on good writing about it!). Like The Player 2, I’m not sure how substantial it is, but the experience of watching it embrace and resist the contraints of its’ genre was interesting. More pointedly: that the series hasn’t led to a wave of high-powered, upper-middle class professionals experiencing so much shame they leave their lucrative jobs is an indictment of both the show and them. In other words: how is it bearable to move through the world getting paid so much money to wreak such havoc on people’s lives and at the behest of such clearly terrible instruments of power? In more other words: that the all too familiar class trappings (the wine! the turtlenecks! the cat and the farmer’s market and the high end sound system!) and neuroses show up alongside/within car chases, gunfire, and explosions lays all too bare the motivations and the tradeoffs. I mean, I do know how: we all justify ourselves. But the hipster verging on twee lifestyle gloss combined with the sudden violence is all too easy and yet all the more apt for the easiness. That is: it may be a stylized world, but, a bit like The Bear, it reaches a little too close to lived reality—not realism—but reality.
A different but similar hollowness and reality but not realism, and perhaps an answer to my tendentious question above, is found in the work that I’ve encountered recently that has had the most impact on me this year: The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harrison. There were several moments where I had to stop and mumble to myself: “Can you do that in a novel? Why would you do that in a novel? How do you do that in a novel?” The set up: a middle-aged not-quite-a-couple get drawn into but don’t quite see a strange conspiracy rising around them. The mood: mordantly funny? So socio-politically trenchant as to be painful? Mundanely unsettling? Damply literary? Dryly weird? None of this was unexpected—it’s M. John Harrison. I think what caught me by suprise was not the plot or the tone or the characters or even the prose, but the way certain lines, certain observations were so perfect they almost felt out of place—not the thin blade of Samatar’s Opacitie, but something stranger: as if the 2010s had condensed themselves into some shimmering, foul-smelling, black drop of oil.
Oddly enough, the work that reminded me most of The Sunken Lands is Christian Petzold’s 2007 film Yella. Full disclosure here: I wasn’t aware of the Carnival of Souls inspiration for the film and so even though I figured out fairly early on what was happening (due to Hollywood/genre fiction logic), I still enjoyed the journey to the predictable ending (which I spoil below, but it’s so obvious that it’s not really a spoiler; scroll past the next two paragraphs if you want to skip it), which, apparently, some of the Carnival of Souls loyalists are bothered by. But it’s also not that particular inspiration that to me is the most interesting and apt (and related to The Sunken Lands and to the threads running through this write-up): it’s the other inspiration for the film—a documentary on a group of engineers seeking venture capital money (which can be watched on the DVD version of the film).
The film is set in a post-reunification Germany. Yella’s abusive ex-husband Ben has built a small technology company in Wittenberge, (former) East Germany, that is on the brink of failure. Yella (Nina Hoss) is ready to move on and has secured work as a bookkeeper in Hannover (former) West Germany. On the day she is to leave, Ben shows up and insists on driving her to the train station. On the way, he claims that he has secured a contract that will save the company and implores Yella to return to him and the company. When she refuses, he drives off a bridge over the Elba river. Yella manages to swim to shore and catch her train to Hanover only to find that the man who hired her is in the midst of being fired. She is despondent but ends up meeting and being of use to the West German businessman Philipp (Devid Striesow) who represents a VC firm and is meeting with various companies looking for opportunities for a big return on their investment. Of course, he’s also taking bribes on the side to talk up the companies to the potential investors. See, he has a dream: he knows of a company that has a technology that if used on oil rigs could makes millions of dollars and buying in would only take several hundred thousand euros. The dream isn’t real, of course. None of it is real. Which, perhaps, is why Petzold shoots the film like it’s a thriller, even though all the actual elements of it are mundane. Most especially, Yella isn’t real—she’s dead at the bottom of the Elba River. It’s a thriller that is a ghost story.
But it’s not a ghost story. It’s what was happening in Germany. It’s about men hunched around conference tables trying to psych each other out; it’s about driving from meeting to meeting filled with both despair and hope; it’s about men and women meeting in nondescript hotels and hooking up even though they know they’re not good for each other; it’s about inflated asset sheets and false promises and cash being circulated in envelopes; and it’s about everything—hotels, office parks, the autobahn, the suburbs—being almost empty but also completely haunted. At one point Philipp pulls out a large stack of euros and peels off a smaller stack and gives it to Yella. He’s giving money to a ghost. But the ghost isn’t the most haunted part of the transaction—the bills are.
And finally, speaking of money and ghosts (and bringing us back to the gothic): I’m very disappointed that I was not introduced to Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 by Jane Tompkins in college. It takes a very specific approach, and I suppose presages the historicist turn literary theory took in the late ’90s and 2000’s and so maybe was seen as outdated by the time I was in college, but it would have nicely balanced out the New Critic and Post-structuralist criticism that is what I mostly was exposed to. Tompkins does a lot of things in the book, most notably, shows how the received conventional wisdom about the reputation/merit early American writers us late 20th century folks imbibed was carefully constructed in the 19th and early 20th century by men with specific agendas and biases, including, of course, a dismissive attitude for fiction wrote for and/or by women (there are echoes of that in Opacities). Tompkins does interesting work unpacking all that, but along the way she also provides some fascinating readings of specific literary texts. Most interesting to me, and most relevant to what I’ve been writing about here is Chapter III “The Importance of Circulating” on Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 gothic novel Arthur Mervyn.
Now I’ve not read Arthur Mervyn (although I have read Wieland, which Tompkins also provides an interesting reading of) so I don’t know how good of a piece of literary criticism this chapter is. But I’m a fan of strong, idiosyncratic readings of novels, and Tompkins reads Arthur Mervyn, which is about the yellow fever, Philadelphia society, bankruptcy and debt, counterfeits, and various mirror characters (almost doubles) of the titular character, as a pro-Federalist tract. Specifically, Tompkins argues that in Arthur Mervyn Brockden Brown is writing an allegory for the virtue of circulation (economic and social—and the two are, of course, attached at the hip) in a democratic society. In other words, what matters to the young America is not just money (having it or not) or social prestige (having it or not) but whether or not one is willing to engage in the game of commerce—to circulate one’s assets and skills and connections in order to engage in the commercial activity that will build the new, mercantile-centered nation that the Federalists want. And so while Arthur Mervyn undergoes all the trials one has as the main character of and meets all the unsavory characters one meets in a gothic novel, in the end he marries a rich widow with good social standing in Philidelphia and emerges ready to be a player in this new mercantile society.
CBB is engaging in this political advocacy by way of a popular form: the gothic novel. In Northanger Abbey Catherine’s reading of gothic novels causes her to over-interpret the situation of Henry’s family thus endangering the possibility of marriage to Henry. That’s because in Austen (in 19th century England) social standing and money are linked but also relatively fixed in place—one comes from a good family and has enough money to remain a good family or one doesn’t. Meanwhile, in the U.S., while social rank matters somewhat, what matters more is one’s willingness to participate in the fiction of commerce, of the circulation of money. A fiction that both is breaking down and being furiously propped up here in the 21st Century as The Player 2, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, and even Opacities all illustrate in different ways.
I wasn’t going to attempt to weave all of these works together quite so tightly when I first decided to dedicate this newsletter to a report on my recent reading and viewing. I just selected the works from my running list of culture consumed I thought would be the most interesting to write about. That I was able to do so tells me that storytelling—whether genre or not—is still doing what it’s supposed to be doing. Because I tend to agree with Samuel R. Delany when he claims in About Writing: “One way or the other, directly or indirectly, good fiction tends to be about money” (56)
But we may need to step back and read works strongly in that direction (as Tompkins does) and also not be shy about pulling works from various genres and nations of origin as we do so. Otherwise, we may fall into the trap of modern entertainment: consuming at speed, focused on the genre tropes and the experience of encountering them and then moving on to the next disconnected experience, rather than listening for the echoes, the ghosts these works can’t quite escape (but also often restrain themselves from fully conjuring [see any of the MCU TV series for the most blatant examples]). Because whatever you believe about capitalism—or whatever you want to call the operation of economies in our modern world—I don’t think you can claim that the system is not haunted.
And on that cheery note: see you in about three months!