Seek by Denis Johnson

I was all set to induct Denis Johnson into my pantheon of adventurous, artistic weirdos, when suddenly, wham, there's "The Militia in Me," 1995.

Denis Johnson was a fucking boomer centrist, which is to say he was a fucking liberal, which is to say that, if he were around today, he'd probably be a Trump guy.

The piece is the purest example of the utter howling uselessness of boomer liberalism, the equivocating between the tyrannical federal government and the militia loonies who object to libertarianism because they want to kill the gays. They're the same fucking side, Denis. They're white, male authoritarians who fetishize guns and strength and, given the slightest provocation, they will merge seamlessly into a single fascistic whole, and when you, belatedly, raise a note of objection, when you realize that "country people" coming to power in the US looks just like what you saw in Kabul in 1996, they'll blow your brains out with the rest of the weak. You fucking gormless idiot.

For boomers, "oh I did drugs in the 60s, I'm a-ok with the gays, I've got my lefty bona fides" is an acceptable idea. An entire generation that, except for a handful that morphed into university professors, had no concept of the left whatsoever. The left isn't your private little epiphanies about the self and grace. It's not the space to do so, free of government intrusion. It's a check against the domination of capital; it's democratic control of our lives; it's justice; it's the sole, sad hope we have in the face of extinction. You spoiled, useless, blind, complacent yokel. 

This whole collection sells blinkered equivocation as sophistication.

But then, by the time you died, you were probably sitting on a tiny nest egg of your own. All those checks from the Paris Review. I always overcomplicate things. You were a white guy, a reformed junkie, with prestige and capital, who lived among others like you. This is nothing more than class interests. I'm embarrassed I thought it could be otherwise. Tell these assholes you'll take their shit away, whether power or toys, and the mask of centrism drops, revealing pure reaction - the defense of existing hierarchies, atop which they squat. We have to break them.

The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

Melancholy, concerned with time and memory. Sometimes time collapses on itself, folds two moments a half century or longer apart into a single instance. Holocaust a looming presence throughout, lurking in the wings of memory, omnipresent but best not stared at directly.

Systematic return to the places of friends and ancestors in an effort to, what, piece together one's own murky identity?

Slippery, plays with the distinction between fiction and non.

Memories disappear without a trace, only to return in full, vivid force years later at some subtle prompting. Sometimes it is unclear whether these are memories or fantasies so palpable that they supplant immediate reality.

There are some real humdingers of sentences, nary a word out of place, like an elaborate ironwork, but I am mostly inured to the beauty of language and they do not satisfy me as they do Alison. But perhaps this can come back, as some other forgotten pleasures have lately hinted.

Recurring themes: nature, looking down at things from the Swiss Alps, being a teacher in small Central European towns, decrepitude and the wearing of time, blurring of time and space and memory, living inside someone else's memories, the Holocaust, the question of belonging to Germany, Jewishness, returning to the same place decades later, loneliness, homelessness, feeling dwarfed by industrial infrastructure, preserving from the dumb, obliterating present a few relics of the past, involuntary memory a la Proust, and other stuff like that.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

Obviously, it is extraordinary that a person in her early 20s produced this book, but it would be a disservice, a slight, to the author to abstain from full throated criticism on that account. At times, this does feel sophomoric. People are too much types. Magical deaf-mutes. The camaraderie of outcasts. On the other hand, it is nice for once to read a book interested in empathizing with its characters rather than dragging them through all manner of hell.

Beginning this book: huh, wonder why schools assign To Kill a Mockingbird instead of this. Midway, reading a lengthy disquisition on black identity and Marxism: oh, I see.

Depiction of childhood feels very real and accurate. So do the sudden, inexplicable reversals of fate or bursts of violence, the deep unnameable wounds that transform characters forever in a flash and that they never mention. All very On Brand for the south. This was probably Julia Pearce, whose name I forgot.

Description of Dr. Copeland's awakening through education reminded me of Stoner by John Williams, which contained the best description of the transformative power of education I have read.

Definitely grown-up Harper Lee. Sad as shit.

I take back the bit in the first paragraph about magical deaf-mutes. McCullers makes clear that Singer's magicalness is projected onto him by lonely, needy people. Also, there's no real camaraderie of outcasts. Instead, very realistically, they misunderstand one another and clash all the more. You spend the whole novel hoping that Copeland and Blount will find each other, and then they do, and then they loathe each other. Very accurate depiction of left factionalism, white obliviousness, and the need for identity politics.

NB I listened to this. The sin. But it lent itself very well to narration. Same with Kafka - the conversational prose, only Kafka plods while this skips charmingly with a Southern vernacular. Same was true for short story collections from Saunders or Johnson, which I have always struggled with in print - something about having to absorb a new cast of characters and background for each story. In fact, I am worried the internet has permanently broken my brain, making it harder to process written text. Get the fuck off reddit.

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka