Friday Links: Get Out Of Montana Edition
"I'm gonna miss the way you violate the English language" - Joshua Marie Wilkinson, 'Trouble Finds You'
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
There’s something that happens—usually when I’m watching The Righteous Gemstones—that makes me go, “oh, we’re putting that in art now?” Not that art’s ever been a place for anything other than degeneracy. Conservatives whining about the West falling or whatever is just them unwilling to admit marble statues make them horny. Point is, because Shakespeare wrote about royalty and Fitzgerald wrote about fancy people and Stoker wrote about Counts, there’s an incorrect association with literature and the highfalutin.
I’m here to tell you that the beer-gutted 60-year-old nine yard margs deep at noon on a Wednesday who just put Van Halen on the jukebox so he could air-hump a pool cue in an attempt to impress a blonde woman in a tank top emblazoned with the word TAMPA—that is literature too.
What I’ve Been Reading Lately:
I can’t take credit for that last sentence. I’ve seen it, many times, with my own 1.15 eyes, but it’s not my work. It’s mistranslated from memory from one of the funniest scenes I’ve ever read, and it happens in this book. Have you ever read a novel and thought, “I wish this was more like a Coen Bros film scored by Tom Waits’s Gen X son?” Have you ever thought, “I like when main characters are weird little freaks, but can we make them absolutely rock-stupid?” Have you ever thought, “I want a novel full of real, actual people, I want the prose to move, but I also want the prose to be good, like written by a poet, if possible?” I think that last one all the time, and that’s why I’m glad I picked up this book. I’m talking, of course, about Trouble Finds You by Joshua Marie Wilkinson.
Who knows what you’re gonna get when a Ford man turns to Chevy a poet writes a novel? In my experience, these artifacts are often heady, postmodern interrogations of language and narrative that can be cool, but difficult to get through. Then I remembered Josh is a filmmaker. This book zips and it has a plot. It’s so fun! Donny’s-ashes-being-scattered-all-over-The-Dude-and-Walter fun, but fun! Usually, a “book written like a movie” is derogatory, but it does feel like our third person limited narrator is a camera that knows where to point. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, but we’re not ripping off Memento. More like, remember how 21 Grams doesn’t stay in one place too long? Oh, and if you’re looking for a really effective use of the present tense? Harry Stables’ mind never stays in one place too long.
Because let’s be clear about one thing: Harry Stables is the most simple-minded jackass in literary history. I don’t want to spoil anything because it’s very fun to find out as you read (though click this footnote to learn what happens to Harry’s dog1), just know that every decision Harry makes is somehow worse than the last. The thing about his stupidity, and any of the other characters’, is that everything feels so terribly grounded. I said I’ve seen the “afternoon drunk yokels in a bar” scene many times before, but really, everything in this book felt super familiar. It’s not that relatability is such a virtue for me as a reader, it’s that I loved someone giving these idiots an unpretentious focus. Everyone in this novel is broke, burned out in some personal dystopia, keeping something from someone because of some built-up interior paranoia, and not thinking much farther into the future than the next five minutes. I kept thinking it reads like it’s set between 2006-2011, but maybe that’s just because that’s how me and everyone I knew was between 2006-2011. There’s beauty in the constative, you know?
LINKS!
Something to listen to? How about “Aruarian Dance” by Nujabes? Or at least this acoustic cover of it?
Anil Dash on his blog getting optimistic about a Weird Internet renaissance. Tech companies will not save us! They barely even help with the stuff they’re supposed to be good at! There’s more of us than there are Hamish McKenzies. Make the internet a million weird zines and a few sports sites and we’re good.
Hey, speaking of making space for weirdos, here’s Soraya Roberts at Defector talking about how much contemporary living crowds out artists. We move too fast, and it doesn’t have to be this way—I was showing my dad Working over the holidays and line from the preface about how much slower the 70s was caught my eye and made me sad. A pull quote: “I see the voices of other artists, like mine, weighed down by capital. By the need for that voice to be turned into money. I see the bearing down, the shellacking, the obscuring of whatever is pure by a society built to exploit and to impoverish. I see that breathing room that gave Patti Smith the freedom to find hers, now completely crowded out by nothing good—by thoughts of exposure and some future pay-off. I see that room to breathe is only available to those who have already achieved.”
Hey, remember how I suggested Nazis might be wearing Kyries in Wednesday’s column? A rabbi in Salt Lake City believes Kyrie complained to security about his “I’m a Jew and I’m proud” sign, reports Eric Walden at The Salt Lake Tribune, resulting in security asking the man to get rid of the sign. I will let the shame-cloud-stink of Kyrie’s “I’m Jewish too…no need to bring that to a game though” reveal the truth I believe it reveals and leave it at that.
Might as well sound the Nazi timpani again, here we have a throwback to a time before Harper’s was like, “let’s hear these Nazis out.” Don’t forget Martin Amis signed that letter. Here’s Dorothy Thompson (way back in 1941, probably not on Bluesky) with the instructive and useful “Who Goes Nazi?”
Christ, dudes, it’s Friday. Let’s have a little fun. Wanna read about the time some weirdo avant-garde artists infiltrated the prop department of Melrose Place? Here’s Isaac Butler at Slate with the story. I don’t know what utility this kind of art has, and I kinda don’t like the implied smug sense of self-satisfaction, BUT I love reading about this kind of stuff. Reverse art heists! Wish Golden Age Cracked.com was around to cover it.
One more funny thing before we go: if you do read Trouble Finds You (and you should), maybe it helps to know I pictured Calvin Hogan as MadTV’s “I’m Kenny Rogers and This Is Jackass” sketch. I say this with love. MadTV mostly sucked, but this sketch had the boys’ dorm at Tennessee Governor School For The Humanities 2005 in stitches for weeks. Also, it should be noted that I think Calvin Hogan is a genius—but a genius can have Kenny Rogers Jackass energy, too.
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. Don’t let any stubby motherfuckers in oversize hunting vests try to frame you for murder. Don’t got a bouquet just because someone you met invited you to a party. And my comrades in Christ, do not go around believing talking to the cops will solve any of your problems.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
she lives.