Hello! After a last horrible gasp of infinitely-lingering-summer on Saturday here in Tokyo (30C, humid) I think — dare I say it and curse it? — I think something like “fall” might be here.
That said, I just got back from walking England where the weather was so aligned with my DNA (this must be a thing) I felt all the cells in my body cry out in joy when the cold and the wet hit the system. London was a balm. Maybe my favorite city in the world. But we’re back now, and we’re busy.
Kissa by Kissa Japanese Edition
Kissa by Kissa: On the Road, Why I walk Japan (「路上と喫茶ー僕が日本を歩いて旅する理由」）is finally coming out in Japanese next month! If you’re into collecting things, you can buy a copy of the first edition from BOOKNERD, my publisher in Morioka. (I believe we’re only printing 2,000 to start; I’m fairly “hands off” on the production particulars on this one, which is an experiment / luxury I’m trying to lean into.) It’s retailing for ~$16 USD (+ shipping) at the current exchange rate (at the time of this writing). I’ve added almost a dozen new photographs, removed a few, changed the orientation on a few others, and even resequenced a few. Obviously, the text is all in Japanese. It’s printed and bound in Japan, by the same printer — Fujiwara — used for my fine art editions. The vibes-galore cover was drawn by Adrian Hogan. The book is 160 pages. Palm-ish sized. Paperback with French-fold covers. It’s a cute little nugget of photographic and textual goodness. The translation is killer and I am indebted to Imai Eiichi for “getting me” and putting it into Japanese.
Here’s a color check I did yesterday:
We’re also having a launch party in Morioka! You should come if you’re in town. You can buy tickets at the door, but also online. (If you’re planning on coming, I’d grab tickets online ASAP.) Tickets are ¥4,500 ($30USD) for the event, and they come with the book and a drink. (What a deal.) We’re also doing an event / “talk show” in Tokyo on November 30 at 10:00 a.m. at Shibuya Publishing and Booksellers in hipster-central Kamiyamacho. Come say hi if you’re in town then, too.
I am truly delighted to finally have this book come out in Japanese, and I think it’s coming out in the best possible form, in the best possible city, with the best possible team.
Books and Books and Books
I’ve read a few books in the last month (and a bunch of longform articles). Three of the books (sorry, all dudes): Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain (2024), Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection (2024), and Larry Brown’s On Fire (1994). They’re sort of all in conversation with one another.
This reading tumble was catalyzed by Greenwell’s Small Rain, which I mentioned I had started reading last Roden. Is Small Rain memoir? (Are all of Greenwell’s books memoir?) “Autofiction?” (Is Ocean Vuong’s most excellent On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous?) Greenwell says it ain’t, but it makes me wonder what kinds of status tickets are being collected or turned in? Is memoir lower on the “art chart” than fiction in general or novel in particular? Is poetry collection ranked higher than novel? Is novel the sweet spot for both Art Status and Possibility of Sustainable Income? When I started writing a “novel” back in 2011 — inspired by the week I spent burying my dad — I claimed it was fiction. Why? In part to create distance — of this I’m sure … but also because I felt acutely those status rankings? I don’t know, truly. It’s all very silly, is what I’m trying to say. (And were I to go back to that unpublished “novel” I’d most certainly kick it straight into the zone of memoir / narrative non-fiction, unabashedly.) I mostly don’t care what’s “real” or “invented” (but readers do obsess) but I am curious about the unseen cultural energies forcing our hands as writers.
Anyway, I finished the book and started poking around and it just so happened that Greenwell had published a newsletter about being simultaneously badly and greatly reviewed.
The great: Parul Sehgal in the New Yorker unleashes, for Greenwell, “the dream of all dream reviews, placing it in the context of my other books and also of larger conversations in literature and art, and making kind of startlingly brilliant observations about the book’s formal ambitions. There’s a moment where she turns sentence-shape into an analogy for the shape of the narrative as a whole; I might have gasped.”
Meanwhile, over in the New York Times, Dwight Garner titles his review “The Endless Drama, and Tedium, of a Medical Mystery.” Yikes. I like Garner. He’s funny, well-read, a great writer, clearly loves literature, and I “vibe” with his takes. As for me, I land somewhere between Sehgal’s fawning and Garner’s bore. I was never bored in Small Rain, but I did wish more “happened” (I couldn’t stop thinking about George Saunders’ Story Club, and his posts on “always be escalating” — “Most writers tend to write stories that are long on exposition but never ascend into the rising action (that is, they don’t escalate). I’ve read entire student novels like this—pages and pages of brilliant exposition in which the tension never rises. I sometimes say that in the exposition we put a pot of water on the stove; getting the action to rise is making the water boil. (What we’ve been calling “meaningful action” is equal to the boiling water is equal to escalation.)”) and felt at times (to veer into hyperbole) “betrayed” — mostly because the medical mystery (the singular potential point of escalation) turned out to be not so mysterious, and without much of any resolution? (I also suffer from a newly developed allergy to things that don’t escalate; mainly because I’ve been conscious to inject a more escalation into my own work, raise the stakes — not in da Vinci Code ways but other ways, ways that amplify or elevate everything else that’s going on in the prose. All to say, I’m more sensitive now than I’ve ever been about prose that “never quite boils the water.”) Blah blah blah — ignoring what I think, Greenwell’s newsletter responding to these two professional reviews is great. I’m sad it’s behind a Substack paywall, but it’s worth paying to read (and to signal to Garth that we appreciate his newslettering; it is weird, though, to me, to pay more for a year of a newsletter than a single book, which comprises many years of work; the fickle nature of consumerism). He focuses less on Garner’s criticisms (because in the end what can you do?), and more on the differences between Sehgal and Garner’s readings:
What moves me is that where Garner sees only minutiae and tedium — the narrator’s “reflections on his experience are mostly so mundane that they hardly count as reflections at all,” he says — Sehgal sees a meditation on being and care. She sees how the narrator’s “Pain and terror rouse him from his habituation, the domestic life that dulls. Their bequest is a restoration of sight; the book feels written as if to preserve this knowledge, to engrave it somewhere permanent.” What a gorgeous idea of what a book can be—a repository of the wonder that always runs through everydayness but that we only sometimes perceive. I’m not sure I can think of anything I could want Small Rain to be more than that.
I admire how he’s able to be so healthy in this take!
And let me quote the final ‘graph in his post:
Sehgal’s review is one of the very rare cases — Tóibín on “Cleanness” [his second “novel”] was another—where being reviewed doesn’t feel terrible. It’s not that she doesn’t evaluate the book; she does. But evaluation isn’t really her point. She’s asking more interesting, more important questions; she’s trying to seek out, sympathetically but rigorously, the book’s deepest aims. I said on Twitter that a writer is lucky — more than lucky — to be read with such perception and care two or three times in a life. Earlier in this newsletter, I talked about the humiliations of publishing, the way it distorts your values and can make you forget, for the weeks or months of a book’s initial reception, the real reasons one writes novels. Seghal’s review was a correction. The hope of being read as she read Small Rain, the hope of having made the kind of dwelling-place she found in it — that’s not the only reason one makes art, but it’s among art’s honorable ambitions.
In digging into the Garner piece, I went back to see what else he had recently reviewed, and if he had skewered with equal aplomb. He had not. A week later he reviewed Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection: “Even Losers Get Lucky Sometimes. Not in This Book.” Geez, what can I say about Tulathimutte’s work? If Greenwell isn’t escalating, Tony is infinitely escalating, escalating so hard and far beyond anything you imagined possible, that sometimes it can feel like your brain is an earth-sized zit about to explode puss all over the world. Rejection is both one of the most exciting and traumatizing things I’ve read in years. Exciting because: Brilliant guy taking chances; and traumatizing because: Fuck his characters are utterly fucked. But fucked in the most contemporary of ways. If you take nothing else from this newsletter, go read Rejection — you may not feel “good” while reading it, but I dare you to put it down. Oh, and he’s funny. Always dark, but never without humor: “… for dinner she stuffs a cold flour tortilla with turkey slices and shredded mozzarella and a squirt of mayo, each ingredient the same color as her, rolled up into a hateful dildo she crams in her mouth, barely chewing.” I LOL’d more times reading this book than any in recent memory (which may say more about my sense of humor than anything else). And his scathing observational asides are just 🤌: “He has that sort of lenticular baldness where you can see the thinning patches only at an angle.”
Derrick came back into the living room. “Gotta take a ride over the bridge,” he said.
“Need to go pull something out of a horse’s pussy.”
“What kind of a thing?” Bob asked.
“A baby horse, I hope.”
The last third of Rejection goes a bit wonky — maybe a little too meta? But it’s never not entertaining, funny, horrifying, and — on a sentence by sentence level — beautifully written. Also, one gets the impression that while it’s certainly got glints of memoir throughout, (Tony himself has admitted to consuming most “every type” of porn available; this plays an important plot point in the book) enough is clearly imagined making no mistake about where it sits in the literary tree.
And then, thanks once again to Garner, I read some Larry Brown, a guy I’d never before read. Garner recommended starting with On Fire, so I did. It’s great. If Greenwell is High Tone Fiction, and Tulathimutte is Murder-Suicide TikTok Universe-Collapse Meme Fiction, then Brown is Earnest Blue Collar, Zero Affect Fiction.
Brown minces nothing. It’s memoir. No hedging. He’s a great writer and his book is, dare I say, just mostly really sweet stuff about being a firefighter?
I never had a feeling any better than I had when driving my big pumper through the streets of Oxford at three or four in the morning, while everybody was sleeping, while the streets were deserted except for an occasional police cruiser, with the lights flashing just yellow caution at the intersections, wheeling that big red truck like all little boys would like to and some will grow up to, like me, and knowing that they were all asleep while we were up, taking care of the city of my birth, watching over them, there and ready to protect them and help them if they needed us. I know that sounds sappy as hell. I don’t give a shit if it does.
He does do a lot of drinking and driving, and smokes a lot while helping people trapped in wrecks, and loves to catch some “S and V” (sex and violence) on Cinemax late at night at the firehouse, but it’s just part of his straight honesty. He talks about accidentally killing one of his cats. And how he tried to raise bunnies but one day opened the door to his pen and couldn’t kill ‘em any more (you raise them, knock them dead with a hammer, and then sell the meat, apparently). His book is a book of vignettes, and as someone who has a bit of a vignette affliction, that too wends its way into my heart. There isn’t much escalation, but he also never promises escalation. Each night, reading this book was like having a nice whiskey on the porch with a good friend who never went to college but talks real good. And you learn a lot about firefighting along the way:
Cats. They’ll crawl up into the bathtub every time when the house catches on fire. I don’t know why they pick that place to die, there among the shower curtain and the shampoo. Small dogs will do it, too, and it’s not happy work to walk back out into the yard and tell the houseowners their pets didn’t make it.
Films
Meanwhile, in film land, Joker 2 (2024) was as bad as everyone seems to think it is. I went hoping it would be “fun bad,” but it was just zero-stakes bad. (I fell asleep in the middle, which I haven’t done in … have I ever done that before?) It’s a useful example in how you can have a beautifully shot — and even interestingly scripted — scene-by-scene movie, which coheres into a meaningless vacuum. See Saunders’ advice up above: Nothing escalating, nothing on the line. Joker 2 is spectacular in its lack of escalation. And … he was raped towards the end? I’m so confused. (That’s not a spoiler: The act serves so little purpose you’re left wondering if it even happened; which in turn says so much about the movie as a whole.) What do they say? A million human hours go into the making of a film? Something like that. A million talented human hours burned like weeds on a farm, a missed opportunity. And poor Gaga; underused to the max. (Somewhere in here there was a SUPERB film.)
On the flip side, in polar opposite land — where everything escalates and everything is on the line — I’ll never watch The Substance (2024) again, but, boy am I glad I watched it once. Talk about a fat-free script. This could have been the world’s most frustrating ten-episode Netflix show. Instead it was a drum-tight 150-minute movie. (Most Netflix series’ would have been better served as 150-minute movies.) It’s no surprise that it won “best script” at Cannes. From the opening shot of the star being poured, to the final shot, the whole movie sings within the bounds of its own abjectly insane set of rules, rules which make no sense if you scrutinize them, but because everyone is so committed, so fully in it (kudos to Demi; I hope she wins something for this) that you go along for the ride, grotesqueries (so many) and all. Don’t bring your kids to this one.
Episode 5 of Netflix’ Menendez brother show, Monsters, is one of the most unexpectedly riveting thirty-five minutes of TV I’ve seen in a while. One single shot, no cuts, just a lawyer and her client talking. (Louis CK tried to do this in an episode of Horace and Pete many years ago but didn’t land the trick; then again, most of that series simply didn’t work.) In Monsters: It works. Does the show work overall? No. It suffers from the affliction beset upon so many Netflix shows: Too much rope with which to hang itself. It’s about three episodes too long.
Which is a good segue into Willy Staley’s most excellent, “How Everyone Got Lost in Netflix’s Endless Library”, recently published in The New York Times. The gist is Netflix leveraged ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) to take on a bazillion bucks in debt, create a fire hose of content, spray it into our eyeballs for dollars and subscription retention, and in the process basically say yes to everything:
There’s no denying that, in the long journey prestige TV has taken from “The Wire” to “The Bear,” a certain slackness has crept in: comedies without many jokes, dramas without any stakes, a pronounced preference for backward-looking plotting that fixates on characters’ traumas, a plague of visibly Canadian filming locations, “Barry.” The first generation of prestige shows was created by veterans of linear TV who longed for creative freedom but knew the rudiments of the business, the things that kept you watching through the commercial breaks: pacing, structure, believable dialogue. But the leash has been off for a decade now, and eventually you face the same problem Richie Rich did: When you’re drowning in cash, it’s always tempting to say yes.
Which leads to, as James Poniewozik puts it, dreaded “Mid TV” — “It’s got a great cast. It looks cinematic. It’s, um … fine. And it’s everywhere.”Monsters falls into this trap. As does, I’m sad to report, Disclaimer (Alfonso Cuarón and Cate Blanchett simply cannot save the script from its empty heart; we do get to see a lot of impressive camera movements though?). (I am way less bullish on Apple’s TV work than many of my friends, it seems; I find their hit rate is quite low, actually.) I really dug the first episode of Disclaimer and then it revealed: There was no trick. Or magic. Just nice lighting.
Am I being too harsh on these shows? I don’t think so. Fargo continues to astound and prove transcendent TV can still be produced. The latest season (five) I watched TWICE IN A ROW. A first for me. I was so blown away by the whole package — especially Juno Temple — I couldn’t help myself. (I even liked the Chris Rock season, though I hear many didn’t.)
Reaching back about seventy years — Ichikawa Kon’s The Burmese Harp (1956) is mesmerizing. It’s streaming on Criterion (and I hear a restored print of it is being screened at an indie theater in NYC right now, but couldn’t dig up which one). A prime example of a great story trumping all the budget in the universe.
OK — we’re at 3,000 words. Too long! I’ll send the next Roden in a few weeks with an announcement of Random House TBOT pre-order goodies. Pub date is now less than seven months away. I just sent out update #271 to my NightingalingaleSPECIAL PROJECTS-members-only newsletter talking a bit about marketing strategy.
Lots of exciting stuff in the pipeline; hope to see some of you up in Morioka or at a Kissa by Kissa JA book event in Tokyo next month!
Thanks, as always, for the support (and reading this far!),
C
