Click over to Star Trek Galaxy to read my personal and spoilery review of Star Trek Into Darkness.

Episode 1 cliffhanger: 11:59:59 AM:

Jack: “Jesus, Chloe, this is going to be a long day. Maybe we should get some lunch.”

Episode 2 open: 1:00:01 PM:

Chloe: “Thanks for picking up the tab for lunch, Jack.”
Jack: “No problem. Those were some goddamned good fish tacos. Welp, back to the ol’ salt mines.”

EVENTS OCCUR IN REAL TIME

I was dubious that this would be any good at all, having seen some of the “sequels” to Psycho over the years. But at a time when Mad Men and Game of Thrones are both running new episodes, it’s quickly become a close third for me in my lineup of shows I can’t wait to watch.

The tone of the show is similar to Twin Peaks — David Lynch is in there somewhere, but more in the sense of chaos under the surface than in any overt sense. The performances are human and real and the feeling of quiet, tragic inevitability is relieved more often than you’d expect by the hope that Norma Bates and her son can figure out their lives and somehow find balance and peace, and yet violence and secrets and death always seem one mis-step around the corner. But I find myself forgetting who and what Norman will become and genuinely feeling pity for the cruelty and confusion he experiences.

Norman’s mother and half-brother both clearly care about him, but their own fears, histories and business ventures are all conspiring to take Norman even further down the dark path he has already taken his first tentative steps upon. His new friend Emma suffers from cystic fibrosis and is pretty, loyal and sad. But Norman only has eyes for Bradley, the prettiest girl in school. Emma taking Norma to see what Bradley’s all about a couple of weeks back added layer upon layer to the emotional complexity and unexpected depths the show frequently plumbs.

Norma is vulnerable and beautiful and occasionally demonstrates a terrifying iron will and monstrous, sociopathic selfishness. The scene in last week’s episode where she, out of genuine concern for her son’s sexual awakening, explains with words and gestures the physical changes the act of lovemaking causes in a woman’s body was literally the most disturbing thing I have seen on TV since Leland Palmer danced with his murdered daughter’s cousin and then caved her head in because she was going back to Missoula, Montana.

If you love serialized drama and are curious about how terminally damaged human beings end up that way, I strongly recommend giving Bates Motel a look. Its characters and mysteries have totally sucked me in, and the tragedy it is visiting on people who you can see actually trying to be better human beings than they seem destined to become is breaking my heart on a weekly basis.

19 years ago, in April of 1994, Glens Falls Post-Star columnist Mark Freeman wrote about the death of Kurt Cobain and the subsequent reaction. This is a document of my correspondence with Mr. Freeman on this subject, starting with Freeman’s newspaper column.

“Death of ‘grunge rocker’ is not a tragedy” by Mark Freeman, The Washington County Curmudgeon—

One thing I’m sure all columnists do is read other columnists. I read every one in this paper. Some, like Tamara Dietrich and Mike Royko, usually please me. Others, like George Will and Charley Reese, frequently make me angry, but I read them all. In addition, I read Molly Ivins, Calvin Trillin, Coretta Scott King, Mark Russell, Art Buchwald, and many others.

Sometimes my reaction to a column is “Wow, I wish I’d expressed that idea that beautifully!” Sometimes it’s “Oh, come on; I can write better than that.” Occasionally another columnist uses the same identical thought and phrase that I did. I never flatter myself that it’s plagiarism; instead I use the smaller flattery that great minds think alike.

Andy Rooney is one of those I’m ambivalent about. I often agree with him, but I find myself disagreeing with him more often than I used to. That means one of us is changing, and I don’t think I’m the one.

The Rooney column that appeared in this paper last Tuesday was headlined: “Cobain suicide was simply a waste.” I don’t blame Rooney for that, any more than I blame myself for the misspelling of “Kingsbury” in the headline over this column a week ago. He and I aren’t responsible for the headlines.

But Andy Rooney says, “It is apparent from what I’ve read now that he (Cobain) was talented and his death was a tragedy.” I don’t think Cobain’s death was a tragedy, and I don’t think he was talented, except in the most minor way. I don’t think Andy Rooney thinks so either, and I wish he wouldn’t be a hypocrite.

In case there is anyone out there who doesn’t know, Kurt Cobain was the prime mover in Nirvana, a “grunge-rock” band. Apparently, an important part of being a grunge rocker is wearing dirty, torn, ill-fitting clothes that look as though they came from a second-hand store, although they probably cost thousands.

I try to be broadminded about modern popular music; after all, my parents weren’t crazy about Glenn Miller and Harry James, who were the musicians I admired. I have problems, however, with so-called “musicians” for whom costume, lights, smoke bombs or gyrations are a major part of the “music.” All Harry James did was plan an amazing trumpet; even those of us who worshiped him admitted he was kind of dopey-looking.

I’m not sorry Kurt Cobain is dead. Pause, while some readers are shocked and others pretend to be. I’m sorry for his wife and child, although as he was a drug addict who was fascinated by violence, it could be argued that they are better off. In any case, they won’t starve, since they will profit from all the TV specials that will now appear, “suggested by real events.”

I’ll save my sympathy for the dead in Bosnia, Rwanda, South Africa and hundreds of other places, including the ghettos of America. They didn’t want to die. Kurt Cobain did. He had tried to kill himself at least once before, with a massive overdose of pills. This time he succeeded, with one of the many guns he kept around. MTV treated his death as a national tragedy, preempting all programming for many hours.

TIME magazine, which is rapidly becoming the “Entertainment Tonight” of news magazines, devotes three pages this week to Cobain, using words like “brilliant,” “genius” and “poet.” It cites these lyrics as some of his best work: “And I forget just why I taste/oh yeah, I guess it makes me smile/I found it hard, it was hard to find/oh, well, whatever, never mind.”

Sorry, TIME, that isn’t poetry, or if it is, it’s very bad poetry. I probably taught a thousand high school kids who wrote better poetry than that.

This is poetry: “I like a look of agony,

Because I know it’s true

Men do not sham convulsion,

Nor simulate a throe.

“The eyes glaze once and that is death.

Impossible to feign

The beads upon the forehead

By homely anguish strung.”

If you’re a fan of grunge rock, it’s astonishing that you’re reading this, but you’re probably saying something like, “Yo, man, but who are you to say one poem is better than another? It’s just whatever turns you on.”

I refer you to another column of Andy Rooney’s, which flattered me, inadvertently, by expressing an idea that I had previously expressed: there is better cooking and worse cooking, better poetry and worse poetry, better basketball and worse basketball. There is such a thing as quality, and it can be determined, although not infallibly, by those who have devoted a great deal of time and energy to a study of the subject.

That poem was written more than a century ago, by a spinster in Amherst, Mass. I chose it because the sentiment expressed is at least as shocking as anything Cobain wrote about.

Emily Dickinson further shocked many of her contemporaries by refusing to state publicly she was a Christian. Although she was as much a rebel as Cobain, she did not find it necessary to take drugs, have guns around, decorate the walls of her home with graffiti, fight physically with her loved ones or take part in wild parties.

She also did not find it necessary to commit suicide. Perhaps that’s because she knew she was not a fraud.

My response

Dear Mark,

I’ve been reading your Sunday column since it began and have found myself agreeing with your opinions at least 85 percent of the time. I’m not sure I’m even in disagreement about the column I’m writing about here, but I do wish to comment on it.

I don’t consider myself a fan of “grunge rock” because at 28 I think the genre, if you want to call it that, is a little out of my realm of experience. I don’t think Kurt Cobain would have wanted to be lumped in with the rest of the so-called grunge rockers anyway. It is clear now he didn’t want to be lumped in with anybody.

But at 28, and with an 8-month old daughter, I found myself discovering after his death a number of parallels in his life that I found disturbing. Our ages, our babies, our inability to make sense much of the time of the world in which we live. If you’re saying to yourself “Well, lots of people are in their late 20s with kids and confusion about life,” well, Mark, that may just be the point when it comes to the issue of Cobain’s talent.

Briefly addressing some factual errors in your piece, the clothes Cobain wore were the clothes he always wore, because he came from an economically distressed northwestern town where it was cold, so he wore flannel shirts. He was poor, so he kept his clothes when they developed holes. I have a few items like that myself. I agree that it might have been an affectation, but he was a rock singer for Christ’s sake—you don’t think Sinatra has any affectations? Or any of the other older performers you mention for that matter. Who among us is totally incapable of that kind of vanity?

I understand you can’t relate to Nirvana. I found, only a few months before Kurt Cobain’s death, that I could. I found your quote of lyrics a bit unfair—again, to bring up the Sinatra analogy, would it be fair to judge his abilities simply by quoting “Fly with me, come fly, come fly away?” And he didn’t even write it!

What’s more important than the lyric alone, as you well know, is the intonation, the delivery, and the emotion delivered to the listener. Music isn’t poetry, Mark, and I don’t believe Cobain ever called himself a poet. That was written by editors and reviewers, and people like the one that misspelled Kingsbury. But people think you write the headlines, and perhaps you make the same mistake when you judge a man by what others called him.

I am sorry Kurt is dead, because I am sorry he was unable to beat whatever demons it was that haunted him. I’m sorry he won’t be around to enjoy the success that his talent gave him, and I’m sorry he won’t be around to comment on the disastrous society that produced him, as he did so well for such a short time. As the first line of the new Nirvana album said, “Teenage angst has served me well, now I’m bored and old.” That may not be poetry, and it may not even be well-written, but it perfectly expresses what a lot of us are feeling, whether you can relate to it or not. Cobain illustrated in his lyrics and in his music a visceral anger and disgust for the rotten world we live in, and speaking as someone who went to college to learn about radio, got a job in that field and has worked in it for over eight years, yet is still unable to make enough money to get by, I can relate to someone disgusted by society. I like this area, want to stay here, and yet find that to be financially secure and still work in my chosen career, I have to leave. That makes me angry. It was a pleasure to find music that spoke to me, and now I’ll still be listening, but a profound voice has been silenced, at its own hand.

That really disgusts me.

Freeman’s Response

Dear Mr. Doane,

Although I deplore the custom of not answering letters, I answer fewer than half of those I receive; I simply don’t have the time. I try to answer those that are written well and display intelligence  a category yours falls into. (unlike many people, I don’t think “intelligent” and “agrees with me” are necessarily one and the same.) If you’d like to see what the average writer does, there will be a letter on Kurt Cobain and me in the Post-Star quite soon. As you read it, bear in mind that an editor at the paper had to correct spelling and usage in almost every line.

I am gratified and somewhat surprised to learn that someone 28 years old agrees with me “at least 85 percent of the time.” Maybe there’s hope for the future, although you don’t seem too optimistic.

I’d like to discuss, which of course means disagree with, a few of the points you made. You say you are 28 and have a new daughter, and suffer from an “inability to make sense of the world.” Let me cheer you with the certain knowledge that it’s not your age; most of us feel that way most of the time, and that was true in the time of Socrates. Did you feel more certain of things when you were a teen-ager? Most people just muddle through, doing the best they can to be decent and raise decent kids. They are the heroes. The others kill themselves or others; as you probably know, suicide and homicide are closely related.

Your choice of Sinatra was understandable but unfortunate; I can’t stand the man. But I would argue that whatever affectations Sinatra, or Tony Bennett, or Wynton Marsalis may have, they are not an important part of their talent.

I did not select Cobain’s “best” lyric; TIME did. Blame them. Like you, if I may say so, I know nothing first-hand about Cobain; all I know is what I have read about him. I don’t understand your reference to “Come fly with me.” As you say, Sinatra didn’t write it. Nobody ever called Sinatra a poet; apparently many thought Cobain was a poet; he wasn’t.

I’m not sorry Cobain’s dead; I am sorry that he, or any person, led a miserable, self-pitying life that, in my opinion, produced nothing that will stand the test of time. People still listen to Mozart. Duke Ellington is still regarded as a great musician. I will bet you twenty dollars that, in twenty years or less, nobody will be playing Nirvana’s music.

Aside from that, we waste too much time and energy in hypocrisy. Nixon is probably dying. Will you be sorry when he’s dead? I won’t. Do you think Kurt Cobain would have been sorry if you had died?

I am sorry you can’t, at present, work in your chosen career, live in the area in which you would like to reside, and make enough money to get by, but your situation is far from unique in either space or time. You say you have to leave. That is one alternative. More and more people are choosing, rather, to select the area in which they want to live and the lifestyle they want, then finding employment that will enable them to gratify those first two needs, even if it wasn’t what they studied in college. If you will forgive a personal reference, that’s why my daughter, who majored in English, now lives in Seattle and works for the county in water pollution abatement.

Most creative people in this area, among whom I include you, find that they have to do a little of this, that, and the other thing to make ends meet. If you get a job in radio in NYC or LA, you will get what seems like a lot more money, but you still won’t be able to make ends meet.

Finally, I’m sure I can’t mention this without its sounding snotty to you, although I assure you it isn’t meant that way: If you have been reading my column since it began, you should have seen the one about my distaste, shared by most people my age, for being called by my first name by people I don’t know very well.

Thanks again for your letter. I’m glad to know that there are young people out there who can read, write and think.

My Reply To His Reply

Dear Mr. Freeman,

Allow me to thank you for your quick reply to my letter regarding Kurt Cobain. A reply was certainly hoped for, but a speedy one was a pleasant surprise.

My apologies if my familiarity in regards to the use of your first name offended you; perhaps you might come to see it as a complement. After reading your column for so many months, I guess I felt I had come to know you in a way. I’d estimate I’ve taken at least 5000 phone calls while on the air at one radio station or another and I’d guess maybe 2 people have ever called me Mr. Doane, one of which calls to ask the temperature about every two hours. Presumed familiarity is a professional hazard for those of us in the media, I’m afraid.

On the other hand, it’s also how I met my wife, so I can’t complain.

Some days, anyway.

As to the topic which was at hand, let me nail shut my half of the conversational coffin on this subject with a few comments and/or clarifiers.

My reference to being unable to make sense of the world was an attempt to demonstrate the relevance of Cobain’s art (or “art” if you prefer) to people of my generation. Confusion about life is without a doubt common to all generations, yet no other popular artist in my lifetime has so well commented upon the apparent state of things as Kurt Cobain, hereinafter referred to as KC. For me, anyway, his music both lyrics and melody (and yes, there were a few) said a lot that someone outside of a narrow age band (younger or older, this isn’t a swipe at older folks) might not appreciate.

Or, to put it another, shorter way: Well, I liked him, anyway.

As for your point that 20 years from now no one will be playing Nirvana’s music; would you have made the same bet about The Doors? They’re more popular now than they ever were when Jim Morrison was alive. The same goes for the Beatles. And make no mistake, for many people of this 20-something generation, KC was on his way to becoming another John Lennon. I may not agree with that sentiment, but it’s clear that his death, no matter what the cause, will only serve to widen his audience and “shine up the legend,” as it were. And of course many music historians feel the Beatles will still be around in another 100 years, never mind 20. I agree that Nirvana might not stand the test of time, but then how many of Mozart’s contemporaries are still listened to and studied the way his music is? Popular music in particular, and popular art in general, is by its very nature highly perishable and subject to a decay of its relevance to future audiences. As someone who’s been playing popular music for a living for the better part of a decade now, I can tell you that the vast majority of music released is forgotten immediately, never mind in 20 years.

That KC’s music has endured as long as it has (NEVERMIND, Nirvana’s breakthrough album from, I believe, 1991, is still on the top 200 charts, its resurgent popularity of course fueled by the death of KC) indicates to me that at least someone will be listening to them in 20 years. If KC had decided to face up to his problems and had continued to write and perform, I have no doubt that his music would have endured. How, we shall just have to wait and see. But in popular music, 1991 is the stone age, so as I say I believe there may be some lasting appeal there. Landfills are filled with CDs, records and tapes of literally thousands of groups you never heard of; now the world has heard of Nirvana, at the cost of a life. It’s unfortunate that KC’s greatest fame isn’t for the success of his art but for the failure of his life.

I had an overwhelming hunch I was barking up the wrong tree when I picked Sinatra, but I tried, anyway. My quoting of Come Fly With Me was to demonstrate the inherent unfairness of judging an artist from one line in a song. I can’t relate to Sinatra or appreciate him in the way, say, my mother did. And believe me, she did! But taking him out of context adds apparent legitimacy to saying he isn’t much of an artist, and the same is true for KC. And TIME may have selected the lyric, but you didn’t point that out in your piece, and besides, maybe you should have dug a little further if that was the only lyric you exposed yourself to before judging whether or not he was a poet. My guess is it wouldn’t change your mind no matter how many lyrics of KC’s I showed you (hence I quote him not), but it would gbe playing a little more fairly in my opinion. Again, KC never called himself a poet—it’s clear he hated himself a lot, so he probably didn’t even consider himself a craftsman at what he did, never mind an artist. But why judge him on what others called him? Exactly what was the point of your piece if that’s your jumping-off point? KC’s affectations were not meant to be a part of his talent, and I didn’t mean to say they were. Again, I can’t say for sure, but it’s my hunch his manner of dress had more to do with intellectual and physical laziness more than any attempt to jump on any fashion bandwagon or start any trends. I have noticed since his death that in various TV appearances he was wearing the same shirt a lot. I suspect he probably just didn’t care what he looked like to anybody. Don’t we all have days like that?

And I suspect many people WOULD call Sinatra a poet. Ask Bruce Matthews at WWSC. The people that love Sinatra love him completely, so far as I can see. Perhaps in 20 or 30 years KC will be remembered in much the same way by the kids (to use the term broadly) that appreciated him before his death. As for those who jumped on after, who can say where their true loyalty, musically speaking, will be ain a couple of decades? I don’t know if I’ll still like Nirvana in 20 years. They only released 4 albums, and I myself only like about half the material found on two of them. But martyrdom is a funny thing, and you can surely see James Dean is hardly worthy of the acclaim he is given. I’ll take you up on that bet, though—we’ll see in 2014 who does and doesn’t remember KC.

Of course, if I’m wrong I’ll pay you off in 1994 dollars, so don’t expect much.

In closing, let me say it is an honour to correspond with you, and I hope I can look forward to another reply, speedy or not. We’ll be on a first name basis any day now!

Regards,

Alan Doane

I’ve been having pretty severe bursitis pain in my hip for the last month, which is why I haven’t been keeping up my usual blogging pace. Yesterday I started going to see a physical therapist, who recommended I do Kegel exercises once an hour to try to strengthen the muscles in my lower body. 

When I told my wife about this, she asked “How do you do that?” I told her what the doctor told me, which is that you contract your pelvic muscles just as if you were trying to cut off the flow of urine in mid-stream. Astonished, she said “Guys can do that too?!?”

I thought a moment, and then said, “No, we’re men. We just spray everywhere until we’re dry as a bone.”

Simple Minds has been one of my favourite bands since they first came to my attention in college. A friend at my college radio station was a huge fan of theirs, and turned me on to the fact that they were more than just “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” That’s a great, radio-friendly hit that has proved the test of time, but it barely scratches the surface of what the band has to offer in terms of depth and complexity.

Talking recently at work to a colleague who hosts an ‘80s show on one of the stations I work for now, I mentioned something about one of their hits from the 1990s, and he was surprised to hear they had any hits after the 1980s at all. 

There’s no question that the band’s prominence in the public consciousness has waned since their glory days, but some of their best songs actually came well after “Don’t You” broke through on the Breakfast Club soundtrack and the 1985 album Once Upon A Time cranked out hit after hit and became probably their best-known album.

By 1992 only the hardest of their hardcore fans were probably still paying attention, and the release of the album Good News From the Next World didn’t even register with me. It was only when music commentator Bob Lefsetz wrote passionately about the album late in 2012  that I gave it another listen, and it was then that I realized one of the band’s all-time greatest songs was on there – “She’s A River.”

Lefsetz calls the song “hypnotic,” and I won’t argue with that – I’ve been listening to it multiple times a day for weeks now and am not tired of it yet. The key to the song’s appeal is the fearless vocal approach Jim Kerr takes, as he tackles with gospel fervor a song about the brick-to-the-head effect of falling in love. There are even gospel-inspired backup singers joining Kerr in expressing his passion late in the song, but by that point we’ve already realized the song’s intent and theme, and the moment the backup singers come in isn’t at all over the top; it is, instead, resonant with what we’re already convinced of, thanks to the lushness of the production and the starkness of Kerr’s wailing.



She’s A River – Simple Minds

Shadow let go

There’s something you should know

I just found my new direction

And I hope you like the key

Like the air that led me to it

She’s the wind that sucked me through it

She’s a river, and she’s turning

There in front of me

Stand back, get back

She’ll paint your blue skies black

She gives bulletproof protection

She got a resurrection feel

When I’m scared, and ‘bout to lose

She gives me travelling shoes

She’s a river and she’s turning

There in front of me

And I go blind

Wasting my time

The river’s in front of me

That’s where I’m gonna be

Shine on, get on

Twilight from dusk to dawn

She’s the spirit of creation

She’s the last chance guarantee

Got a myriad of poses

Sweet miracles and roses

She’s a river and she’s turning

There in front of me

And I go blind

Wasting my time

The river’s in front of me

That’s where I’m gonna be

Shadow

Oh

‘Cause when I find

My state of mind

The river’s in front of me

They say that every heaven’s got a thousand rooms

So take me on a freedom ride

My heart is like a hunter’s in the silent moon

My nerves just feel electrified

Meet me on the staircase

By a darkened room

Light me like a naked flame

The voice of Mother Nature states

All things must pass

And nothing can remain

They say that every heaven’s got a thousand rooms

Take me on that freedom ride

You raise me like a building to the very top

Rush me to the end of time

You fill me full of danger, give me future shock

Then you leave me wasted dying

(Stand back, get back)

Stand back, get back

Move on (she’s a river)  she’s a river

She’s a river

And I go blind

Wasting my time

The river’s in front of me

Stand back (stand back)

Get back (get back)

She’s a river, she’s a river (she’s a river)

She’s a river (she’s a river)

Shine on, get on

Twilight from dusk to dawn

She’s the spirit of creation

She’s the last chance guarantee

Stand back, get back

She’s a river (she’s a river, she’s a river)

The river’s in front of me

(Stand back)

(The river in front of me) get back

That’s where I’m going to be

(The river in front of me)

The river in front of me

When the traffic light turns green, why don’t they move? Why do they just sit there? Maybe they’re afraid of some speed-demon crossing the intersection against the light that just turned red for him. Don’t they know the lights are timed? What are they afraid of? Why don’t they move already? Maybe they’re on their cell phone, texting or checking the weather. Why don’t they move? So frustrating.

I was married and had kids when I met her. She was a couple years younger than me, but we shared a lot of the same interests. Stuff like reading and talking about ideas, things my wife had no interest in. She likes to watch TV. This other girl, she reads books and likes to talk about what happens in them. You don’t find that a lot these days. Who reads books?

I remember when Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on the poor neighbourhoods of New Orleans and other parts of the south. When criticism of the government began to spread, affluent TV commentators would ask “why don’t they move?” never thinking, or not caring, if the victims were too impoverished to pack up their family’s lives and go somewhere else. Sometimes you can’t move, or you think you can’t, and it ends up being the same thing.

After work on Fridays we’d sometimes go out for a couple beers. Not every Friday, and sometimes it was wine, but nothing ever happened. I never told my wife and she never told her husband, of course, because how would they understand that sometimes you just need that time? Sometimes you just need to talk to someone else, someone who shares your interests. We’d talk about books we’d read, or movies we’d seen. We’d argue, sometimes, and then not talk for days. Sometimes the talk would get racy, a little too close to the bone, maybe, but nothing ever happened. Sometimes you just need to talk.

Then there was that year my sister-in-law and her boyfriend and their various kids moved next door. “Why don’t they move?” I’d ask my wife, who I knew loved having her sister and her niece and nephews right next door, but I hated it. I hated having them so close, and how their fighting and their drama would spill across the gulf between our houses and disrupt our home, and it all kind of stopped that night when the ambulance came and took him away. They had had a fight that escalated so much that he had a stroke right then and there. The oldest boy had said that the man had been complaining of a headache, and the woman, my sister-in-law, had pounded the table with a bottle of Tylenol and screamed repeatedly at him “Why don’t you take some of these?” as she pounded away. Now he walks with a cane and lives somewhere else, and strangers live in the house next door and I prefer it that way, honestly. Just because you live next door to each other doesn’t mean you have to be friends, or even talk to each other.

I guess I liked her well enough when we moved in together; my wife, I mean, although she wasn’t my wife then, just my girlfriend. I must have liked her, otherwise why would I have asked her to move in with me? I mean, we both needed a new place to stay and were running out of time, but we liked each other well enough and got along back in those days. Our first apartment was an absolute shithole, but we made the most of it and got along pretty well most of the time. There was that one night when we were totally broke except for nine dollars or something, and we spent it on a pizza and a soda that we shared, because neither of us was getting paid until the next day and we needed to eat. It seemed romantic, bringing that pizza and that single soda back to our lousy apartment, which was right on the main drag so you could hear the tractor-trailer air brakes around the clock, although you got used to it and eventually could more or less sleep through the night. I don’t think we ever met any of our neighbours in that run-down apartment building, but it was nice when the sandwich shop opened on the first floor, right under our apartment, and I could pad down the stairs in my socks and get a submarine sandwich and a Styrofoam bowl of chili for lunch and take it back upstairs to eat. I was working overnights at the time, and that was real convenient, that sandwich shop that opened up right on the first floor. Sometimes I’d wake up to the smell of chili, and that was pretty great, until they moved.

Eventually we moved to a much nicer apartment on a much quieter street, but it was a third floor apartment. Other than the house we live in now, it’s the only place either of our kids ever remembers living in; we were there for nearly ten years, believe it or not. I used to park my car in the lot behind the house, which really only accommodated three cars but sometimes as many as five cars would be crammed in there, angry tenants demanding space even if there really was none to be had. One spring I went down to get in my car, and the engine wouldn’t start. The mechanic told me squirrels had eaten through some wire, which he replaced and charged me a hundred dollars. I told him “I knew I shouldn’t have bought those cheap, acorn-flavoured wires,” but he didn’t laugh. Sometimes people just don’t get it, or maybe he’d heard it all before.

There are a lot of squirrels in our town, always darting across the road in front of cars and more often than not, freezing halfway across and just standing there motionless, waiting for the inevitable. It makes you wonder. Sometimes you can’t move, or you think you can’t, and it ends up being the same thing.

That girl, I gave her a book for her birthday. It seemed like the kind of writing that she enjoys the most. Maybe we’ll talk about it, although we don’t talk as much as we used to. Maybe she’ll talk about it to her husband, although he’s not really the type of guy who reads, or talks about books. I don’t know what she sees in him, but it must be something. Sometimes he makes her cry, but she stays with him. I wonder if he ever bought her a book. They’ve been together a long time, so it seems like he’d have to have bought her a book at some point. There’s this used bookstore about an hour from here that I told her about once. Just thousands and thousands of old books in piles and on shelves, the kind of place you could lose yourself in all day. Once in a while, back when we still worked together, I’d suggest we go down there together and look for books; I’d even say we should bring our spouses and make a day of it. But she never seriously entertained the idea. It was too risky, I’m sure she thought, although sometimes I wonder what either of us ever had to lose.

Shirley Jackson’s frequent themes of alienation and isolation seem to find their ultimate expression in her 1962 novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle, one of the two novels reprinted in The Library of America’s collection Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories.

Mary Katherine is the narrator of the story, and although I would not go so far as to say she is unreliable, her baroque view of the world she lives in does not always immediately reveal the objective truth of her circumstances.

Jackson as a writer excelled at depicting small communities and the small-minded people within them (see her classic short story The Lottery, or the lesser-known but equally compelling The Summer People, for example), and We Have Always Lived in the Castle begins with Mary Katherine (“Merricat” to her big sister Constance) enduring an agonizing journey from the Blackwood family home on the outskirts of town into the village proper, where she seems to be viewed as a freak, an outcast and a curiosity by the townspeople. The story is completely told from Mary Katherine’s point of view, and we slowly get hints of why she and her family are shunned and feared, but at the same time Jackson makes it clear that Mary Katherine and Constance, who live in the Blackwood family home with their handicapped Uncle Julian, keep a clean home and maintain always a strong air of order and decorum.

Eventually and in tantalizing puzzle-like pieces we learn that the order rose up from one particularly chaotic and horrific evening when the Blackwood family was forever changed and diminished, and when their reputation in the community was sealed in blood. The years since have been spent with the family mostly alone by itself, with only one progressively-minded resident of the village willing to come for weekly tea with Constance, who never, ever leaves the Blackwood property. Mary Katherine is responsible for the weekly shopping excursion, which we fear is always a horrible ordeal, but she has also created a magical world for herself and her sister, Uncle Julian, and cat Jonas, in which they are protected by family heirlooms buried on the perimeter of the home or nailed to trees in the surrounding woods, talismans that mostly succeed in keeping out the world, at least for a while. One day, Merricat promises, they will all go to live on the moon, where they can truly be happy (“Everything’s safe on the moon,” she says), and of course, truly be isolated from the world that they work so hard to avoid.

The world has other plans, of course, in this case executed by seemingly-kindly cousin Charles Blackwood, who has come after many years to see what is what in the Blackwood home, and perhaps secure the family safe, said to contain untold riches. 

The Blackwoods, you see, don’t believe in banks, and Charles is certain there was a lot of money and other valuable items in the home on that night, that terrible night, after which no one wanted sugar in their tea.

Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin recently regarded Jackson as one of the best writers of the 20th century, and I second that idea. Although I read the entirety of the LOA collection, I was most impressed by We Have Always Lived in the Castle and wanted to explore a little just why it is such an extraordinary and powerful novel. 

You don’t have to do much research to discover that Jackson had something of a troubled life. Her protagonists are largely isolated, mistrustful and misunderstood, and I strongly suspect that is because she herself was isolated, mistrustful and misunderstood. The Lottery was hugely misinterpreted as non-fiction in its initial publication, very probably because Jackson’s prose is so smooth, so lyrical and convincing that at its best it feels so very true, no matter how extraordinary or shocking are the events it describes. While many regard Jackson as primarily a horror writer, and certainly horror interested her (The Haunting of Hill House is probably the Platonic ideal of a haunted house story, with a brilliant resolution that allows the reader an unparalleled degree of interpretation while still being utterly terrifying), but her greatest gift was her ability to explore the inner worlds of her characters, usually women, usually alienated in some way. Many of her short stories follow a pattern of introducing a woman who is somehow apart from the world or from her family, and then Jackson explores the consequences of that aloneness. But far from being an easy formula, rather it provides the intellectual stem cells that allowed the writer to create an impressive gallery of worlds in which these elements are endlessly, infinitely recombined to deliver shocking cultural commentary (The Lottery), a vision of banal, suburban viciousness (The Possibility of Evil), or outright terror (The Haunting of Hill House).

Jackson’s inability to fit into the world she so eloquently described in her fiction haunted her, and very possibly ended her. The timeline of her life at the back of the LOA Novels and Stories collection holds many hints to the reasons for the wall between Jackson and the outside world, but of one thing there can be no question: Jackson used her pain and her sadness to write dozens of compelling stories, some short, like The Lottery (the story’s reputation is what drew me to her work in the first place), some longer, like We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Having spent months now immersing myself in Jackson’s worlds, I have come to appreciate her subtle worldbuilding (read any five or ten of her stories and you will start to sense a cohesive universe), but more, I have grown to respect her voice and become astonished and grateful for the eloquence and ease with which she is able to use mere words to take me to secret places where I am forced to confront the horrors she no doubt experienced in her life. I don’t pity her; Jackson’s too powerful a writer to be pitied. But I do sympathize, and like Mary Katherine, I frequently find myself thinking of how lovely it would be to take my loved ones to live on the moon, where we are free to take tea and tiny rum cakes, away from all the pettiness and cruelty of this fallen world.

Decades after it became one of the most baffling title tracks of all time, Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” seems to be enjoying a minor resurgence. It was brilliantly featured in a tension-filled sequence during the pilot of the new Cold War-era TV series The Americans, and is also the subject of a quick analysis at The Onion’s AV Club. 

In pointing me to the AV Club piece, my buddy Chris Allen called it “strangely underwritten for the AV Club,” which is certainly true. I am not very conversant in the language of music criticism (certainly not as much as Chris is, as his ongoing Beatles song-by-song reviews prove), but I feel like I could have said a hell of a lot more about it.

For one thing, the song is ONLY odd when considered in the continuum of Fleetwood Mac’s mostly flawless pop-oriented singles, where Buckingham’s ambitions were often muted by Christine McVie’s mainstream sensibilities and Stevie Nicks’s pensive, longing romanticism; taken for what it is, Tusk, in all its unbridled intensity and inventiveness, is par for the course for about a quarter to a third of the songs on Tusk the LP, and completely indicative of the style and quality of musicality on every Buckingham solo album.

For all the comparisons made between Brian Wilson’s music and Buckingham’s, there’s no question that balls-to-the-wall crazy is the most significant musical element Buckingham inherited from Wilson, sometimes to little good effect, but sometimes, like with Tusk, to sheer genius.