“Anora,” the New Kings, and the Absence of Consequences

/ JD Byrne / 3 Comments

One of the bulwarks of the criminal justice system is that the prosecution has to prove someone committed a crime beyond a reasonable doubt – a higher standard than those that apply in civil proceedings. One of the perversities of the criminal justice system is that courts generally will not, and in some jurisdictions are not allowed to, actually instruct jurors on what “reasonable doubt” is. It’s left to the parties to argue it out and the jurors to make the call.

Lawyers, searching for a common experience to which jurors can relate, try to analogize the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard to the kind of certainty you need to make a major life decision. Not where to go to dinner or what movie to watch, but, say, whether to buy a house or a car. The big one, of course, is whether to get married (and to whom). Even if a juror has never been married, they’re aware of what a monumental decision that is.

I was thinking about those arguments while watching Anora this past weekend.

The newly-minted Best Picture winner is about the titular Anora (Ani to her friends and customers), a stripper who embarks on a whirlwind paid-for-date/romance with Vanya, the son of a Russian oligarch. After a wild time in Vegas he proposes that they get married and they do, much to the displeasure of his parents who send their (largely ineffectual) goons to ensure that the marriage is annulled. In the end, when it comes time for Vanya to stand up to his parents and stand with his wife, he can’t do it. The interesting question is why.

The answer, I think, lies in how the film deals with class distinctions. Essentially, the characters are divided into three groups.

Vanya and his parents are the super-rich, the 1%, the “new kings.” They have “fuck you” money and an immense amount of power. They largely suffer no consequences for wrongdoing and, therefore, have little fear of doing it. This is particularly important for Vanya because, as portrayed in the movie, he’s never had to make a consequential decision in his life. Even someone who is only 21 years old, who has lived a normal life, has made decisions that had consequences, both foreseen and unforeseen.

Vanya hasn’t and, as a result, doesn’t even recognize them when they come around. So, when he proposes marriage to Ani I don’t think he’s either (1) simply lying to her in a way to make her do something useful for him or (2) a besotted dope who’s really deeply in love with this woman he’s known for a week. I think he sees the decision to get married as being as consequential as what club to go to or whether to jet off to Vegas. Whether he gets it wrong or not, he won’t really suffer any consequences. He is, quite literally, playing with house money.

The second group of characters include Toros and his brother, two of the goons who are tasked with keeping tabs on Vanya. Neither are remotely in the same class as Vanya and his parents, but they think they can have access to wealth and power if they just continue to make themselves useful. Not for nothing but when Vanya goes missing Toros’ entire motivation for finding him is to please Vanya’s parents and fix a problem. He doesn’t express any concern for this guy whose life he’s looked over for years. He doesn’t see him as a kind of son, worrying about his safety and wellbeing. So long as he finds Vanya and gets the marriage annulled all is right with his world.

The final group is Ani herself, along with another one of the goons, Igor. Only Ani doesn’t realize she’s in this group at first. She thinks she’s in one of the other two, on her way into the good life, achieving upward mobility. Igor, by contrast, knows better. He understands his spot in the hierarchy and that he’s fated to stay there. His bond with Ani comes largely from his empathy for her coming to the same realization as the movie plays out. I think the ending is her recognizing a fundamental similarity between them that she would never have had with Vanya (not for nothing is the scene in the car the only sex scene that appears to include a real connection between the people involved).

The movie, then, reflects more than a little of our current reality. Increasingly, we live in a country with an out-of-touch and untouchable moneyed elite who rarely suffer any consequences for their actions. Susan Collins famously said, during Trump’s impeachment, that she was going to vote against convicting him because he “has learned from this case” getting “a pretty big lesson.” She wasn’t wrong – he learned he faces essentially no consequences for his actions. Just like Vanya, which is why he so often says the first thing that comes to his mind without giving any real thought to what might happen after.

Sitting down to watch Anora I didn’t quite know what to expect. I certainly didn’t expect a pretty succinct analogy for this country’s current class inertia (as one report put it “wealth status is sticky” – there’s little chance you move up or down over the course of a lifetime), but that’s certainly in there. It’s definitely got more going on than the “hooker with a heart of gold” tag some detractors are given it after the Oscars. It does make you think.

What it makes me think is that sometimes the lack of consequences might be the most consequential thing of all.

Similar Wars, Different Worlds

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

A while back I read a good write up about the 1953 version of War of the Worlds over at Reactor in which someone explained  (down in the comments) that the version most of us had seen on TV was a kind of stepped-down version in terms of the Technicolor, but that the currently streaming version was restored to its full glory. That sounded like a good excuse to watch a movie I hadn’t seen for a long time and set me off on a little dig into the story and the ways it’s been told.

The story, of course, started with H.G. Wells, whose novel first appeared (in serialized form) in 1897.

It’s a simple tale – Martians invade England, deal death and destruction to all in their path, but are felled in the end by Earth pathogens they aren’t equipped to deal with. It’s been adapted for the big screen twice (and in numerous other ways, including a rock opera!), in 1953 by producer George Pal and in 2005 by director Steven Spielberg. I consumed the book and both movies in pretty short succession and it’s interesting to see what parts of the book each film emphasizes, while not sticking completely faithfully to its text.

To be fair, that’d be a hard ask. The unnamed narrator of the book is a fairly average upper-middle class guy – he’s neither a scientist nor in the military, but he’s well read and thinks philosophical thoughts. The book follows him as he experiences the first landing of the Martians, including failed friendly attempts at first contact, and then as he (and others) flee as the tripod war machines make their way towards London. Above all, the book creates a sense of loneliness as the narrator loses his family (temporarily), his society, and any real hope in his future. Even though the book Martians never leave England it feels like the story of the last man on Earth. The ending, when it comes, is less happy than it is more a relief. Given how foundational the book is to modern sci-fi it’s hard to even quantify it as “good” or not – it’s just part of the bedrock.

The 1953 movie changes some things dramatically.

The main character, Dr. Clayton Forrester (yes), is not only a scientist but an expert on all things Mars, so he’s much more involved in the response to the Martian landing. It does, as in the novel, include a misplaced attempt at friendship (savagely parodied in Mars Attacks), but there’s a bigger focus on the military response, futile as it is. Forrester is more man of action than passive observer and he’s got others with whom he’s involved (including a love interest), so the emphasis on loneliness really isn’t there. This version also has a pretty heavy-handed religious overlay, with God getting the credit for the bugs that kill the Martians in the end.

The 2005 film in some ways hues more closely to the spirit of the novel, but also makes major changes.

The main character here is Ray Ferrier, a dock worker very much in the everyman vein, who, because this is Spielberg, has two children he has to look after the entire time. There is absolutely no chance for peaceful contact, however, as the aliens just pop up from underground (not sure that makes sense) and start wreaking havoc. Ferrier and clan are thus constantly on the run. While changing the setup, this movie keeps interesting details from the book, such as the Martians plucking up humans to use for food (the 1953 Martians are just killing machines) and a late-story run in with a madman who knows how he’s going to rebuild the world in his own image. Overall, this version does a better job of making the main character (and his kids) seem very very small in the grand scheme of things.

I won’t say either movie is better than the other. The 1953 version’s Martian machines – they look like they’re hovering but there really are legs, if you squint at the right times – will forever be what they should look like, slow and sleek and terrifying. The 2005 version does a better job with the characters, I think. Neither quite gets the central spine of the book, the feeling of loneliness, but that’s understandable.

One thing’s for certain – we’ve been beaming this story out there for decades so that if the Martians ever do come for us, they’ll probably be armed with antibiotics as much as heat rays.

See Me! Hear Me! Feel . . . What, Exactly?

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A couple of weeks ago, after some weather-related fits and starts (fuck winter, seriously!), I got a chance to sit down with the fine folks at the Reading Room Ruffians podcast. We talked about writing in general and specifically about Moore Hollow, since they’d all just read it. It was a fun hour that I’ll think you’ll enjoy. I was really pleased they liked my twist on the zombie story.

Watch here:

Or click here to get links to their pod on all sorts of different platforms.

And here if you don’t get the reference in the post title.

I Enjoy Making Art (and You Should, Too)

/ JD Byrne / 1 Comment

A while back I saw this headline:

And let’s just say I had an instant reaction:

My second reaction was hoping this dope wasn’t related to the Shulman brothers of Gentle Giant fame (doesn’t seem like it). I cooled off a bit and figured maybe he was being taken out of context or something.

Reading further didn’t make things any better. I had thought, perhaps, that what Shulman meant when he said people don’t like making music these days was something about how creators have to spend so much time doing other stuff (building brands, being terminally online, etc.) that “making music” in a business sense is not as fun as it once was. He was talking about professionals, in other words.

Nope. He’s just a douche:

“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software,” Shulman explained. “And I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.”

It’s an interesting and arresting angle.

Not really and here’s why – the vast majority of people who make music do so only for their own amusement or the amusement of those few around them. Most musicians aren’t trying to make it big, or even make a living, making music. They’re making music because it stirs something in their soul, fills a need in the way they interact with a world. Put simply – for most musicians being “good” is irrelevant to why they make music in the first place.

Years ago, one of my local writer colleagues made a very good point about making art. When people ask writers if they’ve ever been published or artists whether they’ve had an exhibition, they’re tying the doing of art with the high-level consumption of it, with sales. As a comparison, my colleague suggested, nobody asks a bunch of middle-age guys playing basketball at the Y if they’re training for the NBA. Rather, we recognize the value of doing the thing just for the sake of doing it, not to produce a product for which other people might pay money.

As a writer I like to think of myself as a professional – I work very hard on the text, work with editors and cover designers to produce a polished final product. As a musician, I am very much an amateur. I make noise when the spirit takes me and, if something comes out that makes me particularly happy, I’ll upload it to share with others. But I don’t deceive myself that I’m doing anything other than having fun and, maybe, another person or two might have fun with it, too. Which isn’t to say I don’t have fun writing, too – if I didn’t I wouldn’t do it – but I have different goals in each area.

Doing anything well, much less competently enough for others to pay you money for it, is hard. It takes work, long-term effort, and lots of failure. You know what doesn’t require any of those? Making are because you love it. Your sculptures can be lumpy. Your stories can peter out in the end. Your songs can be stiff and not particularly catchy. Did you enjoy making them? The answer to that question is the only thing that matters in the end.

So I will disagree with Mikey and suggest that the vast majority of people who make music – or any kind of art – enjoy it simply because that’s the whole point of doing it in the first place. Sure it can be frustrating, but the answer is to take a break and take the dog for a walk, not to turn to some soulless piece of AI to do the work for you.

Make art for yourself. And have fun.

2024 – My Year In Movies

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After a week off to craft a spooky story for the NYC Midnight Short Story Competition, it’s time for the final installment of my look back at the year just past and highlight some of my favorite, or just most interesting, media I consumed (not necessarily new, but new to me). It’s time to talk about some movies  . . .

I Saw the TV Glow (2024)

You remember that episode of The Pink Opaque where . . .. No, of course you don’t, but if you’re any kind of genre fan, you’ve started a conversation that way about Babylon 5 or Buffy or whatever. This movie taps into that shared obsession, with two characters bonding over their love of the fictional The Pink Opaque (long ago in the past where a printed episode guide plays a role). What spools out though goes far beyond a TV show to deal with issues of self, identity, and shared experiences. It also has some scenes that completely freaked me out in the best way (including a superlong monologue that shouldn’t work, but really does). Do I understand it on all the levels other people do? Almost certainly not. Still one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.

Rebel Ridge (2024)

“Semi-action movie about civil asset forfeiture” is a hell of an elevator pitch. It’s down to stars Aaron Pierre and Don Johnson (you heard right) that it works so well. Pierre plays a man who comes to a small Alabama town to pay his brother’s bond – in cash. It’s seized by the cops who classify it as drug proceeds. This is a real thing. The frustrations Pierre experiences pretty well match reality, before things get thrillier the closer to the end we get. There’s some violence, but it’s doled out well and this isn’t a pure-bred action movie. Stay away if you just want to see Pierre kick ass; watch it if you want a pretty clever interrogation of a problematic practice that, somehow, manages to even make the cops pretty well rounded in the end.

The Zone of Interest (2023)

It’s hard to imagine a more somber, only-watch-it-once kind of film. A slice of life about a German family who happen to live across the wall from Auschwitz (in the titular “zone of interest”). Dad’s the commandant. The bold choice of director Jonathan Glazer is that what goes on over the wall is never directly shown, but the sound designed is punctuated with sounds of terror and cruelty that make it unmistakable. What does it say about the commandant and family that this appears to be their dream home? Nothing good, of course. A harrowing watch, but worth it one time.

Blow Out (1981)

If you ever wanted a movie that showed you how people had to edit sound recordings in the pre-digital era, this is it. John Travolta plays a sound guy for low-budget horror films who, while out one night trying to get some good sounds, accidentally records the murder of a sitting governor and presidential hopeful in a car crash. There’s a damsel in distress and a lot of leg work that goes into putting together the pieces, all of which zings with energy and down-to-earth competence. That Travolta winds up right where he started just makes it all the more perfect.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

I’m a sucker for a courtroom drama – so how about one set in a courtroom that is so foreign to my common-law system experience that it was like science fiction? I mean, that’s not the only great thing about this movie, a clever did-she-do-it (there’s no doubt it was either her or an accident) that spends just as much time in the home where the death happens as it does in the French courtroom. Some of it – particularly the round-table out-of-sequence questioning of the defendant – is so odd that I had to do some reading afterwards to see how realistic it was (pretty accurate, within the bounds of dramatic license, or so I read). Did she do it? I’m not sure anybody knows (the lead actress, if I recall correctly, said she didn’t know!).

2024 – My Year In TV

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I continue my look back at the year just past and highlight some of my favorite, or just most interesting, media I consumed (not necessarily new, but new to me). This week let’s watch some TV . . .

Mrs. Davis (2023)

I can only imagine that the brainstorming sessions for this show must have included some mind altering substances. A nun scours the globe, with the help of various other colorful characters, in order to fight an out of control AI that might be taking over the world. Should this work in any way shape or form? No. Does it? Amazingly, yes. It’s funny, thrilling, compelling, and hits you in the feels. In a world overrun with IP-driven reboots and rethinks we need more Mrs. Davises.

Shogun (2024)

Not an original thought, I know – this once-limited series has been praised to the hilt since it premiered. Pleasantly, it completely lived up to the hype. Having no familiarity with either the original novel or miniseries (I’m not that old) I can’t say how it compares to those sources, but as a stand-alone piece of work it was brilliant. Was the ending kind of a cop out? In a way, but isn’t that what life’s like sometimes? Besides, there’s a second season coming to stir things back up!

The Sympathizer (2024)

This is another show that probably shouldn’t have worked as well as it did. The titular character is a North Vietnamese spy who infiltrates the office of a South Vietnamese general so thoroughly that when the general flees to the United States the spy goes along. What follows is a twisting examination of being and identity, punctuated with a lot of black humor. There’s a movie within the show that sends up Hollywood and Robert Downey, Jr. shows up in multiple roles. It doesn’t all work all the time, but, as with Mrs. Davis, this is more of the odd kind of storytelling TV needs.

Say Nothing (2024)

Say Nothing is one of the best books I’ve ever read (as I’ve noted before). When I heard at TV adaptation was in the works I was skeptical that they’d be able to pull off the same trick of telling some very relatable, personal stories about people involved in The Troubles while also providing enough high-altitude context to explore the wider conflict. The show, of course, doesn’t quite do that quite as well, but by paring things down a bit the story told wound up very powerful. The series performs a neat sleight of hand by setting the first few episodes as kinetic pieces of lawlessness and violence done for the cause and then pivoting to explore the long-term consequences of participating in those things. Excellent on its own, even better if it makes you want to read the book afterwards.

We Are Ladyparts (2021, 2024)

It’s a great elevator pitch – a series about a group of young Muslim women in Brittain (of Pakistani background) who form a punk band. Could be a heavy, maudlin examination of the struggle of outsiders in the modern UK, right? Or, it could be a very funny show with deep-down laughs and fun songs that also manages to dig into themes of belonging and identity. I was completely captivated, in spite of a couple of music-related nitpicks (the music isn’t really punk, even if the attitude is, and their plan for success sounds more out of the 1980s than 2020s). Hoping for more!

The Life of Rock with Brian Pern (2014) – Brian Pern: A Life in Rock (2014) – Brian Pern: 45 Years of Prog and Roll (2016) – A Tribute – At the BBC (2017)

While watching stuff I frequently hop over to IMDB to figure out why a familiar face looks so familiar. I don’t know what we were watching or who I was looking up, but one of their prior works was Brian Pern: 45 Years of Prog and Roll – needless to say, it piqued my interest. Brian Pern is a parodic version of Peter Gabriel – lead vocalist of a prog-rock band called Thotch in the 1970s who went on to a genre-defining solo career (he frequently states that he invented world music). Across three short seasons (three episodes each, plus a couple of later specials), Pern first chronicles the history of rock and roll then navigates his own failing career, which ends in a botched Thotch reunion and death in an unfortunate Segway accident. There’s a lot of very funny stuff over the seasons (which includes appearances from the likes of Rick Wakeman and Gabriel himself), but the first is the best. If you’re a fan of prog at all, or much mockumentaries, you owe it to yourself to track it down online.

2024 – My Year In Sound

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I continue my look back at the year just past and highlight some of my favorite, or just most interesting, media I consumed (not necessarily new, but new to me). This week, let’s talk music and podcasts . . .

Albums

Zopp – Dominion (2024)

Zopp is manifesting itself into a real band (they’ve played live), but this, their second album, is still primarily the work of Rya Stevenson, who plays just about everything except drums and horns. At the forefront of the nouveau-Canterbury sound is fuzzed out organ, of course, along with lots of other tasty keyboards. New for this album are a couple of tunes with vocals. Stevenson’s not a powerhouse vocalist, but his laid back, low drama delivery is in step with his Canterbury predecessors. If you thought nobody made music like Egg or Caravan these days, you’re in for a treat!

Ghosts of Jupiter – The Great Bright Horses (2016)

A fine collection of neo-psychedelia that often feels like Traffic run through some kind of chemically-induced dream state. A lot of the palate is organic – acoustic guitar, flute, piano – which makes the soaring, sinewy guitar parts stand out all the more. You don’t need a drink (or something else) to dig this, but it probably wouldn’t hurt. Beautiful cover, too.

Emmett Elvin – Being of Sound Mind (2022)

I knew Elvin from his work with Knifeworld and Guapo, but was completely unprepared for the funhouse experience that this solo album was. Kicking off with some serious Zappa vibes, the songs bounce from genre to genre without any apparent rhyme or reason, but it all works. Menacing and playful, dissonant and melodic in equal measure. There’s even the catchy “Artificial Guitar” than you can kind of sing along with! Far and away my favorite new thing I heard last year.

St. Vincent – All Born Screaming (2024)

I liked St. Vincent’s detour into 70s-inspired sleaze, Daddy’s Home, more than most, but I admit it felt a little slight and lacked the edge of some of her earlier work. No worries here, as the darkness and general oppressiveness is back. The soundscapes are equally lush but feel smothering rather than intoxicating, with an electronic glaze to them. Compelling, yet disturbing, kind of like 2024.

The Decemberists – As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again (2024)

With a title like As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again it was clear that this album would be a return to “normal” for The Decemberists (again, I liked their last album more than most). I perhaps bought into that so much that when I first got this album I thought it was very nice, but kind of “Decemberists by numbers,” without a lot of standout material. My opinion changed over the year and it really grew on me. There are several great songs (“Burial Ground,” “Long White Veil,” “Don’t Go to the Woods”) without even mentioning the closing epic, “Joan In the Garden” that managed to channel “Echoes” in spots. It’s no shame to revert to form when the form is so damned good, right?

Podcasts

Homicide: Life on Repeat

One of the great joys of last year was that, at long last, Homicide: Life on the Street appeared on a streaming service. Not only that, the clamor of that release even interested my wife in watching it, so we burned through the entire series over the fall (more thoughts on that from me sometime later). This podcast, hosted by Kyle Secor (Bayliss during the series) and Reed Diamond (Kellerman), bills itself as a rewatch podcast, but that mostly just serves as a frame for them to bring in various people associated with the show to talk about how the sausage got made. Guests have already included David Simon and Tom Fontana and I’m not sure how long it can make it into the series this way, but if you’re a fan of the show it’s a must listen. And it’s a lot of fun (I love the musical bumpers for various segments they’ve done).

What Went Wrong

A really good podcast about movies with a pretty misleading name. You’d think it was all about doomed productions and flops, but in actuality it’s more of an examination of how things change in movie projects from inception to production. In other words, it’s a recognition that things go wrong, but ultimately can still produce a good movie. The one on Star Wars (I’m old, I don’t do episode numbers) was particularly good.

Dark Histories

My general rule of podcasts is that you need at least two people for it to work right. It’s not just because having someone else to bounce facts and opinions off of is often more entertaining, it’s because one person droning on tends to lead down rabbit hole and not make for compelling listen. Dark Histories is the exception to the rule, as it’s merely Ben and a microphone, but you can tell that he’s put great effort into putting together an actual script to tell particular stories in a satisfying way (with just a hint of sound design in the background). As the title suggests, the focus is on weird, odd, or terrifying stories of the past, things that might get overlooked in general. Fascinating and very well done.

2024 – My Year In Books

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Happy New Year! It’s the time when I take a look back at the year just past and highlight some of my favorite, or just most interesting, media I consumed (not necessarily new, but at least new to me). First up, naturally, let’s talk about books . . .

I thought I read a bunch of books in 2024 until I compared notes with my wife who read twice as many! She consumes books like food and hasn’t fallen prey to the siren song of podcasts like I have, so she has more focused. Still, I read nearly fifty books in 2024 (in addition to publishing one!) and some were particular favorites.

My Effin’ Life by Geddy Lee (2023)

Rush is my “first favorite band,” the one that initially seeded in me the need to hear everything they did, new or old. No surprise, then, that I’d jump at the chance to read bassist/vocalist/keyboardist Geddy Lee’s memoir. It is, of course, heavy on the history of Rush, particularly the early days, but it exceeds the typical rock doc book in a couple of ways. One is Lee’s exploration of his heritage – his parents survived the Holocaust then met as refugees in Canada – which is fascinating. The other is his recounting of the final days of the band and the death of drummer Neil Peart. Recommended for Rush fans for sure, but even those who might only know “Tom Sawyer” from the radio will dig it.

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean (2023)

It’s a great pitch for a book – what if there were people (well, maybe not quite “people”) in the world who survived by eating books, taking in all the stories or knowledge written therein? What I expected from The Book Eaters was a fairy tale about the nourishing nature of books and words, something ethereal and mystical. What I got instead was a really cool spin on vampires (not all these “people” eat books) and problems of family and belonging. Rarely can you say the book delivered something completely different than expected and was all the better for it.

Stillwater #1 by Chip Zdarsky, Ramón Pérez, & Mike Spicer  (2021)

Lots of stories question whether the idea of immortality is a good one, but usually on the scale of the individual? What if there was entire town where no one aged or could die? Like, if somebody jumps off a building and spalts on the sidewalk that’s not the end of things? That’s the setup of Stillwater. The first volume introduces up to someone who managed to get out as a child, only to be lured back. Naturally, things aren’t as grand as one might think they’d be in a town stripped of death. Can’t wait to see where it goes.

Desperate Remedies: Psychiatry’s Turbulent Quest to Cure Mental Illness by Andrew Scull (2024)

The only thing more depressing I read in 2024 came out of the daily news. This survey of the history of relatively modern attempts to treat mental illness is fascinating for showing how we have lurched from one theory of mental illness to the next, each with its own miracle cures that never seem to actually come to fruition. What comes through is that, even today, we don’t have a good handle on what actually causes mental illness (in its various forms) and that makes it nearly impossible to treat. Like I said, depressing stuff, but it does at least provide some hope that we’ll keep bashing away at the problem.

A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder by Mark O’Connell (2023)

There’s a version of this book – telling the story of a murderer in 1980s Ireland whose friendship with the Attorney General threatened to bring down the government – that’s a straightforward telling of the tale, which needs little pumping up to be really interested. This isn’t that book. Rather, what makes O’Connell’s angle interesting is that his grandparents lived next door to where the killer was apprehended and he’d always felt the shadow of that incident lurking over him. His conversations with the killer, who still doesn’t quite seem to grasp what he’s done, dive into issues of identity and memory that are fascinating.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke (2004)

This is kind of a cheat, as I read and loved this when it first came out two decades ago. That anniversary led to a new edition and lots of coverage, so I decided to dive back into it and see if it held up after all this time. Happily, it does. I was a little worried that, with lots of writing under my belt, I might feel more picky about things, but it turns out I just admire Clarke’s work all the more. It’s so immersive, just pulling you into the world that she builds slowly and steadily. I went in willing to consider this one of the great books of the century and left being certain that’s the case.

The Obligatory Holiday Post

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So, 2024 has been a year. It began with on a serious down note, produced its share of highs along the way, and then slouched towards . . . well, whatever we’re doing now. Oy.

Without a doubt, my personal high point was the release of The Triplets of Tennerton, the second book in the newly refashioned Paranormal Appalachian series.

On the back of that release I got to do lots of in-person events and talk to lots of people about it all over the state. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a book launch and came at a very good time for me. Even won an award!

If you’re interested in Triplets you can read excerpts from it here and here and a little about the real world inspiration for the murder mystery at its heart here. I even did an interview of my own self about the book that you can check out here.

In fact, if you’re still doing some Xmas shopping, or maybe you’re looking for a present for yourself (you deserve it!), both Triplets and the original Ben Potter story, Moore Hollow, are on sale in eBook form for 99 cents for the rest of the year. Get Triplets here (Kindle) or here (other formats) and Moore Hollow here (Kindle) or here (other formats). There’s paperback versions of each book, too, available here and here or locally at Cicada Books & Coffee in Huntington and Plot Twist Books in South Charleston.

So, I hope you get some time to read or hang out with friends and loved ones over the next few weeks, regardless of what holidays you celebrate (if any!).

I’ll be back in 2025. Until then, have some seasonally appropriate tunes.

Absorb (and Be Confounded) First, Understand Second

/ JD Byrne / Leave a comment

I have never read Ulysses. I don’t think that’s a major confession (certainly a lesser one that I’ve never read Tolkien, given my genre of choice), given that while it’s one of the most famous works of English literature it’s also got a reputation as one of the most difficult to read. Not a breezy beach romp is Joyce’s chronicle of a day in Dublin.

It’s a reputation reinforced by things like this column on Slate from last month, in which the author staggers under the idea that his book club was going to “raw dog” Ulysses, rather than read it with some kind of supporting, explanatory work alongside. Putting to one side the continuing attempts to make “raw dogging” a thing, isn’t that the way you should first approach a work of art? If you need to have someone else tell you what it means from the jump what’s the point?

Without a doubt there are books, movies, and albums that cannot be fully appreciated on the first go. The one my mind goes to immediate is Memento, Christopher Nolan’s early breakthrough that’s told (in essence) backwards. It’s definitely a movie that rewards rewatching once you have a better idea of what’s going on, but it’s worth experiencing on your own at first to get the full effect. Seeking outside meaning before you watch it yourself spoils part of the fun.

The difference comes from wanting to understand what you’ve already seen or read versus wanting to have a complete understanding of the work the first time you experience it. I’m not saying that are that requires that kind of work is inherently better than stuff that’s more direct and accessible from the jump – there are different kinds of pleasures when it comes to art and sometimes that pleasure is teasing out just what the artist means after you know what they’re saying.

A lot of my favorite music is British. As a result, sometimes there are references in it that I, as an American, just don’t get. I’ve spent time figuring out just what Fish was saying about 1980s Brittain on the first four Marillion albums. That I didn’t understand it all when I first heard them wasn’t important, but learning the details afterwards only deepened my understanding of the songs.

I do the same thing with books and movies. After I finish one I have a ritual in which I scour various review sites – Goodreads, Letterboxd, etc. – as well as critic’s reviews and other write ups, not just to see if my opinion of the work matches consensus (a lot of times it doesn’t!) but to see if other people have insight into what I’ve just read or watched. I love learning about how movies or albums are made and what weird sausage-making process was involved in the final product and how much of the creators’ original ideas came through (if any).

Sitting down to read a book or watch a movie shouldn’t feel like work. Having to do so with a separate work open beside you to make sure you “get” what you’re reading or watching sure seems like work to me. It’s what I do in my day job – I look at a case that requires me to dig into a statute or regulation to figure out what it really means, which requires me to jump to another case, which requires me to look at a historical version of the statute to see how it’s changed over time. I don’t want to have to do that in my spare time. Who does?

Works of art are, in essence, sales pitches. Are you, consumer of art, entranced or intrigued or outraged enough by what you see/hear/read to linger? To borrow a phrase, would you like to know more? That’s the point to at which you might expect a reader or viewer to start digging into supplementary materials. Before you set the hook, however, they really ought to be left to muddle through on their own.

Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go listen to this song for the umpteenth time and, once again, try and figure out what Jon Anderson is on about: