What I'm reading/playing/etc.
Hello! Every week I’m going to write little reviews of stuff I’ve been reading/playing/etc. It’s in a sort of transitional phase, because I’m still getting my shit together, broadly speaking. And I’m not framing it as “recommendations,” exactly, because a lot of the stuff I like requires a lot of patience, and I don’t have the confidence in myself or knowledge of you to recommend, for example, a one-hundred-hour anime video game. More than once I’ve recommended someone something and they’ve started it and gone “wait, what the hell is this?” Count this as my warning on that front.
*Berserk *(vol. 1-5)- Kentaro Miura
A characteristically unhappy guy of Berserk
I haven’t read much manga, really—about half of *Akira (which I really liked and need to go back to), *Junji Ito’s *Uzumaki (which I adored), *Osamu Tezuka’s *Ayuka *(which was a bit much) and Inio Asano’s *Downfall *(which was not for me, though I’m still curious about some of his earlier stuff). *Berserk *has been kind of a revelation. It’s taken me a few issues to get into it, but it really is otherworldly; or it feels like the world has been stripped of so much in order to render those dimensions of experience it focuses on—violence and its aftereffects—more luminous and strange. I loved the transition from the Prologue section to the Golden Age arc, even as the first few issues in particular were just massively bruising.
A Perfect Spy – John le Carré
Tinker Tailor Writer Lies down. Sorry
A wild book. I’m probably going to write about it a bit more in this week’s main letter, but I really wound up liking it. It’s slower and more methodical than some of the other stuff of his I’ve read, but the pace really works in its favor; it builds well, and its pivotal moments are quite moving.
It’s an interesting case, politically speaking. Le Carré is obsessed with the personal experience of the political—you wake up one morning, formed by and caught up in a system far, far bigger than yourself, and you realize that this system has manifestly failed to live up to its ideals. Where do you go from there? At the end of the day it strikes me that his work, at least the little of his work I’ve read, is underpinned by a kind of fatalist liberal individualism: the classic lower-c conservative notion that utopian political projects are doomed because it’s people who run them. But it’s also far more sympathetic with the communist project than most art that reflects this worldview, I think—and as a kind of psychological realism, that project is interesting to me if only because a lot of people do experience the world through that lens. England clearly flusters him.
It’s also very exciting. I love that le Carré makes the maybe-traitor at the center of the book his autobiographical stand-in. (His childhood seemed just incredibly bizarre.) It’s a good book about being very hurt by the world. I really liked it.
Higurashi When They Cry
Tfw Keiichi-kun is hiding something from you
Visual novels are odd, in my experience. I haven’t played many. I’ve loved some of them—AI: The Somnium Files is really wonderful in particular, although it’s maybe more of an adventure game—but they’re one of the media I have to forgive the most. Like, I liked the back half of *Steins;Gate, *but the first part was a true test of willpower.
Anyway, on a sentence-to-sentence level *Higurashi *is nothing special—and the art, um, takes getting used to, though I think it’s actually very expressive—but as a whole, it’s one of the more extraordinary “video games” I’ve ever played. (I put video game in quotes because you don’t actually do anything but read it. There are a few choices tacked on throughout, but they were added for a later version, and are not very interesting.) Without giving too much away, around the second or third chapter it becomes clear that the story’s mystery is a formal one: why is the story being told like this? As you learn more, it becomes clear that the world’s psychological and cosmological dimensions are intertwined; nearly every authorial decision, including ones you never noticed, has a payoff.
Beyond this, it’s seemingly encyclopedic in its treatment of what can go wrong in the life of a child living in Japanese society. This material is handled delicately and movingly—the author, known pseudonymically as Ryukishi07, was apparently a social worker before becoming a full-time game writer, and that comes through. He’s got a deft touch for genre: it shifts on a dime from comedy to horror to thriller to melodrama, and always in tune with the material. It’s also genuinely scary. It’s weird and good.
Skrillex – Quest for Fire
A wild Skrillex, blending in with his surroundings
I want to be clear: this album is very, very silly. My atrophying early-twenties instincts about seeming cool—instincts which have never served me very well, as I have never, ever been cool—are telling me not to acknowledge that I have been listening to it, let alone publically mention the puzzling fact that I’ve listened to it like, fifty times. And if you don’t have a pedantic interest in the ongoing development of maximally expensive pop production or a deep-seated desire to listen to music that sounds like a computer having a migraine, there might not be much here. (Again, I’m not in the business of recommendations.)
But look: it’s kind of sick. When I used to DJ ridiculous parties a decade ago, I would usually open with a subtler track or two, and then play Skrillex’s remix of “Alejandro”—both because it was funny, and because it worked. (I remember having to turn the volume down when I transitioned into it because it was mastered so fucking loud.) I find something existentially affirming in Mr. Moore’s willingness to embrace the absolute bluntest and gaudiest musical ideas. When I made the mistake of going to Bonnaroo in 2012, his set kept me up one night from the other side of the festival grounds. I should’ve just sucked it up and watched it, but who gives a shit. I have never been good at skateboarding, but his music makes me feel like I was once good at skateboarding. He is the large drooling yellow labrador of modern dance music.
Anyway, it definitely drags in the back half, although that might just be because I don’t have the patience for a whole album that sounds like this. There’s an astonishingly silly Missy Elliott feature. Four Tet features on one song; it is, appropriately, slightly more boring. Eli Keszler does his little marching-band snare on a folding chair thing. There’s a track about being too high; there’s a track about drinking water; there’s a track about having friends. There’s a footworky song; he’s clearly proud of that influence, because he says in the title it’s “(juked).” There’s an interlude called “Warped Tour ‘05 with pete WENTZ.” Man, whatever.
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On Character, Pt. 1