Spring 2023 | Volume 5, Issue 2

Joseph M. Reynolds | Bojack Horseman. 

When a great comedy is also the single saddest thing you’ve ever seen, that’s probably what art is.

 

Will Carpenter | Appalachian Reckoning

Particularly to our American readers—but also, more generally, to anyone concerned with the exploitation and marginalization of predominantly rural places, as well as the resistance and vitality that persist in such spaces—I heartily recommend this anthology of work by Appalachian scholars, writers, and artists assembled in response to J.D. Vance’s somewhat infamous Hillbilly Elegy. Edited in 2019 by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, Appalachian Reckoning presents a (perhaps unexpectedly!) diverse array of voices that together challenge nearly every perception of Appalachia, from the most blatant stereotypes to sophisticated arguments advanced by both liberal and conservative elites, familiar/conceivable to us outsiders and internalized by those who call it home. Many contributors sternly, patiently interrogate rhetoric that most of us, especially our most educated, continue to embrace as plain fact; others attempt to resist entirely the pressure to define their experience by the ills exogenously inflicted upon their region, opting instead to offer more immediate instances of Appalachian joy, ingenuity, loss, and trouble. If you aren’t yet concerned with these issues, or believe that they don’t concern you, you’ve all the more reason to open this beautiful book. Should you do so, I’m confident that its piercing analysis, charming frankness, and scintillating essayistic synthesis will keep you reading.

 

 

Harry Lowther | Kenneth Anger – Puce Moment (1949)

Although the content of Kenneth Anger’s earlier short masterpiece, 1947’s Fireworks, feels staggeringly ahead of its time, that film at least has the decency (if that word can ever be applied to Anger’s work) to look like it was filmed using the same technology that was available to other filmmakers in 1947. Puce Moment appears to have been filmed, if not last week, then no earlier than the 1990s. The title hints at Anger’s first use of colour, and he uses it beautifully as he fetishizes a collection of 1920s flapper style dresses. The anachronisms are delicious.

 

The motion applied to these by Yvonne Marquis gives the film a proto-music video feel, particularly combined with the psychedelic folk-rock Anger added as a soundtrack in 1970, replacing the original Verdi soundtrack – which doesn’t work as well, pulling the film into different tonal directions. 

 

Anger’s interests in silent-era Hollywood, sex, and fashion combine with Marquis’ ethereality to convey a sense of dreamlike yearning or fantasy, or, viewed another way, grief for the roaring twenties in this post-war, feminine scene, noticeably absent of any masculine influence. Indeed, the ultimate audience for the character’s outfit is her four equally fabulous dogs.

 

 

Ara Hagopian | The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government By David Talbot

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“She realized, for instance, that intelligence could be gathered From the enemy as well as Allied camps by tapping into the underground homosexual network that ran through Europe’s diplomatic and espionage circles. “One of my [OSS] colleagues was frantic,” Bancroft later recalled, “because he wanted to get a— how do the French say it, a tuyaux— you know, a line into this homosexual network. And he used to bang on the desk and say, “I wish Washington would send me a reliable fairy! I want somebody with a pretty behind so I can get into that fairy network and find out what the British are doing in North Africa!”

 

Stephanie Pushaw | Yellowjackets 

The cutthroat world of teenage girlhood turns literal in this survivalist fable of trauma, sacrifice, and a pitch-perfect soundtrack of 90s disaffection anthems 

 

Christopher Flakus | Father of Lies by Brian Evenson. Coffee House Books.

There are few books and even fewer authors that have the ability to disturb the reader long after having read their texts. Shirley Jackson accomplishes this. Certain books by Phillip K Dick often leave me wondering after my own sanity or reality. But it’s the dark, speculative horror author Brian Evenson’s first novel, Father of Lies which I’ve found both profoundly upsetting, and highly re-readable. To understand the book itself, it might be interesting to note the fact that Evenson was raised Mormon and held a teaching position at Brigham Young University. When a student complained about the content of his work (his book of stories and short novella at the time, Altmann’s Tongue, a phenomenal book in its own right that won the author comparisons to JG Ballard and Kafka) the school’s upper echelon of religious elders told him that he needed to change the content of his writing to continue working there. He sued, and won. Shortly after he left the faith, though cults and blood oaths riddle his work. 

 

Father of Lies could almost be seen as a response to this incident. The book begins in an epistolary fashion, with the correspondence of a psychiatrist named Alexander Feshtig and Director Kennedy, who sends him an unofficial memorandum in a problematic matter, asking to see the files of a patient of Feshtig’s one Elder Eldon Fochs, the true protagonist of the story. The first segment of the book is narrated, in a sense, by Feshtig. We, the reader, are privy to the sought notes in question. Within them we begin to see a portrait of a man who seems…off. Not just in his expression of pedophilic desires, but the power and sway he holds over his congregation, his strange mix of religious fanaticism and cruelty. He justifies his crimes at first, but as the book goes on Fochs cares less and less for justifications. He blooms into the full monster he always was, protected by a Church that knows the truth about him, but would rather hide it than let it “damage the church.”

 

A clear and damning book that brings you into a mind whirling with sadistic madness. Evenson’s style is unique, we’re introduced to beings within Fochs’ own psyche that may or may not be real. Even he can’t decide. And if they are real, whose voices are they? Written in a sparse, surrealistic style, Evenson’s prose in this short novel (he’s always said his preferred mode is the novella) mirrors the strange power of the short stories which first put him on the map. A deeply troubling and sadly urgent novel, Father of Lies, will linger with the reader long after the book has been tentatively returned to the shelf.