Show Notes
A peek behind the paywall. In this episode, I go in depth on Ellroy’s stylistic forebears, play a little Glass Bead Game between AMERICAN TABLOID and very different book, give the quick and very dirty history of CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE, and go full-on true crime telling the ‘real’ story of Chuck Rogers.
More from Method and Madness
The prolific E Rathke joined me to talk the far-out world of his forthcoming BROKEN KATANA omnibus, why preoccupation with the culture war makes you a loser, Broken River zines, and much much more.
A tarot reading on self-possession, bringing your own carrots, and how to let a little meaning in. Shout out to Dolly. Contact me via your favorite social media or bradwkellyATgmail with TAROT in the subject to set up a personal reading for a reasonable fee.
Meditations in Green is the debut novel of the writer, and Vietnam veteran, Stephen Wright. Published in 1983 to praise in mainstream circles—the New York Times review called it “brilliant, and scarifying,” Meditations offers an idiosyncratic, hilarious, and horrifying perspective on that blunderous War in in southeast Asia. If, as Stephen Dedalus says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Wright poses Vietnam as something like the “bad trip from which Spec.4 James Griffin is trying to come down.” In the book, we follow two lines of narrative. One is the 1980s in New York, Griffin is on the margins of society, trying to hold together his psyche as it is invaded by memories, a crazed war buddy, and #4 China White. In the other, we’re with James Griffin in the War as he analyzes aerial photographs for reconnaissance and bombing campaigns, ensconced within the 1069th Military Intelligence Group, a cast of characters only rivaled in imagination, tweaked verisimilitude, and absurdity, by books like Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a book that is funny, disturbing, brutal, and, in my opinion at least, one of the very best American novels on Vietnam war or any other.
Mallory Smart, writer and impresario of independent literature, joins me for a discussion about the Midwest, parking lot hangs, David Koresh, the history of Maudlin House, the current horror boom, and much more. Buy BOOK OF DAVID
First published in 1899, “The Real Right Thing” by Henry James is the shortest of his ghost stories, a subtle and cerebral unraveling of a spectral presence in the library of a great mind.