June in review
Reading
I did a bit better at reading this month, but then I started reading Green's translation of The Argonautika and while the translation is fine, the notes are sort of insufferable, but invaluable so I have to keep reading them. So I stalled a bit and turned to the final book, a chapbook, for solace.
The English Assassin, Michael Moorcock, 1972
I started rereading the core four Cornelius books back in 2025. This is the third, and the first that's well and truly weird at every level. Jerry is dead or comatose (often simultaneously) for most of the book. His sister, her lover, and the wide cast of recurring characters come to the fore here, rattling around in a world apparently undergoing entropic heat death too early -- but the thing that's happening is never revealed. It's equally likely we're hopping timelines and dimensions.
I read The Whispering Swarm a while back, the first book in a series where Moorcock himself is the main character; it's a mix of autobiography and fiction. So, going back to Assassin, I recognized some of the observations he included, making this book somewhat more biographical than the others. So you can see it cutting closer to the bone of post-war Britain's weird, precarious grip on itself and the looming threat of all-out war everyone feared would return.
It's somewhat tough to read even now, honestly. I remembered feeling, when I was 19 or 20, that it was doing interesting things, I recognized that even then, but I didn't like it that much. I was hoping that, as with Harrison's Empty Space, when I came back to it, older and, I don't know, older, I'd like it much more. I liked it a bit more. It's just difficult to keep reading, with whatever my career burnout, post-covid something, and living through Hell 2.0 has done to my brain. That's not the book's fault of course, I'm trying to make that clear.
H. P. Lovecraft & the Great Altar Stones of New England, David Goudsward, 2017
The author got reskeeted onto my timeline saying they couldn't reprint their brief series of monographs, so they'd be gone forever soon, and one was on HPL's tours around New England and which stone, if any, was the direct inspiration for the "altar stone" in "The Dunwich Horror." It's a short piece that does what it says on the tin. I recommend it if you're into... I don't know, whatever the hell it is I do.
Gunsmith Cats v1, Kenichi Sonoda, 1991
Rally Vincent is not straight, Sonoda is simply wrong.
With that out of the way, this comic holds up better than I'd expected it to. It was I think literally the first manga I owned -- to be clear, a few single issues. Along with one single issue of You're Under Arrest. The Cats issues were in the midst of the Gray storyline, which is probably the main Thing of the comic, like it's the first overtly long narrative that keeps sort of coming back and fading into the background, before of course finally ending with Gray dead as shit. You know, it's a book about a lady who shoots people.
I debated bothering to address this at all, but here we go. I spent some time on Amazon and other places checking reviews, because I accidentally bought the wrong edition of Ghost in the Shell (see last month). I wanted to be sure I was getting the new, really nice editions of GC. I did. However, all the reviews on Amazon are about how the book is bad because of May.
If you haven't read this series, May is 17 when it starts. We learn her ex is a bomb maker who's in hiding (even from her), and eventually they meet of course and so on so forth, Gray was the guy trying to kill him.
What's important is that Ken is in his 30s, and we learn they dated four years ago. So a mid-to-late 20-something dated a 13 year old. And they were 100% having sex. And you know what I'm going to say. Obviously, don't do that, if you're above the age of consent, don't violate state and federal laws and have sex with a minor. Don't do that. But also this is a piece of fiction, so despite knowing, and knowing quite well, that media and reading literacy is poor, nowadays, I am baffled that people would give this book negative reviews. The book isn't bad because a bad thing happens in it. Lots of people are murdered in this book too, but no one dinged it for that (insert long sigh about the statuses of discourse about violence and about sex in our culture).
OK. Anyway. The new edition is good; it's good enough that I'll probably eventually replace all my older collected editions. It's right-to-left, with original and translated sound effects. So far as I can tell, the translation is the same as the 90s release, and that seems fine.
Aeneid, Virgil, McGill and Wright, translators, 2025
I dunno, it's fucking Virgil, what do you want from me? The translation is very good, the notes are great, I was not expecting Orphism to appear, or a trip to the underworld. In fact I was not expecting to learn that Dante wasn't just thinking of Virgil when he wrote the Divine Comedy, but basically cribbing from one of the books of the Aeneid and expanding it out.
What I will say, and I mean it's one of the pillars of the history of all literature (I'm not trying to be Eurocentric, it's one of), but also I got halfway through and didn't understand why I wasn't nearly finished. The entire second half is just Virgil showing he can write the Iliad too, so it's just interminable battle shit. And I mean interminable in a few ways -- literally near the end, when they've agreed to a duel instead of more warfare, Hera stirs shit up again and they go back to fighting, after swearing literal oaths to the literal gods that they won't, and the shitheads responsible even go on to say they have done no wrong. I don't mean to say in my perspective they did wrong -- they did wrong in theirs, they broke sacred oaths.
Whatever, it's fine, just be aware that if the Iliad makes you really wish it were shorter even as you appreciate it generally, the latter half of the Aeneid is a bit like that. It's not as long so it's not as bad.
No Ghosts, Max Lury, 2026
CW: phew. ok. all right. Suicide; alcohol; alcoholism (I would argue); sex; graphic descriptions of crimes against humanity including but not limited to rape, torture, killings, beheadings, graphic descriptions of death and mutilation by mechanical accident; mental illness; poor handling of mental illness; misogyny
Shit, I dunno. This is this person's first published novel. It's... it's not good. But it's interesting. At this strange interface I feel awkward. If someone who's been successfully publishing for decades writes a bad book I have no qualms about saying it sucks shit. But a debut novel? I'm torn between, well, being honest, being kind, and being aware that I failed to get into fiction publishing.
But you know, no one reads this blog. This is basically weird fiction. The conceit is that all the ghosts disappeared, and it's a verifiable thing that definitely happened, though people do still doubt it. Also, there's a genAI company specializing in extras, replacing them with generated cg. Also, the two point of view characters, Kieran (a straight dude who maybe had some gay yearning when he was young) and Harlowe (a dirtbag bisexual that the author thinks is not a dirtbag) meet after a long time at the memorial for their best friend, Annie, who is a redheaded manic pixie dream girl seen through the lens of a writer who is aware that trope is bad.
OK, so, don't let me bury the lede. The book is bad for two reasons, even while sometimes it's also good. The first reason is that about half of the book is about nothing happening, slowly. We're supposed to be getting a view into the lives of our two POV characters, and how Annie's disappearance has ruined their lives in different ways, but nothing changes. We understand that by the end of the first chapter.
It doesn't help they're both insufferable. People can write good books about bad people, and even irritating people, but it's pretty difficult. We kind of naturally want to like POV characters, just because we're living in their heads for so long. And you know what I know, books like Lolita turn that tendency against us. And others, like most of the work I've read by Dostoevsky, asks interesting questions about how these assholes came to be assholes and whether they can be redeemed.
These two aren't assholes, or, well, they are sometimes. They're not evil. They're just... kind of generally a bit shit and also dull. Their idea of a good time -- their only idea, I want to be clear -- is to go get drunk and then talk about fucking nothing. And we are subjected to what it is they talk about, repeatedly. It's supposed to be charming, sweet, humanizing, but it's got that thing going where it duplicates real speech (or texting) too closely, which means a lot of it is noise.
The other reason the book's bad, even though sometimes it's not, is that it never explains what's happened. The nova just fade into the background. Are the ghosts really gone? Are they just silent? Who fucking knows. Are they in the AI computers, as I assumed? No comment. Is the AI sentient, and throwing out mysterious clips it wasn't ordered to make in order to contact the dead, or comfort the living? No comment. What's the deal with the mysterious labyrinth in Scotland, and the strange objects that look like household items but are unusable, as though they were made by something that can only look at surfaces and not internals? Fuck you, you thought that was interesting? No, what's interesting is that these two shitheads come to the book's conclusion having asked no serious questions about what's happening, despite having gone into the center of it, from different angles. They sit together in a bar and simultaneously decide NOT TO TELL EACH OTHER WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM.
You could argue that's a profound theme, that two people choosing not to share "fails the quest," but that is in no way connected to anything else that happens in this book.
There's good shit in here. The seances turn into weird AA meetings for people on the outskirts of life, and also they're always on Zoom with someone dying of suicide, voluntarily trying to see if they can get to the ghosts on the other side and then communicate themselves (yeah haha what???)
Something kind of funny is that I didn't read the author bio (this book was a gift). Around page 150 I stopped and said to myself this book has the smell of an MFA grad on it (I get to say this, I too went through that). Come to the end and I nailed it. It's exactly the sort of thing that happens when someone with great ideas and skills goes through an MFA and believes what they're told about what is and isn't important. I want to see the next book this person does. I think it'll be better. Or I hope so, I guess?
A Drive into the Gap Kevin Guillfoile, 2012
So Field Notes publishes books now. At least, they have a few strange chapbooks, and this is one of them. Guillfoile's father was, among other things, the PR guy for the Pittsburgh Pirates (a baseball team) in the 70s, and manager of the Baseball Hall of Fame afterwards. He also, at time of writing, had Alzheimer's. The author discovered that there was a chance he had been in possession of Roberto Clemente's bat, the one he used to hit his 3000th hit, and also his last, as he died tragically in a plane crash taking aid material to Nicaragua after a massive earthquake. This is because of a sequence of events that becomes the thing the author is investigating. It's also a memoir about baseball, writing, dementia, relationships with parents, all the stuff you'd imagine. It's also also about 70 pages long. I really liked it.
Movies
Yojimbo, Kurosawa, 1961
Yeah, I watched one whole movie. At least it was a good one. I'm spoiled for Kurosawa movies now, because they're not all funny from what I understand, but this one sure as shit is. I loved it. I'm not sure I have anything intelligent to say about it honestly.
Games
Fromsoft joints
So in June I finished the Elden Ring dlc, started and finished NG+ runs of Dark Souls 1 & 3, and finished Elden Ring. Then I did an NG+ run of Elden Ring sans dlc. That's out of order but it's not important. I want to write a full essay about my thoughts, but in general I think I'm glad I did this and also I don't think the vaunted Fromsoft design philosophy is good, but not for the reasons I see people complain about. The chuds are wrong; the haters are also wrong.
Patreon
Since this is actually going out on the first, did you know I have a patreon? Any support would be amazing, especially now. As a teacher, I'm functionally unemployed over the summer.