Nonfiction: September's best-written recent release
Read the opening of our pick below ^ Plus Parts 46 and 47 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco
In today’s issue:
— ‘That this Baudelaire of the Dublin Liberties – an alcoholic, opium addict, dandy and writer of strange, exotic, esoteric verses – should burst his way through a drink and drug binge during a Liberties lock-in with our own poète maudit, Shane MacGowan, seemed almost too good to be true’: our pick from the recent releases in nonfiction.
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—’You get the sense that casting yourself as divinities in a TV drama with ego-deflation as a central theme must be like committing murders—the first time is by far the hardest’: Parts 46 and 47 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco. The entire series is available here, and a free copy of the fully illustrated .epub is available on request at auraist@substack.com.
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BOOKS CONSIDERED
A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy by Tia Levings
A Wilder Shore: The Romantic Odyssey of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson by Camille Peri
Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery by Theodore H. Schwartz
Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth, from Hagfish to Humans by Bill Schutt
The Secret Life of the Universe: An Astrobiologist's Search for the Origins and Frontiers of Life by Nathalie A. Cabrol
Nat Turner, Black Prophet: A Visionary History by Anthony E. Kaye & Gregory P. Downs
On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver
Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde by Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Anima: A Wild Pastoral by Kapka Kassabova
When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth's Tumultuous History and Perilous Future by Paul Bierman
I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine by Daniel J. Levitin
Christopher Isherwood Inside Out by Katherine Bucknell
How the World Made the West: A 4,000-Year History by Josephine Quinn
Fierce Desires: A New History of Sex and Sexuality in America by Rebecca L. Davis
A Day in September: The Battle of Antietam and the World It Left Behind by Stephen Budiansky
The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen
The Anatomy of Deception: Conspiracy Theories, Distrust, and Public Health in America by Sara E. Gorman
Finding Mangan: The many lives and afterlives of James Clarence Mangan by Bridget Hourican
Failed State by Sam Freedman
Earth to Moon by Moon Unit Zappa
Goodbye to Russia: A Personal Reckoning from the Ruins of War by Sarah Rainsford
You’re Embarrassing Yourself by Desiree Akhavan
Living on Earth by Peter Godfrey-Smith
Exam Nation: Why Our Obsession with Grades Fails Everyone – and a Better Way to Think About School by Sammy Wright
And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: A Journey Through Global Music by Joe Boyd
Other Rivers: A Chinese Education by Peter Hessler
Avoidance, Drugs, Heartbreak and Dogs by Jordan Stephens
Our first pick from these is
I fell through that pit abysmal
I first heard of James Clarence Mangan – or at least his name first floated free from the morass of Irish poets before Yeats – in the early hours of Monday, 4 August 2008, in a bar called McGruders on Thomas Street, in the Liberties. It was a bank holiday weekend and my friends and I had hatched an ambitious plan to get wasted away from our usual haunts. McGruders sounded promising: recently opened with a very young owner rumoured to be from a family with ‘connections’.
We arrived late on the Sunday night to find that McGruders had the tatty, hopeful, makeshift air of a squat – rooms spiralling into other rooms and out to courtyards hung with bobbing lanterns – but there was hardly anyone around. Dublin sweeps clean for the August bank holiday and we’d got it wrong: the flotsam wasn’t washing up here. But we’d come this far and the people, if few, weren’t dull: a mix of street locals and art students from the college up the road. Our drug hopes centred on a long, tall boy who greeted us like long-lost friends and was clearly off his head. He kept hitting his phone first on his head and then off the table, until it finally smashed, to his great astonishment. But whatever he was on, what he sold us didn’t work. We were retreating into stoical irony when at about midnight everything changed: Shane MacGowan arrived with a girl who had the kind of technicolour looks that make everyone else look like they’re in black and white. My friends John and Trevor went to chat her up and came back to report that she was thrillingly rude to them, ‘She’s like a bad orphan.’
Everything became suddenly clear. John looked hard at a fat young man, who was wandering round wearing nothing but runners, a pair of small billowing shorts like a nappy and a sign round his neck reading ‘Say No to Drugs’ and announced with calm certitude: ‘He has the drugs.’ McGruders’ very young owner, who had long, dirty-blond Californian beach-boy hair, looked at Shane, tossed his surfer locks, and uttered the magic words, ‘Lockin,’ changing the bar in an instance from sparse to intimate. We pushed three tables together and the owner set down three defiant ashtrays – it had been four years since the smoking ban.
The Bad Orphan picked up a guitar, stood on a chair and began belting out Van Morrison’s ‘Gloria’. She had an explosive voice, loud and rough like Janis or Tina, and the atmosphere exploded. I sat down beside Shane. Beside me, young men formed a polite, informal line. They had something urgent to impart. One after another they whispered, ‘Shane, man, you saved my life,’ in low, heartfelt tones. Some of them proffered track marks on their arms, in pride, solidarity or regret, I wasn’t sure which. Shane didn’t say much. He just nodded, without expression and without vanity, obliterating the hierarchy of star and fan. If that sounds like I’m romanticising addiction, I can’t imagine anyone else of his level of fame being so down – the word is precise – with his fans.
He had this book of Irish poetry on him with a shiny green and gold cover, the kind of thing that’s sold in tourist shops beside leprechaun hats and bodhráns – a totally naff design, which, in his possession, became more hip than a chic Faber cover. The young men seized on the book as another way in. ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death!’ said one triumphantly, like a dog returning a stick. He got the nod, but I knew he knew, and maybe Shane knew he knew, that Shane had long pronounced this his favourite Yeats poem. Another guy, who said he was from Limerick, announced that he would now read a poem. The Bad Orphan was still belting out songs, and everyone had got stuck into insistent conversations, so only Shane and I paid any attention to the reading, which was as well because the guy couldn’t read poetry. He kept stressing the wrong word. It was like someone singing off-key in karaoke and I had to stop myself giggling. At the end Shane said humorously, distinctly, and enigmatically: ‘That is the Munster way of saying verse.’
When I woke up some twenty hours later in Trevor’s spare room – with Trevor politely knocking on the door to inform me my family was going spare trying to reach me (my phone had died) – I had throbbing through my mind like one of those insistent refrains from a dream ‘A Vision of Connaught in the 13th Century’, and I saw myself back squinting at a page of Shane’s book trying to read this Mangan poem, which Shane had said was his favourite, but finding that the print was jumping around because of the MDMA and because I only had one contact lens in, being too inept to insert the other. At this memory I sat up in blind panic, afraid that I’d passed out with the lens still in (I hadn’t).
Over the next few days, between apologies and Alka-Seltzers, I started going through my Irish poetry anthologies. They are a desultory collection, most of them with Yeats as the starting point, but in an early edition of the Penguin Book of Irish Verse (1970), edited by Brendan Kennelly, I found a whole heap of Mangan. In fact, unusually, maybe uniquely, in a book spanning from the eighth to the late twentieth century, Mangan gets by far the largest selection of any poet (Kennelly explains in his intro that Yeats is ‘already widely available in paperback’). Here I found the poem that Shane said was his favourite, ‘A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century’. To my hungover jittery eyes, it was wonderful (and is still wonderful). Here is the first stanza:
I walked entranced
Through a land of Morn;
The sun, with wondrous excess of light,
Shone down and glanced
Over seas of corn
And lustrous gardens aleft and right.
Even in the clime
Of resplendent Spain
Beams no such sun upon such a land;
But it was the time,
’Twas in the reign,
Of Cáhal Mór of the Wine-red Hand.
This has ease and grace and simplicity, achieved by the bare, restricted palette. A few consonantal variations (-an/-un/-on) carry the stanza so that any new sound enters with force: ‘excess’ is excess, ‘Beams’ beams out. The second stanza has similarly restricted sounds, but the third starts to get diffuse in menace, and the fourth is overloaded by exclamation marks and the ‘aghast’, portentous vocabulary of H.P. Lovecraft. The final stanza is redeemed when the sun that beamed over the first verse makes a brief effective return:
I again walked forth;
But lo! the sky
Showed fleckt with blood, and an alien sun
Glared from the north
The ‘alien’ is pivotal: it picks up the consonantal n’s and the ‘seas of corn’ from the first stanza, transporting us to Keats and Ruth ‘in tears amid the alien corn’. From this initial reading, I gained a view of Mangan as a writer of fits and starts – Yeats called them ‘electric shocks’ – who hits astonishing notes but cannot sustain them.
Six weeks after this night, Lehman Brothers collapsed, precipitating the worst global recession since the 1930s. McGruders closed shortly afterwards, though the sign remained up for years and was included in a mordant website called Dublin Ghost Signs.
When I started to read more about Mangan and discovered the morbid glamour of his life, which as much as his verse has kept his reputation if not alive then at least undead, I began to think there was something significant and fitting about my first encounter with him. That this Baudelaire of the Dublin Liberties – an alcoholic, opium addict, dandy* and writer of strange, exotic, esoteric verses – should burst his way through a drink and drug binge during a Liberties lock-in with our own poète maudit, Shane MacGowan, seemed almost too good to be true. And other minor notes from the night seemed to resonate with tropes in Mangan’s life and work: the attention-seeking costumes of the art students recalled his famously eccentric attire; my jittery, myopic eyes referenced the mysterious blinding that he describes in one of his memoirs; the ‘lock-in’ recalled that the Liberties was, for most of Mangan’s life, a place apart, outside Dublin city jurisdiction and running its own lawcourts until 1840. The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the subsequent recession recalled the deflation and depression after the Napoleonic Wars, which bankrupted his father, while the subsequent closure of McGruders evoked all the closures and demolitions in the Liberties during his lifetime. This may all seem like bogus retrospective validation – a faith-based search for clues and meaning once you’ve settled the outcome – but it’s not entirely specious. Symbols, tropes and motifs in Mangan’s life and work perpetually feed his myth and, as I would discover, people’s ‘encounters’ with him frequently acquire a mysterious, uncanny significance.
*Dandy seems a mocking term for Mangan’s attire, which was more tramp than Beau Brummell, but I think his insistence on specific flamboyant garments (cloak, coat, steepled hat, umbrella, shaded spectacles) leading to the creation of a distinctive look comes out of the same motivation as the dandy’s: to set himself apart in the crowd.
June 1849: Dr William Wilde, passing a wretched hovel in Dublin’s Liberties, discovers James Clarence Mangan in a state of indescribable misery and squalor. Aged just 46, the man dubbed ‘Ireland’s National Poet’ is about to succumb to the cholera epidemic that is gripping famine ravaged Ireland.
August 2008: Writer Bridget Hourican encounters Mangan during a Liberties lock-in with that other great Irish poet, Shane MacGowan, who found inspiration in Mangan’s poetry.
Alcoholic, opium addict, Romantic, Famine poet, Dublin street character and hero of James Joyce, the mercurial Mangan begins to obsess Bridget. The surviving biographical material - scant, subjective, sometimes falsified - both fascinates and frustrates her and she determines to find him. Who was this Baudelaire of The Liberties – this lurker in Irish history whose enigmatic presence helped determine its course?
As the lines between research and real life become blurred, Bridget starts to notice aspects of her life bleeding into Mangan’s. An obsession becomes a haunting and she realises that the only way to truly reach Mangan is to reckon with her own ghosts.
Finding Mangan resurrects Ireland’s most enigmatic literary figuring, restoring his rightful place in the national consciousness.
‘Imaginative and absorbing, at last Mangan has found the perfect biographer.’ John Banville
The Demon Inside David Lynch states that the celebrated director was possessed by a ten-dimensional entity that went on to make Twin Peaks: The Return. Obviously this is fiction, satire. But the descriptions of The Return’s content are not fiction, no matter how much you come to believe or wish otherwise.
Cult Criticism
If the auteur self-cast as two supreme divinities isn’t enough for Franck Boulègue and his cult readership to find it questionable, how many supreme divinities would it take? Five supreme divinities? A hundred?
And of course we’ve no idea what the actual total is. You get the sense that casting yourself as divinities in a TV drama with ego-deflation as a central theme must be like committing murders—the first time is by far the hardest. Once you’ve crossed that first Line, though, it becomes much easier to cross the second, and even easier with the third, and so on.
But casting yourself as only two divinities seems implausibly untidy, doesn’t it? Serial killers seldom quit after a mere two victims, I imagine, because you’re only getting started at that point, aren’t you, and it must be the same with Gordon Cole. I just can’t see him channelling fewer than three gods, a Bible John of divinity-channellers, and he may even be up there in Dennis Nilsen figures. And as the monstrosity was made by a hyperdimensional being and its boggingness may be infinite, it’s not impossible that we’re dealing with a Vlad the Impaler or a Ghenghis Khan of divinity-channellers, that the FBI Deputy Director played by the auteur is channelling hundreds of thousands of gods, supreme and not quite so supreme. In which case over to you, Boulègue and co. Would you find this questionable?
But let’s be generous and imagine that the series wasn’t made by the Demonic Twin but by the Grand Maître, as Boulègue calls David Lynch, and that when it came to the Tree of Life Boulègue was right about everything except Gordon Cole and Gevurah—that is, the Grand Maître did link ten episodes to the Sephiroth but didn’t actually cast himself as Gevurah the manly core of everything. In that case the most important thing for the Grand Maître, you’ll agree, was to ensure that nobody could think he had cast himself as Gevurah. This should have been his top priority when making the series, not to look like some guy on a date who describes the celestial Sephiroth and winks at you till you get it: I’m one of them, baby.
But the fact is, such a volume of other narcissism surrounds the character played by the auteur^^, we can confidently say that making him Gevurah was intentional, and that this made the self-casting as Thoth much more likely. And as we now know from my experience on Tsarbomba, the Twin possessed Mr Lynch and was the true auteur behind the series, and therefore we can infer that just as Cole’s erection chat satirises Mr Lynch’s volitional impotence, so the equation of Cole with supernatural beings wryly hints at the entity actually playing the role.
We can only marvel again at the cruelty and just plain 10D oddness of entity wit, which forced Mr Lynch to look on impotently through his own eyes as dozens of times in a single work he was made to look either this megalomaniacal or this shoddy. The challenge from the Twin almost seemed to be: How vain do I have to make the man I’m possessing appear before you lot finally call us on the possession? Yet the only one of us that sensed something was off, I’m afraid, was big Stanley.
Like most of Boulègue’s claims his Sephiroth talk has been ridiculed by some haters of The Return, people so damaged by it they instinctively lash out at anything claimed by its admirers. But it becomes less ridiculous once you understand the series was made not by Mr Lynch but by his Twin. Those ten Sephiroth do look like a reference to the ten Dark Matter entities behind the Lynch project, as surely are the nods to Thoth, to Kalki the tenth avatar of Vishnu, and also Cooper’s statement in Part 17 that ten is ‘the number of completion’.
It becomes even less ridiculous when you appreciate that juxtaposition of mingers with philosophical depth and richness was fundamental to the Twin’s strategy of making the series the most godawful ever aired.
On the Rocks
Here are more of Boulègue’s paragraphs on The Return, which I recited with Ella too many times to be healthy. If you ever descend into the hell of the show’s cult criticism you’ll read plenty of stuff like this.
The fact that we have arrived at the end of a cycle (TEOTWASKI: The End Of The World As We Know It) is exemplified by the clock in the Sheriff’s office, oscillating between 2:52 and 2:53. Cooper explains that ‘it is 2:53 in Las Vegas, and that adds up to a ten, the number of completion’. One should also note that in Hinduism, the four Yugas (eras) of the universe are composed of 4, 3, 2 and 1 charanas (periods), which also add up to a 10 when the world reaches the end of its final age. But since there are several ways to get a 10 with a clock, this precise choice should be linked to the Fireman’s clue from episode 1: ‘Remember 430’. If one splits the portions of the clock as indicated below, it becomes clear that 2:53 separates two sections worth 430 (4 hours and 3 minutes).
The clock is of course highly reminiscent of a doomsday clock, pointing at the small amount of minutes that separate us from the midnight of the end of the world—the middle of the night symbolised by Carrie [Paige]’s shriek. On a more positive note, it is also possible to read the design on the clock as a peace sign, pointing towards the solution to end this dark age. In fact, David Lynch himself regularly advocates for world peace through his Transcendental Meditation foundation: The David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace.
Boulègue was among the critics most celebrated by the show’s admirers, and like many of these his approach frequently appeared infected by the show itself, replicating its blend of fixation on ultra-obscurities with failure when it came to the basics. You might want to read out the following Boulègue paragraphs with a loved one.
In East Coker, the second poem of Four Quartets, [T.S.] Eliot returns to his ancestral home in England. He wrote the poem during a ‘truly dark age’, to quote Janey-E, in England during World War II. According to [Kenneth Paul] Kramer, whereas Burnt Norton focused on ‘the simultaneity of timelessness and the flux of time, here the poet turns his attention to the seemingly purposeless, repetitive cycle of birth and death, creation and destruction. Nothing endures; everything changes’. Part 6 of The Return certainly focuses on death, as it is the moment when Richard runs over a young boy at a crosswalk while Carl Rodd relaxes on a nearby park bench…
It almost goes without saying [!] that the apocalyptic visions of part 8 resonate powerfully with the beginning of the poem’s third movement:
O dark dark dark.
They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant…
When the quartet continues in its second movement with the following strophe
And the ragged rock in the restless waters,
Washes over it, fogs conceal it
it is echoed by Diane’s statement that she likes her drink ‘on the rocks’, in part 12.
This ‘on the rocks’ find is a real Boulègue gem. In nearly any other work this allusion would be among its lowest moments. Diana: The Musical; a Marillion tribute band’s secret self-compositions; The Poetical Works of Charlie Sheen: if any of these tried to refer to these Eliot lines with a drink on the rocks this would be close to its low point. It is so bad it makes you regret even thinking about questioning those works, which start to look by comparison like some of humanity’s most precious attempts at communication.
Even List of the Lost might contain nothing worse. You could picture Mr Morrissey considering putting in a reference to these lines that involved someone’s drink on the rocks, perhaps belonging to the character he’s named after Ezra Pound, as the allusion’s in the same miserable punning spirit as ‘Whoever put the pain in painting had also put the fun in funeral’. When all is said and done, though, that novella does not make reference to these lines with a drink on the rocks, or make a reference anywhere near as bad. Who knows, perhaps Mr Morrissey inserted something similar and an editor had to step in because this time the author really had crossed a Line.
How could any allusion to this part of Four Quartets be worse than this? You could of course just go wild and use the number of forms examined by Dougie’s boss, or the total number of divinities played by the auteur, but if you did so not even Boulègue, I assume, would see the reference to Eliot’s lines. No, what you need is the microscopic demonic sweet spot where there’s just enough of a whiff of correspondence that an obsessive such as Boulègue will see the reference and announce it to the world, but not so much that it won’t make the toes of non-cultists curl. And for the Twin to find equivalent microscopic spots repeatedly throughout an eighteen-hour drama is, you have to admit, supernatural artistry.
For the sake of Boulègue’s mental health we can only hope that when he read these Eliot lines he immediately thought of the drink on the rocks, and didn’t have to rewatch every last moment of the series, possibly several times, before he landed on this epiphany. And it almost goes without saying that he was incapable of spotting this allusion’s mingingness. There was no awareness whatsoever that he’d again dug up a creative choice that made his treasured Grand Maître seem the William McGonagall or Amanda McKittrick Ros of filmed drama.
If a researcher discovers something new in a work it’s good news for the treasured artist concerned. This is the unacknowledged because unexamined assumption of plenty of research in academia. But the truth is it’s only good news if what’s discovered is also good. As with Nochimson and others, Boulègue assumed that practically anything the Grand Maître did was by definition excellent, and so on this poor soul went day after day with his investigations, rewatches, broodings, energy drinks surely consumed by the litre, all to dig up appalling artistic choices, yet never once seeing that he was landing his Grand Maître deeper and deeper in trouble, like some fan of Dennis Nilsen who investigated, burrowed, researched beneath his hero’s floorboards and punched the air each time he discovered a human jawbone or spleen because it confirmed the great man’s genius.
Nearly every half-baked literary or spiritual allusion we’ve mentioned—the Finnegans Wake and Ulysses stuff, the Hindu and Greek mythology, and the like—was dug up by doughty Franck Boulègue. In its own depressing way, what he did to his hero was plecto and vicious, almost libellously damaging, yet he’s been published in Cahiers du cinéma, the Lynch worshippers’ house mag and supposedly our culture’s finest film and TV publication. This is where we are. This is the state of criticism of our most influential artforms.
The Eliot allusion was yet another case where I didn’t immediately recognise how bad it was. I could sense it was awful, obviously, but off the top of my head I’d have put it at roughly 0.01% of the pie. But when you get more serious, put your unshod feet up and properly mull it over, you see how wide of the mark that is. It seems I may have underestimated the piechart percentage here by a factor of ten or more.
Am I losing my touch? My mind again? How can you be so affected by how bad The Return was that you lose the woman you love, numerous nonwrestling streaks, your sanity—including your resistance to poodle-rocker’s hair, building dioramas in your forties, and involving the police in your TV opinions—and eventually your entire identity over it, yet still underestimate by a factor of ten an allusion this toe-curling?
So maybe I should have more sympathy for Boulègue’s failure to realise the show’s true rankness. I don’t know. I don’t know much about anything any more, it sometimes feels when immersing yourself in memories of this thing. You drift off to some very strange dimension with expanses and levels you’ll never fathom, way out of your depth, and constantly underestimate how bad it actually was. I’ve been there, Franck. I can identify.
Might future generations even mock me for vastly overrating it, the way I’ve been mocking Boulègue? Might they think I was a fan?
Hey Auraist, is the mangan story published on your newsletter which is exceptional, an extract from the book?