Nonfiction: September's best-written recent releases II
Read the opening pages of our pick below ^ Plus Parts 48 and 49 of The Demon Inside David Lynch: TV Drama’s Worst Fiasco
In today’s issue:
— ‘The dogs are my only true friends in this valley of quick sunsets and rock stacks shaped like things older than anything the mind can grasp, this valley where heaven turns to hell as quickly as breath turns to wind’: our next pick from the recent releases in nonfiction. Our previous pick is here, where you can also find the full list of books considered.
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—’Who are they to judge your teaching abilities and Twin Peaks: The Return, to look down their cocaine-free noses lesson after lesson at the best television series ever and at their well-meaning Zaddy teacher and his dank neckerchief and general edge-snatchin lewk?’: Parts 48 and 49 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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Black Water, Summer
From the edge of the dwarf-pine grove, Black Water is laid out like a drawing. The river’s bone-white bed hasn’t yet dried up. The two waterfalls are lively, then the water thins when it hits the floor of our valley. In late summer, it goes completely underground and you hear it but can’t see it. That’s why it’s called Black Water, the old shepherds said. The old shepherds are gone and what’s left of them are the names they gave to every spring and creek. Little Horseback, Orelek Lakes, Horse Plaza, Borovan, Zagaza, Etip – all of them named after vanished animals, humans, plants and events remembered by the mountain.
Black Water is a river that begins at the glacial lakes below Thunder Peak and passes through our steepish marble valley. The river makes a perfect vulva-shaped loop out of its own bed, then continues as a single stream down the terraces of the mountain until it joins the river known since forever as Strymon, Strymonas or Struma. The god of the river Strymon was born of Tethys and Oceanus, and on coins his hair is crazy like a tangle of snakes or a web of tributaries. And up here, we literally live inside the head of the mountain gods.
When the sun declines over the other mountain to the west – a mountain with a different character and shape from ours – then our little valley is plunged into a shadow so cold you reach for a log to put in the stove. If you haven’t gathered enough dry wood and it rains, you are in trouble. But you are in trouble no matter what.
After some weeks here, I can’t tell the inside from the outside. I am wrestling with a force that feels daimonic. Whether it first appeared inside me or outside of me, I don’t know, but now it is everywhere. I can’t see the other hut from here, only their smoke. They are not bothering me, they’re just sitting there drinking. Again. The only sober one is the child.
I count the dogs by our hut, all there. It’s a habit now, to check who’s here and who’s not: Topi, Gashta the pants mother and daughter, Kasho, Kito, Balkán, Redhead. Only Muna the Monkey can’t be seen because she is under the bed, digging a hole in the earth.
The dogs are my only true friends in this valley of quick sunsets and rock stacks shaped like things older than anything the mind can grasp, this valley where heaven turns to hell as quickly as breath turns to wind. I sit on a flat stone and battle with anger, not for the first time. How quickly everything comes and goes. The mountain is vast. You are small and so are your animals who are not yours, you are just their caretaker and they – yours. Sásho said it: ‘You live if the animals live, and you die if they die. In the lower world you fool yourself that you’re top of the heap, but here it’s fifty-fifty in your favour. Or less.’
Just a few weeks ago, I couldn’t wait to come here. The high pastures are where you come to be free and contemplate every flower, I was told, like on some yoga retreat. But only a few people actually spend the whole summer here – the shepherds.
The glacier above is in the shape of an angel with its wings spread over Black Water. We look at it every day and wonder if it’s shrinking. Above it is the sphinx of Thunder Peak, a round-headed hammer at 2,914 metres, poised to smite us without notice. Everything here happens without notice, and this landslide of the mind happens every second day like clockwork. It’s psycho-geological. The stones slip under your feet. The riverbank slips and the mare slipped into the gorge with Vasko the drunk cowherd.
‘Life here is a game of roulette,’ I’d said to Sásho, ‘I can’t take it anymore.’
‘Russian roulette,’ he said. ‘It’s not for you. I try my best but it’s the nature of it.’
The nature of it is, they are drinking again. I understand them – it’s a way out. Any day now, Kámen will come up with provisions and then I’ll leave. I don’t know what day of the week it is. We keep our phones turned off to save battery. Night closes in. I stumble down the scree to our empty hut where the fire has gone out and my pot with the last vegetables is half-cooked. I will rekindle it and wait. I don’t like being a woman who waits. But this is what you do here: you wait and endure.
The dogs will come and put their heads on my lap, one by one: Muna the Monkey, Topi, Redhead, Gashta the pants mother and daughter, the two toughies Kito and Kasho, even Balkán who has never put his head anywhere near me.
I stop to look at the dead ram. The eyes were pecked by crows within an hour of him dying in a lethal headbutt with another ram. It’s mating season, ‘a madhouse’ the shepherds say, a favourite word.
‘Fighting to the death for love,’ Sásho said. ‘Nothing we can do.’
The empty sockets confirm it: nothing we can do.
The spellbinding new book by the prizewinning writer Kapka Kassabova tells the story of her time with the last moving pastoralists in Europe: a gripping portrayal of human-animal interdependence, and a plea for a different way of living.
Living with one of these communities over the course of one summer, Kassabova experiences the intensity, brutality, beauty and isolation of their existence. She witnesses the epic, orchestrated activity of transhumance – the seasonal movement of vast herds of sheep, along with shepherds and dogs. As she becomes attuned to the sacrifices inherent in this work and the rich histories that shaped this Balkan region, Kassabova finds herself drawn deeper into the tangled relationships at the heart of the small community.
Anima is an extraordinary portrayal of pastoral life, where humans and animals exist in profound interdependence. Kassabova conjures the spirit of this remarkable place with intimacy and empathy, and helps us imagine how we might all begin to heal our broken relationship with the natural world.
A book that mesmerises with its sense of adventure and epic sweep, this is creative nonfiction at its best. — Guardian
[Kassabova is] iron-hard and courageous, both on the page and in life... Roaming across the high pastures, Kassabova sees all our lives with clarity — Spectator
The poet laureate of the margins... "Must I squeeze my experiences into such a small space when they are so much larger?" This question suffuses Kassabova's incandescent book, and she poses it relentlessly, in spare, hard prose - prose worthy of the rock and the raven — Charles Foster, Times Literary Supplement
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.
Why It’s Okay to Pick on This Man a Bit
It’s hard to read Franck Boulègue’s delvings into The Return and Eliot’s Four Quartets and not think of the plectoid annotator Charles Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Before our first breakup Ella commented more than once that I was not without my own Kinbote inclinations, which seems fair enough. And maybe this is one reason why I’ve picked on Boulègue.
Others:
>> Because in his way he’s as bad as the likes of Abascal, Johnson, Gove, and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Like them and most of the series’ conned marks, he’s away off in the wilds of post-truth. And so despite the discrepancy in our career trajectories, I strongly identify with his problems, specifically his denial which looks as extreme as that of César, Mateo, Trinna, Les, the droppings collector or me ever was.
When giving interviews and lectures he appears to be a genuinely lovely person, as he holds forth and wows everyone in his beautiful accent, berserkly. Chomps at his conger-eel-in-peat baguette and tries to convince himself and others that it isn’t just delicious but the tastiest baguette of all time. Never mind the black stains and splashes of eel eye on his teeth and lips and chin, and his violent retches, the baguette’s unheard-of taste and texture come from basing its recipe on the snake’s slithers across the Garden’s soil in Paradise Lost and are therefore genius.
I want to gently massage his Season 3 subspaced head and tell him that everything will be okay. I do. As with Charles Kinbote he is almost adorably away with the fairies. Do you feel that same bond with almost adorably berserk Franck Boulègue? Here on the sidelines most of us are Boulègues and Kinbotes, aren’t we, fretting or blithering compulsively about other people’s work, trapped in the hell of our own thoughts, as Boulègue said of Audrey Horne.
>> Because he illustrates so well the self-destructive tendency of the apparently well-intentioned left to focus on trivialities and obscurities that blind them to the basics. That is, their lack of perspective, their failure or refusal to see the bigger picture, so much learning put to such daft use. E.g. the fact that Boulègue thought The Return was the greatest television series ever while he also believed this:
My main problem with the new series is found in its depiction of women. The original series was already a bit vain from this point of view, with (male heterosexual) fans debating endlessly about who might be the prettiest girl in Twin Peaks, as if they were in a candy store. One is totally free to have personal preferences, but this market of women approach has always seemed a bit objectifying to me. This time around, after four episodes, I have to say that I find the new series a bit disappointing from this point of view, especially after our TV screens have been graced with strong female characters such as Buffy, Carrie Mathison, Sarah Lund and countless others. I expect better of a 21st century series: not one single female character after four hours of viewing who contains much substance or embodies any central role, but several prostitutes of course and gratuitous stripping down (for women only).
Consider how poor the portrayal of women had to be for even a fanatic such as Boulègue to question it this way. Now consider how unlikely it was that a series that depicts around half our population this poorly was anything like the greatest ever.
>> The tendency of too many of the bohemian left to value transgression just for the sake of it, the types who cheer on paedophilic photographs in galleries, that lot, as skewered by Angela Nagle. Or as we’ve said, to not even mention or see such misjudgement when it’s butting them and everybody else in the face.
>> Intellectuals in recovery fellowships who ignore everybody else and address only other intellectuals in the room, who make eye contact with them alone and use jargon only intellectuals understand, have a bad time of it. This refusal to speak to the room is met with an atmosphere that isn’t easy to describe, not resentment but, and this feels even worse, something like pity that this guy’s so frightened he has to protect himself with jargon only understood by his perceived peers. And when he gets none of the nods or other affirmations granted to previous speakers, he becomes yet more jittery and bitter and focuses more exclusively on his fellow intellectuals, but now even his supposed peers are looking down at their toe-bulged shoes, quelling embarrassed sighs.
>> Concern that Boulègue might not know when to stop rubbing his buttocks in growlers’ faces.
T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: Another Jawbone
Krishna’s teachings about liberation in and from time follows [sic] in the third movement of the poem, and are mirrored in the 13th part of The Return when the Mitchum Brothers enter the Lucky 7 Insurance office mimicking a train, a scene corresponding to the following statement:
You are not the same people who left that station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you
Boulègue’s description here was a little off again, as the Mitchum brothers plus Dougie Jones and the fembots Mandie, Sandie and Candie actually enter the scene doing a conga, and only as they leave does Robert Knepper as Rodney Mitchum tootle out a brief ‘Choo-choo’. But as the conga probably does mirror this bit of Four Quartets, the only proper response is that as with the drink on the rocks this is a pretty honking mirroring.
Say you’re back teaching those same teens how to get your ideas across in narrative and you provide this as your latest example. On the left-hand side of your whiteboard you write
You are not the same people who left the station
Or will arrive at any terminus
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you
Then you write
WAY TO COMMUNICATE THIS: Six halfwits in a conga line
How would you get the students to quit laughing and saying Ew, Yikes, Blech, Oh dear God, and Just kill me now?
You might consider giving an explanation of the term pretentious. It really is okay to use that word here. Seriously. It’s fine.
No? Okay, maybe you should show them a clip of the conga from Part 13, so they can see these blonde millennials presented as stupider than any other characters in screen history, plus three old white galoots with not a grey hair between them but plenty of faintly yellow fake tan made blatant by the series’ capricious lighting. Behold the jolly, interestingly complexioned, éminence grise sons of the Greatest Generation, you might tell the class, the generation that landed at Normandy and helped defeat Hitler in their teens and twenties.
But now what do you do? How can you persuasively bisociate the lines on the left with a conga? How can you make these teens see enough correspondence? Scoot around the classroom as though on railways tracks, past row after row of frowning students, warbling ‘Choo-choo’? I doubt that’ll win them over. More Ews and Yikes, not to mention T.S. Eliot’s whirls in his grave.
Eliot argued that new classics retrospectively rearrange the canon, with older classics having to ‘accommodate’ the new work and being altered in the process, an idea that was claimed by Manbams for Season 3, which travelled back in time and altered not only the canons of TV drama and cinema but of literature as well. Which leaves us with the tantalising possibility that in his Four Quartets Eliot was somehow made to write ‘You are not the same people who left the station/ Or will arrive at any terminus/ While the narrowing rails slide together behind you’ to subtly, very subtly, blink and you might miss it, communicate the notion of elderly men from the future wearing something called ‘faintly yellow fake tan’ as they do something called a ‘conga’ with three ‘fembots’. Try explaining that one to the class.
And perhaps you might try to link ‘Krishna’s teachings about liberation in and from time’ to new words you’ve written on the board:
Just for Men and faintly yellow fake tan
Because possibly this is the subtle bisociation here, the message the long-term-homebody white boomer auteur wants to communicate, that white boomer men have liberated themselves in and from time, the same time that presumably restricted the Greatest Generation from conga-ing up Omaha Beach wearing yellowish fake tan. Try explaining this to the class, and then to T.S. Eliot.
It’s not going down very well with any of them, is it? So what do you say to them? And who do these little clowns and scumbags think they are anyway, with their Ews and Blechs, and their lives and sexual adventures ahead of them? Who are they to judge your teaching abilities and Twin Peaks: The Return, to look down their cocaine-free noses lesson after lesson at the best television series ever and at their well-meaning Zaddy teacher and his dank neckerchief and general edge-snatchin lewk?
So you remind them that the conga line doesn’t merely refer to Eliot’s poem. Like everything else in the show it also communicates some offscreen guy’s guilt over some misdeed or whatever, and never happened anyway because all three seasons of Twin Peaks are in fact this guy’s dream.
That’s shut them up, hasn’t it? Not so full of themselves now, these unappreciative runts. On a roll, you dish out a few tasty morsels you’ve saved for a day like this: the allusions to Finnegans Wake and to Osiris climbing to heaven on Dougie’s nine insurance forms; all the best-of polls the show topped; the Big Bad superstud’s seductive use of ‘Oo-oh’; why TV dramas about rape mustn’t ignore its upside. That’s when the runts begin to scream.
You ignore them and dish out ad hominems for doubting the best television series ever, followed by death threats, followed by a hail of droppings from the collection in your desk drawer. It’s Gucci, Gucci, GUCCI, you tell the runts as they duck, that your generation’s left them to cope with a midden of a world, insects and birds dying off in mass extinctions, easy access to rape porn, plus men like Trump, Putin, Xi, Netanyahu, Modi and a cricketer in control of nukes and the response to a pandemic and the climate going to shit.
Colleagues run into the room but you keep them at bay with more ad hominems and droppings and share more morsels from the G.O.A.T. tour de force, then paeans to the joys of subspace. It doesn’t feel like you’ve… how does it go again? Helloo-oo-oo! Helloo-oo-oo!
Next thing you know you’re being walked out through the front doors by the police and past the entire school body, another shower of clowns and scumbags. Fuck it, you think, I’m sacked anyway so why not really let them have it. You break free from the police, draw yellow highlighter all over your face, and tell everyone the rock bottom.
The moustachio’d PE teacher, the pervert, breaks down in tears. Ballbusting old dinner ladies and aloof fembot sixth-years crumple to the ground as their knees give way.
Wake up, you vermin! your froth-coated lips shout as you conga solo in a figure of eight, an infinity symbol, a puff of steam from the teapot that enables voyages through time and helps save abused kids, your trousers’ bum ripping wider open every time you conga-kick. Fix your heart or die!