The best-written nonfiction recent releases; and Francis Spufford's Golden Hill
Read extracts from our picks below ^ Plus The One
In today’s issue
— ‘As a mason must build a wall one brick at a time, though the finished wall be smooth and sheer, so in individual pieces did Mr Smith’s consciousness return to him, the next day, as he lay in the truckle bed of Mrs Lee’s gable-end bedroom, and assembled the world again’: an extended extract from Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, which we chose as the best-written previous winner of the Ondaatje Prize, part of our project to find the best-written books of the century to date. We’ll soon be publishing Spufford’s Auraist masterclass on prose style.
—’There are songs that divide pop history into Before and After. Some are incontestable : ‘She Loves You’, ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’, ‘Rapper’s Delight’. Others are up for debate’: our first pick of the best-written recent releases in nonfiction.
—‘nightporters doing a posh actor’s angular sextagenarian dancing from a Richard Curtis turkey during an orgy were probably not the worst holiday anecdote to take home’: The One, part 9 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. Thanks for the support Auraist readers have already shown this series, and welcome to the new readers joining us from Twin Peaks sites and groups.
You can also browse our author masterclasses on prose style, picks from the best-written recent releases, from prize shortlists, the best-written books of the century, and extracts from many of these.
Recommend Auraist on Substack, or restack or share this post today, and we’ll send you a complimentary paid subscription (if you share it outside Substack just reply to this email with the relevant link). Or you can join the 16k discerning readers who’ve signed up for free access.
If you’d like us to consider your book in the genre of your choice, please sign up for a paid subscription.
GOLDEN HILL by Francis Spufford
II
As a mason must build a wall one brick at a time, though the finished wall be smooth and sheer, so in individual pieces did Mr Smith’s consciousness return to him, the next day, as he lay in the truckle bed of Mrs Lee’s gable-end bedroom, and assembled the world again.
First, the white ceiling. Then the slow realisation that this was not the dark, damp timber six inches above his nose to which he had woken for six weeks in his bunk aboard Henrietta. Then the memory of his purpose; and the whole variorum mosaic of the evening before; and a burning curiosity. The light through the gable window was full sunshine. He jumped out of the bed in his shirt and threw the casement wide – rooftops and bell towers greeted him; a jumble, not much elevated, of stepped Dutchwork eaves and ordinary English tile, with the greater eminences of churches poking through, steepled and cupola’d, and behind a slow-swaying fretwork of masts; the whole prospect washed with, bright with, aglitter with, the water last night’s clouds had shed, and one – two – three – he counted ’em – six crumbs of dazzling light hoisted high that must be the weathercocks of the city of New-York, riding golden in the hurrying levels of the sky where blue followed white followed blue. The Broad Way, it turned out as he leaned and craned from the window, was a species of cobbled avenue, only middling broad, lined on Mrs Lee’s side with small trees. Wagon-drivers, hawkers with handcarts and quick-paced pedestrians were passing in both directions. Somewhere below too, hidden mostly by the branches, someone was sweeping the last leaves, and singing slow in an African tongue as if their heart had long ago broken, and they were now rattling the pieces together desultorily in a bag.
But Mr Smith took his time from the hurrying clouds and the hurrying walkers. He splashed his face with water from the ewer, changed his shirt, and threw on his breeches and his coat; descended the stairs in clattering leaps that startled the widow Lee, who was serving porridge and a dish of kidneys to her boarders in the ground-floor parlour.
‘Shall you be wanting breakfast, sir?’ she asked, with more deference than she was used to show to guests, for the word had reached her too, with the morning’s delivery of the milk, that she was entertaining a nabob unawares: a being so overstuffed with guineas that he might scatter them at the slightest nudge.
‘I thank you, no,’ said Smith, scarce pausing; ‘I shall furnish myself as I go. Good day!’ And the hall door slammed behind him as he went.
The singer had departed; the street was all business. Which direction to follow? To the left, Broad Way seemed to debouch onto a green common, with a complication of barriers or fences beyond it, but the flow of the traffic favoured, by a majority, the rightward direction, where the houses thickened, and the heart of the town plainly lay; that was the way the barrows of bread and the milk churns were going, and Smith strode with them, almost skipping. The cobbled roadbed seemed to lie along the top of the gentle hummock the island made, between the two rivers, as if it were following out the course of some mostly submerged creature’s spine, with the cobbles as lumpish vertebrae. On both sides the side-streets sloped down, but beyond Broad Way on the side where Mrs Lee’s door stood – the west side, he calculated – there was only one layer of building, backed by a few scraggy shacks: the lanes descended there to an uncertain shore, where rowing boats were drawn up in clumps of yellow grass, and wading birds stalked on mudflats exposed by the tide. The weight of the town seemed all to be to the east. It was there that the openings revealed descents tight-packed with tall houses in the mode of Amsterdam, where pyramids of doorsteps supported mid-air door-ways. Or rather – looking closer – in the modes of Amsterdam and of London intermingled, for the spindle-thin facades of the one style jostled now against the broader haunches of the other. It was from these windings that Smith had emerged in the rain, last night, and it was into these that the barrow-pushers and the costermongers, the merchants in a hurry and the prentices on errands, steadily streamed away from the main flow of the avenue.
But Smith, in holiday mood, followed Broad Way instead, strolling past a square-towered stone church that might’ve been transplanted (like a rose root in moistened sacking) from any county town of the English shires, and a bowling lawn preserv’d from foot traffic behind railings, a teardrop of perfect green, until the avenue dissolved into a parade ground before a fort, with a blowy esplanade behind, where left and right and all around the bright air showed yesterday’s grey expanse of water turned tossing blue in all directions, crowned with white caps. It was the point, the last, the ne plus ultra of the island; and the burly wind pumped Smith’s chest with tipsy breaths. The silk of the Union flag on the pole within the fort snapped and ruffled, but the fort itself, on inspection, was if not quite derelict then at least distinctly singed, with blackened walls and here and there rooflines broken to bare, scorched rafters. The sentry in the box beside the gate sat head-down, a huddle of red. Only the wooden structure alongside seemed fresh, a contrivance of pale timbers whose function Smith at first could not fathom. A gibbet without nooses? A giant’s enlargement of the vermin board where a zealous keeper nails carcasses of owls, weasels, all rivals who presume to hunt the master’s game? This board was strung with dark blotches and streamers; rustling congealments Smith puzzled at till, leaning close enough, he saw the fibres the wind stirred were human hairs, still rooted in the parchment-yellow of scalps. There must have been forty, fifty, sixty of them nailed there, and close up, they reeked like bad meat. He stepped abruptly back.
Round to the left, the swaying mast-forest beckoned from behind the houses, and now Smith took the invitation of a street’s mouth, and followed into the gullet of the town. Prosperous dwellings, here, with window-glass glinting, and maids swilling doorsteps and stairways clean; counting-houses too, and stalls, and shops; streets a-bustle, heterogeneously, for though the houses were plain as day the domicile of wealth, New-York’s answer to the new-pattern’d squares of the West End, the business of the port was running through them, in mixtures London did not see. Wagoners moving boxes, cases, crates, barrels; fresh-landed emigrant families carrying off their all, looking as dazed (no doubt) as he did himself; a coffle of shuffling black men in irons underscoring the street music with a dismal clank. In London the costers would not have cried their apples at the Lord Mayor’s door, a goldsmith would not have been in business next to a meagre dealership in marine supplies. There were omissions too, as well as unexpected presences. Smith had instructed his brain to ignore the information of his nose – schooled reflex of the city-dweller, in the face of stinks – and it took a little time for his brain to take the news that there were few stinks to ignore. The vapour from the scalps remained the worst of New-York’s bouquet. A little fish, a little excrement; guts here, shit there; but no deep patination of filth, no cloacal rainbow for the nose in shades of brown, no staining of the air in sewer dyes. A Scene of City-Life, his eyes reported. A Country-Walk, in a Seaside District, his nostrils counter-argued. No smells; also, he realised, no beggars. He had been strolling the city’s densest quarter for minutes, and yet no street-Arab children pepper-pointed with sores had circled him round, no gummy crones exhaling gin had plucked his sleeve, no mutilated men in the rags of uniform had groaned at him from the ground. He wandered at his ease among strangers who seemed universally blessed with health and strength and moderate good luck, at least, in life’s lottery. Not to mention height. He was used, in the piazza of Covent Garden, to standing taller by a head than the general crowd; but here, in the busy bobbing mass of heads, he was no taller than the average.
It was perhaps because of this relaxation of the usual irritations of the street that Smith, without taking notice of it, relaxed in turn the town-dweller’s habitual guard, and failed to perceive, as he reflected and considered, that others were meanwhile reflecting and considering upon him. He paused to admire the unloading boats, where an arm of the harbour pushed up among the houses. He passed into a narrow square where printer’s devils ran from door to door with bundles of paper, and smiled on enquiring its name and being told it was Hanover Square, for its London counterpart ran less to ink, and more to ballrooms lit by half a thousand candles. He spied a coffee-house ahead, from which came perfumes of hot bread and well-ground beans, and stopping short of it, did what he would not have done at home, or anywhere he had full conviction he trod the humdrum earth. To try to sift from the unruly cram of Mr Lovell’s paper a suitable scrap to command his breakfast, he pulled out in the street his whole pocket-book. Quick as a wink, one of his followers dashed forward, snatched it, and took to his heels up the road ahead.
Smith had had his riches in his hand. Suddenly he did not. Smith gawped. Smith stared stupidly at the empty hand where money had been. And a document besides, which— But there was no time for that. Smith hesitated – considered shouting ‘Stop thief!’ – perceived a train of likely consequences – shook his head like a man assailed by flies – and set off in pursuit himself, silently, instead. His moment’s stillness had given the snatcher a lead of twenty yards or so already, and though Smith’s legs pumped and his green coat’s tails flew out behind him, the goal of his chase was slipping deftly between backs, round corners, up alleyways. Now the streets of New-York reeled by, not at a stroll but at a sprint; the same scenes, the same mixture of familiar and unfamiliar chequered close together as black and white squares of a chess board, but accelerated, passing at a blur; in fact, some of the very same route he had trodden the night before, but now had no time to recognise, as he gasped, and pounded, and felt the enforced enfeeblement of his shipboard weeks dragging at his limbs, while the figure ahead, jinking and turning, weaving and bounding, drew no closer, in fact pulled ahead. The thief was thin, with long, straight, black hair, and seemingly tireless legs in grey breeches, and bare dirty feet that twinkled as they rose and fell: that was all Smith could tell as the distance widened.
Now they were running uphill. Smith, seeing the grass of an open space ahead, and deducing that every street here must run upward in parallel to the open ground, whatever it was, resolved on a desperate expedient, and flung himself right at the next cross street, then left uphill again on the next street over, meaning if he could to cut the fugitive off at the top. The street was far emptier here, and Smith made himself squeeze out the greatest pace he could as he bolted upward (as he hoped) in parallel to his wallet. There were no more cross streets: no chances to see if his stratagem was working. Bare walls, poorer doors, empty lots. A hammering heart. Lungs on fire. The top of the street coming up. Smith threw himself left once more and gasped his way across to the top end of the original street, expecting at any moment to catch sight again of his quarry. He turned the corner.
Nothing; nobody. Nobody in sight at all at this end. The currents and eddies of the town’s traffic all flowed other ways, leaving this street, at this moment, as an empty backwater. Just a hundred closed door-ways in the bright morning light, into any of which, Smith saw, realising the magnitude of his error, the thief might have vanished. He could not knock on all of them. He wheeled around. The green space was a ragged common. A cow was gazing at him, chewing the cud in comfortable incuriosity. Any of the bushes might conceal a thief. Then again, they might not.
Mr Smith put his hands on his knees and breathed; labouring, just as much, to bring his emotions under his control, to stop the indignant working of his mouth, which wanted to form – which wanted to shout – words he would not permit it. When his chest no longer heaved, he smiled, experimentally, at the cow, and if the expression resembled a rictus somewhat, a drawing of the lips from the teeth such as a corpse may perform when the strings of the flesh tighten in death, it was, nevertheless, voluntary, which was the only quality he just then required of it. The cow was indifferent.
Then Mr Smith walked onto the common, past a cricket-pitch worn to bare dirt at the wickets, past a pot kiln and a charcoal-burner’s fire and a flock of sheep, and found himself a spot between trees where he could feel as sure as may be that he was not observed; and there, in the security he had not bothered to assure himself of earlier, he turned out the coat pocket where he had kept the pocket-book, and investigated his resources. As he had hoped, some of the paper bills had escaped in his carelessness, and were loose in there. But not many. He smoothed them out one by one, and counted. Five – six – six shillings and six – and eightpence – and this dirty spill was a sixpence too – and another shilling. Eight shillings and eightpence, in the money of – he squinted – New-York and New Jersey. The flimsiness of the paper seemed altogether less entertaining now. Plus, he remembered with a burst of relief, the small pile of veritable coin, which he had left in a heap at his bedside. Twenty-nine shillings odd, where he had reckoned on six times as much. He calculated. Could he live as he had planned? No. He would live as he must.
When he rose from his hiding place, his smile convincing once more, the road running along the far side of the common struck him as somehow familiar-looking, and a minute’s walk in that direction confirmed it. It was the Broad Way continuing in the other direction to the one he had set out in. He had circled the whole town; that was New-York, all of it. The far end of the common was blocked with a palisade, and the Broad Way, cobbles diminished into a cart-track, went out through the barrier at another sentry post. At a venture, he asked if the soldier decorating the ground there with spit had seen anyone; anyone running.
‘Migh’er done,’ he said.
Smith studied the expectant face, and considered the state of his pockets.
‘You didn’t, though, did you,’ he said.
‘No,’ agreed the soldier, amiably, and stuck his clay pipe back between his teeth.
Francis Spufford is the author of five highly praised works of non-fiction, most frequently described by reviewers as either ‘bizarre’ or ‘brilliant’, and usually as both.
His debut novel Golden Hill won the Costa First Novel Award, the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Desmond Elliot Prize and was shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, the Rathbones Folio Prize, the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and the British Book Awards Debut Novel of the Year. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He teaches writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London and lives near Cambridge.
RECENT RELEASES IN NONFICTION
Books considered:
Four Shots in the Night by Henry Hemming
The Invention of Prehistory by Stefanos Geroulanos
Jelly Roll Blues by Elijah Wald
Hell Put to Shame: The 1921 Murder Farm Massacre and the Horror of America's Second Slavery by Earl Swift
Still as Bright: An Illuminating History of the Moon, from Antiquity to Tomorrow by Christopher Cokinos
Missing Persons Or, My Grandmother's Secrets by Clair Wills
My Black Country by Alice Randall
The Weight of Nature: How a Changing Climate Changes Our Brains by Clayton Page
Aldern The Believer: A Year in the Fly-Fishing Life by David Coggins
The Age of Magical Overthinking by Amanda Montell
Ian Fleming by Nicholas Shakespeare
Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life by Jason Roberts
This Part is Silent: A Life Between Cultures by SJ Kim
Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution by Anne Higonnet
The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook by Hampton Sides
Free Love: The Story of a Great American Scandal by Robert Shaplen
Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos by Lisa Kaltenegger
The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions by Adam Kuper
Everest, Inc. by Will Cockrell
The Moment: Thoughts on the Race Reckoning That Wasn't and How We All Can Move Forward Now by Bakari Sellers
The Great Abolitionist: Charles Sumner and the Fight for a More Perfect Union by Stephen Puleo
The Whole Staggering Mystery: A Story of Fathers Lost and Found by Sylvia Brownrigg
Silk: A World History by Aarathi Prasad
World on the Brink: How America Can Beat China in the Race for the Twenty-First Century by Dmitri Alperovitch with Garrett M. Graff
Radiant by Brad Gooch
The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton
Rural Hours by Harriet Baker
Futuromania by Simon Reynolds
All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld
Spinoza: Freedom’s Messiah by Ian Buruma
A Body Made of Glass by Caroline Crampton
An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi
Reading Lessons by Carol Atherton
Bald by Stuart Heritage
Moederland: Nine Daughters of South Africa Cato Pedder
Against Landlords by Nick Bano
Our first pick from these is FUTUROMANIA by Simon Reynolds:
THE SONG FROM THE FUTURE: ‘I Feel Love’ by Donna Summer, Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte, and the Invention of Electronic Dance Music
There are songs that divide pop history into Before and After. Some are incontestable: ‘She Loves You’, ‘Anarchy in the U.K.’, ‘Rapper’s Delight’. Others are up for debate. Sometimes a song splits pop time in half without that many people noticing its revolutionary implications: think Phuture’s ‘Acid Trax’, the pioneering acid house track of 1987, whose impact fully emerged only later. Other times, the rupture in business-as-usual happens in plain view, at the peak of the pop charts, and the effect is immediate. One such pop altering single that was felt as a real-time future-shock is ‘I Feel Love’.
Released in early July 1977, ‘I Feel Love’ was a global smash, reaching No. 1 in several countries (including the UK, where its reign at the top lasted a full month) and rising to No. 6 in America. But its impact reached far beyond the disco scene in which singer Donna Summer and her producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte were already well established. Postpunk and new wave groups admired and appropriated its innovative sound, the maniacal precision of its grid-like groove of sequenced synth-pulses. Even now, long after discophobia has been disgraced and rockism defeated, there’s still a mischievous frisson to staking the claim that ‘I Feel Love’ was far more important than other epochal singles of 1977 such as ‘God Save the Queen,’ ‘Sheena Is a Punk Rocker’, or ‘Complete Control’. But really, it’s a simple statement of fact: if any one song can be pinpointed as where the eighties began, it’s ‘I Feel Love’.
Within club culture, ‘I Feel Love’ pointed the way forward and blazed the path for genres such as Hi-NRG, Italo, house, techno, and trance. All the residual elements in disco – the aspects that connected it to pop tradition, show tunes, orchestrated soul, funk – were purged in favor of brutal futurism: mechanistic repetition, icy electronics, a blank-eyed fixated feel of posthuman propulsion.
‘“I Feel Love” stripped out the flowery, pretty aspects of disco and really gave it a streamlined drive,’ says Vince Aletti, the first American critic to take disco seriously. In the club music column he wrote for Record World at the time, Aletti compared ‘I Feel Love’ to ‘Trans-Europe Express/Metal on Metal’ by Kraftwerk, another prophetic piece of electronic trance-dance that convulsed crowds in the more adventurous clubs.
The reverberations of ‘I Feel Love’ reached far beyond the disco floor, though. Then unknown but destined to be synth-pop stars in the eighties, the Human League completely switched their direction after hearing the song. Blondie, equally enamored, became one of the first punk-associated groups to embrace disco. Brian Eno famously rushed into the Berlin recording studio where he and David Bowie were working on creating new futures for music, waving a copy of ‘I Feel Love’. ‘This is it, look no further,’ Eno declared breathlessly. ‘This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.’
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.
The One
It isn’t easy to find comparisons to The Return that work. It’s so extreme, so out-there, that beyond the Twin’s unreleased Season 4 it doesn’t resemble anything else. Based on the information you have so far, what would you say it resembles?
We can’t even say other artistic disasters, or I can’t. Think of the mingingest works you’ve come across, the ones where your toes curl so hard and often they nearly puncture your shoes. Anything that threatens your shoes like that must be pretty bad. But this ultraminger leaves none of your shoes intact. If all you did was watch or think about it there is no theoretical limit to the number of shoes it could wreck.
And thinking about it poses a worse threat to your shoes than mere watching does. On a surface level Twin Peaks: The Return is the world’s worst-ever TV drama, but when you explore it in some depth, see what its showrunner was really up to, that’s when it gets supernaturally bad. Many of its most excruciating elements don’t hit you right away. You need to step back and study the canvas in its totality, or as much of it as you can, to even start to perceive what the Twin saw fit to produce here. And if you do, you better not be wearing shoes. Doesn’t matter whether they’re steelcapped or titanium-capped, your big toes will shoot right up through them, and that can be quite dangerous. In fact with these worst elements, as well as your toes curling up and back your ankles do too. These elements aren’t just toe-curling but ankle-curling.
And the series’ rock bottom can go one step further and have your lower legs trying to curl upwards at the knee-joints. This is why it’s best to watch or think about The Return at home. You don’t want to remember that rock bottom while you’re in the cinema, or a dentist’s chair. You don’t want to be Les at a GA meeting as the bohemian across the table complains that he wasn’t breast-fed as a baby, and your mind drifts off to the rock bottom… then the elaborate multiple curl begins, you can’t help it, cogs turn within cogs, then the whole table’s risen and you’ve an oddly angled and hard to explain Reebok at the bitter bohemian’s throat.
Artistic Disaster used to be a category for me containing roughly a dozen items. Now it just contains The One, with a capital T and O. What might previously have seemed like Chernobyls or great oil spills can no longer get anywhere near artistic-disaster status because the entire category has been occupied and filled to bursting point by The One, so they either fade from your memory or suddenly gleam with non-ultimate-vileness and rise in your estimation to assume their place in the Noble Failure category, or Maybe I Missed the True Intent There, or simply Richard Curtis or Morrissey.
E.g. The Boat That Rocked, a bizarrely acidic Curtis comedy about 1960s pirate radio, featuring some of the greatest pop ever recorded, a strong if unexpectedly hoary cast, a preponderance of genteel Home Counties types who keep the dreams of rock‘n’roll afloat, oddly desolate repartee passed off as knowingness and hip, and clangers so frequent and troubling they guaranteed it disaster status, at least until Season 3 came along. When at the film’s climax the sextagenarian Bill Nighy proclaims ‘Wock‘n’wewl!’ into the camera, you could feel reality warp around you as it tried to cope with what was spawning on the screen. (He doesn’t actually pronounce the r’s in Rock‘n’roll as w’s, but you can’t help feeling he should).
My friendship with César Grez was originally shaped years ago by joint admiration for Twin Peaks and Fire Walk with Me and dislike for The Boat That Rocked. We’d try to speak about other subjects but usually drifted back to that show and those films and then the conversation would take off in quality and intensity. An odd guy, César. He has a real liking for lettuces and eats them in one go, not removing the leaves or anything but instead just crunching his way through like it’s a giant apple.
We found work together as bouncers at a nightclub just off Sol, then after we were sacked for thieving crates of Guinness got jobs in a hostel in las Letras as nightporters. One night an orgy took place across the ground floor, and as César and I were on MDMA we accepted the invitation to join in. Since everyone else was on MDMA as well it was better than expected, gentler and less pornographic, although still pornographic enough with young women bent over the toilet sinks and guys behind them.
We were behind two Norwegian sisters when César and I began to do Bill Nighy’s dancing from The Boat That Rocked, unpleasantly posh sextagenarian dancing, angular, chaotic, uptight yet supercilious. The sisters had no problem with it, though, because if anything this added a certain funkiness to everybody’s rhythm, plus nightporters doing a posh actor’s angular sextagenarian dancing from a Richard Curtis turkey during an orgy were probably not the worst holiday anecdote to take home. In our canon of lows from The Boat That Rocked, the only moment rated lower than Nighy’s dancing was his Wock‘n’wewl, so that was next at the sinks, to smoulder at our angular dancing and then Wock‘n’wewl at each other and the sisters, who fled the toilets.
In the morning our boss Cruz came in and went spare at the mess: a diaphragm on the pool table, different liquids across the floors, bare footprints on the marble reception counter. When I couldn’t explain the footprints, managing instead just MDMA-comedown mumbles, Cruz asked if I’d lost my mind.
I tried that trick that usually gets management off your case, which is to gaze past them with a slackjawed look suggesting you’re too dim to waste time on. This had worked on Cruz several times previously when he’d inquired about my mental state, but that day he asked the question again, a question I carefully thought about and then as though in someone else’s voice answered, ‘It doesn’t feel like I’ve lost my mind’ (No se siente como si estuviera loco). Which isn’t really the answer your boss wants to that question, so he fired me on the spot.
Over the next few days I had some form of breakdown due to that answer surprising me as much as it had Cruz, leading to weeks of fairly serious mental collapse and delusion—combusting furniture, tiny soldiers in my food—my own rock bottom till the Lynch-related crisis in 2024, and to the eventual understanding that I basically had lost my mind to booze and pills. At which point Intimidante Security took me on and I was rostered, funnily enough, at Santa Rita’s.
César was also fired and I never saw him again until weeks before our premiere party for The Return. The series then revealed him to be a brainwashed Lynch cultist, sadly, which made me hate it all the more, and made him rip me off as well. For a long time he owed me €400 for my half of the domain thereturn.es that we bought ahead of the show’s premiere and that he soon banned me from, this the same César who I’d got taken on as a guard at Santa Rita’s when Har quit to become a shaman. But I suppose, I used to tell myself, we’ll always have The Boat That Rocked and Wock‘n’ wewl.
Nowadays, though, I can’t see what all the fuss was about. The Boat That Rocked is one of the worst English films ever made, and you’re seldom more than thirty seconds from a wince or shudder, and it might infiltrate your drug trips for years, and a five-month The Boat That Rocked really would constitute a historic low, but as it stands: big deal. Nobody’s going to struggle to understand how bad it is, and it’s hardly the kind of thing a transdimensional demon would bother possessing Curtis to make.
The novella List of the Lost was published in September 2015, the exact time filming began on the abomination, and was written by another white male boomer with illustrious hair who peaked decades ago and then fell into reactionary bowfingness that wrecked his legacy, but who still has a cohort of followers who get angry at anyone who criticises him. Mr Morrissey’s book contains so many similarities to The Return that you have to wonder if it was some sort of demonic rehearsal. It too is a pretentious, incoherent, boring, misanthropic work about American culture, child abuse, murder, unnerving woodland, bleak sex, disillusion, contempt, old age, demonic entities, and aversion to human physicality, especially female physicality. It appears to have had no editor, so what we get is the unfiltered, uncut figurative cocaine vision of Mr Morrissey. It too is full of obscure digressions and the writer’s self-overestimation. It too is supposed to be a work of fiction but is instead little more than a platform for the opinions, fetishes and speculations of the writer, e.g. 1975 Bostoners surely weren’t as fussed as this when it came to the mooted secret homosexuality of Winston Churchill.
It is full of implausible dialogue like ‘ “I have erotic curiosities,” topspins Ezra’. The writer doesn’t seem to respect women that much: ‘the lust of the woman is at first childlike and desperate—as if they know there is something about which they know nothing, and this itch takes on the aggressive’. Old people repeatedly and implausibly bed the attractive young. The sex scenes generally aren’t the best.
The book refuses to cohere into any kind of overall meaning, or often even temporary meaning: ‘Whoever put the pain in painting had also put the fun in funeral’; ‘Easy victories don’t await, but just rewards seem like a tasty cakewalk, a wrapped-up walkover, so neat and ready to breast the tape’; ‘In your face, in your face, in your face, lover do I never need as long as I have these that send me like the wind... the bullet of Justy as a hell-driver flyer with a disciplined land into Dibbs’ dry hand, and the new corner man faced the home straight with power-hitter grunts and Bunkie pluck as the bilge-free body speedballed with stirred stumps to beat the devil with scorch and sizzle and unfortunate dribble and snappy like crazy he somersaulted with pitching motion into a ferocious belly-flop tumble of a sprawled pratfall—face to the gravel, each limb slithered like snowslide subsidence.’
Publishing this book with Mr Morrissey’s name on the cover was just as cruel, led to the same kind of humiliation for the artist, as the casting of singer-songwriter Chrysta Bell as Tammy Preston in the abomination, which we’ll cover soon. And just like the abomination, List of the Lost is made even worse by the apparent belief of the artist that what he stands for is kindness and civility and his work is some kind of guide to better living for a populace a fair amount of which he appears to disdain, and by the fact that buried deep within this sloppy misanthropic mince is the odd flash of the brilliance he was once renowned for.
But if it was indeed a rehearsal, then a rehearsal is all it was, at most the equivalent of an afternoon’s Wehrmacht wargaming before the abomination’s Operation Barbarossa launched thousands of Panzers and Stukas and millions of troops along a two-thousand-mile front, followed by Einsatzgruppen and sadistic doctors.
Except for this comparison to really work brainwashed César-like Russians would need to have Sieg Heiled as they were bombed to pieces, starved to death, hanged by Einsatzgruppen, wouldn’t they? The point being, once more, that it’s hard to find comparisons to the abomination that work. List of the Lost is among the worst English-language books of the century, but with The Return we’re talking about the whole planet and the worst project since art was first invented. It isn’t ‘one of’ anything. The Return is The Return. It is The One.
We could say it resembles a mashup of elements of The Boat That Rocked, List of the Lost, 4chan, Operation Barbarossa, pro-wrestling, a Vox rally, a documentary on post-rape trauma, a pubescent Goth recluse’s own confusion and miffedness projected out onto the world, a boxset of Paris Hilton reggaetón covers of the works of Shostakovich, discovering unfriendly commandos in your Rice Krispies, The Room, Double Down, Fateful Findings, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, hate-filled junk like rape porn featuring psychiatric patients, coming down off bad pills while being savaged by stray pitbulls in a wasteland puddle in the most dispiriting housing scheme in Buckie, and a webcammed masturbation spree for five months to photos of the masturbator’s own life and works^^.
Also a Children in Need telethon hosted by a Michael Gove who kicks off the night with a speech about the children eventually turning into morons and swine, so forget about them and instead let’s all spend the evening watching an epic tribute to the career, opinions, fetishes and speculations of Michael Gove^^, who sniggers at the adoring studio audience and ridicules anything aired that doesn’t centre on his own career, opinions, fetishes and speculations. Then he’s joined in the studio by the ghosts of William McGonagall and Amanda McKittrick Ros, and by Tommy Wiseau, Neil Breen, Ron Jeremy, and the ancient Egyptian divinity Thoth and the divinity Gevurah from the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, and the gang of them whirl around the place giving one another hugs and backslaps.
But there’s something even worse taking place here, because Mr Gove was so sure the Cult of Michael Gove would adore his transgressive telethon that it led him to feel contempt not only for the general Children in Need audience but for the Cult of Michael Gove in particular, for being so craven they’d lap up any old garbage he throws their way. Picture his smirks and sneers, then, as he drops into his telethon stand-up routines that mock his cult members for their veneration of this farce, including for these routines.
But that comparison doesn’t help much because no such thing will ever be made, surely, apart from The Return.
Interesting content… actually a bit fascinating… but whew, long… I’m definitely finding out what happens to Smith in New York, so thanks for the intro.