Let the Corpses Tan

 

Let the Corpses Tan is a 2018 French film based on a crime novel by the French novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette (1942-95), who has been repopularized in the U.S. recently, at least among literary and leftist political folks, by the release of a number of his books in translation by New York Review Books.

Manchette’s tightly-presented, crisp noir crime plots and characters filled with various clashing political ideologies usually feature a radical leftist political content that is at the same time subjected to Manchette’s ironic, even cynical (which is part of the fun) presentation of leftist political futility. The portrayal of radical left political criminals drowning themselves in the absurd confusions of French society in the 60s and 70s and forward seems to have a lot of appeal for those who feel stuck these days in the political dead ends of current U.S. culture.

Let the Corpses Tan presents a series of remarkably vivid and unique images and sounds in its presentation of a gang of murderers and bank robbers who find themselves increasingly trapped by some combination of bad luck, armed police response, and their own duplicity. In fact in some ways the film is best understood as a series of cool effects. Image by image, sound by sound, the narrative shows the members of the gang spiraling down, even with occasional victories, into their own bad dreams and bad ends. The constantly violent and sexually-charged images give the movie some combination of repellant attraction in nearly every frame, although it’s not necessarily the violence that’s repellant and the sexuality that’s attractive.

What’s missing is, unfortunately, much of any kind of politics, beyond the brief mention that these murdering thieves hate cops and have a lawyer with them who’s a thief too but playing both sides of the law. The various kinds of geographical images shown throughout the film might suggest that the characters are trapped not only by the landscape but by a set of social ideologies that they’re squirming inside, unable to get themselves free of, but whatever ideologies those might be, they never prove especially relevant to the action.

In terms of social content, the film reminded me most maybe of Reservoir Dogs, in which the layers of cynicism and violence reduce the identities of the characters to mere functions of their own violence. There are no real people in Let the Corpses Tan. The men are all assholes crazed by their urges for money or sex or both, and stuck in a situation they can’t escape, and the women are stuck with them. The whole thing is going to explode in one hail of gunfire after another. People are character-less pawns of their own duplicity. That might be a point worthy of Manchette’s writing and social attitudes, some might say. But the lack of any significant political or social framework, or much in the way of interesting character dynamics, leaves the movie as a kind of detached exercise in watching human ants get crushed in a maze of their own good-looking but nearly personality-free violence. I bet the crazy images and sounds sure are cool on a big screen though.

Liliana's Invincible Summer by Cristina Rivera Garza

 

Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister's Search for Justice is a powerful and unforgettable book, emotionally difficult to handle at times although nothing in it is done for shock value. It’s the true crime story of the murder at age 20 of novelist Cristina Rivera Garca’s younger sister Liliana. The murderer was identified relatively quickly, yet also never caught.

But the book is much more than a horrifying crime story. Garza is one of the most narratively sophisticated novelists working right now. The point of view shifts, the non-linear timeline, the interviews conducted with others, the use of real diary entries, and maybe most of all the impressive eye for detail, make the work read like an experimental novel that, line by line, never stops being gripping. I wanted to look away but couldn’t look away. The story is horrible, but the writer’s approach shows why that story matters, rather than cheapening it.

The book is also deeply feminist, discussing the crucial need for women to gain more control over the narratives forced onto them in an anti-feminist social and cultural environment.  Things may have changed for women in Mexico since Liliana’s death in 1990, somewhat, but not as much as they need to, and the book never shies away from showing the problems both that women faced then and still do now.

It’s maybe not quite fair to either writer, but I kept thinking of Liliana’s Invincible Summer as an antidote to Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666, or at least to the infamous long list of brutal murders that forms one of the sections of that novel. In Garza’s book, the focus is on just one murder, just one promising life destroyed by a young man’s murderous obsession.

Liliana Rivera Garza never reached her 21st year, but she lives in these pages in all her complexity, both in the ways she was just like many teenagers and young adults, and in all the ways she was unique. The pain, confusion, and anger created by her death survives in the many people who knew her who are interviewed in the book, and so does her remarkable particularity and the love that many felt and still feel for her. Liliana’s Invincible Summer features a life portrayed by a grieving sister who also happens to be one of the most daring and insightful narrative writers working today.

The Beast and Other Tales by Jóusè d'Arbaud

 

Someone on Facebook read The Beast and Other Tales by Jóusè d'Arbaud and enjoyed it and that encouraged me to read it, and thanks to you if that was you (I don’t remember). The first story and longest tale is the main attraction of the book. Still, the three other surprising and moving stories also deal with the inexplicable, the vastness of the universe (even on the most local scale), loneliness, and guilt. They are all set in a place I’d more or less otherwise never heard of: the Camargue Delta, a region where the Rhöne River meets the Mediterranean, a flat delta of shrubs and grass and water and mud south and east of the town of Arles, France.

Written in 1926, “The Beast of Vacarés” is a horror story of sorts, reminiscent to me of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (obviously) and Arthur Machen’s Hill of Dreams (more subtly). It’s a tale with a moody sweep of landscape that features an profoundly odd encounter between an isolated bull herder and something (someone?) that, well, I won’t say any more about. The back cover of the book does say more, and what it says feels both right and wrong in its implications of what the encounter involves. The tale is not going to provide easy answers, or a lot of comfort. Powerful, strange, unforgettable.

If you’re looking for a story to take you to a place far out of the world you recognize, there’s one right here.

The Night Ocean by Paul La Farge

I really loved the first three parts of The Night Ocean. After that, the narrative became more bloated and meandering and harder to care about, although I always enjoyed the concept(s) it was working with.

If you like the work of H.P. Lovecraft, romantic tragedies about queer love, the history of science fiction and horror writing, unstable postmodern tales within tales, or works about the political landscape of 20th century America and Europe, The Night Ocean will certainly have something for you, although you’ll like it best if you like all of those things.

It had something for me in all of these elements, although I found the parts of the book involving Lovecraft to be more compelling than the rest. The main narrative framework, that of the psychologist and her maybe-dead husband, seemed to fade into insignificance in many ways.

My Award Winners in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk

 

I first read Please Kill Me: An Oral History of Punk by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil soon after it came out in 1996. I was very interested in the environment and people in it, but I don’t recall thinking about it much as a piece of writing.

Having just reread it in an e-copy of the 20th Anniversary Eidtion (with an updated index of names) because my friend Adam Deutsch was reading it, it now strikes me as one of the best books about rock and roll that I know, constantly fascinating and energetic. It doesn’t have much to say about the music as such, but it captures the personalities and the culture of U.S. East Coast (and some British) punk with a level of perceptiveness that comes from the people involved in that culture.

I was making a lot of lists in my head as I read it, just for my own fun and interest. So here are the people in the book who are my Award Winners in various categories. Like all lists, don’t even try to take it too seriously.

BIGGEST JERKS

Lou Reed

Johnny Rotten

“Handsome” Dick Manitoba

(Controversial Honorable Mention: Patti Smith)

BIGGEST GENIUS

Iggy Pop

MOST COMPLETELY DOOMED DRUG ADDICTS

Connie Gripp

Nancy Spungen

Johnny Thunders

Sid Vicious

Jerry Nolan

HOW CAN THEY POSSIBLY STILL BE ALIVE IN 2025?

Iggy Pop

MOST INSCRUTABLE

Patti Smith

Richard Hell

MOST DANGEROUS TO OTHERS

Dee Dee Ramone

Connie Gripp

“Handsome” Dick Manitoba

Jerry Nolan

BEST INSTRUMENTALISTS

Johnny Thunders

Robert Quine

SADDEST STORIES

Sid Vicious

Nancy Spungen

Connie Gripp

Nico

BIGGEST MANIACS

Dee Dee Ramone

Connie Grip

“Handsome” Dick Manitoba

Iggy Pop

Stiv Bators

SANE AND REASONABLE PEOPLE

Deborah Harry

Wayne Kramer

Patti Smith (nearly)

Richard Hell (nearly)

I’m sure I’m missing some names that should be on this list, and some categories too, but that’s what I have so far. There are a lot of lesser known names that might reasonably be featured here too.

RIP David Thomas

 

The band Pere Ubu was unquestionably my introduction to the concept of an avant garde in art or any other form. I was a junior in college when my boss put on the record Dub Housing in the campus record store where I worked.

I knew some of the music of John Coltrane and had occasionally heard what I then thought of as “20th century classical music” that sounded cool and strange, but I had never encountered the concept of “avant garde” in relation to them. I had written papers in high school and college about James Joyce and William Faulkner, but “avant garde” was not a term I saw applied to their work either. I’d never heard of Dada. I knew the word “surreal” as being about weird dreams but not about its connection to the concept of an avant garde.

Listening to Dub Housing, I had one of those epiphanies that are very real sometimes. “I don’t understand music anymore at all,” I said to myself. I was only several years into being aware that there was such a thing as punk music. “What kind of music could this possibly be?”

My response to not understanding the album was to buy it and take it home and soon pick up other albums by the band as well. It turned out that some of my musician friends at college, Andy Rosenau particularly, already knew about the band, but we had never talked about them to that point in my life.

This wasn’t the first time that I had become fascinating by something in literature or music or art that I didn’t understand. But it was a turning point because I became conscious that I was fascinated by literature and music and art that I “didn’t understand.” It was a feeling of being riveted. Why didn’t I understand? Why was it so interesting?

It wasn’t long after that when I came across a copy of the New Directions book Ubu Roi, the play by Alfred Jarry, one of the foundational avant garde texts, as is well known. From then on, I was on my way to a much broader set of interests than I had known about before.

RIP to David Thomas (1953-2025), one of the most unique and powerful musicians of my lifetime.

Nice, the Collected Poems of David Melnick

 

I’m not really writing a review of Nice, the collected poems of David Melnick, because the intro to the book contains all the information anybody would need, including what you need to know about the poems.

The book is a fascinating and tightly constructed package, containing, it seems, all of Melnick’s poetry that’s known to still exist along with a careful scholarly framing that’s full of insight and reminiscence. There’s something satisfying about the completeness of what’s offered between these pages, even as there are ongoing absences of information about some parts of his life and about some of the writing that he must have destroyed. David Melnick didn’t keep a lot of his own poetry, but all of it that got out into the world is essential reading.

What comes across powerfully to me is a sense of astonishment at the consistent distinctiveness of Melnick’s poetry, a play of language and sound that feels sparkling with energy and layered with implication. It’s writing on the absolute fringe of possibility.