Method and Madness

A preview wherein I try to sort out how Italo Calvino would feel about literature-machines based on his amazing 1967 lecture “Cybernetics and Ghosts”
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The prolific E Rathke joined me to talk the far-out world of his forthcoming BROKEN KATANA omnibus, why preoccupation with the culture war makes you a loser, Broken River zines, and much much more.

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A tarot reading on self-possession, bringing your own carrots, and how to let a little meaning in. Shout out to Dolly. Contact me via your favorite social media or bradwkellyATgmail with TAROT in the subject to set up a personal reading for a reasonable fee.

Meditations in Green is the debut novel of the writer, and Vietnam veteran, Stephen Wright. Published in 1983 to praise in mainstream circles—the New York Times review called it “brilliant, and scarifying,” Meditations offers an idiosyncratic, hilarious, and horrifying perspective on that blunderous War in in southeast Asia. If, as Stephen Dedalus says, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” Wright poses Vietnam as something like the “bad trip from which Spec.4 James Griffin is trying to come down.” In the book, we follow two lines of narrative. One is the 1980s in New York, Griffin is on the margins of society, trying to hold together his psyche as it is invaded by memories, a crazed war buddy, and #4 China White. In the other, we’re with James Griffin in the War as he analyzes aerial photographs for reconnaissance and bombing campaigns, ensconced within the 1069th Military Intelligence Group, a cast of characters only rivaled in imagination, tweaked verisimilitude, and absurdity, by books like Catch-22 and Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a book that is funny, disturbing, brutal, and, in my opinion at least, one of the very best American novels on Vietnam war or any other.

David Leo Rice joins me to pore over the negatives of this novel. We talk the ongoing reverberations of the Vietnam war, Stephen Wright’s mastery of exposition and psychedelia, David’s personal experience studying under Stephen Wright, the consciousness of the jungle, the chaos of total information, James Wood’s notion of hysterical realism w/r/t MiG, the comfort of paranoia, and much, much more.

Subscribe to David’s substack, buy his books, and listen to his brilliant podcast WAKE ISLAND. He is one of the finest writers working today and I count myself fortunate to chat with him.

Check out David’s Vietnam-era story I mentioned at the top of the episode: “The Ward Clerk”

Mallory Smart, writer and impresario of independent literature, joins me for a discussion about the Midwest, parking lot hangs, David Koresh, the history of Maudlin House, the current horror boom, and much more.
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