"Dune," horror stories, and creepy fall music

Reading, listening, t-posing recommendations

You’re reading Read Max, a newsletter by Max Read. Tomorrow, expect a column about the Facebook leaks expected to drop next week and the ongoing moral panic. Today, some reading and listening, and t-posing recommendations.

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If you’re reading this, you’re unlucky enough to have subscribed to this newsletter the week Dune came out, which means there’s a high likelihood that you will be subjected at some point in the next couple days to tediously lengthy complaints about the flawed political economy of the Dune universe, rendered in an authorial voice that teeters precariously between “winningly ironic and self-aware” and “embarrassingly pretentious and self-indulgent.” For now I will just say: I thought the movie was pretty great, largely because it’s faithful to the novel’s political and moral strangeness, which is sometimes transcendent and sometimes transcendently stupid.

“The internet,” or whatever, when confronted with that strangeness, is almost certainly going to produce a number of headlines about Dune’s Orientalism, imperialism, appropriation, etc., which will be gleefully shared both by people who want to stridently castigate glib Hollywood bigotry and by people who think that stridently castigating glib Hollywood bigotry is gauche, unsophisticated, and cringe. Truthfully neither the novel nor the movie are precisely innocent of any of those charges, but the novel’s politics are also much weirder — for better and for worse — than Twitter deserves.

If you’re going to see it, I really highly recommend the historian Daniel Immerwahr’s article about Dune’s convoluted politics, and how they emerged from Frank Herbert’s interest in (and friendship with) the Quileute Nation of the Pacific Northwest. It’s an intelligent and sensitive read of the book and Herbert’s life that recognizes what makes the novel so compelling without exonerating it of its many stupidities. It won’t make anyone think of Dune as either blameless or irredeemable but it might stop a few people from participating in the bad-opinions game at any stage. There’s a less academic version of the article here, and a video lecture that covers the same ground here.

I’m late to it but I really liked this CJR story about pirate radio in New York City by Amanda Darrach, featuring the New York Pirate Sound Map’s David Goren. (You can read a transcript of it here, but you should really listen to get a flavor of what pirate radio sounds like.)

“But what if one day, a man with a gun walked into my house and said to me, ‘you have to make me laugh or I will kill your partner sitting quietly there in the other room.’ (Or what if a woman with a gun walked into the house? And what if that woman was also a doctor?) What then? When need winds its clammy self around laughter, things become sinister.” Leah Beckmann attempted to get comedians to tell her who they can’t make laugh.

“3D rendering of French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac” via @sharp_sticks

Balzac t-posing. Read more about t-posing here.

October is the time to read scary stories, duh. I have a soft spot for old-fashioned English ghost stories — the kind, where, like, a country doctor visits his Oxford classmate for a “fortnight,” sees a strange-looking dog, and then dies of some mysterious blood illness a few days later; or, like, a beautiful woman in a painting comes alive, takes the narrator of the story to a fancy-dress party, and then marries the devil (?), or something — and so I’m reading Penguin UK’s collection of E. Nesbit’s Horror Stories, which exists directly in that tradition.

Nesbit’s stories feature not much shock (though they can be a bit lurid), but instead inculcate a kind of ambient, almost wistful sense of loss, sadness, and dread. A Victorian author best known for her children’s books, Nesbit was a founder of the socialist Fabian society; she was married to a psycho named Hubert Bland who impregnated her best friend (twice) and forced her to raise the children as her own. This is relevant to my favorite story in the collection, “The Shadow,” in which an old woman tells a story about her pregnant friend and her friend’s husband. I like the first paragraph, which is also a good summary of what makes a good ghost story:

This is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects --no explanation, no logical coherence. Here is the story.

Sadly it seems like most of the collected editions of Nesbit stories readily available in the U.S. are hideously ugly, but at least some of them, including “The Shadow,” are readily available to read online.

In the same vein of autumnal folk horror: If you are looking for some creepy music to get you in a Halloween mood, I strongly recommend Deep England by the electronic composer Gazelle Twin and the “drone choir” Nyx, a collection of songs “rooted in English pagan and sacred music.” If you like the original Wicker Man, the album has a great cover of the nursery-rhyme-creepy classic “Fire Leap.”

If you’re just looking for some straightforward fall mood music, here’s a falling-leaves playlist I made on Spotify — a mix of folk, ambient, jazz, and other melancholy crisp-air stuff. Enjoy!

A final note: Read Max by Max Read is still figuring out precisely what it is. If you have suggestions, questions, ideas, criticisms, requests, please email me or leave a comment below. Just, be aware, I’m not going to change the font; sorry, don’t bother.