The Pleasures of Reading, Viewing, and Listening in 2024, pt. 23: Christopher Brown

 

 

Reading and Viewing in 2024

by Christopher Brown

 

I dragged my wife this summer to see a post-apocalyptic prequel to the third sequel of a 1979 movie about Australian men trying to kill each other with their cars, promising her this was the one that would finally deliver the feminist utopia made from the ruins of petrochemical capitalism we had been teased with in 2015. And we did get a glimpse of The Green Place of Many Mothers—for about three minutes at the beginning until the bikers showed up, proving the filmmakers’ inability to unmoor their story from its (and their) roots in those '70s exploitation films where the bikers always showed up, and their (or maybe Hollywood’s) inability or unwillingness to show us an authentically different version of how life could be.

 When it came time to watch the actors pretending to be space opera jihadis rising up under the leadership of the tween prince, while we averted our eyes from the events unfolding in the real Arab world, I went alone.

 I took a long lunch to catch a weekday matinee of the movie about a Second American Civil War, but as anticipated it had no politics.

 

Maybe that is why most of my movie viewing this year was of the Criterion Channel’s new feed of their own non-stop selections from their library, Criterion 24/7, which lets you experience fragments of great movies as ambient backgrounds to domestic life. Among my favorite discoveries were An Angel at My Table, Jane Campion’s 1990 adaptation of the autobiographies of New Zealand author Janet Frame; Ornette: Made in America, Shirley Cole’s 1985 documentary following the improvisational music pioneer back to his hometown of Fort Worth; and Radio On, Christopher Petit’s beautiful black and white English road trip at the dawn of the Eighties.

 

 The most illuminating book I read this year was written in 1849 about events that took place in 1810-13. Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River is classic Americana, the account by Scots-Canadian entrepreneur Alexander Ross of his years helping launch John Jacob Astor’s Pacific Fur Company in the Pacific Northwest. A tale of frontier exploration and colonization, it begins with the dramatic arrival in downtown Manhattan of a group of Canadian management recruits escorted in a giant canoe by singing Voyageurs, takes a harrowing journey by ship around Cape Horn under the captaincy of an Ahab-like tyrant, has a decadent and utopian sojourn in pre-colonial Hawaii, and then details for hundreds of pages all the mishaps, fears, and failures of the group as they try to build their outposts and interact with the diverse Native American groups that surround them. You realize you are reading a business book, written not by adventurers, but by traders, whose skill was not trapping wild animals, but making deals. Reading their story, you get a vivid tour of the Pacific Northwest as it was before Anglo-American settlement and a fresh appreciation of how entrepreneurial finance was the real virus that paved the way for what would follow. 

 

Exploring similar territory from a radically different vantage was Boyce Upholt’s excellent 2024 book The Great River: The Making & Unmaking of the Mississippi, a wonderfully written work of Anthropocene ecology about what we have done to the bountiful riparian world we found between the Appalachians and the Rockies and the futility of our efforts to engineer the forces of nature into submission.

 

In a year extra busy with my own book launch and work and familial responsibilities, much of my reading was in the margins of the day, on the tiny screen of my phone after putting our daughter to bed. I deeply connected with Camille Dungy’s Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, which made a diary of a suburban yard into an incisive exploration of race, family, and American identity. I liked some aspects of Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger but found his efforts to write the other fell short, exposing the exhaustion of the burned-out masculine archetype at the center of the story. I was fascinated by my discovery of W. G. Sebald’s book-length poem After Nature, and enchanted by the dark spell of Nathan Ballingrud’s Crypt of the Moon Spider, a work of wonderfully weird fabulist melancholy that gets into your head and starts poking around like an alien dentist. I ended the year enjoying Joanna Pocock’s Surrender, which had been on my TBR pile since I picked up the print edition from Fitzcarraldo upon its publication in 2019. It’s a beautifully written and deeply insightful account of the author’s two-year stay in Montana in the company of her husband and daughter, witnessing the damage of both human and natural ecology at the frontier that is the edge of every American town, while navigating her own crises and life changes.

 

I devoured the nihilistic noir of David Goodis’ Dark Passage, enjoyed the brief retelling of the story of Viking matriarch Aud the Deep-Minded in Keneva Kunz’s new (to me) translation of Eirik the Red's Saga, and went into the bunker with Volker Ullrich for Eight Days in May, his fresh 2022 reconstruction of the last gasps of the Nazi regime. After our own incoming regime won the evident support of the American Volk, I found myself retreating into the labyrinth with Borges, rereading my favorites of his stories in the original Spanish (as collected in the Cuentos Completos, which I also enjoyed in the audio edition narrated by Gerardo Prat). Reading Borges untranslated takes some work for me, but made me realize how much more feeling and magic those stories had than one gets from the logic-drunk translations by American professors—and how much more strongly I could feel the specters of colonial horror and emergent autocracy echoing through the walls of the library in which those micro-narratives take sanctuary.

 The single thing I read this year that resonated with me the most was an essay by Patricia Lockwood in the December 4 issue of the London Review of Books, “Encounters With Aliens,” about watching X-Files reruns with her husband after he has major surgery, seeing how the whole show is about control of Scully’s body (and of that of the actress who plays her), and all the visitations of ghosts and disparate connections a nugget of aging popular culture can conjure. A reminder that our diverting escapes from the news of the day can also serve as left-handed strategies of engagement, and maybe even the laboratory to germinate the seeds of real change.

 

 

Christopher Brown’s latest book, A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys and Other Wild Places, is now available from Timber Press.