PROCEED WITH CAUTION

Finally finished. Truly devastating book. Wildly, magisterially powerful. Anyone put off by the artifice of MZD’s other work who refuse to do anything but call it pretentious without engaging it or giving it the time of day can be silenced by the heft of this one’s earnestness and unflinching heart.

Everything in the book thus far has felt like a McCarthean cosmicality, fates and ghosts humming massive beneath the surface of the unfolding narrative, felt by every character present, aiming toward our setting ourselves free of our lingering imperialist sense, though notably more hopeful than him.

I have been loving its use of horses to comment on American expansionism. The contrast between the warring families’ beliefs re: how the horse and, more broadly, the earth should be treated (as a tool to be exploited vs a religious practice of oneness) has been a masterclass in setting up catharsis.

Critics thus far, to the extent of my research, have felt put off by its use of huge words in a semibelievable dialect, constant digression, and Greek chorus but I think the contrast between them only underscores its epic scale, leaning heavily on the way oral tradition amplifies stories to godhood.

In a similar vein, Collier’s new guitar record was pleasant and inoffensive. It’s nice to hear him switch up from oddball genreclashing experiments—re:which, I commend his ability to construct them in a way that functions technically—and focus on crafting a cohesive sound. It highlighted his talent.

This fact struck me with a profound disappointment, as the reasoning behind why I would undertake such a process I thought was fascinating, but in the wake of this ice-bath of truth I have made it a mission to go and see this artifact in person to ascertain whether their rationale aligned with mine.

Schattenfroh was brilliant. Book as author as torus, as tzimtzum, unfolding by infolding until the sky’s light breaks again and the torus has cycled back to its initial state. A requiem for seemingly every death but mostly his father’s, an outpouring of grief shucked from the walls of Nobody’s soul.

The Room is one of my favorite movies and I was in theaters for both Best Friends 1 and 2. I have a hard drive full of bootlegged mp4s of everything he did pre-The Room. I wonder what type of deal he’s on now. I know grifting is profitable and Big Shark’s eternal theater run’s expensive but come on.

This feels like—being a requiem—the DMT-flooded flashing before the eyes as Nobody gives up the ghost. Every scene is stunning and kaleidoscopic, every facet turning and returning to show a glimpse of some new side. How this was translated is beyond me. Lawton is pushing into John E Woods territory.

I’m having a blast with this brick. It doesn’t give way easily and the unbroken stream of vision is easy to get lost in, but part of me wonders if that is the deliberate nature of this thing. To portray life as this unceasing flow impossible to comprehend in its entirety in the moment of experience.

This thing is phantasmagoria. An absolutely relentless onrush of hypnagogic allusion. Why travel through space when you can travel through the dreamweaving subconscious? Why not hurry down hundred page Revelation visions, each ekphrastic moment kneaded til toroid, through which the next can be seen?

I wish he’d felt his heart once before he died. I wouldn’t wish his wife and kids’ grief on anyone. I wish he’d spread the values of his professed religion rather than the vain and hateful constructs that have risen in its name. I wish he’d lived just long enough to see his stupid lil table flipped.

This brutality was inevitable. This is what happens when truth, long-suppressed, breaks its way free like a bull goring its torturer. Those who have made themselves emblematic champions of (and mouthpieces for) systems of genocide and oppression will die martyred in the name of their loveless cause.

That purpose is necessarily, fundamentally antihumanity. People like him do not value humanity, only self. The truth will stare them in the face and they’ll construct some soulless system of logic around it like the cogency of an argument negates the lived reality of it, which they’re detached from.