Thoughts on Books I Finished, April 2023

Shroud for a Nightengale, PD James: Three or four books into this series about poet/detective Adam Dalgliesh, I find myself unable to detect whether I really like them. I enjoy the prose, and I do find the books compelling, but the pervasive loathing of humanity, particularly the feminine portions thereof, is starting to overwhelm the pleasure on offer. This one starts with a phenomenal couple chapters—more or less James on lesbians and an enormously zesty, upsetting scene of murder—and ends with a solution to the mystery that I'm absolutely not sure makes any sense. If you're in the mood for a book about a large group of women who hate each other and are mostly hated by a couple detectives, very skilfully depicted, you could do a lot worse.

Further reading: Joyce Carol Oates; Hilary Mantel.

40 Watts from Nowhere, Sue Carpenter: Recommended the other week—and, as it turns out, blurbed—by Mike Watt, this is an entertaining and well-structured story about someone who decides to start a pirate radio station, does, runs it for a couple years, and then gets shut down, all in a mid/late-90s milieu of fading, but still present, 80s corporate consolidation with enough money sloshing around to slop over the edges of the bucket and irrigate the underground, and low enough rents to live somewhere cool and do cool stuff while working just enough to finance it all. So for all of that it's a fine fun read. For anything else—insight as to the why of anything, especially the why of any of the author's actions at any given time—you'll have to look for another book.

Don't All Thank Me at Once: The Lost Pop Genius of Scott Miller, Brett Milano: When I was a kid and mostly mainly into AC/DC but with growing frontiers into the Ramones and Slade and Hüsker Dü and the Meat Puppets and Screaming Trees and guitar heroes everywhere (and Slayer and fIREHOSE and Minutement and Voivod and Black Sabbath) I picked up Game Theory's (power-pop, with a lot of experimental moments) album Lolita Nation on cassette. I must have seen a review somewhere. I do have a memory of reading a long fantasia on the album, mostly about its references to the Beach Boys and "Sloop John B", in a zine I picked up in Kansas City, but, like trying to figure out what those "uh uh I feel funny a bit" chants are on the Blatz/Filth split, the Internet is useless. I loved the tape, and listened to it all the time. I tried to pick up other Game Theory albums over the following years, but they never hit me the same way. When Scott Miller died suddenly a few years back, his family dumped a bunch of his out-of-print music on the Internet so people could hear it again, and, even without my cassette, I found I still loved Lolita Nation.

This book reveals on the first page that Miller died by his own hand, and that loss doesn't loom over everything in the book, but it never quite leaves the stage, either. Brett Milano doesn't offer any answers, and neither do Miller's interviewed bandmates, much. This leaves Lolita Nation as the Rosetta Stone for my understanding of Miller, particularly this bit from "Exactly What We Don't Want to Hear" which Milano (64-5) glosses as "about two groups of misfits: record collectors, and obscure artists whose records are collected ... Both ... are on something of a hopeless quest." To my ear, though, the lack of hope in there is more important than Milano lets it be:
It's been a decade of trade-offs
Of try myself or let others try
What sort of win is there waiting
For prima donnas like me to find
Standing all night in line?


It's been a decade of record stores
Hordes of failing new wave careers
What lengths we're going to just to find
Exactly what we don't want to hear
With all our well-trained ears


It's been a decade of lives I've left
Twenty months behind when I've gone
If I've been missing expect the worst
That I won't be gone long

Miller's own "failed new wave career" remains one of the 80s' less fair judgments, to me. This book hopes to reclaim Miller and rescue his musical "genius" from obscurity. I read it in a sitting. When I pulled up my music streaming service of choice to listen to Lolita Nation while I read, it told me Game Theory has 92 listeners per month.