John A. Williams’ !Click Song (Book acquired 28 Jan. 2026)

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I picked up a copy of John A. Williams’ 1982 novel !Click Song after reading Ishmael Reed’s write up of it from Rediscoveries II. From Reed’s essay–

The Ku Klux Klan may appear to be clownish, and inept to some, but they have one thing right. They do represent an “Invisible Empire,” of which, the kind of monkeyshines that go on in places like Forsyth County belong to those of a small ignorant outpost. On the day that some joker held a sign warning of welfare disaster if blacks moved into the county, a New York Times columnist and a book reviewer spread the same lie about welfare being an exclusively black problem, yet, I doubt whether demonstrators will march on the editorial offices of the Times.

Klan thinking goes on in the editorial rooms of our major newspapers, in the film, and television studios; and in the public schools, and universities whose white male supremacist curricula are driving Hispanic, and black children out of education. One hears Ku Kluxer remarks in places that present themselves as the carriers of “Western civilization” like National Public Radio where,recently, a man congratulated a musician for using the saxophone as a “serious” symphonic instrument. “Up to now,” he said, “the saxophone has merely been used to make ‘jazzy howls.’ ” In “the Invisible Empire,” George Shearing will always receive more recognition than Bud Powell, Paul Cummings more recognition than Cato Douglass, and racist mediocrities will always get more publicity and praise than John A. Williams.

Amulet — Jordan Sullivan

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Amulet, 2025 by Jordan Sullivan (b. 1983)

Sunday Comix

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From “Modern America” by Robert Crumb. Published in Arcade #2, Summer 1975, The Print Mint.

A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

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A note to readers new to Infinite Jest

David Foster Wallace’s 1996 novel Infinite Jest poses rhetorical, formal, and verbal challenges that will confound many readers new to the text. The abundance of (or excess of) guides and commentaries on the novel can perhaps have the adverse and unintentional consequence of making readers new to Infinite Jest believe that they can’t “get it” without help.  Many of the online analyses and resources for Infinite Jest are created by and targeted to readers who have finished the novel or are rereading the novel. While I’ve read many insightful and enlightening commentaries on the novel over the years, my intuition remains that the superabundance of analysis may have the paradoxical effect of actually impeding readers new to the text. With this in mind, I’d suggest that first-time readers need only a dictionary and some patience.

Infinite Jest is very long but it’s not nearly as difficult as its reputation suggests. There is a compelling plot behind the erudite essaying and sesquipedalian vocabulary. That plot develops around three major strands which the reader must tie together, with both the aid of—and the challenge of—the novel’s discursive style. Those three major plot strands are the tragic saga of the Incandenzas (familial); the redemptive narrative of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, with Don Gately as the primary hero (sociocultural); and the the schemes of the Québécois separatists (national/international/political). An addictive and thus deadly film called Infinite Jest links these three plots (through discursive and byzantine subplots).

Wallace often obscures the links between these plot strands, and many of the major plot connections have to be intuited or outright guessed. Furthermore, while there are clear, explicit connections between the plot strands made for the reader, Wallace seems to withhold explicating these connections until after the 200-page mark. Arguably, the real contours of the Big Plot come into (incomplete) focus in a discussion between Hal Incandenza and his brother Orin in pages 242-58. Getting to this scene is perhaps a demand on the patience of many readers. And, while the scene by no means telegraphs what happens in IJ, it nonetheless offers some promise that the set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes shall add up to Something Bigger. 

Some of those earliest set pieces, riffs, scenes, lists, and vignettes function almost as rhetorical obstacles for a first-time reader. The  novel’s opening scene, Hal Incandenza’s interview with the deans at the University of Arizona, is chronologically the last event in the narrative, and it dumps a lot of expository info on the reader. It also poses a number of questions or riddles about the plot to come, questions and riddles that frankly run the risk of the first-time reader’s forgetting through no fault of his own.

The second chapter of IJ is relatively short—just 10 pages—but it seems interminable, and it’s my guess that Wallace wanted to make his reader endure it the same way that the chapter’s protagonist–Erdedy, an ultimately very minor character—must endure the agonizing wait for a marijuana delivery. The chapter delivers the novel’s themes of ambivalence, desire, addiction, shame, entertainment, “fun,” and secrecy, both in its content and form. My guess is that this where a lot of new readers abandon the novel.

The reader who continues must then work through 30 more pages until meeting the novel’s heart, Don Gately, but by the time we’ve met him we might not trust just how much attention we need to pay him, because Wallace has shifted through so many other characters already. And then Gately doesn’t really show up again until, like, 200 pages later.

In Infinite Jest, Wallace seems to suspend or delay introducing the reading rules that we’ve been trained to look for in contemporary novels. While I imagine this technique could frustrate first-time readers, I want to reiterate that this suspension or delay or digression is indeed a technique, a rhetorical tool Wallace employs to perform the novel’s themes about addiction and relief, patience and plateaus, gratitude and forgiveness.

Where is a fair place to abandon Infinite Jest? 

I would urge first-time readers to stick with the novel at least until page 64, where they will be directed to end note 24, the filmography of J.O. Incandenza (I will not even discuss the idea of not reading the end notes. They are essential). Incandenza’s filmography helps to outline the plot’s themes and the themes’ plots—albeit obliquely. And readers who make it to the filmography and find nothing to compel them further into the text should feel okay about abandoning the book at that point.

What about a guide?

There are many, many guides and discussions to IJ online and elsewhere, as I noted above. Do you really need them? I don’t know—but my intuition is that you’d probably do fine without them. Maybe reread Hamlet’s monologue from the beginning of Act V, but don’t dwell too much on the relationship between entertainment and death. All you really need is a good dictionary. (And, by the way, IJ is an ideal read for an electronic device—the end notes are hyperlinked, and you can easily look up words as you read).

Still: Two online resources that might be useful are “Several More and Less Helpful Things for the Person Reading Infinite Jest,” which offers a glossary and a few other unobtrusive documents, and “Infinite Jest: A Scene-By-Scene Guide” which is not a guide at all, but rather a brief series of synopses of each scene in the novel, organized by page number and year; my sense is that this guide would be helpful to readers attempting to delineate the novel’s nonlinear chronology—however, I’d advise against peeking ahead. After you read you may wish to search for a plot diagram of the novel, of which there are several. But I’d wait until after.

An incomplete list of motifs readers new to Infinite Jest may wish to attend to

The big advantage (and pleasure) of rereading Infinite Jest is that the rereader may come to understand the plot anew; IJ is richer and denser the second go around, its themes showing brighter as its formal construction clarifies. The rereader is free to attend to the imagery and motifs of the novel more intensely than a first-time reader, who must suss out a byzantine plot propelled by a plethora of characters.

Therefore, readers new to IJ may find it helpful to attend from the outset to some of the novel’s repeated images, words, and phrases. Tracking motifs will help to clarify not only the novel’s themes and “messages,” but also its plot. I’ve listed just a few of these motifs below, leaving out the obvious ones like entertainment, drugs, tennis (and, more generally, sports and games), and death. The list is in no way definitive or analytic, nor do I present it as an expert; rather, it’s my hope that this short list might help a reader or two get more out of a first reading.

Heads

Cages

Faces

Masks

Teeth

Cycles

Maps

Waste

Infants

Pain

Deformities

Subjects

Objects

One final note

Infinite Jest is a rhetorical/aesthetic experience, not a plot.

[Ed. note: Biblioklept first posted a version of this note in the summer of 2015. Today marks the thirtieth anniversary of Infinite Jest’s publication. Wallace’s novel remains underread by overtalkers].

“Barricades of Welcome” — Pete Winslow

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“Barricades of Welcome”

by

Pete Winslow

Welcome from the Kiwanis and Rotary
Said the sign by the road block
Welcome said the mayor
Locking all doors with the key to the city
Each motel had a sign that said welcome
But the wind whistled through the rooms
And there was no furniture
The Chamber of Commerce gave you a map
Showing the way out of town
An angry mob carrying welcome signs
Chased you across the city limits
You could hear it for miles as you ran down the highway
An insane cry of welcome welcome welcome
You were well on your way to learning the language of
the place.

The Passage — Shyama Golden

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The Passage, 2022 by Shyama Golden (b. 1983)

Thomas Kendall’s How I Killed the Universal Man (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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I started Thomas Kendall’s second novel, How I Killed the Universal Man last night. Good stuff so far. Blurb from publisher Whisk(e)y Tit:

John Lakerman, alternative current affairs journalist for donkeyWolf media, is sent to participate and report on a clinical trial for a newly developed, biopharmaceutical, antidepressant. While researching the article, and the disappearance of its lead researcher, Lakerman is drawn into a complex world of body augmentations, migrant labour, billionaires, a Virtual Reality Game and a series of fatally seductive mutations.

How I Killed The Universal Man is a transhumanist noir taking place in a near future where environmental disaster and the advent of biological A.I is leading to the radical reorganisation of consciousness. A narrative about the unknown forces structuring narrative’s necessity, How I Killed The Universal Man begins from the premise that reality is always virtual.

“James A. Garfield and All the Shot People,” a poem by David Berman

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“James A. Garfield and All the Shot People”

by

David Berman

Insects are a manifestation of negative will.
—Anon.

I thought I saw an angel below the engine
but it was just vibrating air.

People used to see things
in the woods and the air and the closet:
spirits, dragons, and headless things,
lost and angry floats
conspiring to make every stomach pulse
like an almost accident
and every body’s head come unwound.

Our vision is not so fuzzy now.
We stare into eyes and see their parts,
have cameras, sidewalks, pills,
and other futuristic devices.
Some of our race have counted up into the highest numbers,
the high clear numbers.

Now we know the speed of light,
and that we never see anything just when it happens,
but a part of a second afterwards.
People are getting lost in their own houses,
wandering down hallways and through rooms for years.
We stumble downstairs full of water,
and when I wake up it all pours out of me.

From Caliban #8, 1990.

The issue also contains a few illustrations by Berman, including this one:

Mass-market Monday | Joanna Russ’s And Chaos Died

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And Chaos Died, Joanna Russ, 1970. Ace Books (n.d., c. 1978). No cover artist or designer credited. 189 pages.

From Samuel R. Delany’s review of And Chaos Died:

The first two pages of this hardcover reprint of And Chaos Died present the protagonist, Jai Vedh, as a quietly despairing modern man with a nearly psychotic desire to merge with the universe. Moreover, it is suggested that this essentially religious desire is a response to the meaninglessness and homogeneity of every day life. There is a vacuum inside him; and when, on a business trip in a spaceship that has taken him off the surface of Old Earth (“on which every place was like every other place, ” p. 9), he senses the great vacuum of space itself about the ship, the real vacuum and the psychological vacuum become confused. Propelled by his desire for mergence,

on the nineteenth day he threw himself against one of the portals, flattening himself as if in immediate collapse, the little cousin he had lived with all his life become so powerful in the vicinity of its big relative that he could not bear it. Everything was in imminent collapse. He was found, taken to sick bay, and shot full of sedatives. They told him, as he went under, that the space between the stars was full of light, full of matter — what was it someone had said, an atom in a cubic yard? — and so not such a bad place after all. He was filled with peace, stuffed with it, replete; the big cousin was trustworthy.

Then the ship exploded. (p. 10)

The place Jai Vedh comes to, along with the philistine captain of the exploded spaceship, is the first of Russ’s SF utopias. Noting the January 1970 publishing date on the original edition, and thus inferring 1968/1969 as the most probable time of composition, we may be tempted to read this particular utopia as a kind of arcadian fall-out of that decade’s ecological crusade. A more sensitive reader of SF will, however, notice its sources in SF works that substantially predate that crusade: the nameless planet of telepaths takes its form from Clarke’s Lys (the more ruralized companion city to mechanical Diaspar in The City and the Stars, 1953) and from the world in Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Touch of Your Hand” ( 1953). What characterizes this particular SF image is not rural technology, but advanced technology hidden behind a rural facade; not human communication in good faith, but ordinarily invisible communicational pathways (some form of ESP); and it is always left and then returned to.

Sunday Comix

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From “What Is Government?” by Clifford Peter Harper, a visual adaptation of text by Pierre Joseph Proudhon. Published in Anarchy Comics #3, July 1981, Last Gasp Comics.

Richard Hell’s Godlike (Book acquired, 23 Jan. 2026)

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Richard Hell’s 2005 novel Godlike is getting a new printing from NYRB. Godlike reimagines the volatile Verlaine–Rimbaud dyad as a 1970s No Wave New York collision of art, desire, and language language language. Symbolist rebellion transmutes into downtown punk nihilism, drugs, and poetry. This corrosive Künstlerroman was originally issued by Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery (an imprint of Akashic books). Read the description/blurb at NYRB; here’s a taste from Chapter 15, around the middle of the novel:

They spent the greatest amount of their time together reading and writing and sometimes talking in T’s apartment. These were probably their best times too despite being experienced largely as tedium. They preferred the times of thrills, but the thrills grew out of the tension; and the mild, mildly restless, half-frustrated times of the many nights and late afternoons of doing almost nothing in T’s apartment, or walking the streets without direction, were their true lives.

T’s room was like some kind of glum office in its lack of daylight and its featurelessness, but with the little pictures now tacked on the walls, and the typewriter and sheets of paper, and the drugs, it got some character. He’d picked up a few stray pieces of furniture on the streets, including a table and three chairs, crates for shelves, and a beat-up old oriental rug. There was a secondhand portable record player too and a few albums.

They drank coffee and beer and sometimes codeine cough syrup and sometimes smoked some grass or snorted a little THC or mescaline and every once in a while a tiny bit of heroin, but mostly they lay around and lazily, impatiently goofed and wrote and complained, goading each other. Sometimes in the middle of the night one of them would go out for a container of fresh ice cream from Gem’s Spa. They’d go to a movie sometimes, or wander the rows of used bookstores on Fourth Avenue, or drink in a bar, but most of t he time was spent in the dim back apartment.

The days and nights were as endless as wallpaper patterns. Boredom and irritation were normal and lengthened out into sometimes-mean giggles and into pages of writing. Writing was their pay. Books were reality. The room was a cruder dimension-poor annex to the pages of writing. The writing, as casual as it was—smeared eraseable typing-pages with revisions scribbled on and crumpled pages of rejected tries—was the brightly lit and wildly littered universe erupting out from the dark, poor, inexpressive room.

How odd is it to have as a purpose in life the aim of treating life-in the medium created for the purpose of coldly corresponding to it, words—as raw material for amusing variations on itself? Sometimes T. and Paul fantasized about this, imagining themselves as godlike philosopher poets encouched in the advanced civilization, languorously sipping their fermented grain as they spun ideas and mental-sensual constructions of life-language in the air for the pleasure of their own delectation.

 

Read “Even Greenland,” a perfect short story by Barry Hannah

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“Even Greenland”

by

Barry Hannah

I was sitting radar. Actually doing nothing.

We had been up to seventy-five thousand to give the afternoon some jazz. I guess we were still in Mexico, coming into Mirimar eventually in the F-14. It doesn’t much matter after you’ve seen the curvature of the earth. For a while, nothing much matters at all. We’d had three sunsets already. I guess it’s what you’d call really living the day.

But then, “John,” said I, “this plane’s on fire.”

“I know it,” he said.

John was sort of short and angry about it.

“You thought of last-minute things any?” said I.

“Yeah. I ran out of a couple of things already. But they were cold, like. They didn’t catch the moment. Bad writing,” said John.

“You had the advantage. You’ve been knowing,” said I.

“Yeah. I was going to get a leap on you. I was going to smoke you. Everything you said, it wasn’t going to be good enough,” said he.

“But it’s not like that,” said I. “Is it?”

The wings were turning red. I guess you’d call it red. It was a shade against dark blue that was mystical flamingo, very spaceylike, like living blood. Was the plane bleeding?

“You have a good time in Peru?” said I.

“Not really,” said John. “I got something to tell you. I haven’t had a ‘good time’ in a long time. There’s something between me and a good time since, I don’t know, since I was was twenty-eight or like that. I’ve seen a lot, but you know I haven’t quite seen it. Like somebody’s seen it already. It wasn’t fresh. There were eyes that used it up some.”

“Even high in Mérida?” said I.

“Even,” said John.

“Even Greenland?” said I.

John said, “Yes. Even Greenland. It’s fresh, but it’s not fresh. There are footsteps in the snow.”

“Maybe,” said I, “you think about in Mississippi when it snows, when you’re a kid. And you’re the first up and there’s been nobody in the snow, no footsteps.”

“Shut up,” said John.

“Look, are we getting into a fight here at the moment of death? We going to mix it up with the plane’s on fire?”

“Shut up! Shut up!” Said John. Yelled John.

“What’s wrong?” said I.

He wouldn’t say anything. He wouldn’t budge at the controls. We might burn but we were going to hold level. We weren’t seeking the earth at all.

“What is it, John?” said I.

John said, “You son of a bitch, that was mine—that snow in Mississippi. Now it’s all shot to shit.”

The paper from his kneepad was flying all over the cockpit, and I could see his hand flapping up and down with the pencil in it, angry.

“It was mine, mine, you rotten cocksucker! You see what I mean?”

The little pages hung up on the top, and you could see the big moon just past them.

“Eject! Save your ass!” said John.

But I said, “What about you, John?”

John said, “I’m staying. Just let me have that one, will you?”

“But you can’t,” said I.

But he did.

Celeste and I visit the burn on the blond sand under one of those black romantic worthless mountains five miles or so out from Mirimar base.
I am a lieutenant commander in the reserve now. But to be frank, it shakes me a bit even to run a Skyhawk up to Malibu and back.

Celeste and I squat in the sand and say nothing as we look at the burn. They got all the metal away.

I don’t know what Celeste is saying or thinking, I am aso absorbed myself and paralyzed.

I know I am looking at John’s damned triumph.

Posted in Art

“News,” a poem by Grace Paley

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“News”

by

Grace Paley

although we would prefer to talk
and talk it into psychological the-
ory the prevalence of small genocides
or the recent disease floating
toward us from another continent we
must not     while she speaks her eyes
frighten us     she is only one person
she tells us the terrible news     we
want to leave the room we may not
we must listen     in this wrong world this
is what     we must do     we must bear it

On the Way to Athens — Ludwig Schwarzer

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On the Way to Athens by Ludwig Schwarzer (1912-1989)

Guillermo Stitch’s The Coast of Everything (Book acquired, early Jan. 2026)

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Guillermo Stitch’s follow up to 2020’s Lake of Urine is The Coast of Everything, an enormous seven-hundred-and-something pager that with a matryoshka doll (decon)structure. I really liked Lake of Urine, a zany, slapstick surreal adventure story. The Coast of Everything of course intrigues me. It’s also pretty big! It’s been staring at me for a few weeks now, daring me to plunge into something deep. (I’ve been reading only short stories and nonfiction so far this year — story collections by Joy Williams and Robert Bingham, and a depressing and engrossing book called The Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp.) So anyway, I dipped in this afternoon, read the preamble, I suppose you would call it, and then dug into the first of what I take to be connected/nested novellas, “The Tale of the Enchanted Road.” I plan to keep swimming.

Indie publisher Sagging Meniscus’s blurb:

To find the center, begin at the edge…

A daughter’s devotion parts her from her father. A dutiful soldier sentences his daughter to a loveless exile and her mother to madness. With her last breath a dying woman exhales the whole world. A young girl with a broken body holds it up.

Their nested stories bleed into one another: tributaries in search of a common sea; parched souls in search of an oasis; ink racing through blotting paper.

A book with no ending and endless beginnings, The Coast of Everything—the long-awaited second novel from the author of Lake of Urine—is an astonishing masterpiece, epic, unfurling, baffling and beguiling. A gumshoe noir, a space opera; a multiverse melodrama, an adventure; a leap of faith, a call to prayer and a call to arms. It is a notification of our first duty wherever our humanity is threatened: to persist.

Includes two free recipes.

I’ve concluded that whiteness is an American invention | Ishmael Reed

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I’ve concluded that whiteness is an American invention. In Europe people have their cathedrals, ancient towns and cities, paintings, opera houses, that have been there for centuries. They have their roots. They’re secure. In the United States we have people who call themselves ‘white.’ They don’t say they’re Irish, or French, or German, or Swedish . . . just white.

The white middle class, however, is in more trouble now than the blacks were thirty years ago. With all the big migrations, this country is not going to be all-white, all English-speaking, in a few years. Of course these migrations, changes, are enriching their culture. But they don’t see it that way. The white middle class has a settler mentality: very paranoid, insecure, embattled. They become more and more isolated. What this class forms at this point in time is a group of people who call themselves white and who feel that their experience is the only permanent, historically viable experience, that everyone else’s—Afro-American, Latin, whatever—is just a short term fad. This point of view affects American education, politics, culture, the psyche.

The white settler culture can’t relate to other cultures. There’s more resistance to cultural change in the United States than in almost any country. But just as there’s transformation, now, from the old technology to a high technology, there’s a transition going on from a settler to an international culture, and this only increases the white settler’s sense of being embattled, and increases anxiety and paranoia.

From persons who are spokespersons for this settler culture, you aren’t going to get an accurate reading of reality. It’s too paranoid. It’s appropriate they have a white settler cowboy for a leader. But I feel sorry for Reagan. I think what’s happened to him is probably the worst tragedy since what happened to the salesman in Arthur Miller’s play. It’s pathetic that he’s been used as he has. He’s just another expendable front man.

The white male can’t rule the roost anymore. He’s in a terrible position. The kind of power he had is disappearing, and looked at over the longer historical view, he didn’t even have power that long. It’s become difficult to be a white man. I didn’t think I’d ever hear myself say that…

A white man…is some kind of homogenized, standardized profile that occurred in the United States. It began in a Yankee puritanical ideal that these old patriarchs, codgers, elders, who formed our leadership class, men like the Mathers and Jonathan Edwards who built the Ivy League schools our  leaders—like George Bush, for instance—went to, a man who’s just ignorant, who talks about voodoo economics. Being a white man is an ideal that comes out of that matrix. I guess you would call it ‘patrix.’ All white men—and white women—are supposed to mold themselves in that ideal. They’re supposed to give up their ethnic roots—Polish, Irish, French—and become some kind of bland homogenized… supermen. Some kind of Rocky, the white male wish fulfillment. There’s a lot of narcissism, too, in the white man’s ideal. But this white macho swaggering stuff, the Yankee ideal and old Puritan myth of self help, discipline, self-sufficiency—all that transcendental moralizing you get with Emerson—it doesn’t work in this world. It worked at a time when a man could go out and hunt and fish and raise cattle. But now, more and more white males can’t make it, can’t do it, can’t be successful at it. And then they start striking out.

From “A Conversation with Ishmael Reed” with Judith Moore. First published in Express: The East Bay’s Free Weekly, 18 Feb. 1983; reprinted in Conversations with Ishmael Reed, 1995, UP Mississippi.

Sunday Comix

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From “Dr. Deluxe” by J. Gaccione (signed as Chicken Delight), published in Yellow Dog #17, March, 1970, The Print Mint.