A few months ago I passed one of my neighbours out on the street, perched halfway up a tree with a hatchet in his hand. He’s in his seventies, maybe close to eighty, and he was up this narrow tree balanced somehow on a thin branch and a ladder he’d leaned against and which had come from the 1960s or something. Anyhow, there he was, perched with a hatchet in his hand as he took to a tree branch to hack it off. I offered to help (actually I offered to cut his branch off) but he told me, rather gleefully, that he had everything under control. I suppose he did. My theory is that he has a chainsaw but just likes hatchet work.

I started reading a collection by John Crowley a couple of weeks ago called Novelties and Souvenirs. It was published in 2004 or so, about the time I bought it, I suspect, and it collects all of Crowley’s short fiction at the time. In the next twenty years he went on to publish a bunch of other fiction so the book only really covers half of it now. Such is life, I guess. Anyhow: Crowley died at the start of August and I guess that was the reason I went and found this little book on my selves. A lot of people I know rate Crowley very highly, especially his 1981 novel, Little, Big. I haven’t read it. In fact, until I opened this book, I hadn’t read much of Crowley at all.

Novelties and Souvenirs is a bit up and down to be honest. I don’t think it’s Crowley’s best showing and is, perhaps, not the place to start if you haven’t read anything before. There’s a very good novella in it called ‘Great Work of Time’, however, and that alone is worth the purchase of the book. It won a World Fantasy Award in 1990, if that means anything to you. The piece is about a secret society of time travellers who want to ensure that the British Empire remains the dominant power. The intervention creates alternate timelines and changes things greatly, resulting at some point in lizard people, even. It’s a little funny in that way. You can have the British Empire so long as you accept that there will be lizard people is, you feel, a deal Nigel Farrage would organise. Rise up my cold blooded brothers! But maybe I’m being unkind to the lizards. Maybe lizard people wouldn’t want anything to do with Farrage, or any of the others like him. Maybe they’d have standards and would reject him and prefer to live in the middle of the planet. You never know. At any rate, the story moves along pretty well. It sort of suggests that Crowley liked work when he could have some space, and he has a style that enjoys time as well. I wouldn’t say Crowley was the most economical of writers, at least from my limited experience, and he feels cramped and under developed in a lot of the short pieces within the book.

I don’t know that Novelties and Souvenirs convinced me to read Little, Big or any of Crowley’s other books, but it didn’t convince me not to.

I watched Craig Gillespie’s Supergirl as well. I thought it was fine and didn’t really understand what all the noise was about. It’s funny to think that the guy who made Lars and the Real Girl, a movie about an awkward man who starts a relationship with a RealDoll, made this film. Maybe that’s why some were against it.

I liked Supergirl more than Superman to be honest. I thought Superman played like episodes four and five of season three of a TV show. It never really felt like a movie, whereas Supergirl does. I liked Milly Alcock’s drunk, lost, lonely Klara. She’s a much more interesting character than Clark who is upright, righteous and trying to do right. Gunn’s film tried to subvert this in the backstory a little, but it never really changed the fact that the character just isn’t all that interesting. I know, I know, plenty of people will say otherwise, and to each their own. I’ve just never been able to make myself care about Superman. Unsurprisingly, then, I preferred Supergirl. It’s a simple little thing, and I was pretty happy with the film. Supergirl eyebeams some people, beats up some others, has a few drinks, rescues some enslaved girls, and saves her dog. Not really sure why anyone complained, other than for those weird, embarrassing reasons that guys ought to be a bit ashamed to be going on about. I mean, really.

Things are otherwise moving along. At the start of the year I wrote myself a list of things that I wanted to get written by the end of the year. I have three big projects and a couple of collections I want to flesh out and finish. I don’t reckon I’ll finish any of them by the end of the year. It’s the way of things, I guess. But they’ve all made solid progress, some in surprising (but good) ways and I think I’ll get the big one (new novel) done some time early next year. Just got to keep writing, really.

Ben

(Ben Peek is the author of nine books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His most recent book is called The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare Magazine, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)

I did manage to get myself right (or my immune system got me right, at any rate) by the end of the week and I saw Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge. It was released in 1970 and I never thought I’d get the chance to watch it in a cinema, much less on a print, but last Friday I did. It was pretty great even if people clapped at the end. For some reason it happens a lot in films nowadays and I don’t really understand why.

Anyhow: Le Cercle Rouge follows Corey (Alain Delon), a thief, who is about to be released from prison. The night before he is let out a prison guard comes into his cell and tells him about a job. The job is, you discover in time, the robbery of a jewel store. Along the way Corey helps a recently escaped prisoner evade capture, Vogel (Gian Maria Volenté), and the two of them agree to do the job together. The two later recruit Jansen (Yves Montand), an alcoholic marksman who was once a police officer. They are pursued by Inspector Mattei (André Bourvil), a cop with three cute cats, and from who Vogel first escapes.

Le Cercle Rouge is a stripped back, stylish minimalist crime film. It’s free of the witty dialogue or machinations that you’ll find in a lot of modern crime films nowadays (or back then, I guess). It works on chance and happenstance and for a long time you think Corey and the others are in control, but they never are. It has a brooding quiet that signals the waiting failure. The cast of Le Cercle Rouge is mostly male and the costumes and cars and sets are all extremely stylised and this exemplifies the kind of noir film Melville made towards the end of his life. Three of them – this one and Un Flic and Le Samouraï – star Alain Delon and form a sort of linked trilogy and they’re all the same in this regard. Women are particularly under served in Le Cercle Rouge but it would be wrong of me to say that there are good roles for them in the other films. Catherine Deneuve is probably best served in Un Flic but even then it’s a bit thankless. Un Flic stars Richard Crenna, who would later play Colonel Trautman in the Rambo films. He’s given a good role in Un Flic, a film that has a great opening, but is marred by some dodgy model work in the middle. My favourite of these three films, however, is Le Samouraï. It’s about a professional hit man and it’s just about perfect in its quiet and its nihilism. No other professional killer movie comes close.

This year I’ve watched more films on print (as you’re probably sick of hearing) than I have otherwise and it’s drawn me back out to regular cinema going. It’s nice that there’s a bit of a revival going, really. Nice also that these old films are still around and still preserved, rather than suffering the fate that most did back in the day. One of my pleasures in an increasingly less pleasurable social media is watching people save prints. I suppose it’s a sign that I’m old now, but there you go.

(I don’t have anything against new releases, though many feel like they’re not really for me, and I thus don’t bother seeing them. I’m not terribly bothered by this. I know some people talk about it but honestly there’s plenty of old stuff to watch. There’s a lifetime of films, really, for me to go through. If whatever new comes out only appeals to me here and there, I’m okay.)

I finished up Kathe Koja’s Velocities a little before I got sick. It’s a great collection of dark, weird stories. It opens with a piece called ‘At Eventide’, a story about a man coming to a woman’s house to have a box made. It’s maybe my favourite piece in the collection and works with an elegant sort of darkness built around a woman who lives alone and who makes memory boxes and who doesn’t want to make one for the man who has come to see her. You never quite know what the boxes hold, though it’s teased. It’s the absence of this knowledge that builds the promise and horror, though. The story is mostly focused on the man’s trip to see the woman and her experience of him before, and it works great. Other stories, such as ‘The Marble Lily’, ‘Urb Civ’ and ‘Velocities’ are also great examples of Koja at her stylish work. The last story is presented as an interview between a reporter and an artist who can’t escape the memory of his father.

Velocities is a small collection. There’s thirteen stories in it, but most of the pieces don’t really go that long. I’ve become, recently, interested in how other writers work their small, compact pieces, and Koja has the skill well on display in this collection. Mostly, I think, she does it through absence, through suggestion rather than explanation, or detail. Koja works on the edges of uncertainty, works in a world that is crumbling around her narrator, and perhaps her reader as well. The final story in the collection, ‘Pas De Deux’ feels like the best example of this as Koja tracks a path of self destructive through obsession after an abusive relationship. There’s a real skill in doing what Koja does so stylishly and so economically. Well worth a look.

Anyhow, think that’s enough for the day. Winter feels like its over. It’s hasn’t been too long of a season, I don’t think, but it has had some cold days and nights and I’ll be happy to see the back of that.

Take care.

Ben.

(Ben Peek is the author of nine books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His most recent book is called The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare Magazine, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)

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