### *Under the Mountain Wall* by Peter Mattheissen (10/24/2025) Another Mattheissen book writing about splendors of nature -- confirming his status as the writer who finds ways ways to weave nature, science, poetry, and curiosity in sentences the way that best resonates in my brain. Short summery: Mattheissen is the chronicler of the lives of a set of people living in Papua New Guinea, whose lives are completely untouched by modernity, even into the 1960s. WWII is over, the first atomic bomb has been launched, and the people of these tribes still live their lives as if no advancements in technology had made it from pre-Mesopotamia to themselves. Two passages from the book will probably stay with me the longest. First, the funeral rites of Asuk-Palek, a warrior who dies in combat. This is the most detailed of the passages in the book about what funerals are like for the people, and it includes sitting the body in a chair so all can sit before it and weep, as well as passages of day-long chanting/wailing/moaning in grief. To drive away ghosts, to give honor to the dead. Then, the body is burned, and the bones remain. These bones become wards, talismans, and charms. Many pigs are slaughtered. Then, the death of the boy Weake, whose murder at the hands of a raiding tribe is the momentum of the second half of the book. His death passage feels like a great loss for the people, and his last breaths and moments are very alive in the book. It can be a bit shocking to the modern senses to see the ritual of taking a body that has been pieced with spears and is bleeding out, but still alive, dipped in a muddy puddle. At the book's apex, the tribe of Weake, the boy who died (led by the chief Weaklowe), take upon themselves a war with those who murdered Weake. Yet the whole time, it occurs to the writer that this war, this endless cycle of vengence and murder, is itself a kind of sport between the people -- who are willing to call off the war to chase doves with spears before resuming minutes later. It is a kind of cultural engagement between the peoples whose symbols, motives, and cycles are somehow both ever-present and lost to time. The closing passage hit two particularly poignant images. First, Tukum, a young boy known as the swineherd, decides to take upon himself a new life -- so he takes his one material possession (a cowrie belt) and heads to a new village. His mother is gone and he is routinely mocked for his station as the pig herder. Then, to close: messengers from another tribe come to talk about how one of their own was killed by a "sound that echoed the mountains" -- no doubt a reference to a gun, and how modernity has come for this way of life at last. Almost as an afterthought, they include, how new butterflies have appeared for which there is no word in the language -- Matthiessen pointing toward invasive species many years before it was in vogue. To be born a woman in a pre-writing society is not an easy life. It is full of labor, rape, and disregard. Men are the chief characters of the book, and women are mostly regulated to domestic labor which support the men's needs and lifestyles -- in some sense, not that different than some modern societies, but with much more violence. A lovely portal into the lives lived by people who are not ourselves, and the reason to own books: be surrounded by the lives of people who we are not, to know that to embody one's self in the world is not fixed to all-time. Yet, somehow, it is hard not to feel wrong for having seen into this should-be-gone world, where knowing what we know now about germs, disease, and indigenous immune systems, having white people from Harvard follow you and chronicle your existence is a doom to that kind of existence itself. I rarely feel like Matthiessen is fetishistic about the people he is memorializing, but the endeavor itself is the fetish. ### The Despair of the Young by Mary Gaitskill https://marygaitskill.substack.com/p/the-despair-of-the-young "... and the madness of academia" is the subtitle. I'm not entirely sure this subtitle fits the entirety of what is poignant about this essay into five words, but Gaitskill does a fantastic job of capturing some quality beyond a triangulation of despair -- or at least, a quality too sophisticated to put into five words. Gaitskill puts into words a self-pity-less account of what it's like to grow up in a world quite unlike, and quite better, than the world in which we ask young people to mature today. Instead, she illustrates through a pair of stories (or two primary ones) intertwined. The story of a young man named Luke, more contemporary, and another of Don, in the 90s. Both of these young men wrote disturbing, violent fiction for their college courses. Don's work, much more violent, creepier -- really murder porn -- paired with unsettling behavior, also fell flat as written work. The class more or less tolerates it, but only out of fear because he is a legitimately fear-inducing person. Luke writes much better fiction that is still violent and perhaps indulgent, but it is more tasteful, and based on Gaitskill's interrogation of the author, does seem to come from a place of genuine writer's expression and character curiosity, rather than just shocking images for their own sake. Luke's education career is stymied by repeated mental health counseling that the author implies gets his education more off-track than on-track, while Don's life unfolds somewhere away from the essay where we learn he is actually someone who has been acting strangely on campus for 10 years in various characters. Why are these stories useful in parallel? Not because it is a good thing that Don walked away from this class into his random-event-generator life with the purpose of scaring women, nor is it a good thing that Luke's university life is inverted due to his inability to realize his words/work is not "appropriate," for the time. In fact, Gaitskill tells him early in response to possibly turning in a particularly scandalous story (and he is going out of his way to professionally ask for permission to do this, just just seeking forgiveness later): "No.  Not in this climate.  It would cause a big fuss and frankly I don’t want to deal with it. People would go nuts, the dean’s office would get involved, it would be a crisis.  I mean, maybe later on you could ask the class how they would feel about it?   Maybe if they got to know you?" Luke declines, and drops out by the end. Gaitskill does not spend much time languishing the loss, but does note that she finds Luke to be a symptom of something much bigger: the horror, dire circumstances of the student fiction she sees in 2025 (rapes, assaults, violence) feels much more authentic to the life of the mind of the 2020s college goer. So little of it feels contrived. Good emerging writers, in spaces where "anything goes" or they are allowed to feel like their work is allowed to express itself independently, flounder. They don't have sufficient boxiness to their criticisms of writing or language -- they fling "toxic masculinity" toward any unlikeable male character, regardless if it is true. Part of this discrepancy is because college is for learning how to be a good writer and critic, which requires first being a bad writer and critic. But it runs deeper: sitting in the murk of our constant, highly visual wars on the world's oil-rich poor, the surveillance state, the hyper-partisan propaganda. The cold truth of America's globe-spanning, blood-soaked machinery splitting biomes like atoms cannot be bandaged over by universities hiring psychologists to clear the universities of possible legal repercussions when these young people take their own lives. Institutional responses are not responses; the most red-eyed tiktok issuing a public apology was likely filmed three times. I see these symbols every day. When entering my job, at a university, I park my car and head out of the garage. At the bottom of the stairwell are two signs, the first-last transcriptions of the system into which I walk. A sign with a minstrel-looking homeless-coded insect, standing next to a trashcan, tossing some garbage. The sign says "don't be a litter bug." The second is a sign that simply says "You are enough," with the university's emergency self-help phone number. ### The Great Believers by Rebekah Makkai The worst part of this book is the fact it exists at all. A story of calamity -- because tragedy is what happens to only person, or very few. Calamity is the story of many tragedies simultaneously; is impossible to tell at once. You can only ever see a calamity one face at a time. The AIDS epidemic of the 80s is one such event. *The Great Believers* is one such face. The inciting event of the book, the death of Nico, in chapter one, creates a hundred small tentacles that reach out and lash the future. Yale, the protagonist, suffers and loses and mourns and weeps, then dies too. This is obvious from the second chapter on. Instead you have gay men, each one falling victim to the same disease by virtue of their particular vices: Nico, Terrance, Charlie. Yale's best friends, lovers, acquaintances, lost to the disease which eradicated gay man like bombs eradicate cities. Impossibly fast, then impossibly slow. Thirty years after Chapter one, our deuteragonist, Fiona, searches for her daughter in Paris. These chapters are brisk and feel like the connective tissue between the book's organs, alternating with the chapters set in the 80s. The overall plot of Fiona's arc is not really flimsy, but is thin, and it feels this way until the final quarter of the book because only then do you begin to sense the real weight of the burden Fiona carries in her appearances during the 80s sequences. That the only survivors of the AIDS epidemic in her community refer to her as a living saint is almost understatement. "To live so devoted to the life of others you'll never get the chance to understand or fully mourn, and therefore fail to be the person for others that you could have been" is the book's pseudo through-line. As you learn the story of Nora's family, you see a giant allegory for the gay elders of the modern day take shape. I think the book would fail to tell a story of the AIDS crisis, while even remotely conveying the sense of human loss contained, within if it contained a single number, a single factoid or statistic. The desires of the characters are unquantifiable desires, and that is what makes statistics fail to compartmentalize within the narrative. So when the individual plagues of the disease hits the characters, it hurts the reader. The sequence of Yale spiraling into death, when he is at last contained within only his mind and slipping out of life, is horror writing. It's pulpy, elegant, elemental too. The spattering realization of Terrance's (and Nico's) cat, Roscoe, being likely dead in the apartment, neglected for over two weeks, was so anxiety inducing to me I had to put the phone down and call someone (thx kcw). Roscoe lives, you'll be happy to know. Which is what makes it so hard when Roscoe is brought to Yale's deathbed, and Yale acknowledges it as the last thing he will ever touch that is not his own hands or a hospital bed. If you are capable of being turned into a pillar of salt, this is when it might happen. I felt the last time I ever had Baxter's fur in my hands. It's not the same, I know, but it is one of the sensory images that I will always have, and this book made me feel like it is important enough to memorialize. Makkai's prose is long, sometimes sprawling. I thought she was a much better plot-writer than sentence-writer. The chapters sometimes felt like I was zoning out of interest in the story before, in the final 300 words, Makkai ropes me back in. Yet, I also think that when you fall into a story that contains such depth of person, such heft of subject, such severity of senses, it is better to say too much than to say not enough. If you are reading for the purpose of learning how to be a better writer (which I am and it is the primary reason I've turned to fiction recently), I find *The Great Believers* to be a not-so-great for teaching __how to write__, but a gripping, poignant example of __how to write about__. The reason being: it will never be possible to say enough, let alone too much. If one thousand writers each wrote one thousand *The Great Believer's*, which we all took the time to reach individually a thousand times over, only then would we satiate the cavity of human dignity suffered by the generation of queer people who were lost to a disease that the most powerful people in the world found appalling, yes, but tantalizingly virtuous. A disease that systemically pillages the immune systems of gay men, drug users, and (disproportionately) Black people was, is, the Reaganite's wet dream. We all lose when the most powerful people in the world let such a nightmare -- a genuine living, breathing, unescapable nightmare as the AIDS virus is to Yale and his friends -- annihilate their enemies. One day, maybe ten days after finishing the book, I had a dream about Terrance and Nico, how I lost them myself, and cried through my dream for them to return. There is no silver lining to the AIDS epidemic. We are lucky, still, to have *The Great Believers*. ### *Hamlet* by Shakespeare Unknownth were I th' fabl'd quill o' th' Bard On whose papyrus did majesty o'er spill, and herald did he sketch name eternal: the great writer. Be dunce, me who cann't 'ntuit from lack of performance known what play, on Globe's hallo'd stage, did pass thee the monument of play extr'ordinair. Hark! Were not I the fool, shallow puddle IQ from whose primordial ooze did first waves o' thought crest, I mid'st known what form great stage doth make. Yet I am poet. Scrib'lr o' the dots of I's and cross th' T's, thusly keen what lyrical grip Shake's Speare coils 'round throat of songs prim'or'dial. There no more magnif'cent the line be in all of lines' past than the pen'o'meter o' iambs that Bard rests to page. No other nimble pen compare to thee, none o'er the land agile or swift as thee from margin hence to margin ho. His protag'nist Hamlet, Prince'd Denmark, soliloquies for thee aught be named; foil, his ghastly uncle, to hell be banned; father, ghostly, perturb'd to roam halls endless; of great Horatio falls burd'n o' story told. Ophelia! Your wat'ry sufr'ge I'll join, see you in sweet serenity. ### *Macbeth* by Shakespeare More once I enjoin William o' Avon in drama, greatest tragedy o'erfall the realm o' Scotland 'n history's history of bloodlet. Thi' story Macbeth, most foul harem sor'sres'es his fate they for'see -- king of Scotts he must be, drove last, most fatal, most final t' insanity. Wife Macbeth, known no name o'er, saunt'r sleep'ly, confess her hands ochre, marr'd a barn's ruby hue, then t' guilty hysterics pass fr'm 'er world t' next. In meditation the reign'd tyrant Macbeth's choir doth app'r more perfect'd than the perform'd troupe o' Hamlet, though the superior personage, the character on whose might might be summit is t' mine eyes Hamlet. What sparks! Ferocity! Doth these acts know no relent? Murther! Murther! On stage another drop'd corpse doth dirge toward an earthworm's consume. To mine own sense seems fair: Billy Shakes is what the prophets turn toward the star Sirius to see, the lumin'st star th' sky o'er. Nay -- Shakespeare's not our pinhole toward heaven's silv'ry light, no, he th' sun, orbit around which all we might. Unknown knowledge, untom'd recipe, our helioc'ntric univers'tality.