Wave Break: What's New, What's Good
A quick overview of what I've been up to and where I'm going
I’ve been doing this thing for about a year, so there’s probably no better time to let you know what the hell is going on!
Here’s a rundown of what I’m doing, what I’m going to do, what I’m reading, who I’m inspired by, and, well, a whole lot of self-promotion, because what the hell else am I going to do here? I might be broke, but I’m not running a charity.
But, before we begin, why don’t you click on that subscribe button?
Who am I? I’m James Kislingbury. Writer. General layabout. Man about town. If you’re here, you probably already know who I am (because I told you personally, “Hey, I’m writing a newsletter and I’m putting short stories up on it, you should subscribe to it.” I might have also threatened you. If that’s the case, I am sorry, but it did work).
You can follow me on Tiktok, Twitter, and Instagram. . . or you can just click on the link tree here. If I think of anything else, I’ll let you know.
Here’s my cat (and Wedbert)!
This originally started as a place to show of my fiction writing. Unfortunately, I think too highly of my own opinions for it to stay that way.
It then quickly evolved as a place to put other writing, namely, but not exclusively my media criticism. I majored in that sort of thing, so it’s always been a part of my writing life, either as liner notes and the odd review on A Quality Interruption’s Patreon or, God forbid, my blogspot (which I haven’t touched since the first week of the lockdown and I haven’t even thought about in years). It’s good to stretch these muscles out in
If you haven’t seen it, I’ve been doing mostly Star Wars reviews. The latest of these is on The Acolyte, a show that’s much better than the discourse would indicate and still not as good as it needs to be. You can read the first installment here and work your way backwards.
For some reason I’m sad that I’m out of episodes. It wasn’t great, but it was nice to have something to look forward to every Tuesday. As uneven as the show was, I’m actually looking forward to whatever they do next with the series, which is something that The Last Jedi— even Andor1, couldn’t accomplish2. More specifically, it’s not something I thought I was capable of after The Rise of Skywalker. I suppose, if anything else, that makes The Acolyte a success.
I put out a World War II short story about three GIs trapped in a tank at the tail end of the war in Europe. It’s called Calving in an Iron Coffin. It’s fun, it’s gorey, it’s weird, and, importantly, it’s short. Twenty minutes if you’re taking your time (and why wouldn’t you want to savor this bit of late-War pulp, huh?).
I wrote this one years ago during a particularly prolific period and unlike a lot of the stuff I was writing at that time, it required very little work to make it acceptable. Sometimes you just have to write something to get it out there and sometimes you have to write something so you can move on to the thing you actually want to write, the thing that’s actually worth reading. Calving, fortunately wasn’t one of those forlorn stories destined for the Junk Drawer. It cleaned up pretty well. I think you should read the darn thing.
What am I reading?
A lot of things, as it turns out— and also fewer things than back when I had a real job.
One writer I’ve found myself coming back to is Magen Cubed. She’s a non-fiction writer and, ostensibly, a media critic (not that she doesn’t criticize media, but she seems much too clever to put into a box that mundane). Besides the fact that she writers pretty often about Neon Genesis Evangelion, what I dig about her work is that it looks back at the past and manages to make something previous out of memories of that time without it relying on nostalgia3. Her writing seems to be constantly contending with something that’s been lost, that she does not quite have a name for.
Anyways, she’s doing the Lord’s work out there and I’m looking forward to whatever she writes next.
(Her latest piece also reminds me of I Saw the TV Glow, so if you want a little primer on that, you should read my review on it. Spoiler: I think it’s really well done and scared the hell out of me in ways I don’t think I will ever fully understand. Oh yeah, and you should watch it. Go support art by people that aren’t jerks liek me.)
While I’ve done fewer Smoke Break Fictions (you know, stories you can read on your smoke break), I did manage to get one out recently
The Lot was inspired by a recent visit to a Taco Bell, of all things. It was late at night which is, traditionally, when you find yourself ordering exactly too much garbage food. It’s not the sort of mistake you make in the light of day. It reminded me of a lot of nights I had as a younger man, wasting time, driving around, moving through the world seemingly alone in my shit box car. I think there’s something universal about being alone in the middle of the night. Not quite said, but far from happy. I don’t miss those days, but it’s nice to revisit them sometimes.
For that matter, Sound and Visions I and Sound and Visions II is a bit of a riff on that feeling, as well.
As far as the other stories I wanted to do with SBF, a couple of them got out of hand. Sometimes five-hundred words just isn’t enough (and that time is most times). One of those stories was The Business at the Aztec, which is another entry in my raft of dirtbag fictions. I love stories like this. Just idiots butting up against dangers that they don’t understand. Also, they are drunks. Also, they are in some sunblasted version of California. Also, they drive a hyperspecific car that Donut probably did a video on.4
As far as my actual micro fiction is concerned, keep an eye out, but don’t blink, because, well, they’re real small.
As always, the podcast, A Quality Interruption, continues in spite of all data saying that we should stop?
After a few personal delays (including a COVID scare— we’re all fine, thank you), we’ve been pumping them out. Just in the past week we’ve done Perfromance (1970), The Silent Partner (1978), and Miracle (2004). Our next episode will be on the regressive Western classic, The Wild Bunch (1969).
As of this exact moment, I’m re-watching Confidential Report AKA Mr. Arkadin, which, for whatever reason, might as well be a lost film for how few people talk about it. It’s odd, because not only was it written, directed, and stared by Orson Welles, it’s also a great little film.
It’s a scrungy, little scary film noir about the chaos of post-War Europe. An arthouse thriller that plays like The Third Man by way of Touch of Evil. It was the first Orson Welles film I ever saw and it’s still one of my favorite— and still criminally underrated.
I mean, it’s no Citizen Kane, but what is?
Anyways, more on the podcast in a moment.
As far as what else I’ve been reading, I’ve been working my way through The Power and the Glory. I always considered myself a Graham Greene fan and having bounced off of The Heart of the Matter, I have come to the suspect that maybe that I don’t actually like Graham Greene. His short story work is great— pithy, to the point, and funny— and his genre work, like Our Man In Havana is a lot of fun, too.
The Third Man is also an epochal story and easily one of the best things to happen in the English language since, I don’t know, Canterbury Tales (but not that one). The Quiet American is also a great work. It’s a frightening, confusing book (and movie), and one that is, critically, steeped in genre. Knowing all that, it makes some sense that I’ve deluded myself this way.
The Power and the Glory has corrected me on this front. Nothing much at all happens in this book except for an Englishman talking about a faith he doesn’t share in a country he doesn’t like. I didn’t like Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano either, but at least that turned out to be a great film (it probably helps that John Huston, unlike Greene, didn’t hate Mexico). Greene, when he’s trying to be serious, comes off as a tremendous bore. There’s only so much interest I have in Greene’s particular form of English guilt.5
I know coming out against one of the hundred greatest novels in the English language makes me out to be something of a philistine, but on the other hand: Fuck it. If you can’t squeeze a good yarn out of a priest hunt, that’s on you. The back of the novel talks about the priest being too human to be a martyr, but reading this book, I don’t see a single human being. I see cartoon characters with ethnic garb vaguely draped over them and, let me tell you, that works much better when you’re going for a laugh than when you’re going for empathy. In the future, I think I’ll stick to his “entertainments.”
(Anyways, now I’m reading the third omnibus volume of Vagabond. I need to read Gretchen Felker-Martin’s newest novel, Cuckoo, but right now I need to wash the taste of Graham Greene out of my mouth with some good, old-fashioned sad boy samurais).
Oh yeah, and I’m going to grad school. Not really anything to know about that. Nothing you can really do about that. Just thought you should know.
Now that we’re at the end, I’m going to beg for money one last time. Why am I begging for money? Well, because money can be used in exchange for goods and services and I like goods and services. If you want to help me in this endeavor, click on the button below and get it going. At five bucks a month, you can change my life. . . not a whole lot, but, hey, it’s something!
Or, if you’re an even bigger sicko, you can give straight across to the Patreon I have for A Quality Interruption— the podcast that I quite literally cannot give away! Is the Patreon underused and utterly fallow? Yes! Will I take that money anyways, also yes. And before you say “You want money for nothing?” (to which the answer is, “I would preferably like money for nothing”), keep in mind that you don’t actually want bonus material from me. Or Cruz. Or anybody, really. By giving us money, you get to feel good without any of the obligations of looking at our hoary wares.
Patreon dot com, slash Quality.
Make it happen. I can’t do this shit for free forever.
You know what? Write this down: I’m going to review the second season of Andor. I should use my skills on a Star Wars thing that I actually enjoy.
Andor is, by far, the best thing Disney has put out under the Star Wars banner, and even that couldn’t get me interested in Star Wars again.
Nostalgia has always been a deeply annoying emotion to me. If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, then nostalgia is the last refuge of the hack. Why write something that has emotion when you can just reference something from the past and pretend that’s good enough? There’s been a pretty horrifying spate of these things, especially about the 1980’s as of late. What gets me isn’t just that they all mostly ignore the actual aesthetics of the 1980’s (there were never that many synthesizers and there was never that much neon), but they all are reflective of a fictional version of the 1980’s. Why be nostalgic for an era when you can’t even face the era itself? The answer is because these people aren’t nostalgic for a time, they just miss thinking The Goonies was a good movie.
It doesn’t help that I’ve sense found out that Greene harbored sympathies for Kim Philby. I should probably read more up on this before I shoot my mouth off, but— BUT— I get the sense that Greene empathizes with him more as a peer of the same class (and as an anti-American) than as somebody with whom he shares political sympathies. It’s something I expect from a tankie, not a man of letters.