The Red-Hot Head Rot Newsletter

Welcome to Volume 3 of The Red-Hot Head Rot, where you will find the trinkets and baubles that clank around inside my head, trying to make it seem like a space where special things happen.

The first two volumes are archived two years back, lost to obsolescence.

Here goes!

Last year's New Year's Resolution—or does the resolution belong to the year in which it is meant to play out?—was that I read less.

Why? Because reading too much has prevented me from doing worthwhile and important things, like writing more. I read too damn much. Sure, reading requires discipline. But for some time it has been a toxic discipline, meaning it adversely affects other aspects of my life, like hygiene and children.

That said, I still love to read. I've just taken it down a notch. Funny, because the books still manage to get read. Oh, the wonders of what they call the abundance mindset.

Here's what I've been digging into lately:

French crime novelist Gerard de Villiers wrote around 200 (!!!) hardboiled noir novels featuring international man of mystery Malko Linge, a gray-eyed spy for hire with an obscure background and even more obscure raison d'etre. Malko, a prince of some lineage or other, always needs funding for an add-on to his chateau, so he agrees to take on near-impossible missions. Imagine James Bond and former Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi in one person.

These Malko novels are campy and fun. The action scenes are detailed, and the femme fatales are intriguing and varied. Since my French is only passable, I cannot attest to their literary merit; I only know that they're fun to read.

La Panthere D'Hollywood in particular had a delightfully convoluted plot and held a special place for me, as it featured Southern California landmarks I'm familiar with. It concerns a Hollywood call girl whose big game cat murders a Navajo. A sleazy Hollywood producer launches a cover-up, but he's foiled by the intrusive Russians. Always the Russians.

I studied French on my own and can understand 95 % of these books, despite being quite poor at comprehending spoken French and being barely able to converse in it. I guess I can always dream.

Jewish American writer Philip Roth was the consummate novelist. While none of his books ever shook my world like Gravity's Rainbow or The Satanic Verses, every single one of them was damn good. That he kept performing that feat over and over for over fifty years should be celebrated.

In a career made from straddling the conflict between modern American living and traditional Jewish values, Roth put all his novels together so well. They almost always take place on the East Coast and involve a dysfunctional, hyper-sexed man of Jewish extraction trying to fend off haters. The pathos is often so intense that it takes on a real hilarity. The plots grow more and more convoluted and truly resemble the absurdities of real life.

His debut book, seen above, contains the titular novella—a beautiful love story of nostalgia and class—and five wonderful short stories. Splendid stuff.

His subsequent novels were all very good. Favorites include Portnoy's Complaint and The Anatomy Lesson. I returned to Goodbye, Columbus after twenty-five years because I've been wanting to reread my favorite fiction before I die. I'm not an inveterate pessimist, thinking I'll knock off sooner than later, but the reread list is long, ya dig? Long.

What I've been listening to:

Sleep, the fathers of stoner metal, slay on The Sciences, a masterpiece of weed-drenched riffs and 12-minute dirges that waft you on a magic carpet ride of bong smoke to the Giza plateau (“Giza Butler”) or the icy wastes of the South Pole (“Antarctica Thawed”). Insistent rhythms on “Sonic Titan” and “Marijuanaut's Theme” are sure to transport you to blissed-out realms, even if you're not partial to the devil's lettuce. Yours Truly doesn't do well with weed, but he loves the genre. Check out The Sciences. I lose myself in literary imaginings while I blast off to this.

And as if blowing smoke rings back into time, we end up with Black Sabbath's third studio album, Master of Reality, the bold inauguration of stoner rock as an aesthetic. The godfathers of stoner metal start with “Sweet Leaf,” sure, but it culminates in “Children of the Grave” and “Into the Void.” Again, I don't partake of the hippie cabbage, but black lights and velvet posters activate when I play this album. I get cottonmouth just listening to Geezer Butler's Rickenbacker bass and Tony Iommi's doomy guitar tone. I vibe the hell out, which is what we need to do more of, a lot more of, in this breakneck-paced, workaday world.

What I'm currently working on:

• The Princess of Las Vegas, a 4-part short story on Substack, about an MMA reporter who befriends a strange, beautiful woman on the Las Vegas Strip. Is she an archetype, a phantasm, or something more mundane and therefore sinister? Check out part one here.

• A brand-new novel titled Schrodinger's Cat Fight. It concerns a man who wishes to cheat on his wife but looks to avoid the moral blowback by doing so only through jumping timelines in the multiverse. Things get messy and legalistic in this philosophical sci-fi comedy.

• Marketing for The Sisterhood of the Wick, my literary detective novel about a double murder involving plastic-explosive lingerie and combustible lipstick. It takes place in Orange County, my own backyard. I hate marketing and almost as a matter of principle avoid doing it.

Well, that's all for now, foax! There should be more of these Red-Hot Head Rots, as long as I keep reading a little less than usual.

Bye,

b

Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK.