That is indeed me and my mouth and teeth, one of the uglier selfies you’ll find on the internet. O, cavernous darkness! Not only is it ghastly, but at the present, pronouncing Fs and Vs is an extra airy affair. I had hoped the dentist could replace the broken crown, but I’d snapped it too close to the gumline and the best option was the dreaded implant, one of which I already have on an upper molar. I’m well aware that months must pass before an implant can be placed: extraction, bone graft, screw, abutment, crown. It’s an incredibly mechanical process, one that near the end involves a literal torque wrench turning in one’s mouth.

Of course, I’m also incredibly lucky that I can afford one. Implants are expensive even with decent insurance, running anywhere between three and five thousand dollars. Which is why, now that I’m interacting with the world at large with a windy gap, I’ve noticed something interesting. The state of one’s teeth is like a billboard of one’s financial status. Perhaps I’m being overly sensitive right now, but I swear, most people I’m talking to, like the hotel concierge or the checkout person at the drugstore, are treating me kinder, taking some small measure of pity on me as if I’m a street urchin in need of support. Not only that, I have even found immediate kinship with the dentally distressed! At my neighborhood Home Depot a few days ago, the snaggle-toothed guy in lumber helping me was happy to flash me a smile, and I was just as happy to flash one back.

In a week, the pontic retainer my dentist fashioned will give me back my regular look for the next four months, so my membership to this club will come to an end. The retainer is dentures in reverse: I’ll need to take it out to eat. An inconvenience, but I have nothing but appreciation for modern dentistry. A hundred years ago, I’d probably already be wearing ivory teeth — if I could afford them.

Recently Adam wrote an insightful piece about creative writing workshops, so after reading MacKenzie Scott’s third novel that she published here on Substack, Last Days in Two Nations, I thought I’d turn back the clock two decades (last workshop: Spring Semester 2006 at NYU) and write up a critique.

Not that anyone asked, especially the author, who published this with the intention of it being a completed work! But as a merchant of fiction, I live in the fantasy inside my head, and in my current fantasy, I’m in class, there are twelve students sitting around a round table, and MacKenzie is one of them.

Now in my MFA workshops, we submitted a chapter or two at a time, since we were all in the process of writing the Great American Novel1, so no one submitted (or was allowed to submit) an entire book at once. But like I said, we’re in the land of make believe. So that’s what this is, a real critique of a real book under a fantastic pretense. Why not…

A note about critiques: I had the pleasure of having the same professor for all of my NYU workshops (Chuck Wachtel). Chuck ran his workshops with a couple of rules in mind for the readers (on both the written critiques and in class discussion about a submission).

1. Begin by accounting what worked.

2. Then shift to suggesting what can be improved.

3. While this is going on, the submitter takes notes and says nothing.

4. When the discussion ends, the submitter has the option to address the class.

I liked this format so much that when I taught my one and only college class (Intermediate Fiction Workshop for NYU’s undergrads), I instituted the same plan. At the end of the semester, I read all the anonymized student comments about the class and I can still remember the one and only piece of criticism: one student was not a fan of this format and said so. She found my adherence to it “annoying.”2 And isn’t it amazing that after all these years, that is the only comment I remember! All the lovely accolades from my other students are long forgotten, which once again demonstrates the unwelcome memorability of negativity.

Anyway, I’ve digressed enough. Critique time…

Dear MacKenzie,

The world you’ve built here is quite alive. This is a difficult trick to pull off, because none of your characters spend much time infodumping — you dole out the information in a very digestible piecemeal fashion. And this dystopia feels so very real, with its own language and vocabulary that reminds me of other dystopian works, like George Orwell’s 1984.

Perhaps even more impressive is the structure of the book itself. I love that you limit yourself to one week, Monday to Sunday; the framework keeps the plot tight and nimble. And to break apart the story with eighteen distinct points of view is one hell of a challenge — you’ve outdone Faulkner in As I Lay Dying, who took on just a puny fifteen! :)

The story is dark, no question, and many of your characters meet gruesome ends, which feels right. After all, the novel is titled Last Days in Two Nations. And the societal aspects that you tackle here are also to be admired. Whenever you bring up the word pandemic, no coincidence that it is always in the plural. Even though Donald Trump is not referred to by name, there’s little question in my mind that the leader of the Dakota Membership, Damian Paxton, reflects similar shades of crudeness and cruelness. Liv Lockhart, your other main character, has a name that’s perfectly loaded (“she lives with a locked heart”).

I’m no expert in dystopian fiction — my credentials are having read 1984 and having seen The Hunger Games films — so please take all of my following comments with a huge grain of salt. But one thing I remember about both works is having somebody to root for. The only people who might fit this bill are Jenny and Deepak, but they are ancillary characters. I don’t need my leads to be fearless heroes or heroines; take Winston Smith, the protagonist of 1984. Even though he is powerless to stop Big Brother and his cohorts and is nothing more than a cog in the massive totalitarian nation, we root for him nonetheless or maybe even because of his weakness (how destroyed are we when he utters those words, “Do it to Julia!”?). I can’t say I feel that way about any of the primaries in your book — Damian, Liv, Jonah, Gary, Gregor, Tracy — I never cared about any of them. Having a character you care about is essential in all fiction, but it’s probably a requirement in dystopia, because the world is already so harsh.

As much as I found the varying POVs intriguing, they also made immersion into the story difficult. Because so much of this world is already unfamiliar, switching POVs adds to the unfamiliarity. More than once I found myself lost, having to backtrack to see where I was in the story. If you had limited the story’s POVs to Damian, Liv, Jonah, and Tracy, I think it would have resulted in a more engaging narrative. The way it stands now, the book feels emotionally scattershot.

On “Thursday,” there is a Damian section that features dialogue between him and Liv that goes on for a very long time. You might want to break that up, because it’s an exhausting read. I know Liv is being interrogated and it is an exhausting situation for her, but there’s no need to exhaust your readers, too, if that makes sense.

The character I seem to know best is Damian, which is sad and awful! I wish this weren’t so, because he’s so horrid. And weirdly, at the same time, I feel like I don’t understand him. At the core of it, what is his motivation? Much of his exteriority is explored, but perhaps not enough of his interiority. Though I should mention, this could just be a personal limitation, that I cannot make sense of the innerworkings of someone like Paxton no matter how much you reveal. I don’t know — I’ll probably need to think on this some more.

Lastly, I want to tell you how arrestingly, hauntingly beautiful your prologue and epilogue are. It’s the finest writing in the book, hands down. The epilogue is a chilling coda; I love how you sneakily link up Churchill’s dentures with Paxton. I got a real sense of timelessness with the ending, that so much of all of the struggles and triumphs and failures of humanity both good and bad will end up as detritus. I was reminded of the Chuck Palahniuk quote in Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.”

That’s it! I respect this book of yours more than I liked it, but maybe that was your intent all along. If you have a question about anything I wrote here, please ask away. Looking forward to chatting with you at Apple after workshop.3

SWINTH was its name, and I came to it later, around 1988, which I know for a fact because I still have a floppy disk that has the file, and amidst that program are my sophomore high school documents! On 3/9/1988, for Period 11, I wrote a “current events” assignment for Social Studies about Krabbe disease (was this really the best I could do?).

Anyway, I have always been fascinated by this program, because it’s both a screensaver (anyone remember Mystify back in ancient Windows 3.1?) and an incredible showcase for C64’s SID, the venerable sound chip. And last year, I somehow got into my head that I wanted to find the people who made it.

It took months — months! I kid you not. And for the first time in my life, I felt like a real journalist, if not a detective. I emailed, DMed, LinkedIn Messaged utter strangers who were wives, friends, children of the creators I was desperately trying to locate. I scoured ancestry sites that were both life-based (i.e., family trees) and academic (i.e., professors and their advisees), I sifted through obituaries and Internet Archives. And after all that searching, I found two of the four, as the other two had passed away.

My goal for this article was to create an “oral history” style of interviews, where it almost feels like all the interviewees are in the same room even though they were interviewed separately. The first book of this kind I encountered was Legs McNeil’s The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, which I used to write my second novel. A more popular work that utilized the same technique is Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James A. Miller; the “More Cowbell” history is so good!

Long story short, this took a while, and I’m very proud of it. For those who know and love SWINTH, I think you’ll get a kick out of it. And for those who have never heard of it, you are about to embark upon a bit of computer history as it was made, over at GOTO 10.

Goto 10: Retro Computing & Gaming

The History of Swinth

Enjoy this guest post from Sung J. Woo! — Paul…

Read more

3 months ago · 3 likes · Sung J. Woo

Goto 10: Retro Computing & Gaming

I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

Enjoy this article by Sung J. Woo. It may focus on the Commodore 64, but I think it applies to most of us that were around in the 80s. — Paul…

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3 months ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · Sung J. Woo

My origin story! Seriously. This 8-bit computer shaped so much of my life. Jack Tramiel was the man who brought the Commodore 64 to the masses, and his story is phenomenal. An excellent piece on him can be found on Every.

Goto 10: Retro Computing & Gaming

I Owe My Life to the Commodore 64

Enjoy this article by Sung J. Woo. It may focus on the Commodore 64, but I think it applies to most of us that were around in the 80s. — Paul…

Read more

3 months ago · 13 likes · 3 comments · Sung J. Woo

It’s my origin story! Seriously. This 8-bit computer shaped so much of my life, and it all began here:

And now, 42 years later, it has made its triumphant return:

If you’d rather listen to me read my article, you can do that, too, below:

I’ll also drop this into the podcast feed. Thank you as always for reading/listening!

This story originally appeared in THE2NDHAND, which used to be printed on a broadsheet (11”x17”). A sample issue looked like this:

Very zine-y. I went going back and forth with the editor, Todd Dills, regarding this story, submitting it then pulling it then resubmitting it…and through it all, he was gracious and kind. The problem was that this story is basically an homage of a novel, After Life (read it!), and I was afraid the author of the novel would not be cool with me doing this, but like editor Todd, author Rhian was also super kind. Kindness rules!

Fork in Chopsticks

Not sure how the filmmaker arrived at that title, but I remember holding no objections. I was just amazed that the short film was made at all. Still amazed! On my old personal website, the page for the movie looked like this:

The editor of the story on East of the Web created a great logline for it:

Kung fu dubbee and would-be actress, Ally gets one last chance.

As far as audio recommendations go for this round, I have become a huge fan of the Acquired podcast:

These are very longform — seems like four hours is their norm nowadays. And often even longer; I just finished listening to the trio of episodes on Google, so that’s twelve hours. And they blew right by.

All right — one last thing.

I lied! This will not be the final episode of Spoken into the Ether, as there will be another next month.

So you’re not done with me yet. Until next time!

I don’t write scifi stories too often — in fact, this might be the only one. And of all the short fiction I have written, this is the one that got the briefest attention of Hollywood (millisecond). That plus the story itself awaits you.

As for my audio recommendation, I recently discovered the Literature and History Podcast. It’s been going on since 2016, so I’m very late to the game, but the beauty of a project like this is that it’s completely evergreen — after all, Doug Metzger’s podcast deals with classics like the Iliad and the Bible. Incredibly researched, superbly narrated (what a voice!), and hilariously sung (he writes a comic song for each episode), I’m not even on the 20th episode and can’t wait to get caught up.

Where were you when the OJ was declared not guilty? I was at my first real job (IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, in the journals department). Nobody got much work done that day, Tuesday October 3, 1995, as we were all fixated on the verdict. As I recall, not everyone had internet access at the office. I’m almost certain we found out via a live radio broadcast.

The story I’m reading for this episode is OJ adjacent — the protagonist isn’t right in the head, and there is indeed violence. It involves a television director, a sub shop, and unrequited love…though obsession is probably a better descriptor.

For my audiobook recommendation, my Philip Roth journey continues. The Great American Novel is one of his lesser known works, but not only does James Daniels narrate the hell out of it (he must assay at least twenty distinct characters, possibly thirty), the novel is 100% about baseball. The 2026 season’s opening day is just weeks away; for once, my timing is right on!

It was a light metallic clanging, almost a pleasant chime, except it wasn’t pleasant at all but quite concerning. The noise travelled up the gas line from the basement, where our twelve-year-old gas furnace struggled to warm up the house during the coldest winter in recent memory.

My wife and I live in northwestern New Jersey, in a very old house, dating back to the mid-1800s. It used to be the general store during the years of the Morris Canal, and keeping our humble adobe warm has always been a challenge, none more so than this past February when the polar vortex squatted over a significant chunk of the country.

I’m somewhat handy around the house, but when it comes to electricity or heat, I leave it to the professionals. I recorded a snippet of the noise on my smartphone and sent it over to them. It was received with a collective shrug. “I’ve been doing this for a couple of decades,” my HVAC guy said, “and I’ve never heard anything like that.”

He sent out one of his techs. In the basement, we both listened to the noise when it occurred the longest, a good twenty seconds, around 8am. I told him the noise stops when I open the panel. He said we should try replacing the gas valve, because there was a 90% chance it was the culprit.

It took him less than ten minutes to replace the valve and charge me $850. Expensive, but if it fixed the problem, worth it. Unfortunately for me and our furnace, the noise continued unabated. When I reported back to the tech’s boss, he said he’d have to come out the following week because he was so backed up with other work. Not what I wanted to hear. What disappointed me the most was how uninterested he was in thinking through this problem of ours. Probably because he had another dozen people like me, all with distinct issues of their own.

And that got me thinking. I knew of something that had all the time in the world for me, any time of the day: AI.

Being a certified geek, I went to work. I set up my laptop and a decent microphone (podcast quality!) by the furnace and recorded a whole day’s worth of sounds. Because I’m familiar with working with audio in its digital waveform, I was able to create a time-based report. I’d surmised the clanging would be most prolonged when the furnace came on early in the morning (we drop the house temperature from 69 to 58 degrees Fahrenheit), but that didn’t turn out to be the case. The inducer, the motor that controls the airflow inside the furnace, ran for 30 seconds when there were no clangs, but then ran for double that number with the clangs. I counted 23 clangs at its longest, around 8am, and as the day went on, the number dropped with each subsequent heat cycle until it disappeared altogether by 1pm.

I created a 57-second snippet of the clanging into an MP3 file and uploaded it and the report to Google’s Gemini, and here’s what it said:

Based on the audio recording and the detailed log of your furnace’s behavior, the rhythmic clanging you’re hearing is a classic symptom of condensate (water) backup or moisture in the pressure switch system.

The most telling clue is the “recovery” pattern in your log: the noise began immediately after a very long heating cycle (1 hour and 48 minutes) and gradually disappeared over several shorter cycles as the “clang” count dropped from 23 to 0.

After some more chatting, I realized I’d neglected to add what might be a crucial data point: The clanging stops immediately when I open the furnace’s top panel. What do you think?

Thus decreed Gemini:

This is a “smoking gun” in furnace troubleshooting. When a noise stops immediately upon removing a cabinet panel, it almost always points to an airflow restriction—specifically in the combustion air intake.

Bingo! I further informed my HVAIC of our concentric vent, where the intake is situated behind the exhaust. Because we have had consecutive subzero temperatures, the vapor cloud from the exhaust was most likely frosting the intake vent during the longest cycle, when the furnace ran for almost two hours straight. In layman’s terms, because it was so hard to breath out, the furnace was having trouble breathing in.

That very evening, I drove to Home Depot and bought a PVC pipe, a plastic ring adapter, and insulating foam for $10.92.

I didn’t need the foam so the fix could’ve been even cheaper. After extending the exhaust by 14 inches, the highest number of clangs reduced to three.

I relayed my triumph to the HVAC guy, hoping being bested by a large language model would guilt him to come back on his dime so he can further follow Gemini’s instructions. He did return, eventually, to do maintenance and also to comment that the exhaust vent now looked like a toilet plunger. He’s not wrong, but I love my plunger vent nonetheless.

Meanwhile, I thought of all those insufferable AI commercials during Super Bowl 60, and wondered if my HVAC guy saw them, too, thinking his line of work was safe from the oncoming AIpocalypse. I’m afraid these machines are coming for all of us.

p.s. For the curious, my very full conversation with Google Gemini: https://gemini.google.com/share/834b358a7a46

Unlike Jake, one of the two main characters in this story, I’m incapable of growing a beard. A fu manchu may be possible, but even that is doubtful. Which is actually fine by me. I knew a guy in college who had a five o’clock shadow around one o’clock, every day. This particular feature of his body rarely brought him much joy.

The fourth episode of this podcast featured a jettisoned chapter from my first novel; this is its sibling, the second of two deleted chapters now resurrected. It’s a domestic tale, involving a chef who grew a beard while his wife was out of town. Hilarity does not ensue.

On the audiobook front, I’ve been on a Philip Roth kick, and the kicking continues:

I love that the cover says it’s directed by Philip Roth. What does that mean? I can only imagine Philip told Ron how to read the book, though I doubt Ron needed much help because he was such a great actor. It’s yet another fantastic reading by him. Be warned, this book is still quite raunchy even today! For me personally, it overstayed its welcome about 80% of the way through, but it ends strongly and I must say, I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much listening to a book. No question it’ll offend many, many people, but I enjoyed it immensely.

The thing that stands out with this story is that it’s written in the second person — the “you” voice. Which I have often called a bastardized “I” voice, because that’s its eventual function, to put you into the story so you see it from my point of view.

Here’s the lovely cover that my story appeared in.

InterText was one of the first online lit magazines. It ran from 1991 to 2004! Holy cow, that is like a hundred years in internet time.

And speaking of time, it’s recommendation time! Another Philip Roth classic, The Plot Against America, read once again by Ron Silver.

I wish I didn’t have to say this is timely reading/listening, but it is. A miniseries was made by HBO and shown during the pandemic, which I have not seen, but I think the book will be more than enough.

Here’s the very first one:

It premiered in 2004, and this story you are about to hear, “The Lost Diaries of a Cro-Magnon Man,” was written right around that time. So credit where credit’s due — thank you, GEICO Caveman! Also, thank you to Michael, who accepted this story for In Posse Review.

For this episode, my audiobook recommendation is not for a book but for a narrator — Grover Gardner. For the last few months, I’ve been listening to The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William L. Shirer. It’s more than 57 hours long, and I have five hours to go. Gardner read this book, and he’s also read all of Robert A. Caro’s LBJ books (I’ve listened to the first two). At this point, it’s not crazy to measure this man’s reading in days instead of hours.

That is the Alpha Tau chapter of Phi Kappa Tau, which still exists today at 106 The Knoll, Ithaca, New York, and indeed it was my first house, as my formative years were spent in an apartment complex. And the reason why I read the essay first is because this short story is all about my fraternity experience. Animal House it was not — not even close!

Two milestones of note, one of which Substack celebrated in a very Substack way:

And the other:

Thank you, dear readers and listeners! I’m actually kind of shocked that there have been a thousand downloads (1002, to be exact, as of this moment). My hope was we’d get there by the end of the series, so these are some very sweet metrics.

And on the subject of podcasts, if you haven’t listened to Kevin Stroud’s The History of English Podcast, you are in for a treat. I have listened to all 186 (and some bonus episodes, too) and eagerly await his next one.

“Sung? Goodness, no, lazy? No way! He’s held a job at a megacorp for almost thirty years, doing backend internet stuff, and he’s published five novels while working full time. You know he never even majored in computer science? He learned how to code on the job. No, Sung is the antithesis of sloth.”

Well, okay, maybe I’m not lazy in what pertains to the necessities of making a decent living and adding my miniscule contribution to the world of English letters, but these people have no idea I am very, very lazy when it comes to wanting to be good at things in which I have zero talent.

There are many cool scenes in The Matrix, such as Neo slo-mo limbo-dodging bullets:

This probably ranks quite high on the lists of many, but for me, there is nothing more enticing than Keanu lying down on what looks like a gross dental chaise longue, downloading every single martial arts style ever developed directly into his brain, so he can utter:

How is this not the dream of everyone, to have mastered a craft without the drudgery of actually learning said craft? How many times have I traveled to Paris and heard the sonorous accents of passersby, only to wish I could just understand what they were saying sans keeping my Duolingo streak alive? Every single time.

AI large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude may have captured most of the hype (and the cash), but speaking as a writer, their linguistic abilities pose me scant concern. Sure, they can string together some nice if generic sentences, and I’d be the first to admit that compared to most of the student work I encountered as a college-level creative writing instructor, the chatbots write better ultrashort fiction than those disaffected youths. But the likelihood of LLMs pumping out a complete novel in my remaining lifetime is low. And even if they did, who cares? I already know how to write. Granted, I know I’m light years away from the best writer who ever lived, but I know enough and that’s good enough.

But you know what I don’t know at all? How to write a song, even though I desperately want to. Now of course, I could learn. I could take a course or two…or probably a dozen, since I’m just not musical. Of all the art forms, I find song composition to be the most mysterious. Painting, well, I can see how that’s done: pick up a pencil or a pen or a brush and learn to copy what you see. Even musical instruments, they, too, are a matter of dedication and practice. But to come up with an entire song? Where do you even start?

The only experience I’ve had with songwriting was a chapter in my first novel, which was eventually jettisoned before publication, and deservedly so; it had too little to do with the central story. But it did feature a section where the narrator sings, so for that part, I wrote the pretend lyrics:

I can see you
stocking the Campbell’s aw-ay
even though
you’re not here anymore

I can see you
dancing in aisle eleven
even though
you don’t care anymore

We ran, we kissed
with cans in our hands
we tried, we failed
like some no-frills brands

We ran, we kissed
with cans in our hands
we tried, we failed
like some no-frills brands

Margie, do you remember
that double coupon day long ago
when Harry gave his no-tice
to find his one true love in Fargo

Oh uh-oh, oh uh-oh, oh uh-oh

I can hear you
asking paper or plastic
even though
you’re not here anymore

I can hear you
checking the date on the milk
even though
you don’t care anymore

We ran, we kissed
with jugs in our hands
we tried, we failed
like some no-frills brands

We ran, we kissed
with jugs in our hands
we tried, we failed
like some no-frills brands

Margie, where are you now
do you know how much I need you
now you’re gone, so far gone
did you have to go so far away

I wrote that back in 2008. Fast forward to 2025, when I found this music video:

Created by the Irish filmmaker Ruairi Robinson, the entire video, including the singer, is AI generated. The lyrics are the Rudyard Kipling poem “Boots,” which were fed through Suno, which created the music. And the voice. And the song.

I bet you can guess what I did next:

The keywords I used to generate this song were as follows: dream pop, expressive vocals, heartfelt piano, studio-quality, realistic. Does this make me a songwriter? Of course not. It’s more like I posted a want ad, hired musicians, and had them set my silly lyrics to melody.

I don’t know what I’m more awestruck by, the results themselves or the frighteningly small effort I made to achieve them. A few seconds was all it took for Suno to cobble together what is without question a complete song, despites my screwups. For one, I neglected to copy the last line of the lyrics, so the final stanza only has three lines. Was this a problem? Not at all – it cleverly filled in the empty space with a piano riff. An even bigger gaff was that I simply did not write enough lyrics for a full song; I could see that when the generation was taking place, Suno paused after it got to around the 1:45 mark. But then, like magic, it kept churning. Much like the way it patched over the missing final line, Suno brought in previous lyrics and added echoes and other fancy musical doohickies I know nothing about.

While marveling at Suno’s generative capabilities, it was at this point that I felt the guilt of creative laziness. Is this our future, where creation becomes this simple? What will become of us, the humans twenty years from now, when we’ll be able to create an entire music video from scratch by texting a bunch of keywords? Or books? Or films? Or anything, really. 3D printing will only get bigger and faster and better. Will we be able to build a chair while never leaving our chair?

I suppose we’ll all become proficient prompt engineers, which may turn into an artform in itself, though I wonder…

Has anyone ever admired an instruction leaflet?

1. Bird Figurine

2. 1950

3. Confessions of My Wart, Which Is on My Right Foot, Second Toe

I don’t have a picture for the third story, but maybe that’s for the best. Does anyone really want to see a photo of a wart, even if it’s a talking wart? Maybe especially if it’s a talking wart…

My audiobook recommendation for this episode is Demi Moore’s memoir Inside Out.

I still can’t get over just how young she was when she was in the iconic movies of my youth, such as St. Elmo’s Fire (just 23!). Perhaps it’s her husky voice, but she’s always seemed older than her actual years. As the book nears its end, Demi’s emotions become almost palpable. She’s never been one of my favorite actresses, but after listening, I can tell you that my esteem for her has never been higher.

Anyway, this is what I consider this episode to be — a DVD extra equivalent for my first novel, Everything Asian. Initially it was the second chapter, featuring a wayward mother and daughter team of shoplifters who ran into the Kim family. As you can imagine, hijinks ensue. This chapter was ultimately jettisoned, but now it lives on here on my Substack. I hope you enjoy it.

And now an extra of that DVD extra — the graphic below comes from an essay I wrote for The New York Times back in 2009, which you can see features a boy showing a pagoda to a customer. It is, believe it or not, a pagoda music box! The novel still has one, too, at the end of the first chapter, and it has a nonfiction counterpart. Confused? I think I am, too…

For this episode’s recommendation of an audiobook, I’d like to highlight the narrator Julia Whelan. She sometimes reads for The New York Times, and her performance of Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s essay on Val Kilmer back in 2020 is not to be missed.

When I first saw this illustration in print, I found it rather frightening and didn’t quite understand why Chloe had taken this dark path. But then I thought about this story from the mother’s point of view and it made startling sense. Before this art, I thought my story was mostly funny, but Chloe made me realize it’s actually mostly scary. But also funny! They go hand in hand, always.

Since I mentioned those excellent Philip Roth audiobooks last time, I’m thinking I’ll keep suggesting other audiobooks. I’m listening to Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! right now, and although I’m only halfway through, I have zero reservations recommending it. Well, maybe not zero…0.5?

My biggest complaint is that when the book veers off the central story (where protagonist Cyrus talks with the dying painter/performance artist at the Brooklyn Museum), which it does just about every other chapter, I wish these ancillary parts hewed closer to the main narrative. I’m sure they will, eventually and retrospectively, but it’s a bit of a slow burn. And speaking of burning, I couldn’t help but recall the Seinfeld episode “The Burning” when the book begins, because that’s almost exactly the situation that Akbar depicts, where Cyrus is acting in front of medical students with a disease. Thankfully it isn’t Kramer’s gonorrhea, but I found the echo odd!

Huge, huge props to Arian Moayed, the narrator. I loved him in You Hurt My Feelings, and his portrayal of different voices, accents, and genders is masterful here.

p.s. I have finished Martyr! since writing the text above. My recommendation remains in place — I think the last chapter of the book could’ve been tighter, but it’s a remarkably well written work overall, especially for a first-time novelist. I have noticed upon reading reader reactions is that there is some uncertainly regarding the ending. I don’t want to spoil this, but there is no spoiler tag in Substack, so I’ll write my opinion in ROT-13, a rudimentary encryption method. You can simply go to rot13.com and paste the following to decrypt it.

Ur qvrf. V’z fhecevfrq guvf vf rira n cbvag bs qvfphffvba. Vg vfa’g rknpgyl pyrne whfg jura ur fgnegf qlvat, ohg ng bar cbvag va gur svany puncgre:

“Plehf jnvgrq, naq va uvf jnvgvat orpnzr vapernfvatyl njner bs ubj ubg gur tebhaq unq tbggra haqre uvf srrg.”

Plehf vf fvggvat bhgfvqr va gur pbyq ba gur orapu. Ur vf rkcrevrapvat ulcbgurezvn. Naq gura nyzbfg ng gur raq:

“Oruvaq gurz, n terng oynpx fgnyyvba, gjvpr gur fvmr bs gur erfg, jvgu na vyyhzvangrq evqre tevccvat gur ervaf qerffrq va n ybat oynpx pybnx.”

Guvf vf gur fnzr ubefr/evqre gung unf svtherq vagb gur abiry frireny gvzrf — uvf hapyr Nenfu, Bexvqru’f cnvagvat — fvtavslvat qrngu. Vg’f fb ba gur abfr gung Plehf fnlf gb Mrr, “Ernyyl?”

Gura: “Gur tbyqra yvtug penpxvat guebhtu gur tebhaq unq tngurerq vagb n infg naq qrrc cbby, jnez naq thetyvat nofragyl yvxr na hanggraqrq vasnag.”

Naq gur svany yvar bs gur abiry: “Nebhaq gurz, oveqf naq oevtug oybffbzf qebccrq yvxr svfgf bs fabj sebz gur fxl.”

Gur orqynz Plehf vf rkcrevrapvat vf uvf qrngu. V pna’g frr gur obbx raqvat nal bgure jnl ohg uvz qlvat, fvapr gung’f jung ur’f jnagrq fvapr gur ortvaavat bs gur abiry.

I bet one of the main reasons why Albert Camus’s The Stranger is often a staple of American high school English curricula is because it’s short. According to my ebook copy, it weighs in at 36,054 words, so definitely novella territory. I was never assigned to read this slim book during my high school years, but I knew of it thanks to the song “Killing an Arab” by The Cure:

Standing on a beach / With a gun in my hand / Staring at the sea / Staring at the sand is how the song starts, and the catchy refrain is I’m alive / I’m dead / I’m the stranger / Killing an Arab. The lyrics are quite excellent at distilling the book to its essentials; Cliffs Notes/Sparknotes are probably envious of Robert Smith’s wordsmithing.

Have you read The Stranger? I just finished it, and lord, I can’t believe this is something education forces kids to read. I feel this way about most books that I had to read as a student. I remember listening to Frank Muller’s harrowing audiobook narration of 1984 a few years back, and again, I said to myself – why are kids reading books never meant for their eyes? Animal Farm, okay. Even though that’s also a book I have no doubt George Orwell never intended for adolescents, it’s got talking animals, so that one I can see.

But The Stranger? About the young Frenchman Meursault who likes to nap a lot (well, okay, I guess maybe the kids can relate), feels very little for his mother’s death (she died? oh, okay), who has a roughneck friend who likes to beat up women, who befriends a guy who regularly beats his dog…this is something kids would enjoy reading? Doubtful. The narrator is basically a sociopath, especially when it comes to his relationship with his girlfriend Marie. When she asks him if she loves him, his response is, “I replied, much as before, that her question meant nothing or next to nothing…” And when she asks him why he agreed to marry her, he says, “I explained that it had no importance really, but, if it would give her pleasure, we could get married right away.” Then of course there is the murder, in cold blood, of the aforementioned Arab.

Something I did not know about The Stranger is that the second half of the book is a grand courtroom drama. It reads like a fairly modern episode of a legal TV show, with the prosecution and defense attorneys dishing out loaded accusations and affronted outbursts. I also was unaware that the famed French capital punishment device, the guillotine, wasn’t abolished until 1981. All this time I thought it ended with the Reign of Terror back in the late 1700’s, so when Meursault imagines the guillotine for his crime, it was still very much in use.

Back when I was attending high school, young adult novels existed but not in the greatly expanded way they do now. As far as I’m concerned, S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders was the only appropriate book I read, the only one featuring people and stories I actually cared about. Considering the current poor state of reading, wouldn’t it make more sense to have kids read more propulsive works of fiction that showcase teenager characters, such as Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, Stephen King’s Carrie, and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars?

I’m just glad I read The Stranger as a fully grown adult who could appreciate all of its old-people themes. Had I read it earlier, it’s highly unlikely I would’ve picked it up a couple of weeks ago. That’s what happens when kids are forced to read books like Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, which I had to read, which I didn’t read, which I’ve avoided my entire life. Maybe I’ll get to it one day…but probably not. Timing, as always, is everything.

On a slightly related topic, I have an audiobook recommendation: Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, his first book. There are two versions of this audiobook; the one I’ve listened to is the older one. Your local library may have it — the cover looks like this (via NYPL):

According to Audiofile, John Rubinstein narrates the titular novella. It’s a fantastic performance. Because I’m a petty listener, I’m always on the lookout for mispronunciations. The only miscue: U of Illinois’s Fighting Illini, which he pronounces as ill-ee-nye (should be ill-lie-nie). 😊

This was the second Roth I listened to. The first was American Pastoral, which also has two versions. I listened to the older one (NYPL, take two):

Narrated by Ron Silver, who recently passed away. I remember him from Reversal of Fortune, where he played the lawyer Alan Dershowitz. Petty mispronunciations: Booton (boon-ton, should be Boon-en), and Goethel (go-ethel, should be Gah-thal).

Listening to this later work of Roth’s in comparison to his first was an interesting experience. I found Goodbye, Columbus to be superior in every way — American Pastoral has this strange framing device where the story of the main character, Seymour “The Swede” Levov, is constructed by Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, you could say in real time. It’s a unique way to execute the plot, in a way giving Roth/Zuckerman absolute control over the character, but that also results in a kind of narrative vacuum. Because we know the story is being constructed, everything that happens feels less important than it should be — it’s all made up anyway, so who cares? Of course, every novel is a made-up story by the writer…so it’s kind of metafiction-y, what Roth is doing. For me, this hurt the book more than it helped.

One thing for sure, Roth’s dialogue was on point from the very beginning of his career. My favorite part of Goodbye, Columbus was Leo Patimkin’s monologue, where he details his exploits as a light bulb salesman. His speech goes on for pages, but I couldn’t get enough of it, and found it better than anything I encountered in American Pastoral.

Which made me wonder about my own career as a novelist — have I improved from my first book (Everything Asian, 2009) to my latest (Lines, 2024), on a purely writing level? Fifteen years is not a long time, but not short, either. I think my plotting skills may have gotten more complex, but honestly, I don’t think I’ve become a better writer, line for line, per se. That seems like bad news, but maybe not. At least I don’t think I’m getting any worse!