This World Is A Black Hole

braindead dopamine fiend recovering from lobotomy. music, science fiction, and endurance sports. 31.

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Hi, my name is Damon. This blog exists as a space for me to post photos that I take, album/book reviews and other forms of creative writing. No aesthetic reblogs, just OC with zero notes—the way God intended.

Thank you for your time.

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Top 20 albums of 2025 Top 25 albums of 2024 Top 25 albums of 2023

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Book Review: The Sarah Book by Scott McClanahan (2015)

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The Sarah Book is a semi-autobiographical (I suspect even highly fictionalized) account of the divorce between Scott McClanahan and his wife, the myth, the legend, Sarah. In the novel, Sarah is a beautiful, intelligent, driven mom of two who works as a nurse, and Scott is... the king of debauchery, a man-baby who runs from his feelings and deflects any difficult emotion with alcohol, junk food, and humour (much to the reader's delight). He is truly a pathetic little worm at times, but it's always hard to hate him for it cause he is also just kinda dumb and self-destructive in a sad way. When Scott fails time and time again to grow up, to be a proper father and a caring husband, Sarah understandably files for divorce.

What ensues is a whirlwind of a memoir that captures all the highs and lows of the human experience. McClanahan alternates between the days leading up to and during the divorce as well as flashbacks to earlier in the couple's relationship, creating a multilayered portrait of their life together in all of its ugly, beautiful glory. As campy as it may sound, McClanahan's portrait of this relationship refuses to fall into tropes or cliches. There is no happy ending, nor a particularly tragic one; there are no winners or losers, no good guys or bad guys, no moral righteousness to be found. McClanahan shows life for what it is: a series of small, unglamorous battles, ideally ending in mutual respect between opponents. The real crux of McClanahan's storytelling is his ability to frame these small battles as microcosms of patterns that exist within the larger universe, making the story of Scott and Sarah feel like the story of all humanity.

I think I enjoyed Crapalachia a little more for its larger cast of characters, but only marginally. Both novels were excellent, and once again, McClanahan's narrative voice proves to be addicting, propulsive, and emotionally fulfilling. I can't wait to read Fights! now!

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Book Review: Peace by Gene Wolfe (1975)

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Peace is by far the most confounding Wolfe novel I've read so far. It reminded me more of Pynchon than anything resembling the dark fantasy he would become known for. Even on a prose level, it felt different: tighter and punchier for sure, but also less expressive. I was actually surprised to find that this was published after The Fifth Head of Cerberus, because I enjoyed that one much more on a sentence-by-sentence basis. In short, this was a much different Wolfe than the one I fell in love with.

I can barely even tell you what this book is about, much less make a convincing argument for why you should read it. At times I felt like Wolfe was commenting on American colonialism and the manufacturing of history/reality, but any time I got close to picking up what he was putting down, I got lost again in the bramble of seemingly unrelated stories—full of their own forking paths. The narrator is also highly unreliable and seemed to be able to travel back and forth in time to inhabit his own body at different periods of his life, but I never really figured out the mechanics of that trick or why it was important. I felt just as lost reading this as I did reading The Crying of Lot 49 and equally unsure as to whether I was being taken for a ride or if there was really something going on behind the curtain.

But here's the thing: I know Wolfe is a master craftsman and wouldn't just write a nonsensical story for shits and giggles. There was clearly a lot going on off-stage that I just couldn't figure out and will probably take a reread or two to fully wrap my head around. That's just what reading Wolfe is like sometimes. There were stories within the chaos that I did enjoy in isolation, like the story of Mr. Tilly, the strange pharmacist haunted by a murderous ghost, or of Mr. Gold, the old bookseller who manufactures rare books, but I couldn't connect them in a way that felt tangible. I don't think I've ever felt this dumb since the first time I read Borges. Oh well! Better luck next time.

I still highly recommend this for any Wolfe fanatics, or maybe those who are interested in a metaphysical time-traveling ghost story with a Pynchonesque zaniness to it, but I probably wouldn't start your Wolfe journey here.

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Hi all,

I have decided to move my blog over to Wordpress for a few reasons including but not limited to better theme customization, better search engine optimization, and the ability to open up comments to people who don’t have tumblr accounts, but more importantly, because I can’t stand tumblr promoting their app with a dropdown banner when people open my site, or showing ads between my posts when viewed through the app. You’d think having a custom domain would prevent that, but no. I refuse to let my writing be an advertisement for this shitty company.

I’m already much happier with the layout and the integration of things like youtube and bandcamp player embeds (I couldn’t embed those things here because on mobile they would extend past the post column border and break the page). I’m still tweaking things though and working on importing my content over, so it’s not totally finished yet.

That being said, I will likely continue sharing my posts here, because I still love this place deep down, but if you want to check out the new site, it’s over at thisworldisablackhole.ca

THIS WORLD IS A BLACK HOLE

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The Rifles by William T. Vollmann

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It's been a long time since I've read a book that feels... unreviewable—at least in the way that I would normally tackle a review by trying to understand the "why" that connects the various themes and events or by relaying the reading experience through a reflection of my own life. The Rifles is just not relatable like that, it aspires to so much more than a mirror for the reader to find themselves in.

According to Vollmann himself, as he writes in a letter to the RCMP in 1991, which is included in the back of this book, The Rifles is "partially concerned with the relocation of Inuit families from Inukjuak, Quebec and Pond Inlet, Baffin Bay, to Resolute and Grise Fiord in the 1950s," and it is, but it is much more complicated than that; it's also, as the title suggests, an investigation into the way that the introduction of mechanical rifles into indigenous communities impacted both their food supply and their very way of being for better and for worse. A lot of these communities were handed rifles and then coerced into predatory trade agreements with European settlers for access to ammunition that ultimately led to overhunting and mass starvation events amongst the population. It is also about Sir John Franklin, a British explorer who, in the 1820s and 1840s, captained three different expeditions to map out the Arctic archipelago. The Rifles is also about Vollmann's own expeditions to the Arctic, where he creates an alter-ego version of himself named Subzero and explores the parallels between his own life and the life of Sir John Franklin, often weaving their identities and stories together in a sort of metamorphic flow state of time and consciousness that is mapped onto the ice-locked corridors of the Northwest Passage. And then animating the story and all of its narrative mechanics is this tragic Inuit myth of Sedna and the Fulmar, a beautiful maiden who is deceived and whisked away by a great bird-spirit and eventually, after being rescued by her father, is drowned in the sea, thus becoming the sea goddess who provides the Inuit peoples with their source of nutrition. This myth is then recreated and mirrored in the stories of Subzero and Sir John Franklin and their respective relationships with both the Arctic itself and the Inuit women they fall in love with, making The Rifles ultimately about the very nature of exchange itself, whether bodily, culturally, or technologically. There is no such thing as exchange without consequence, emotionally, physically or otherwise.

In many ways The Rifles is a personal odyssey through history, memory, and geography, with all of these journalistic queries into the relocation of Inuit families and the evolution of hunting technology and its impact on culture unfolding in the periphery. Vollmann explores the ramifications of these events through anthropological fiction rather than essay, but there is real journalism in here, too. There is a whole chapter where Vollmann drops the Subzero alter ego and details his own trip to Isachsen on Ellef Ringes Island, where he almost froze to death and set himself on fire in the same night. There are also real interviews that Vollmann conducted with the residents of these communities about their conditions, as well as email exchanges between Vollmann and the government of Canada, that are all presented plainly in sections of the novel.

But it's the way that Vollmann takes his investigative inquiries and his thoroughly sourced knowledge of history and shoves them through a blender of pure psychological fantasy that makes The Rifles such a hard book to pin down in a review. At the beginning of the novel, Vollmann speaks to the reader, using the second-person pronouns "you," and describes you, the reader, trying to follow a stream to its origin in an attempt to find "some place definite," only to find that each pool of water has another one higher above it and that, in fact, you’re standing on a goddamn glacier, so it is foolish to think you can find a single source anyway. So perhaps the "why" that threads the patchwork of stories, characters, and places in this book together isn't so much of a single relationship of cause and effect, but an absence of omniscience that creates a void of perspective for the reader to fill in themselves, like the glacial labyrinth of waterways that both connect and isolate the Arctic archipelago.

Vollmann is operating in a mode here that I don't think anyone else has the nerve or grit to copy, his approach is raw and sometimes he takes great risks by leaping into ambiguous territory, sometimes even painting an unsavoury picture of himself in the process, but mostly leaving the reader with more questions than answers, and it is truly something special to behold. That is why I consider The Rifles to be a beautiful, ugly masterpiece.

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Life, basically. Kind of abandoned the side blog, hope y’all don’t mind if I start dropping some photo dumps here in between reviews.

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the bridge ---

forty-five feet above the inlet, with harnesses hoisted above their heads like angel wings, men in hard hats click-clack-clammered steel beams into pillars of stone. they were building an artery, opening new avenues of expansion into the dark, forested heart of the opposite shoreline, and they would die for it. watching the incident from below, the colossi cranes resembled the pudgy forearms of a giant baby, toppling a tower of blocks with a gurgle of joy as toy soldiers crashed into the waters below.

an engineer, now disgraced, hangs his head in shame, nodding to the rhythm of the gavel. the support beam should have held, your honour. it should have, but it didn’t. a fraction off on the math and there went the bodies, one, two, three, falling like ospreys into the blue bath of concrete, but these men did not return to the surface grinning with sunfish in their beaks, they were driven into the riverbed like nails, entombed in the materials of their labour.

but we wiped our tears, and the artery was completed. civilizations have lost more for less, said the news anchor, but when the bridge went bang a year later, the conversation took on a less ambivalent tone. to destroy such a valuable piece of infrastructure, the news anchor said, red in the face, one that men gave their lives for, no less, why, it’s unthinkable! but kids will be kids, and dynamite is so easy; it feels like gold in their hands.

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La Medusa by Vanessa Place

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I've never read a book before that so violently resists the reader. Trying to navigate the gauntlet of La Medusa felt like having knifes thrown at me from the page. I was constantly ducking and weaving, but mostly just getting stabbed in the cranium by long sections of gibberish, wacky text formatting, and a narrative that was rapidly shifting between perspectives and styles (at one point bouncing from a nine-page poem to a children's fairytale to a slapstick screenplay starring Medusa and Saint Patrick) and splicing itself open at random to make way for History Channel facts and emergent voices from beyond the third and fourth walls. I quickly learned to roll with the punches and focus more on the hip-hop-influenced rhythm of the prose than the meaning of everything being said, but I think by doing so I only gave in to another one of the books many diversions. It ultimately doesn't matter how entertaining the final frontier of postmodern linguistics is when you find yourself 150 pages into a novel and feel like you haven't absorbed anything of meaningful value yet.

So no, I did not wholly enjoy my time with La Medusa, but I don't think Vanessa Place would be surprised or even disappointed by my reaction; in fact, the visceral rage and confusion this book made me feel was a direct result of the narrative operating exactly as it was supposed to. La Medusa is disorienting, illogical, fractured, needlessly frustrating, and overly cryptic, but when you consider the framing of the narrative as a central awareness of Los Angeles, a cosmopolitan sprawl where winding freeways and disparate cultures clash to form new mythologies, it kind of makes sense why the narrative would mimic the sensory overload of traffic congestion and toxic fumes that almost forces the reader to benumb themselves just to make it through. I can respect an author who purposely risks alienating readers to prove a point, but I don't have to enjoy the experience.

But as much as I wanted to cram this book down a paper shredder at times, I still found it hard to DNF. Not only does the constant shifting of POVs make it feel easy to maintain momentum, but the POVs do eventually begin to intersect and become more interesting as we learn more context about their stories. I found myself particularly compelled by the disturbed Dr. Bowles, who seemed to leave behind a trail of death wherever he went, Myles P, whose wife engages in sapphic relations with Rocki while he and the boys drink beer in the truck stop parking lot, and Feena, the young girl struggling to grow up with an authoritarian mother. There were also some odd moments of cogency where the prose shifted from pure psychosis and actually offered something interesting to latch onto, and those moments felt like bursts of dopamine after a fast. Ultimately, the best thing about reading La Medusa is that it will make every other book I read for the rest of my life feel like a cake walk. This wasn't so much of a story as it was a character-building exercise, like digging holes in the Mojave Desert. You'll be grateful for the experience when you're older.

[thisworldisablackhole]

will be conducting a performative reading of Ulysses at 10 PM EST. space limited rsvp now.

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The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald

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I'm at a loss for words. How do you “review” a human life?

There are a multitude of lives packed inside this book—stories within stories that have been swept under rugs, scattered amongst ephemera, crumpled in the back of desk drawers, scrawled in notebooks and journals, buried in the dust of architecture. Despite the novel's focus on four individuals, each life becomes a window into a thousand more. Victims of war and genocide do not exist in a vacuum after all; their stories and their pain are passed down through generations. Despite the displaced survivor's best attempt to compartmentalize the trauma and start fresh in new countries, those painful memories are carried with them, and they seep through the cracks, often resulting in illness and suicide further down the familial chain than you might expect. But these things aren't talked about within the families experiencing them. Talking about them would make them real, so as with his debut novel, Vertigo, Sebald’s primary objective with The Emigrants seems to be to give shape to those things left unsaid by paying careful attention to the details of what was; he reconstructs the lives of these emigrants by talking to their family members, looking at photographs, reading their journal entries, and tracing their geographical steps. From modern-day America to war-torn Europe, all the way back to Jerusalem, where spirituality and decay coexist in staggering contrast, we follow this river of time, memory, and lineage in an attempt to trace generational trauma back to its root, but as we get closer to penetrating that web of memory, the image often becomes more ambiguous.

The Emigrants is haunting, beautiful, and immensely clever, easily one of the best books I've read all year. Sebald does have a way of droning on like a grandparent recounting in meticulous detail the events of their youth, but if you listen closely, you can see a cathedral beginning to take shape; the stories begin to take on a mystical quality, and those memories become real, visceral, and present; we begin to embody them as if they were our own—because they are our own.

I leave you with a few choice quotes:

"Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes the head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds." (p. 145)

"Naturally, I took steps, consciously or unconsciously, to keep at bay thoughts of my parents' sufferings and of my own misfortune, and no doubt I succeeded sometimes in maintaining a certain equability by my self-imposed seclusion; but the fact is that that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark in recent years." (p. 191)

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Crapalachia by Scott McClanahan

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VOICE is such an underrated aspect of writing. I think anyone can learn to write in a specific style or utilize specific vocabulary to great effect, but truly embodying one's own voice through the page seems to be a rare gift reserved for poets and playwrights—those who utilize their arms and their lungs just as much as their brains. I only recently discovered McClanahan through a video of him reading a passage from his newest (and yet unreleased) novel, Fights!, but I was immediately hooked by his voice, by the confidence of his delivery, and by his ability to convey the intrinsic humour of humanity with the tender precision of a spitball blown through a straw.

That voice is fully embodied here in Crapalachia. Whether recounting stories of his histrionic Grandma Ruby taking photographs of dead people or of himself having to clean shit off the floor while helping his disabled Uncle Nathan use the bathroom, McClanahan sings like a canary in a coal mine. Crapalachia is very much a love letter to a time and a place and a deeply humanizing portrait of the people in it—people who the coastal middle classes would slander as hillbillies or rednecks. McClanahan brings these people to life in all of their ugly beauty, and I think the reason he is able to pull this off without coming across as patronizing is because these are his people; these are his memories, his family members (albeit reimagined and fictionalized), and they are embodied in his voice just as his voice is now embodied on the page.

What is more beautiful than that?

I could keep going about how the momentum of each chapter is carried into the next, making the reading experience feel like one continuous movement despite the non-linearity of the moments transcribed, or how buried beneath the tender reminiscence is a study of how the development of rural communities in Appalachia has been intentionally stunted by the evils of the coal industry, but I'll leave it there. Crapalachia is simply a beautiful book. You will laugh, you will cry, but more importantly, you will empathize. I deeply look forward to reading more of McClanahan's work.

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A Shining by Jon Fosse

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Perhaps reading A Shining directly after Morning and Evening wasn't the right move. Both novellas explore the same idea that our consciousness may very well steamroll its way straight through death without even noticing that the body has perished, but A Shining takes a much more concise and direct approach that I found overall less interesting or evocative. But don't get it twisted; this was still a great read, and while the ideas are similar, their expression is quite different.

In A Shining, we find our narrator driving at random down roads that eventually lead him to a dark forest where his car gets stuck in a rut. Realizing that the last house he passed was miles back down the road and looked to be abandoned anyways, he decides to follow a path through the forest where he quickly gets lost and a bunch of surreal shit begins to ensue.

The metaphors for life are fairly obvious, but I loved the unsettling and claustrophobic atmosphere that Fosse was able to build with them. As our narrator tries to navigate this forest, he runs into ghosts and struggles against fatigue and decision paralysis. A Shining seems to espouse this idea that even in the dark forest of life where progress feels inert, movement and human connection are paramount to survival. It was a much-needed reminder that it does not matter so much which direction you move in so long as you keep moving, even if only to stay warm. And hug your parents, goddammit; they might need the love more than you do.

I still fully recommend this book, especially as it is such a quick and impactful read that you can bang out in a single sitting; I would just not read it right after Morning and Evening. Regardless, I am very excited to continue my Fosse journey with either Vaim or Trilogy as my next choice.

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Morning and Evening by Jon Fosse

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What do you think happens when you die? Like, assuming that your consciousness is a self-contained capsule of memory and awareness that can exist outside of your corporeal form (one might even call it the "spirit"), do you think that it (you) will even notice when it is separated from the body? Or will it simply continue on without a hitch? One thing seems certain: without any new input, your consciousness will likely trigger a feedback loop and generate some strange conglomerate of past memories that will be recontextualized into new experiences (almost exactly like generative AI), but this could only go on for so long until your consciousness becomes aware that something feels off.

Personally, this idea terrifies me, and there is indeed an unmistakable sense of cosmic dread that runs through this novella, but Fosse has managed to create a compelling vision of how imperceptible the veil between life and death might be while also making an equally compelling case for the intrinsic beauty of life in every stage of its cycle. It is through this process of the consciousness coming to terms with its own fate that Morning and Evening proves how a certain level of discomfort is absolutely necessary to experience any sort of joy in life, and by the end of that process, all I could do was cry.

But I think the true genius of Fosse is how he was able to embed this philosophical conceit into both the structure of the story itself, which begins with the father of the main character having a premonition of his son's death during the moment of his birth, and also the prose, which is itself a cyclical, repetitive, and hypnotic stream of consciousness. Fosse's prose might not be for everyone, but Morning and Evening was such a unique and beautiful experience, and at only 107 pages long, I'd say it's worth anyone's time. I just hope that when I die the void of nothingness will swallow me whole.

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Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti

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I used to think politics had nothing to do with me, but something changed as I got older and started consuming fiction: I began to notice the pattern of politics, economics, environment, and class as being inextricable forces that shaped the lives and worlds of the characters I was reading about. The more I read, the less I could see a separation between myself and the politico-economic systems that shape our material realities, and the more I became obsessed with this idea of interconnectivity, which sparked a train of self-education that eventually led me to Michael Parenti.

Blackshirts & Reds makes one thing clear: from the Industrial Revolution to the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, to the new age of American imperialism, to the increase in social division, the atomization of culture, the hijacking of "democracy," and the current economic and environmental crises we are facing, one thing is at the center of it all: capitalist greed. Parenti does an amazing job at illustrating how these systems of capitalism and fascism collude, accelerate, and destroy everything in their path, but he also makes another thing painfully clear: almost every critique of communism (aka the biggest existential threat to capitalism) is completely rife with hypocrisy and ignorance, and that is by design—the direct result of decades of anti-communist propaganda and misinformation campaigns.

Look, I'm not here to tell you what to believe or convince you that communists are infallible angels, but I want to encourage you to think critically about why Western capitalists would put so much time and energy into undermining a system of governance that was only ever trying to provide a basic standard of living for its populace, free from opportunistic parasites looking to get rich off of the labour of others—a system that was never even given the chance to reach its apogee because the threat that it posed to capitalist society put it under constant attack. Maybe it's because there is no profit in loving thy neighbour.

Capitalism has failed us, and as Parenti puts it, our only hope of creating a better society lies in an informed and mobilized citizenry, so consider picking up this book.

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Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson

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A queer coming-of-age story based on loose fragments of ancient Greek poetry penned by Stesichorus (630–555 BC) about Herakles and the monster Geryon? Sign me up.

I honestly didn’t know what I was getting into when I picked this up; I have experience in neither poetry nor Greek mythology, but thankfully Carson’s reimagining (or renovation) of this ancient myth doesn’t really require knowledge of either to enjoy. Autobiography of Red blurs the lines between classicism and modernity and offers an easily approachable spin on narrative verse. Yes, Hades is an actual location in the novel, but so is Buenos Aires and Huaraz. There are airplanes and fast cars and towns built into the slopes of active volcanoes, and yes, Geryon has wings and can fly, but he is also just a moody, confused kid who is really into expressing himself through photography. And Autobiography of Red feels very much like a collection of snapshots—each short chapter starts with a single line that sets the scene, and then Carson goes to work with her visceral, multilayered prose to paint heartrending scenes of distance, insecurity, and tenderness. Instead of Herakles killing Geryon with an arrow to the skull as in Stesichorus’s poem, he kills him with emotional indifference, but this indifference leads to a sort of awakening in Geryon as he learns to embrace his true form as a beautiful, flying red monster.

Upon completion I wasn’t sure how much the verse structure actually added to the experience, especially considering Carson doesn’t follow any rhyme scheme or metering device, but I think the line breaks really helped me to slow down, and focus on the rhythm of each word—something I might not have done if everything was condensed into simple paragraphs. Either way, this story is packed with allegory and hidden meanings, and I really enjoyed how Carson was able to create such a potent sense of feeling and environmental pressure with so few words. This story might take multiple reads to fully unpack, but I look forward to doing so.

I have to shout out my two friends: John, who first recommended Carson to me as a poet who might appeal to the poetry hesitant like myself for her structural freedom and focus on long-form narrative, and Dallan, who helped me understand the historical context of the framing device and who read the book alongside me. Thanks to these two, I was able to have an extremely refreshing reading experience and also expand my curiosity for poetry.

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Midnight Is Not In Everyone’s Reach by António Lobo Antunes

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The best art is often times the art that challenges your perceptions and forces you to meet the artist halfway. In the realm of music I have often developed Stockholm syndrome in my attempts to grapple with perplexing styles, and through that effort I have turned many albums from ear antagonists into lifelong friends. The same can be said about books.

I say this because as much as I ended up loving Midnight Is Not In Everyone's Reach upon completion, I cannot understate the challenge I faced in getting there.

The narrative form of this book is very experimental and surreal. It reads more like fragmented shards of poetry than a cogent story. In short, it is about a woman who returns to her childhood beach house to say goodbye to the ghosts of her family before following the path of her older brother who committed suicide, and just like the narrator in Juan Rulfo's Pedro Paramo, she becomes consumed by lingering memories that interject and overlap, causing past and present conversations to weave themselves into a dizzying collage, and the novel quickly becomes less about a singular protagonist and more of an intimate portrait of familial trauma and grief.

Sounds cool, I know, but this non-linearity of events becomes a deterrent, as if the form of the novel itself were a trauma response set in place to safeguard those memories from surfacing. Even on a sentence-by-sentence basis the words often assemble themselves in nonsensical strings of (perceived) non-meaning, which caused me to repeatedly question what this book could possibly tell me that was worth the effort of prying it open, but what kept me going through those moments of doubt was Antunes's careful repetition of motifs to string together fragments of memory into distinct profiles of emotion and character. What appeared nonsensical and formless at first began to reveal its structure, like a free jazz ensemble, which is purposely obtuse but clearly the result of skilled musicianship and collective harmony—a beautiful thing in and of itself.

I'm still not convinced that this story couldn't have been told in a better and more effective way, but I respect the hell out of Antunes for putting out a piece of art that doesn't compromise the risks it takes in order to be easily digestible. In retrospect, Midnight Is Not In Everyone's Reach is not the book I would have picked as my intro to his oeuvre, but it offers a singular experience that, despite its hurdles, I will remember and cherish forever.

[thisworldisablackhole]

May 11th, 2026

Being cheeky/using up the last couple shots on the roll outside of the photo lab.

Yashica T4 / Portra 400