Tag: books

The Intruder from the Cypress Gloom

Sometimes you hear stories of horror and the supernatural, and you don’t know what to do with them, especially if the person telling the story seems sane and credible. As a result, the story lingers and haunts you for all your life. For example, I’ve never forgotten a story one of my college students told me back in the fall of 1998. She was a re-entry student—a nurse in her early forties—juggling coursework at UCLA with overnight hospital shifts. The kind of woman who sticks in your memory: short, sturdy, glasses perched low on her nose, with the weary, perceptive eyes of someone who’d seen too much and lips that knew how to pace a punchline.

Most afternoons, after class let out, she’d linger by my desk and recount episodes from her Louisiana backwoods childhood or from the fluorescent netherworld of her hospital’s VIP wing. Her stories ricocheted between absurdity and horror—tales told with the calm authority of someone who could handle arterial spray with one hand and chart notes with the other.

But one story gripped me by the spine and never let go. It wasn’t about dying celebrities or ER gore. It was about something far worse. A visitation. A monster.

She and her cousin Carmen were feral children, raised in the lawless heat of rural Louisiana, where school attendance was optional and adult supervision was more myth than fact. Left to their own devices, the two girls invented what she called “mean games”—they tortured frogs, pulled wings off insects, and hinted at darker cruelties she refused to name. Lord of the Flies in sundresses.

And then one afternoon, the visitor arrived.

They were holed up in a decaying house, conspiring over their next cruelty, when the porch door creaked open and something stepped inside. It looked like a man. But it wasn’t. Over six feet tall, it had a tail—thick, muscled, and disturbingly animate. It moved with a will of its own, curling and flicking behind him like a fleshy metronome. His body was bristled with wiry hair. His voice? Low, hoarse, and calm in the most terrifying way. He didn’t threaten. He simply listed.

Sitting in a rocking chair, the creature, a sort of rat-man, described, in brutal detail, everything the girls had done—every frog mutilated, every insect dissected. Nothing vague. He named the acts like he had them on file. And then he made his offer: Keep going, he said, and I’ll recruit you.

He stayed for three hours. Just sat there. Breathing. Flicking that tail. Describing their path toward damnation with the steady tone of a bureaucrat explaining retirement benefits. When he finally left, dissolving into the heat shimmer of the Louisiana dusk, the girls were too stunned to move. Carmen whispered, “Did you see that?” My student just nodded.

They never spoke of it again. But they changed. Overnight. Sunday school. Prayer. Kindness, enforced not by conscience but by fear. The kind that settles in your bones and never leaves. Whatever that thing was, it did its job.

And this is the part that haunts me: she wasn’t a kook. She wasn’t mystical, manic, or given to exaggeration. She was a nurse—clear-eyed, grounded, more familiar with death than most people are with taxes. She wasn’t telling a ghost story. She was giving a deposition.

To this day, I see those two girls, wide-eyed and paralyzed, staring down a thing that knew them intimately and promised them a future in hell’s apprenticeship program. Whether it was a demon, a shared psychotic break, or some mythological construct formed by childhood guilt and Southern humidity, I don’t know. But I do know what it meant.

The creature’s message was brutal in its simplicity: Keep practicing cruelty, and you’ll lose the ability to stop. You’ll become it.

That’s not just folklore. That’s biblical. The idea that if you repeat your wickedness long enough, God—or whatever you believe in—stops interrupting you. He doesn’t smite you. He simply steps aside and says, Go ahead. This is the life you’ve chosen.

No wonder Kierkegaard was obsessed with working out your salvation with fear and trembling. There’s nothing more terrifying than the idea that damnation is self-inflicted, not by a thunderbolt, but by repetition. That the road to hell is paved with muscle memory.

September 23, 2025
Zosia Mamet and My Personal Reading Revival

It’s rare that I fall in love with books these days, but when it happens, I’m grateful because reading reminds me of my glory days, the early 80s when I consumed books with ferocity, imaginative pleasure, and obligation like a bodybuilder taking protein powder and creatine. Three major factors have curtailed my reading of books: One, I’ve grown so cynical over the years that I’ve come to the belief that 99% of books are in actuality just a short story or essay with padding. An author has an intriguing idea, and they sit down with their agent and cook up a book that is mostly chicanery with a dash of substance.

Then three days ago, I heard actor Zosia Mamet talking about her memoir Does This Make Me Funny?, a collection of essays, with KCRW host Sam Sanders, and I was so struck by her depth of wit, intelligence, and moral perspective that I immediately bought her book, or I should say the Kindle eBook version of it. Even more rare than buying books as intellectual property, it is even rarer that I buy a hard copy of something, unless it is a kettlebell training book or a cookbook like Miyoko Schimmer’s The Vegan Creamery.

Getting most of my books on Kindle speaks to the second reason my reading has diminished. The physical act of reading is unpleasant. Holding the book, turning the pages, getting into a comfortable position, attenuating my eyes to the various font sizes. I find the whole thing disconcerting and unpleasant, like trying to figure out the seat positions, buttons, and levers of an unfamiliar car. The most comfortable forms of reading are either sitting at my desktop and reading the Kindle on a 27-inch screen or reading while sitting in bed with a 16-inch laptop.

The third reason I don’t read as much is that the Internet and its attention economy have fried my brain over the decades. The attention muscles inside my cortex have atrophied to a woeful state.

But occasionally a rose grows out of the cracks in the cement sidewalk, and such is the case with Zosia Mamet’s memoir, as witty, deep, self-deprecating, and salient as the author speaking to Sam Sanders three days ago. Reading the memoir is to connect with someone for whom her writing voice and the core of her being are the same. The result is something distinctive and salient, something that recoils and then snaps forward to leave its literary fangs inside you. Isn’t that what writing is supposed to be about? Nabokov was like that. So was Kafka. And so is Zosia Mamet.

I detest some confectionary celebrity memoir reeking of privilege, superfluousness, and mediocrity. None of that is in Zosia’s collection of essays.

As we read in Jancee Dunn’s New York Times article “At Least Zosia Mamet Can Laugh About It,” the core of her book is about her mental, physical, and spiritual health. Coming from a family that is deeply entrenched in literature and the arts is a double-edged sword with excruciating pressure to live up to superhuman expectations causing Zosia’s thorn in her side to be the constant sense that she is falling abysmally short.

Like the best comedia, she opts out of self-pity for humor as she does a deep dive into her anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, anorexia, and anhedonia, and all the self-destructive behaviors she succumbed to in order to overcome these afflictions. Because she knows that body dysmorphia is a delusion that hijacks her brain, she says about herself: “I am often an unreliable narrator of my own reality.”

Which in a nutshell is the human condition: Can we trust ourselves or are we getting duped by our own fake narrative?

What tools from our emotional toolbox can we use to be more reliable? Perhaps comedy is one of them. Think of our irrational states: overcome by maudlin self-pity, vanity, and grandiosity, we spin grotesque narratives about ourselves that compel us to behave in ways that are ridiculous and often result in self-sabotage. Perhaps comedy is the antidote. Perhaps comedy distances us from our preposterous self-mythology and helps us in the arduous process of self-reinvention. That’s the sense I’m getting from Zosia Mamet’s very necessary book, a book that has no padding at all but has been made from a brilliant mind with blood, sweat, and tears.

September 22, 2025
Florida Fever Dreams and Katrina Floodwaters: Future Writing Prompts I Can’t Quit

I work obsessively hard to develop essay prompts for my college students. When they prove effective and resonate with the students, I am gratified beyond words and will keep the prompt for perhaps too long. I have an assignment about a diet writer Rebecca Johns who in her essay “A Diet Writer’s Regrets” explores the irony and misery of gaining weight while dispensing weight-loss tips in her women’s magazine articles. Her inability to execute her own advice becomes an opportunity for my students to explore the notion of free will when it comes to weight management, especially now that GLP-1 drugs are proving that dependence on technology can be so much more reliable than aspirations toward self-agency. The students’ essays over the last four semesters have been truly engaging, revealing either their own weight-management torment or a friend or family member’s.

One problem, though, with an essay prompt is that as it gets used semester after semester some of the essay components, such as the counterargument-rebuttal section, start looking the same. I suspect the previously written essays become in some form or other available to the new batch of students, and for this reason, I think even the best essay prompts have a limited shelf life.

Another challenge with creating essay prompts is that you don’t really know how they will land with the students until you actually try it out. For example, I was very enthusiastic about my freshman composition class’s first assignment in which they write about the crisis of young men who lack a sense of belonging and purpose and how in their vulnerable state they become vulnerable to the deceptions, manipulations, and false claims of bro influencers. We studied the Liver King who is said to have made over a hundred million dollars and in his caveman cosplay, he was simply too ridiculous and grotesque for my students–all athletes–to take him seriously. He proved so absurd that whatever gravitas I was trying to squeeze out of the assignment just felt like a joke. While millions of men followed their organ-eating cult leader, my athletes were not impressed, and I felt that my essay prompt suffered for it. As a result, I doubt I’ll do that one again.

Looking ahead, I’m thinking of Florida as less of a physical place and more of a mental fever swamp where I can explore the notion of freedom in its immature and mature incarnations. The TV comedy series It’s Florida, Man and the documentary Some Kind of Heaven about a hedonistic senior citizen home could be an effective exploration of the perils of perpetual adolescence. To avoid making the essay prompt nihilistic, I am leaning toward a contrast essay in which the students explore a more healthy kind of freedom as Cal Newport advocates in his message of “deep work”–the idea that focused work is essential to flourishing and self-fulfillment.

Another topic that possesses me is Hurricane Katrina, the idea that a natural disaster was made into a man-made catastrophe through neglect and reckless disregard for the people of New Orleans. This ignominious chapter in American history is a powerful window into red-lining, government corruption, and media misinformation. The riveting documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) convince me that I will be exploring Hurricane Katrina next semester.

My challenge with Katrina is making sure the story doesn’t collapse into pure tragedy. To balance the devastation, I need to highlight the unique culture of New Orleans—the joy, the tight-knit families, the music, food, and resilience that define the city. The message I want to leave students with is that, despite catastrophe, New Orleans has a distinctive soul that continues to draw the world to its city.

I suspect even after I retire in less than two years I will still sniff out writing prompts. Coming up with essay prompts is my addiction, and this addiction isn’t going away anytime soon.

September 20, 2025
The Bodybuilding Gollum of Shepherd College

In Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man, paranoia has a name: Harold, a disgruntled English professor who stalks the halls of Shepherd College convinced his masculinity is shriveling under fluorescent lights and academic jargon. The place is no sanctuary of learning but a mausoleum of joyless theory—an institution where semiotics and power structures reign supreme, while Harold dreams of biceps, protein macros, and shredded abs. To him, the Priests of the Intellect are laughable scarecrows, their bodies soft as tomatoes skewered on toothpicks, their credibility dissolving with every Oreo they dunk between papers on Derrida.

Banished to a basement classroom without sunlight, Harold becomes a musclebound Gollum snarling at his colleagues above, who bask in daylight and collegial belonging. Faculty meetings are his personal hell: an ordeal as odious as wisdom-teeth extractions performed by a dentist with no anesthetic and no soul. While his peers pontificate about “backward design” and “cohorts,” Harold visualizes his metabolism torching fat, each fiber of muscle flexing like a Renaissance sculpture coming alive.

What makes Harold truly unhinged is Shepherd College itself—a cult in mortar and brick, built on the deranged philosophy of the late R.K. Mort, who declared that architecture should “infect” and “haunt” its inhabitants. Mort’s disciples fawn over his absurdities as if he were an academic messiah, turning the college into a dehumanizing theme park of theory. It’s Severance with faculty ID cards.

As a lifelong bodybuilder trapped in academia myself, I relate to Harold’s plight more than I’d like to admit. Yet I nearly hurled the book across the room when Harold showed up to his interminable meeting without food. A man obsessed with protein who forgets to pack a meal? Unforgivable. In my forty years of teaching, I never once forgot to bring my Tupperware of chicken breast or Greek yogurt to the institutional trenches. I wanted to shout at the page: “Get in the game, Harold! Respect the gains!” Still, his misfit rage and comic pathos hook me. Harold may be a wreck, but he’s my kind of wreck.

I’m only two chapters in but eager to consume the entirety of this delicious satire.

September 13, 2025
The Man Who Always Waved

When my twins were born in 2010, I spent years pacing the sidewalks of my Torrance neighborhood with them—first in a stroller, then a wagon, and eventually on their own unsteady feet. Along those same sidewalks shuffled old couples with dogs, walkers, and time to spare. Sometimes one half of a pair would vanish, leaving the other to walk alone, and soon enough that figure too disappeared from the neighborhood stage. I never knew most of their names, yet I felt tethered to them; they would smile at my daughters, wave with fragile hands, and in that exchange I saw the cycle of life laid bare: the beginning in my stroller, the ending in their absence.

One man I did know by name—Frank. I don’t recall how we met, but I remember the details: his beige Volvo station wagon, the clever mirror nailed to the tree behind his house so he could back out with precision. Frank looked to be in his late sixties in 2010. He walked the neighborhood with brisk efficiency, always in uniform—olive shorts, white T-shirt, glasses perched on his nose, a beige bucket hat shading his face, and a small wristwatch on a leather band, which he consulted like a man keeping an appointment with life itself.

He reminded me of a restrained Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day: perhaps square at first glance, but steady, decent, reliable. No matter how intent he was on his route, he never failed to lift a hand in greeting. The wave was never exuberant, never perfunctory—it was graceful, automatic, the gesture of a man who seemed stitched together with quiet goodness. His wife matched him in cheer, and though I never learned her name, she radiated authenticity. They were a pair who seemed to exist outside of fashion, untouched by fads or pretensions.

Over time, I realized they had become more than neighbors to me. They were a balm against my cynicism, proof that stability, kindness, and simple decency still existed in a world that seemed allergic to all three. Which is why, six months ago, while lifting weights in my garage, I felt a chill: What happened to Frank? I hadn’t seen him in ages. He would be in his eighties now. Surely he hadn’t slipped away unnoticed?

Then, this morning, as I turned into my neighborhood after dropping my daughters at high school, I saw him. Frank, unchanged, same outfit, same bucket hat, same little watch. I raised my hand. He raised his. And before I knew it, a tear streaked my cheek.

September 11, 2025
Words of Wisdom in a World of Publishing Hallucinations

Last night I dreamed I was at the Aspen Institute, where I took the stage as a guest speaker while snowflakes pirouetted past the classroom windows like bored ballerinas. Dozens of young writers—already published, already duped—sat before me, waiting to be enlightened. I told them the truth their publishers had concealed with a smile and a contract: the marketing promises were fairy dust, the royalty checks were jokes, and their “book deals” were little more than elaborate scams. They would earn a pittance, and the betrayal would sting worse than any bad review.

Some of them glared at me like I’d just blasphemed against their gods, but others—emboldened by rage—shouted the names of their novels and memoirs into the snowy air. A nineteen-year-old tech billionaire from India cried out the title of his memoir: The Gunther Effect. I made him repeat it three times, as if conjuring a spell, so the words wouldn’t slip away. Against my better judgment, I was intrigued.

By popular demand, I returned for a second sermon. This time, I was flanked by professors and “established” writers who knew the game as well as I did. Their lectures weren’t brilliant, but they didn’t have to be. For me, just focusing on one speaker, narrowing the scattered kaleidoscope of my mind into a single lens, felt like mental hygiene—a purging of the Internet’s endless distractions. I thought, This is what I miss: the monastic joy of being a student, concentrating on one voice instead of chasing dopamine scraps.

And slowly, the room shifted. The students began to understand that my colleagues and I weren’t cynics but keepers of the ugly gospel. We had the keys to the vault, the passwords to real power. We were the Priests and Priestesses of Light and Success, consecrated by disillusion. Hands shot up like candles in a vigil, their questions burning against the snowfall outside, and we were exalted, gratified, almost holy in the glow of their hunger.

September 8, 2025
The Road to Studio City Is Paved with Lane Closures

Yesterday I braved my cousin Pete’s 75th birthday blowout in Studio City, dragging my wife and one of my twin daughters along for the ordeal. Like a fool, I skipped the Google Maps pre-check. The punishment: three lane closures on the 405. What should have been a breezy forty-minute jaunt became a 95-minute death march in a metal box. I joked that Pete should’ve hired a therapist specifically for the traumatized survivors of Southern California traffic—“Welcome, let’s unpack your freeway PTSD before the cake is served.”

The party itself was bigger than I bargained for—150 guests orbiting around a swimming pool, lubricated by a taco bar, hummus hills, pita plains, and charcuterie slabs that could feed a small country. A band of four septuagenarians hacked out Beatles and Stones covers with the enthusiasm of men reliving their garage-band glory years.

I chatted with cousins and one of the guitarists, but inevitably the conversation veered into my professional life: “So, Jeff, what about AI in the classroom?” I gave them my stock answer: AI is a double-edged sword. It can turn us into lazy bots outsourcing our brains—or, on the bright side, it can make my grading life less of a grammar police beat. I explained that AI gives every student a free grammar tutor, a perk I never thought I’d live to see. And yes, I confessed my own guilty pleasure: I write a sprawling Nabokovian memo, feed it to the machine, and tell it, “Sharpen this. Add acid wit.” What comes back is so tight and sly that I want to light a candle in gratitude.

Left unsupervised, AI churns out limp, hollow paragraphs—Shakespeare’s “sound and fury, signifying nothing.” But with a solid draft and precise marching orders, it can take my word-bloated gasbaggery and spin it into crisp, surgical prose. The tool is neither angel nor demon; the sin or virtue belongs to the user.

Of course, I also sinned in the culinary department. My “moderation” consisted of three or four thick slabs of brie smothered with figs and crackers, plus a couple of carne asada tacos. I had a token bite of my daughter’s birthday cake, which was so sweet it could have stripped paint, but that was restraint by default, not discipline. I’m certain I left Pete’s bash two pounds heavier.

The drive home was mercifully shorter—just an hour—though Google still had the gall to insist the 405 was the “fast” route, lane closures and all. Let’s just say the 405 and I are on a trial separation for at least a year.

September 7, 2025
Blast from the Past: Telefunken Banjo Automatic

Six inches tall and barely ten inches across, the Telefunken Banjo Automatic delivers a lot of effortless sound for a radio its size. This vintage came in good shape as the seller had cleaned it up, even took it apart and did a “deep clean” to all the knobs. So there’s no static to speak of. This arrived with no AC. It’s feeding of six C batteries.

Don’t be fooled by the swanky yellow. This colorful radio has outstanding FM reception and while the AM is above average it cannot light a candle to my bigger, brawnier Telefunken Partner 700, which at $40, cost me about half of the Banjo price.

The Banjo’s controls are smooth, and this bright yellow Telefunken feels upscale through and through, but if you’re Telefunken hunting, I recommend the bigger Partner 700. As good as the spunky yellow Banjo is, its speaker sound and AM sound loses to its bigger, more serious cousin.

In some ways it’s not fair to compare the two Telefunkens. The Banjo is a smaller portable, the Partner a heavier table radio. If I compare the Banjo to the similar sized Sangean PR-D5, the Banjo wins in speaker sound. The PR-D5’s small stereo speakers are so tinny my ears have trouble picking up the sound. In contrast, the Banjo fills a room easily. The FM on the Banjo is better than the PR-D5 and AM sound is similar. Of course, the $80 PR-D5 is new and digital and has presets so the comparison doesn’t quite work either.

One strange quirk about the Banjo that I’ve never encountered before is that AM numbers are inverse to the FM numbers so that 103.1 FM, for example, is close to 640 AM. Strange, but no big deal.

If you’re looking for a small travel companion, the Banjo is high-end and will not disappoint. If you’re looking for the majesty of a Panasonic RF-3000 (one just sold for over $300) and want to save some dough, check out the Partner 700, which I stole for $40.

September 6, 2025
Blast from the Past: Panasonic RF-3000, The Tank

I picked up the package of the Panasonic RF-3000 and could already feel the presence of greatness evidenced by the density of the box. Inside was a 25-pound radio. What do today’s radios weigh? Two pounds?

The heft of this vintage reminds me of a beloved car my parents bought, a brand new 1967 Chrysler Newport. My parents loved that car and would still have it today except that a troubled neighbor boy attempted to steal the car in 1974 or 1975. The car rolled down the steep hill of a street we lived on and was totaled (as a side note that same troubled boy stole another car a few years later, crashed it, and suffered permanent brain damage, but I digress).

My point is today’s products are cheap and often chintzy. This can not be said of the solid looking RF-3000. Its only flaws are that twice the previous owner, suffering from dotage presumably, felt compelled to inscribe his social security on the radio. Perhaps this is a testament to his proprietary love of the radio, well deserved. In any case, the person managing the deceased radio owner’s estate disclosed this flaw on eBay. Sorry, there’s something unwittingly macabre about this review. Please let me proceed.

Why does a man want a heavy radio? The same reason a man wants 300-500 horsepower in his sport sedan. One word: Confidence. The RF-3000 delivers and more.

I turned on the RF-3000 and was stunned by crystal clarity and a salient quality of sound that in my subjective mind may eclipse its legendary brother, the RF-2200. Stations came in with ease. The birdy on the dreaded 710 AM vanished with a slight rotation of the hulking 3000. 88.9 KXLU came in loud and clear. Same for 89.3 and 103.1, other touchy stations. Let’s get real. The 3000 puts today’s radios to utter shame (forgive me, but hyperbolic emotion lends itself to cliche).

This radio is huge. My wife says it looks like a relic from The Hatch in ABC’s hit TV show Lost. As I said earlier, it evokes the grand heft of my parents’ 1967 Chrysler Newport.

What did I pay for this booming radio that is so solid I am reminded of the hull of a cruise ship? A paltry $87. You can buy some mediocre radios out there for twice that much. I’m glad I snatched this thing. What a treasure. File the vintage RF-3000 as more grist for middle-aged curmudgeonly men to rant and bicker about the loss of quality in the Modern Age.

September 6, 2025
Comparing the Tecsun PL-660 and the PL-680: Why the 660 Is Better for Me
I picked up an open-box Tecsun PL-680 for a huge discount, a deal too good to resist. Did I need it? Absolutely not. I already own the Tecsun PL-660, its near-identical twin. But this wasn’t a rational purchase—this was a radio-fueled nostalgia binge, a return to my obsession from 15 years ago. I love these radios. I love their design, their buttons, their retro Cold War aesthetic. And let’s be honest—I just wanted to compare them.

First Impressions:

I expected to prefer the PL-660’s design, but the PL-680 surprised me. It has a slightly different look, and now that I have both, I can’t pick a favorite. They’re like fraternal twins with great reception and a questionable resale value.

Performance Check:
- AM/FM Reception? Identical—stellar sensitivity, fantastic clarity, and minimal RFI (unlike my finicky DSP radios).
- Speaker Sound? Nearly indistinguishable, though the PL-680 might have a hair more output—but if you blindfolded me, I doubt I could tell the difference.
- Compared to My Tecsun PL-880 & PL-990? Not even close—those two have the richer, fuller audio these models lack.
The Unexpected Revelation:

Now here’s where things get weird—the Qodosen DX-286, a smaller, less expensive radio, outshines them in speaker quality. It sounds richer, deeper, fuller, like it’s punching out a solid 3 watts of audio muscle compared to the 1-watt Tecsuns. Suddenly, I found myself fantasizing about a “Super Qodosen”—a 10-watt speaker beast, with a sturdy kickstand and a 7.5-inch chassis, like the Tecsun 660 and 680. If someone built that, I’d throw money at it immediately.

Do I Prefer the Qodosen Overall?

The short answer is no. Its short telescopic antenna can limit FM in some areas of the house and other owners tell me it really shines with an elongated FM antenna, which fits in the 3.5mm jack. This is inconvenient for some.

Also, I’ve learned that I can enjoy the speaker sound on both the 660 and 680 by turning the Treble/Bass switch to Bass, a personal preference.

Buyer’s Remorse?

Not a chance. These are legendary performers, and more importantly, they’re relics of my Radio Obsession 1.0 days. Nostalgia, curiosity, and a good deal—that’s all the justification I need.

Update:

After a month of comparing the two, I much prefer the 660 because the 680 fades in and out of LAist 89.3 causing huge volume fluctuations. I don’t have this problem with the 660. I’m using the 680 in my garage for my kettlebell workouts and close to the outside parkway, the clear reception helps the 680 so I don’t get those volume fluctuations.
September 6, 2025