Tobias Carroll (dot) info

Notes, thoughts, & miscellany

Tobias Carroll is the author of five books. Up next: Kill List, a book on the film for Bloomsbury Academic’s Timecodes series. You can find out more about those books here.

  • Patrick Leigh Fermor, But Occult

    “A few days after he had sent the Cuxa postcard, he read her some chapters from the autobiography of Michael Ashman, a minor travel writer who had walked across Europe in the late thirties…” The above passage comes up in the first third of M. John Harrison’s 1992 novel The Course of the Heart. I read it for the first time in 2010 (or so Goodreads tells me) and it left little to no impression on me. After reading a bunch of Harrison’s work for a Literary Hub article, I returned to it and found myself devastated by the book.…

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  • “Glass Onion,” Round 2

    Watched Rian Johnson’s latest film on the big screen solo last month, and watched it at my folks’ place this week while visiting. (I’d also watched Knives Out with them on a Jersey visit, so it seemed fitting.) Definitely a film that (for me, anyway) rewarded multiple viewings. And, good lord, Janelle Monáe’s work in the film is just fantastic. Also, the brief reference to a certain late-20th century American novel is one of my favorite visual gags in recent memory.

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  • HOLIDAY CUSTOMS OF NEW JERSEY TOWNS, EPISODE 14: Okcidenta

    Travel to the end of the interstate highway near the border of Monmouth and Ocean Counties and you’ll find what remains of the town of Okcidenta, founded in 1923 and later abandoned after the mayor and town council were implicated in a horse racing scandal. The town council numbered twenty-six residents in total; the town’s adult population was thirty-one, which spelled doom for its municipal future, and many of the homes were subsequently broken down and used to build a local amusement park. In his acclaimed 1992 memoir Defenestrating Krampus in the Pine Barrens, the infamous big game hunter Herman…

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  • Two years ago I bought a domain

    I have a “professional” site up elsewhere. In the early days of the pandemic, I thought, What if I had another space somewhere? Somewhere for, shall we say, old-school blogging? And then pandemic-era depression set in and I did nothing else with this space for months. Scratch that, a year. Scratch that, two years. But hey. Better late than never, eh?

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