Haven’t been reading much lately; haven’t really missed it. I’m writing a novella/short novel/jumbo story and am on the lookout for anything that might serve as inspiration: biographies and memoirs of musicians; any hyperbolic first-person account of the narrator’s schlubby acquaintance, a la Oscar Wao or Humboldt’s Gift (as recommended by my advisor); stories set in Butte, Montana; stories with interesting mother/son relationships. This next one has the latter:
We Disappear by Scott Heim : Astonishingly, I am reading another brand new book. This is Heim’s first, I believe, since Mysterious Skin in 1995. I’ve reached the point where the novel begins to justify its strange premise by unveiling the deeper meanings involved. Specifically, the “We” in the title refers not so much to the missing children that mother and son obsess over, but the mother and son themselves, one dying of cancer and the other always high on meth. It helps to know that both characters are a little bit out of their minds, because even though Heim makes every attempt to make the story plausible, so much of their motivation defies easy description. I feel more strongly and consistently about this book than I have about any other that I could and probably would write something like this myself. This includes the excessive use of lists and semicolons; the ornate but pretty language that doesn’t seem to come easy to its writer; the ideas, objects and ways of life with which the novel concerns itself. Heim includes a list in the back of the book of the albums he listened to while writing it (I don’t find him the least bit crazy for doing this, though I guess some writers can’t have any distractions while they’re working) and I wasn’t surprised to find many of my ambient and electronic faves among them: Future Sound of London, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Low, M83, Boards of Canada, Angelo Badalamenti. This all must be ideal music to channel the strange and somber frequencies along which Heim’s mind clearly operates.
Jazz by Paul Tanner, David W. Megill, Maurice Gerow : Boring but marginally useful textbook for my jazz class that appears to have been dumbed down from previous editions. Thank God we’re also reading this…
Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, edited by Robert Walser : Source material going back to the origins of jazz. Sidney Bechet and Jelly Roll Morton are particularly eloquent when reflecting on their experiences and exaggerating their own importance.
Other recent reads:
The Listening Book by W.A. Mathieu : Corny but entirely genuine series of observations to help the reader get in touch, so to speak, with the hearing mechanism. There are about ten sentences worth of real wisdom, which almost made it worthwhile.
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday : Great book, whose best qualities have more or less escaped my mind by now. I had a sense of vast spaces and movement within them, on a cosmic level that few books achieve. At the end, when Abel returns home, it is unclear to me whether men still run through the canyon, or if these are just the ghosts and echoes of previous generations. It is an ending that is not as hopeless as it could be, like many things I have encountered recently (the beautifully sad Wendy and Lucy, for example, which like the other two best movies I have seen recently—Chuck and Buck and The Wrestler—strikes me as a literary achievement as well as a cinematic one).
Gilead was great. My Oscar favorites (with only the Winslets and Changelina yet unseen):
Picture: Milk
Director: Gus Van Sant
Actor: Sean Penn
Actress: Melissa Leo
Supporting Actor: Josh Brolin
Supporting Actress: Viola Davis
Original Screenplay: Milk
Adapted Screenplay: Doubt
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Nu-Boox
Currently:
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson : I never expected to love a novel about a preacher so much, but this one, while not secular, has a humanist emphasis, with a narrator who is constantly surprised by the wondrousness of existence. Robinson’s interest in John Ames has much to do with what they share as writers, or as people who concern themselves with the lives of others. Baptism is described as a sensation of “really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time,” a line that corresponds to this one: “Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.” Both of these work as descriptions of what a truly great writer like Robinson does. I hope those lines give a sense of how much more approachable this book is to a heathen like me than anything by Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene. Gilead makes clear the true and simple purpose of religion in Ames’ life: to help him live a purposeful life, be good, occupy his time, and recognize beauty.
Other recent reads:
Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan : Mediocre comic book with hyperbolic praise on the back cover by Joe Sacco (whose Palestine I have avoided reading because the new edition comes with an introduction by Edward Said—nothing against Edward Said, but I don’t like comics and theory to mingle so closely). The story is typical: two characters search for a man missing after an attack on a bus station in Tel Aviv; they become intimate along the way, discover things about the missing man, discover things about themselves, so on and so forth. The drawing style is lumpy and awkward; I don’t expect (or even desire) great art in a comic book, but I could never warm up to Modan’s drawings. There’s nothing in the characterization to make the protagonists more than bland and anonymous; a wider array of facial expressions would certainly help here. I will say that Modan is a fantastic colorist, though.
Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser : I adore Steven Millhauser, except for those moments when his writing makes me aware of his weird sexual foibles. There’s not a female character in this entire collection who is not either weak, invisible, or in the act of turning her face away. Is he even aware? Well, perhaps it’s to be expected, as invisibility is one of his primary concerns, along with invention, architecture, history, passion that borders on madness. He’s an ideas man, and not in some boring theoretical or philosophical way, but in the way that Thomas Edison was an ideas man. He’s more a watchmaker than a writer, and reading these stories is like being presented with some fantastic new invention, complete in itself.
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen : A very good first novel whose pleasures are mostly in the Philip K. Dick vein. I guess all of the sci-fi elements here are simply delusions of the narrator, but I read the book in a sci-fi frame of mind, holding out hope that the delusions would eventually prove themselves real. In the end, the book is a love story, not a meteorological thriller, but it’s a lot of fun while it lasts. It’s full of brilliant observations, most of which double as hypothetical science fiction ponderings and romantic truths.
I don’t know what the hell I was talking about the last time I wrote about The History of Love (I mean my vagueness, not the quality of the book), but here are some things about it that seemed to me to be unbelievable (implausible)—nearly as unbelievable as that moment in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button when Tilda Swinton’s character is referred to as “plain as paper”:
1) Reading The Street of Crocodiles in one afternoon. I seem to recall this book being about 140 pages long; it is fairly dense and the character who reads it in The History of Love is only 15 years old. I’ve estimated my reading rate to be about 20 pages an hour on average, so The Street of Crocodiles must have taken me about seven total hours—certainly more than an afternoon—and that after years of practice reading “fairly dense” books. At a full time job where my only duty was reading books, I would get through two 400-page books per week, or The Street of Crocodiles six times. Anyway, I’m insecure about how slow I read, and moments like this, in which teenage characters read with such ease, frustrate me enormously. (Even more infuriating: hack film critic Noah Forrest, who seems nice enough but who I love to hate, claims to have recently read Watchmen in one afternoon! What? Even the superhumans it depicts couldn't possibly read that fast, especially a 400+ page book so dense with meanings. It took me a week of heavy reading to get through it!) But it’s nice to see Bruno Schulz getting some love, because he’s one of the best and I thought only weirdos like Guy Maddin knew who he was.
2) The book is saturated with “firsts”: the first time Leo Gursky becomes aware of death, the first time Leo Gursky becomes aware of love. Literature is full of these moments, which I don’t believe have any existence in reality. I don’t mind the hyper-literariness of The History of Love for the most part, but this is one place where it strikes me as a flaw, because it makes even a character like Leo, despite the richness of his voice, seem overly constructed and impossible to grasp. I could accuse Everything is Illuminated of a similar implausibility, but I liked that book better because it was more willfully and consistently eccentric. Krauss seems to want it both ways, to write about rich characters and to write meta-literature (she is brilliant at the latter), while Foer, by being simply absurd, arrives with ease at big emotions, and melds the two halves of his story without the awkward construction of Krauss’ ending. And it seems to me a much more profound revelation to find out that Alex has never been carnal with a woman, than it is to find out that Bruno isn’t real.
However, I really liked when the mother makes a dinner of fake meat chicken nuggets. That could not be more plausible.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson : I never expected to love a novel about a preacher so much, but this one, while not secular, has a humanist emphasis, with a narrator who is constantly surprised by the wondrousness of existence. Robinson’s interest in John Ames has much to do with what they share as writers, or as people who concern themselves with the lives of others. Baptism is described as a sensation of “really knowing a creature, I mean really feeling its mysterious life and your own mysterious life at the same time,” a line that corresponds to this one: “Any human face is a claim on you, because you can’t help but understand the singularity of it, the courage and loneliness of it.” Both of these work as descriptions of what a truly great writer like Robinson does. I hope those lines give a sense of how much more approachable this book is to a heathen like me than anything by Flannery O’Connor or Graham Greene. Gilead makes clear the true and simple purpose of religion in Ames’ life: to help him live a purposeful life, be good, occupy his time, and recognize beauty.
Other recent reads:
Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan : Mediocre comic book with hyperbolic praise on the back cover by Joe Sacco (whose Palestine I have avoided reading because the new edition comes with an introduction by Edward Said—nothing against Edward Said, but I don’t like comics and theory to mingle so closely). The story is typical: two characters search for a man missing after an attack on a bus station in Tel Aviv; they become intimate along the way, discover things about the missing man, discover things about themselves, so on and so forth. The drawing style is lumpy and awkward; I don’t expect (or even desire) great art in a comic book, but I could never warm up to Modan’s drawings. There’s nothing in the characterization to make the protagonists more than bland and anonymous; a wider array of facial expressions would certainly help here. I will say that Modan is a fantastic colorist, though.
Dangerous Laughter by Steven Millhauser : I adore Steven Millhauser, except for those moments when his writing makes me aware of his weird sexual foibles. There’s not a female character in this entire collection who is not either weak, invisible, or in the act of turning her face away. Is he even aware? Well, perhaps it’s to be expected, as invisibility is one of his primary concerns, along with invention, architecture, history, passion that borders on madness. He’s an ideas man, and not in some boring theoretical or philosophical way, but in the way that Thomas Edison was an ideas man. He’s more a watchmaker than a writer, and reading these stories is like being presented with some fantastic new invention, complete in itself.
Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen : A very good first novel whose pleasures are mostly in the Philip K. Dick vein. I guess all of the sci-fi elements here are simply delusions of the narrator, but I read the book in a sci-fi frame of mind, holding out hope that the delusions would eventually prove themselves real. In the end, the book is a love story, not a meteorological thriller, but it’s a lot of fun while it lasts. It’s full of brilliant observations, most of which double as hypothetical science fiction ponderings and romantic truths.
I don’t know what the hell I was talking about the last time I wrote about The History of Love (I mean my vagueness, not the quality of the book), but here are some things about it that seemed to me to be unbelievable (implausible)—nearly as unbelievable as that moment in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button when Tilda Swinton’s character is referred to as “plain as paper”:
1) Reading The Street of Crocodiles in one afternoon. I seem to recall this book being about 140 pages long; it is fairly dense and the character who reads it in The History of Love is only 15 years old. I’ve estimated my reading rate to be about 20 pages an hour on average, so The Street of Crocodiles must have taken me about seven total hours—certainly more than an afternoon—and that after years of practice reading “fairly dense” books. At a full time job where my only duty was reading books, I would get through two 400-page books per week, or The Street of Crocodiles six times. Anyway, I’m insecure about how slow I read, and moments like this, in which teenage characters read with such ease, frustrate me enormously. (Even more infuriating: hack film critic Noah Forrest, who seems nice enough but who I love to hate, claims to have recently read Watchmen in one afternoon! What? Even the superhumans it depicts couldn't possibly read that fast, especially a 400+ page book so dense with meanings. It took me a week of heavy reading to get through it!) But it’s nice to see Bruno Schulz getting some love, because he’s one of the best and I thought only weirdos like Guy Maddin knew who he was.
2) The book is saturated with “firsts”: the first time Leo Gursky becomes aware of death, the first time Leo Gursky becomes aware of love. Literature is full of these moments, which I don’t believe have any existence in reality. I don’t mind the hyper-literariness of The History of Love for the most part, but this is one place where it strikes me as a flaw, because it makes even a character like Leo, despite the richness of his voice, seem overly constructed and impossible to grasp. I could accuse Everything is Illuminated of a similar implausibility, but I liked that book better because it was more willfully and consistently eccentric. Krauss seems to want it both ways, to write about rich characters and to write meta-literature (she is brilliant at the latter), while Foer, by being simply absurd, arrives with ease at big emotions, and melds the two halves of his story without the awkward construction of Krauss’ ending. And it seems to me a much more profound revelation to find out that Alex has never been carnal with a woman, than it is to find out that Bruno isn’t real.
However, I really liked when the mother makes a dinner of fake meat chicken nuggets. That could not be more plausible.
Friday, January 2, 2009
Nu-Year
Currently:
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss : A book about words, literature, books, characters who sometimes believe in one or all of these things and sometimes don’t, but who keep coming back. Well, I don’t want to generalize too much yet, but I’ve gotten a sense of Krauss’s larger design, and it seems like it might be beautiful. The book suffers at times from the “tyranny of the short sentence” (though that is perhaps just how Leo Gursky speaks), details that are mere details, and, yes, cleverness, that modern feature that is a flaw only when it undermines the laws of the fictional world for the sake of poetry. Krauss is allowed some leeway because her book is very much about language: the right words, the wrong words; a character speaking a “wrong sentence” is an admission that there is a right sentence. I can think of many situations for which the right words exist. But then I have never doubted the existence of poetry or the right words.
Other recent reads:
Why Are You Doing This? and I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason : Was it a mere two years ago (give or take a few days) that I first became consumed by the world of comic books (to say nothing of my childhood, when I read mostly Ren and Stimpy comics, something called Tales from the Bog, and other such slim issues indiscriminately)? Aye, it was. No better way to round out the second annum than with these two by Jason, a Norwegian artist who writes novelette-length absurdo-deadpan tragicomedies starring animal-headed humans. Both are conventional by definition (conventions recycled): Why Are You Doing This? is a wrong man thriller, and I Killed Adolf Hitler is the most brilliantly silly time travel narrative of recent years. Also, an economical and beautifully patterned love story (I have just described Back to the Future). Even so, it is the lesser of the two Hitler assassination plot stories I’ve encountered recently (Valkyrie was surprisingly good). I wonder if these stories would be even funnier if the characters were visibly human. I suspect they might be.
Drown by Junot Diaz : Not unlike his novel, though these stories benefit from having a less intricate overall design. Recalls Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, both thematically and in terms of sequencing. Diaz ends with an archetypal yet meticulously detailed story of a Dominican man making his life in the U.S. It is as powerful, though perhaps not as beautifully written, as Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent.” A certain commenter on this blog was right in describing the title story in this collection as similar to something I’ve recently written. I couldn’t hope to match Diaz’s quality of writing, or the bottomless despair of his narrator (I might’ve called it “Drown, but maybe float in the end”), but I could easily have included the only corresponding character who is absent in my own story, the mother, because she is so recognizable. Regret…
Destiny by Otto Nuckel : 1930 woodcut novel, the most relentlessly bleak story ever told. I read a couple of these “picture storybooks” last winter, by Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. Masereel’s The City is among my favorite things ever, a happy-sad succession of images of decadent 1920s Germany. Masereel’s cuts are somewhat lumpy, absent of cross-hatching, but in a single image, he can convey all of the beauty or sadness of a life. Lynd Ward’s Mad Man’s Drum tells a linear story, and is built around a single gesture that gains in power and evil as it recurs. Those fingers, held in that position…so disturbing it could just about make you pass out, an even likelier possibility given the breathtaking intricacy of Ward’s images. In Destiny, Nuckel opts for a blurry style of cutting, particularly effective in rendering human faces. More than Masereel or Ward, he relies upon universal human experience, and his cityscapes are smothering and prison-like. It is fitting then that the woman whose destiny is shown is fuzzy-faced, her suffering always seen from a distance. There is one exception: in a single image Nuckel gives her real visible features, and it is unbearably sad to see her there, reaching her hand out to a bird on the table. At book’s end, after her fate has been sealed, a bird lies dead on the ground, pierced through the heart. So much for a happy ending. Nuckel was not optimistic about life, and “destiny” has no glorious connotations here.
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine : Four great stories in the Daniel Clowes style, though different in that Tomine doesn’t seem to have any attitude toward this world of high schoolers and twentysomething survivors of high school. That makes these stories more pleasurable in a way: no cynicism, just a strange sympathy for his characters and their weaknesses; the real life world to Clowes’s ghost world. Compulsively readable, like a good crime novel: there is mystery in these lives.
Maurice has a remarkably happy ending (spoiler) in which Clive continues to lie to himself and will spend the rest of his life lying to his wife, with whom he has no physical relationship, for which reasons Maurice tells him off and then goes to live with charming Alec in the wilderness, owners of the land but outcasts from English society, existing outside class and the infinite invisible pressures that imprison the supposedly enlightened masses. In a nutshell. Forster says the novel might have been published upon being written had he given it an unhappy ending, because then it would have read like a warning, but that he would not have written it for any reason but a happy ending. I personally agree (I would never write anything with no hope in it), but I wouldn’t want to generalize to discredit a book like Destiny, which is hopeless, but authentically so. Thank God Maurice got away from that Clive fellow for another reason: his chastity was becoming unbearable. A last bit of pondering: how might this book be different if race was a factor? I’m thinking of an article by Dan Savage about homophobia within the African American community and racism within the gay community (not an equilibrium, according to Savage). Pure and pale love between men seems to be a prerequisite for Maurice; I don’t think a gay black Englishman would get much love in its pages, but I might be wrong.
The History of Love by Nicole Krauss : A book about words, literature, books, characters who sometimes believe in one or all of these things and sometimes don’t, but who keep coming back. Well, I don’t want to generalize too much yet, but I’ve gotten a sense of Krauss’s larger design, and it seems like it might be beautiful. The book suffers at times from the “tyranny of the short sentence” (though that is perhaps just how Leo Gursky speaks), details that are mere details, and, yes, cleverness, that modern feature that is a flaw only when it undermines the laws of the fictional world for the sake of poetry. Krauss is allowed some leeway because her book is very much about language: the right words, the wrong words; a character speaking a “wrong sentence” is an admission that there is a right sentence. I can think of many situations for which the right words exist. But then I have never doubted the existence of poetry or the right words.
Other recent reads:
Why Are You Doing This? and I Killed Adolf Hitler by Jason : Was it a mere two years ago (give or take a few days) that I first became consumed by the world of comic books (to say nothing of my childhood, when I read mostly Ren and Stimpy comics, something called Tales from the Bog, and other such slim issues indiscriminately)? Aye, it was. No better way to round out the second annum than with these two by Jason, a Norwegian artist who writes novelette-length absurdo-deadpan tragicomedies starring animal-headed humans. Both are conventional by definition (conventions recycled): Why Are You Doing This? is a wrong man thriller, and I Killed Adolf Hitler is the most brilliantly silly time travel narrative of recent years. Also, an economical and beautifully patterned love story (I have just described Back to the Future). Even so, it is the lesser of the two Hitler assassination plot stories I’ve encountered recently (Valkyrie was surprisingly good). I wonder if these stories would be even funnier if the characters were visibly human. I suspect they might be.
Drown by Junot Diaz : Not unlike his novel, though these stories benefit from having a less intricate overall design. Recalls Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, both thematically and in terms of sequencing. Diaz ends with an archetypal yet meticulously detailed story of a Dominican man making his life in the U.S. It is as powerful, though perhaps not as beautifully written, as Lahiri’s “The Third and Final Continent.” A certain commenter on this blog was right in describing the title story in this collection as similar to something I’ve recently written. I couldn’t hope to match Diaz’s quality of writing, or the bottomless despair of his narrator (I might’ve called it “Drown, but maybe float in the end”), but I could easily have included the only corresponding character who is absent in my own story, the mother, because she is so recognizable. Regret…
Destiny by Otto Nuckel : 1930 woodcut novel, the most relentlessly bleak story ever told. I read a couple of these “picture storybooks” last winter, by Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward. Masereel’s The City is among my favorite things ever, a happy-sad succession of images of decadent 1920s Germany. Masereel’s cuts are somewhat lumpy, absent of cross-hatching, but in a single image, he can convey all of the beauty or sadness of a life. Lynd Ward’s Mad Man’s Drum tells a linear story, and is built around a single gesture that gains in power and evil as it recurs. Those fingers, held in that position…so disturbing it could just about make you pass out, an even likelier possibility given the breathtaking intricacy of Ward’s images. In Destiny, Nuckel opts for a blurry style of cutting, particularly effective in rendering human faces. More than Masereel or Ward, he relies upon universal human experience, and his cityscapes are smothering and prison-like. It is fitting then that the woman whose destiny is shown is fuzzy-faced, her suffering always seen from a distance. There is one exception: in a single image Nuckel gives her real visible features, and it is unbearably sad to see her there, reaching her hand out to a bird on the table. At book’s end, after her fate has been sealed, a bird lies dead on the ground, pierced through the heart. So much for a happy ending. Nuckel was not optimistic about life, and “destiny” has no glorious connotations here.
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine : Four great stories in the Daniel Clowes style, though different in that Tomine doesn’t seem to have any attitude toward this world of high schoolers and twentysomething survivors of high school. That makes these stories more pleasurable in a way: no cynicism, just a strange sympathy for his characters and their weaknesses; the real life world to Clowes’s ghost world. Compulsively readable, like a good crime novel: there is mystery in these lives.
Maurice has a remarkably happy ending (spoiler) in which Clive continues to lie to himself and will spend the rest of his life lying to his wife, with whom he has no physical relationship, for which reasons Maurice tells him off and then goes to live with charming Alec in the wilderness, owners of the land but outcasts from English society, existing outside class and the infinite invisible pressures that imprison the supposedly enlightened masses. In a nutshell. Forster says the novel might have been published upon being written had he given it an unhappy ending, because then it would have read like a warning, but that he would not have written it for any reason but a happy ending. I personally agree (I would never write anything with no hope in it), but I wouldn’t want to generalize to discredit a book like Destiny, which is hopeless, but authentically so. Thank God Maurice got away from that Clive fellow for another reason: his chastity was becoming unbearable. A last bit of pondering: how might this book be different if race was a factor? I’m thinking of an article by Dan Savage about homophobia within the African American community and racism within the gay community (not an equilibrium, according to Savage). Pure and pale love between men seems to be a prerequisite for Maurice; I don’t think a gay black Englishman would get much love in its pages, but I might be wrong.
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Christmas Leaves
Currently:
Maurice by E.M. Forster : Like A Scanner Darkly, which is maybe only a very good novel until Philip K. Dick’s dedication to “people who were punished entirely too much for what they did” makes it a great one, the most affecting thing in Maurice so far is not in the novel itself but in an opening note: Begun 1913. Finished 1914. Dedicated to a happier year. Wikipedia tells me that Forster was himself gay, though not openly and perhaps not exclusively. I wonder then about the efficacy of making Maurice so unremarkable, so unlike Forster, in everything other than his sexuality. Shouldn’t Maurice’s sexuality affect his ordinariness, and what is ordinariness anyway? For the English, I guess it is what they respect in others and fear in themselves. One might think that Maurice would cultivate this so as not to be revealed, but in fact he is just inherently unremarkable. It is interesting though that the only way he and Clive are able to “come out” to their families is to come out as agnostic, atheist, or un-Christian.
So Maurice the character is sort of a bore, but the novel is psychologically accurate in pretty much every way. Some of it is somewhat trite (I’ve been thinking of that God-awful play that helps to ruin Andy Millman’s career in Extras), but many clichés of the literature of forbidden love affairs originate here. There are only so many options when one has to behave in coded ways, and when those are finally overcome, love follows its expected course. There’s one exchange (“Maurice…” “Clive…”) that could have had me rolling my eyes if it wasn’t also sort of sweet. The book makes very clear the pain of living in a place where no one ever tells you that you can love anyone you want. I bet Morrissey likes this book.
Other recent reads:
A Mercy by Toni Morrison : Morrison has earned such a brilliant reputation that I assume she could get away with not even trying anymore, and from A Mercy I was expecting little more than a slight story with a few nice observations, or an appendix of things left unsaid in Beloved. I saw her on Charlie Rose talking about this book and her creative process with inspired vagueness, and thought, “What is she trying to cover? Here’s Charlie Rose once again pretending that something decent is a work of genius.” I guess I should feel ashamed for thinking such things about the great lady. She has put everything into this book, and it’s every bit as good as Beloved. She’s maybe the best writer since William Faulkner at tracing the fallout of intersecting lives, and describing characters who live in what feel like Biblical times. The world of A Mercy is dark, diseased and brutal, so no surprise that it is such a fertile breeding ground for violence, hatred, religion and immorality. I could go on about a million things that make this book great: structure; character; horror (one scene nearly kept me from sleeping); insights about women, what a women’s community might have looked like in 1690, how ephemeral it had to be; the volume of great lines, a trader looking at a slave and hearing “no sound, just the knowledge of a sound he could not hear.” To say more would take more pages than the book is long, and give no sense of its real beauty. A last note: This would not be Morrison if she did not return to the Middle Passage, and the way she describes it in A Mercy, with an emphasis on the fear of cannibalism and Africans jumping overboard, is reminiscent of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano. It is fitting that she alludes to such an intense account of the passage (if she is so doing), even if the truth of Equiano’s narrative can never be established.
Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote : I could probably be happy reading nothing but Truman Capote for the rest of my life. I had read his third phase, In Cold Blood, and here are representative examples from what he calls his first and second phases, which prove that he was working at the height of his powers throughout his entire writing career (though he claims it was not until his fourth phase that he exploded the full potential of his material). I still believe that Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding is a better tale of freakish adolescence in the American South than Other Voices, Capote’s first novel. But Capote was a prodigy on the scale of McCullers, and his novel works as a companion to hers with its boy’s perspective on growing up. He treats the delicate matter with the dense language it deserves, not the trite clichéd wisdom that so often frames the “coming-of-age novel.”
That said, Capote could never quite remove himself from his material. The way he describes his early life in the preface gives the impression he was born an adult, and he writes adults better than he writes children. The best part of the novel is Randolph’s first-person account of his own self-discovery, where, in language worthy of Moz, he describes love as natural and real, and mentions those bigots who mistake the “arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.” I think Randolph is Capote, which could explain why the section is so effective. His monologue also describes Narcissus as being perhaps not egocentric, but more willing than most to admit his self-love. That line gave me a shock of recognition, as only a few days before, in less eloquent terms, I had tried to write something similar (though I had the benefit, inaccessible to Capote, of that great Mekons line about “lusting for youth in the mirror”).
Other Voices may be the more beautiful work, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s is more immediately satisfying, a perfect miniature. I realize now that all my notions of the ideal writer’s life come from Capote—the novel’s narrator, in his New York apartment upstairs from Holly Golightly, really seems to have the perfect lonely existence. In comparison with the movie, the book suffers from the absence of “Moon River,” but benefits enormously from not having Mickey Rooney in it. And not being a Hollywood production, its characters are able to be more miserable and all-around seedier, and the story does not have to be a straight romance with a happy ending. I wouldn’t want the movie any other way—the movies are made for happy endings—but in the book, it would be impossible for the narrator and the love interest to be the same person. It would kill that sense of loss, of not belonging, searching, loving from afar (all of this reinforced by the frame structure). Holly, in the book, can only be loved from afar—a character like her, endlessly frustrating but taking up all of one’s attention (I’ve known at least one Holly), has become a sort of cliché, but Capote describes her in so many vivid ways it is clear he originated it. Did he have Marilyn Monroe in mind? It is very funny when Holly’s gross Southern origins are revealed—almost as if Other Voices represents the repressed past and Tiffany’s is the superficial present. But what a glorious present; New York has never looked so good.
Also finished:
In the final analysis, the best thing about The Garies and Their Friends is also its greatest shortcoming: its single-minded focus on race as the only obstacle to utopia. In spite of this, Webb writes about identity in such a way that allows for more complex readings: “Coloured” could easily be exchanged for “gay” in many scenes, especially the one in which Clarence despairs of being “found out.” But the book does not challenge Victorian standards of gender and sexuality. Race is its only unstable quantity, where a truly honest book would have more. This all becomes most apparent when the sickening food imagery returns at the end (this time in the form of a wedding banquet), and Webb fails to acknowledge the possibility of anything sinister under the surface (like Frank Norris would). But for Clarence’s demise, the ending feels like a lie—when the issue of race (Clarence and Birdie’s only obstacle) is solved, joyful unity will be possible for all, and everyone can grow old and watch their grandchildren frolic.
And:
If I was more up-to-date in my reading, this might be a good time to celebrate the best books of the year. As it is, I’ve only read three—Wrack and Ruin, Berlin: City of Smoke and A Mercy—and I’ve already described my affection for all of those on this blog. I also have new ones by Steven Millhauser, Rivka Galchen, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane on my reading list, but until I can regale you with the merits of those, here are my favorite movies of 2008 (with many left to see), in descending order of Zen: Milk, Wall-E, Flight of the Red Balloon, Chop Shop, Rachel Getting Married, In Bruges, Paranoid Park, Tropic Thunder, Happy-Go-Lucky, Frozen River, The Edge of Heaven, Be Kind Rewind, The Visitor. See you next year.
Maurice by E.M. Forster : Like A Scanner Darkly, which is maybe only a very good novel until Philip K. Dick’s dedication to “people who were punished entirely too much for what they did” makes it a great one, the most affecting thing in Maurice so far is not in the novel itself but in an opening note: Begun 1913. Finished 1914. Dedicated to a happier year. Wikipedia tells me that Forster was himself gay, though not openly and perhaps not exclusively. I wonder then about the efficacy of making Maurice so unremarkable, so unlike Forster, in everything other than his sexuality. Shouldn’t Maurice’s sexuality affect his ordinariness, and what is ordinariness anyway? For the English, I guess it is what they respect in others and fear in themselves. One might think that Maurice would cultivate this so as not to be revealed, but in fact he is just inherently unremarkable. It is interesting though that the only way he and Clive are able to “come out” to their families is to come out as agnostic, atheist, or un-Christian.
So Maurice the character is sort of a bore, but the novel is psychologically accurate in pretty much every way. Some of it is somewhat trite (I’ve been thinking of that God-awful play that helps to ruin Andy Millman’s career in Extras), but many clichés of the literature of forbidden love affairs originate here. There are only so many options when one has to behave in coded ways, and when those are finally overcome, love follows its expected course. There’s one exchange (“Maurice…” “Clive…”) that could have had me rolling my eyes if it wasn’t also sort of sweet. The book makes very clear the pain of living in a place where no one ever tells you that you can love anyone you want. I bet Morrissey likes this book.
Other recent reads:
A Mercy by Toni Morrison : Morrison has earned such a brilliant reputation that I assume she could get away with not even trying anymore, and from A Mercy I was expecting little more than a slight story with a few nice observations, or an appendix of things left unsaid in Beloved. I saw her on Charlie Rose talking about this book and her creative process with inspired vagueness, and thought, “What is she trying to cover? Here’s Charlie Rose once again pretending that something decent is a work of genius.” I guess I should feel ashamed for thinking such things about the great lady. She has put everything into this book, and it’s every bit as good as Beloved. She’s maybe the best writer since William Faulkner at tracing the fallout of intersecting lives, and describing characters who live in what feel like Biblical times. The world of A Mercy is dark, diseased and brutal, so no surprise that it is such a fertile breeding ground for violence, hatred, religion and immorality. I could go on about a million things that make this book great: structure; character; horror (one scene nearly kept me from sleeping); insights about women, what a women’s community might have looked like in 1690, how ephemeral it had to be; the volume of great lines, a trader looking at a slave and hearing “no sound, just the knowledge of a sound he could not hear.” To say more would take more pages than the book is long, and give no sense of its real beauty. A last note: This would not be Morrison if she did not return to the Middle Passage, and the way she describes it in A Mercy, with an emphasis on the fear of cannibalism and Africans jumping overboard, is reminiscent of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano. It is fitting that she alludes to such an intense account of the passage (if she is so doing), even if the truth of Equiano’s narrative can never be established.
Other Voices, Other Rooms and Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote : I could probably be happy reading nothing but Truman Capote for the rest of my life. I had read his third phase, In Cold Blood, and here are representative examples from what he calls his first and second phases, which prove that he was working at the height of his powers throughout his entire writing career (though he claims it was not until his fourth phase that he exploded the full potential of his material). I still believe that Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding is a better tale of freakish adolescence in the American South than Other Voices, Capote’s first novel. But Capote was a prodigy on the scale of McCullers, and his novel works as a companion to hers with its boy’s perspective on growing up. He treats the delicate matter with the dense language it deserves, not the trite clichéd wisdom that so often frames the “coming-of-age novel.”
That said, Capote could never quite remove himself from his material. The way he describes his early life in the preface gives the impression he was born an adult, and he writes adults better than he writes children. The best part of the novel is Randolph’s first-person account of his own self-discovery, where, in language worthy of Moz, he describes love as natural and real, and mentions those bigots who mistake the “arrow pointing to heaven for the one that leads to hell.” I think Randolph is Capote, which could explain why the section is so effective. His monologue also describes Narcissus as being perhaps not egocentric, but more willing than most to admit his self-love. That line gave me a shock of recognition, as only a few days before, in less eloquent terms, I had tried to write something similar (though I had the benefit, inaccessible to Capote, of that great Mekons line about “lusting for youth in the mirror”).
Other Voices may be the more beautiful work, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s is more immediately satisfying, a perfect miniature. I realize now that all my notions of the ideal writer’s life come from Capote—the novel’s narrator, in his New York apartment upstairs from Holly Golightly, really seems to have the perfect lonely existence. In comparison with the movie, the book suffers from the absence of “Moon River,” but benefits enormously from not having Mickey Rooney in it. And not being a Hollywood production, its characters are able to be more miserable and all-around seedier, and the story does not have to be a straight romance with a happy ending. I wouldn’t want the movie any other way—the movies are made for happy endings—but in the book, it would be impossible for the narrator and the love interest to be the same person. It would kill that sense of loss, of not belonging, searching, loving from afar (all of this reinforced by the frame structure). Holly, in the book, can only be loved from afar—a character like her, endlessly frustrating but taking up all of one’s attention (I’ve known at least one Holly), has become a sort of cliché, but Capote describes her in so many vivid ways it is clear he originated it. Did he have Marilyn Monroe in mind? It is very funny when Holly’s gross Southern origins are revealed—almost as if Other Voices represents the repressed past and Tiffany’s is the superficial present. But what a glorious present; New York has never looked so good.
Also finished:
In the final analysis, the best thing about The Garies and Their Friends is also its greatest shortcoming: its single-minded focus on race as the only obstacle to utopia. In spite of this, Webb writes about identity in such a way that allows for more complex readings: “Coloured” could easily be exchanged for “gay” in many scenes, especially the one in which Clarence despairs of being “found out.” But the book does not challenge Victorian standards of gender and sexuality. Race is its only unstable quantity, where a truly honest book would have more. This all becomes most apparent when the sickening food imagery returns at the end (this time in the form of a wedding banquet), and Webb fails to acknowledge the possibility of anything sinister under the surface (like Frank Norris would). But for Clarence’s demise, the ending feels like a lie—when the issue of race (Clarence and Birdie’s only obstacle) is solved, joyful unity will be possible for all, and everyone can grow old and watch their grandchildren frolic.
And:
If I was more up-to-date in my reading, this might be a good time to celebrate the best books of the year. As it is, I’ve only read three—Wrack and Ruin, Berlin: City of Smoke and A Mercy—and I’ve already described my affection for all of those on this blog. I also have new ones by Steven Millhauser, Rivka Galchen, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane on my reading list, but until I can regale you with the merits of those, here are my favorite movies of 2008 (with many left to see), in descending order of Zen: Milk, Wall-E, Flight of the Red Balloon, Chop Shop, Rachel Getting Married, In Bruges, Paranoid Park, Tropic Thunder, Happy-Go-Lucky, Frozen River, The Edge of Heaven, Be Kind Rewind, The Visitor. See you next year.
Monday, December 8, 2008
Wasting Time for Finals
(To the tune of "Making Plans for Nigel")
I'm still plugging away at The Garies and Their Friends and Fire This Time. Dang. I should probably get back to those (both still good). But before I do that…
Other recent reads:
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel : Fantastic, but you can go read someone else’s praise on the internets: there’s no scarcity of it. Oh, what the heck… The drawings have the looseness of a New Yorker cartoon while the diction is exceedingly literary and theoretical (and the book is thick with allusion). I might normally object to this, since comics should ideally find a middle ground where words and pictures constitute a single medium (thanks, Scott McCloud!). No problem here, because Bechdel owns her big words, and needs them to help make sense of her life. She comes as close to understanding her father as possible (no small task for a man always absorbed in a book) while still making it apparent she can never know him, and is wonderfully forthcoming about the evolution of her sexuality. I don’t often say this… Very inspiring: the ways young people search for themselves, and why.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote : I had to do a presentation on this for Marlon James’ class (yikes—as if I have anything to teach him). Having read it before I meant to just skim through, but it’s so engrossing that I ended up reading the whole thing again, more or less. Class discussion unsurprisingly centered on the ethics involved in Capote’s writing, but I hate to trivialize or criticize his method because the end result is one of the most beautiful things (very sad, too) I’ve ever read.
Tales of Conjure and the Color Line by Charles Chesnutt : For my money the best thing we read in my African American literature class (not to discredit anyone else, Douglass in particular). Wry humor, with all sorts of weird, comical and disturbing configurations of race and color politics. These stories are nearly 40 years more contemporary than anything else we read, which was quite evident.
Astonishing pages abound in Berlin: City of Smoke. Jason Lutes is in the middle of some sort of masterpiece. In the last issue of book two there is an odd scene in which the jazz band Cocoa Kids confront their manager about some questionable business practices. The whole scene is very cumbersome, with awkward blocking and pacing, and I have to wonder if Lutes is trying to mimic some bad 1930s melodrama. This is not to say I don’t like the scene—it’s great, and suggests that Lutes knows a lot of tricks, necessary if he’s going to pull off the wide variety of situations that crop up in the book.
I ended up drawing out the aforementioned comparison between The Bondwoman’s Narrative and House of the Seven Gables in a paper I wrote (a pretty clever argument, if I may say so myself). All I have left to mention is that I’ve never before been so satisfied with a resolution defined by marriage and stability in a nineteenth century novel—and that’s saying something, because they all end with marriage. On second thought, Great Expectations may rival it, but the last line of that book defies simple readings, or any certainty that union occurs, so I give it a pass on the merits of “too complicated.”
I'm still plugging away at The Garies and Their Friends and Fire This Time. Dang. I should probably get back to those (both still good). But before I do that…
Other recent reads:
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel : Fantastic, but you can go read someone else’s praise on the internets: there’s no scarcity of it. Oh, what the heck… The drawings have the looseness of a New Yorker cartoon while the diction is exceedingly literary and theoretical (and the book is thick with allusion). I might normally object to this, since comics should ideally find a middle ground where words and pictures constitute a single medium (thanks, Scott McCloud!). No problem here, because Bechdel owns her big words, and needs them to help make sense of her life. She comes as close to understanding her father as possible (no small task for a man always absorbed in a book) while still making it apparent she can never know him, and is wonderfully forthcoming about the evolution of her sexuality. I don’t often say this… Very inspiring: the ways young people search for themselves, and why.
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote : I had to do a presentation on this for Marlon James’ class (yikes—as if I have anything to teach him). Having read it before I meant to just skim through, but it’s so engrossing that I ended up reading the whole thing again, more or less. Class discussion unsurprisingly centered on the ethics involved in Capote’s writing, but I hate to trivialize or criticize his method because the end result is one of the most beautiful things (very sad, too) I’ve ever read.
Tales of Conjure and the Color Line by Charles Chesnutt : For my money the best thing we read in my African American literature class (not to discredit anyone else, Douglass in particular). Wry humor, with all sorts of weird, comical and disturbing configurations of race and color politics. These stories are nearly 40 years more contemporary than anything else we read, which was quite evident.
Astonishing pages abound in Berlin: City of Smoke. Jason Lutes is in the middle of some sort of masterpiece. In the last issue of book two there is an odd scene in which the jazz band Cocoa Kids confront their manager about some questionable business practices. The whole scene is very cumbersome, with awkward blocking and pacing, and I have to wonder if Lutes is trying to mimic some bad 1930s melodrama. This is not to say I don’t like the scene—it’s great, and suggests that Lutes knows a lot of tricks, necessary if he’s going to pull off the wide variety of situations that crop up in the book.
I ended up drawing out the aforementioned comparison between The Bondwoman’s Narrative and House of the Seven Gables in a paper I wrote (a pretty clever argument, if I may say so myself). All I have left to mention is that I’ve never before been so satisfied with a resolution defined by marriage and stability in a nineteenth century novel—and that’s saying something, because they all end with marriage. On second thought, Great Expectations may rival it, but the last line of that book defies simple readings, or any certainty that union occurs, so I give it a pass on the merits of “too complicated.”
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Synecdouchebag
I’m tired of books, but I’ve written about movies here before, so perhaps I should share the pleasant day of solitude I spent in Uptown on Thanksgiving eve, playing amateur film critic-cum-festivalgoer:
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is a movie whose goal is to prove that its own narrative project is doomed to fail. I don’t know if that makes it a failure or a success, but it is certainly not a triumph. There would be no problem if the movie’s title was accurate, but in fact it is a misnomer. Upon winning a MacArthur Genius Grant, theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) designs a play in an abandoned warehouse that eventually comes to represent his entire life and every person in it. His ambitious (to say the least) theater piece is not a synecdoche but an example of the whole standing in for the whole. But art must be a synecdoche; one cannot represent the beauty (or agony) in every human life, but by showing the beauty in the lives of a few, one can show every other human life to be beautiful by analogy. Kaufman certainly understands this, but his movie is plagued by Cotard’s same system of representation in which everything is given equal weight and nothing is put into context. Cotard also realizes his downfall by film’s end, and seems ready to say that he wants to embark on a smaller project, but by then it is too late. His whole life has been consumed by something that was never going to succeed.
I’m perfectly happy to watch Kaufman play all the post-modern games he can devise. They are a bit perfunctory here, but probably enough to carry the movie if they were built upon something real and solid. Hoffman’s romance with Samantha Morton should be that real thing, and the suicide of one of his actors should be the point at which we realize that there are human beings underneath these kaleidoscopic identities. But both are as disassociated from reality as everything else in the movie. It requires a soliloquizing preacher to explain the tragedy: sad people hurtling toward the grave. There’s no authentic human drama in the movie to support this (quite affecting) speech. The end result is Adaptation with the life drained out of it, or Being John Malkovich with no surprises, an intentionally unpleasant movie that made me want to take better care of my body. Hoffman’s performance could stand to be less solemn, but then so could the movie. How about a laugh-out-loud comedy? It might have been doable (it’s a very funny movie at times). The whole thing needs a reworking, so Hoffman’s work is the best it can be under the circumstances. Tropic Thunder is the infinitely superior meta-actor comedy of recent months.
Not fifteen minutes after downing Kaufman’s acid, I walked into Milk, which proved to be the perfect remedy: my favorite movie this year, and the best biopic I’ve ever seen. It avoids the pitfalls of the genre precisely because it is a synecdoche: the man standing in for the movement. This is a human rights movie, dressed up in a number of satisfying ways: document of a scene, (dude-heavy) ensemble piece, history lesson, political expose. It’s a joyous experience, and only Gus Van Sant could have made it so (though Oliver Stone, who was originally attached to direct, would have known how to keep it from being overly solemn). Some have complained it does not evoke the same poetry as his most recent films. It is a poetic film, because it is so loving, but Harvey Milk was not a poetic person, so the detached, lyrical style of Paranoid Park or Last Days would have been a fatal flaw. Milk is an extrovert, so the film must reveal its intentions in every frame, as it does. I hesitate to look on Van Sant’s last four (fantastic) films as practice for this more conventional narrative, but he has at least learned when to use following shots. There are three here that come to mind: one is terrifying, one is beautiful, one is inscrutable. I’m in awe of his craft, but also of the fact that there are so many good actors in America.
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is a movie whose goal is to prove that its own narrative project is doomed to fail. I don’t know if that makes it a failure or a success, but it is certainly not a triumph. There would be no problem if the movie’s title was accurate, but in fact it is a misnomer. Upon winning a MacArthur Genius Grant, theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) designs a play in an abandoned warehouse that eventually comes to represent his entire life and every person in it. His ambitious (to say the least) theater piece is not a synecdoche but an example of the whole standing in for the whole. But art must be a synecdoche; one cannot represent the beauty (or agony) in every human life, but by showing the beauty in the lives of a few, one can show every other human life to be beautiful by analogy. Kaufman certainly understands this, but his movie is plagued by Cotard’s same system of representation in which everything is given equal weight and nothing is put into context. Cotard also realizes his downfall by film’s end, and seems ready to say that he wants to embark on a smaller project, but by then it is too late. His whole life has been consumed by something that was never going to succeed.
I’m perfectly happy to watch Kaufman play all the post-modern games he can devise. They are a bit perfunctory here, but probably enough to carry the movie if they were built upon something real and solid. Hoffman’s romance with Samantha Morton should be that real thing, and the suicide of one of his actors should be the point at which we realize that there are human beings underneath these kaleidoscopic identities. But both are as disassociated from reality as everything else in the movie. It requires a soliloquizing preacher to explain the tragedy: sad people hurtling toward the grave. There’s no authentic human drama in the movie to support this (quite affecting) speech. The end result is Adaptation with the life drained out of it, or Being John Malkovich with no surprises, an intentionally unpleasant movie that made me want to take better care of my body. Hoffman’s performance could stand to be less solemn, but then so could the movie. How about a laugh-out-loud comedy? It might have been doable (it’s a very funny movie at times). The whole thing needs a reworking, so Hoffman’s work is the best it can be under the circumstances. Tropic Thunder is the infinitely superior meta-actor comedy of recent months.
Not fifteen minutes after downing Kaufman’s acid, I walked into Milk, which proved to be the perfect remedy: my favorite movie this year, and the best biopic I’ve ever seen. It avoids the pitfalls of the genre precisely because it is a synecdoche: the man standing in for the movement. This is a human rights movie, dressed up in a number of satisfying ways: document of a scene, (dude-heavy) ensemble piece, history lesson, political expose. It’s a joyous experience, and only Gus Van Sant could have made it so (though Oliver Stone, who was originally attached to direct, would have known how to keep it from being overly solemn). Some have complained it does not evoke the same poetry as his most recent films. It is a poetic film, because it is so loving, but Harvey Milk was not a poetic person, so the detached, lyrical style of Paranoid Park or Last Days would have been a fatal flaw. Milk is an extrovert, so the film must reveal its intentions in every frame, as it does. I hesitate to look on Van Sant’s last four (fantastic) films as practice for this more conventional narrative, but he has at least learned when to use following shots. There are three here that come to mind: one is terrifying, one is beautiful, one is inscrutable. I’m in awe of his craft, but also of the fact that there are so many good actors in America.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Richard Van Nice
Sis sent me this article from today's edition of the Helena Independent Record. It's about one of my favorite places in Helena and the great guy who owns it. The article is surprisingly well done, and it doesn't lie: he really has read everything.
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