tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-86273577541424684122024-03-12T21:21:59.052-07:00BoMuMoBooks, Music and Movies Beyond ObjectivityIan Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.comBlogger54125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-74278364218172081842014-02-28T13:45:00.000-08:002014-02-28T13:45:35.665-08:00A Good Look at Death: Comments on A Prairie Home Companion<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>I watched </i>A Prairie Home Companion<i> with a few friends this week. Hoping to warm them to the subject and approach of the film, I prepared the following introductory comments:</i><br />
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When <i>A Prairie Home Companion</i> first came out, I had never read or listened carefully to Garrison Keillor. I knew about his radio show, but just that it existed and was generally well-liked across generations.<br />
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I went to see it because it was directed by Robert Altman, my favorite director. Altman made the movie at the tail end of a career that changed how movies were made.<i> MASH</i>, <i>Three Women</i> and<i> Nashville</i> brought arty, counter-cultural ideas and styles into mainstream movie houses across America. Altman was known for putting microphones on all his actors, placing them in a scene, and roaming with his cameras searching for true and funny moments.<br />
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Altman was an unknown director of commercials when he made <i>MASH</i>. He stayed well under an already small budget and shot on a tight timeline to keep studio executives off the set. Some of the actors complained that it was pure chaos. When the movie came out, it was a shock. It delighted and surprised its audience because no one had seen anything like it.<br />
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When actors caught wind of Altman's approach, they all wanted to act in his movies. He said of his method, "I insist that they do what they became actors to do. I want them to create something and not just hit marks and say words."<br />
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There's an honesty, and a great deal of faith in human truth to show itself in funny and moving ways, throughout Altman's movies. After seeing <i>A Prairie Home Companion</i> in a small, mostly empty theater in Chicago, I felt so excited that I returned to watch it two more times during the following week.<br />
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It was the funniest, fullest, most lively movie about death I had ever seen. It was full of oddball characters, roaming plot lines, highbrow symbolism, astounding performances, and lowbrow puns and gags. It didn't derive any of its substance from hip irony or sarcasm.<br />
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I felt like it looked at human transience fully, and had a good laugh about the whole thing.<br />
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This is the same sort of grace and humor I hope to have toward my own losses, to the unfairness and unpredictability of my own circumstances. To be able to look at the whole mess and say, as Garrison Keillor said through a character in his novel <i>Pontoon</i>, "Life is unfair. That's what makes it so beautiful."<br />
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The same year that<i> A Prairie Home Companion</i> came out, Altman received an Oscar for lifetime achievement and died.<br />
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While I felt the pain of the loss of a man I admired greatly, his passing seemed, like many of the greatest moments in his films, a beautifully timed, perfectly realized accident.<br />
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Garrison Keillor's work on this film is unmistakable, and I went on to read most of his novels, many of his essays, and quite a few of his short stories. I saw in them the same free movement, the same sense of wonder, the same happy fatalism that Altman captured so well in this film.<br />
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And if it doesn't mean that much to you, I hope you can at least get a few good laughs out of it. After all, that's pretty much the point. </div>
Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-37813336953810224312013-12-30T14:38:00.000-08:002013-12-30T15:07:56.147-08:00On Love and Place: Ian's favorite books in 2013<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In my travels and readings this year, I meditated on human communities and their relationships to landscapes. I found tremendous insight in the writings of Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, and the author who defined this year's themes and most influenced my thinking, Wallace Stegner.</div>
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Here were some of the books that I found most enriching this year:</div>
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<i>Train Dreams</i> by Denis Johnson is a hallucinogenic, skeletal novella. Stegner's thoughts on the transient lives scattered throughout the American West primed me to engage the lyricism and imagery of one of the most powerful stories of the West I've ever read. A train deposits a stranger in a wild land.<br />
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The soul of a place is laid bare through a life formed in it. I hope to revisit this novel many times, to relate with the mystery at its core.<br />
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<i><br />What Every Person Should Know About War</i> by Chris Hedges is a book that trusts its reader with the bare facts of contemporary warfare. The Q&A format creates a context for surprising emotional impact. The book is not necessarily anti-war. But it does demystify the whole thing, exposing why people go to war and what war does to soldiers and civilians.<br />
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After finishing this book, I felt admiration for survivors of wars, and a deep distress at the apparent inevitability of the whole thing. This helped to established a vocabulary that I would explore in conversations throughout the year about war and, later, what it means to be a neighbor.</div>
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Lightman's meditation on time and perception helped to shape my experience of the American West during my travels there this year. I wrote about it <a href="http://blinkpack.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/books-for-the-road-einsteins-dreams-and-the-desert-sky/">here</a>. I read this book once a few years back, but reading it communally made a profound difference in how I experienced it, and led me to start gathering with friends to read stories aloud to one another.</div>
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I formed a book group to re-read <i>Infinite Jest</i> this year, and the vast, complex novel opened up in interesting ways as a result. I developed a clearer picture of the themes of identity and distraction, the depth of DFW's vision, and the arcs of the tortured characters' lives.<br />
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As with the first read-through, there were ups and downs in the reading. The naked desperation of some of the characters, the oblique way in which main events appear only vaguely on the periphery of the narrative, and the dense speech of a great mind in turmoil made for hard work at times, but these things also made the journey entertaining in a really rich way. The despair at the heart of this novel becomes something wonderful in the hands of an earnest, big-hearted artist. <br />
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Edward Abbey is not a polished writer or thinker. His extremism leads him to some questionable beliefs. He doesn't always respect form or choose the most constructive approach to conversation like his one-time teacher, Wallace Stegner, or his fellow student, Wendell Berry.<br />
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I think these flaws are part of his charm, and his infatuation with desert landscapes consumes them into a furious, impulsive, and lyrical voice, and this voice finds its perfect setting in <i>Beyond the Wall</i>, a collection of essays about deserts. I found this book more interesting than <i>Desert Solitaire,</i> because of its geographic range, and more focused than <i>The Monkey Wrench Gang</i>. The character Edward Abbey writes most fully and to greatest effect is Edward Abbey.</div>
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I'd been meaning to read Sherman Alexie for a few years, after reading <a href="http://www.believermag.com/issues/201202/?read=interview_alexie_case">this excellent interview</a> with Neko Case in <i>The Believer</i>. This year, I finally started, and I was unable to stop. In a period of two months, I read <i>Reservation Blues</i>, <i>War Dances</i>, <i>Flight</i>, <i>Ten Little Indians</i>, <i>The Toughest Indian in the World</i>, <i>The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian</i>, and his first story collection <i>The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven</i>.</div>
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I found a rich, complex kind of life in Alexie's comic sense, his freewheeling narratives, his big-hearted sense of tragedy, and his active rebellion against tribalism in America's social structure. And I know that he was mostly drunk when he wrote his first story collection, but I enjoyed it the most because it was so freely written, sprawling, and funny. He certainly grew as a writer, but there was a unique delight in these unhurried, unpolished early stories that I found surprising and captivating.</div>
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My thinking about neighborhoods in relation to their landscapes really took form when I began reading Wendell Berry. While I find some of his ideas irrelevant to urban life or hostile to those who just can't fit in with rural communities, I do feel that he speaks to a deep, human need to live both communally and in harmony with the land that supports us. His clarity of thought and careful speech both influenced the way I read and spoke this year.<br />
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<i>Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community</i> packages most of his key ideas in masterful and moving essays. He addresses sales resistance, the relationship between Christians and the earth, local economies, pacifism, and agriculture. His passion and thought culminate in the title essay, in which he calls for community to fill the gap between public and private lives.<br />
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Stegner's attention, memory, passion, and intellect are all deeply inspiring to me, and I found a great deal of wisdom in the novels and nonfiction that I read from him this year. I began with <i>Angle of Repose</i>, then continued through his work, reading <i>Beyond the 100th Meridian</i>, <i>Collected Stories</i>, <i>The Spectator Bird</i>, <i>The Big Rock Candy Mountain</i>, <i>Remembering Laughter</i>, <i>Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs</i>, <i>Recapitulation</i>, and <i>Crossing to Safety</i>.<br />
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While there were great passages, themes, characters, and stories throughout all of his books (of which <i>The Spectator Bird</i> was my least favorite), I think that his attention to human relationships, context, and memory found their fullest subject in <i>Crossing to Safety</i>. Stegner forgoes the conventional twists to study the life of a friendship between two couples. This approach brings readers into contact with slow and powerful truths about human shortcomings, community, and the nature of love between complex people.<br />
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What amazes me about Barry Lopez is not how much he knows, which is truly remarkable, but how many ways he knows. A respected biologist, philosopher, journalist, anthropologist, and artist, Barry Lopez taught me new ways to know a landscape, to regard a life, to contemplate relationships and animals and time. I finish his essays and stories feeling more alert and filled with wonder.<br />
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His passions and perspectives find a landscape to match their breadth and depth in <i>Arctic Dreams</i>, a stunning meditation on the arctic and the animals and humans that make lives there. He dedicates a chapter to "Ice and Light," honors the complex lives of narwhals and polar bears, and details the history of exploration of the great northern desert.</div>
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I think the highest compliment I can pay an author is that she or he taught me to speak and think differently. I changed my thinking in numerous subtle ways after reading Lopez, but I also began thinking in terms of "landscapes" of interrelated lives and features, and practiced treating animals, people, and places with greater "regard."</div>
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My favorite book of the year was a novella from an author who, until this book snuck into the canon of Western literature, was just seeking to understand his brother. Fly fishing provides a metaphor, stage, and movement for the mysteries of love. There's a great deal to say about the author's pacing, technique, insight, and voice, but at this passage, in light of the things that surrounded it, I had to put the book down and wait for my eyes to clear.</div>
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For some time, he struggled for more to hold on to. "Are you sure you have told me everything you know about his death?" he asked. I said, "Everything." "It's not much, is it?" "No," I replied, "but you can love completely without complete understanding."</blockquote>
And that's a truth that ties it all together for me.</div>
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Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-634239115986506702011-08-08T16:05:00.000-07:002011-08-08T17:23:58.298-07:00Cleaning Up the Subjunctive: A Review of Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsw4LYm1ENPIy3iFLzlobyqTtnwGiQH7dTEmvr2ebbI_FlJCpZE5nzymYIPX8oUGsODdZlSRherAGSKF_rJ8n7h_qpSIyLlWNY2__Q3Dns0lYT8qysIn3akpIbQo0zx5w6t6IvGe8xDmki/s1600/MasonDixonCover.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsw4LYm1ENPIy3iFLzlobyqTtnwGiQH7dTEmvr2ebbI_FlJCpZE5nzymYIPX8oUGsODdZlSRherAGSKF_rJ8n7h_qpSIyLlWNY2__Q3Dns0lYT8qysIn3akpIbQo0zx5w6t6IvGe8xDmki/s400/MasonDixonCover.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5638625212981627762" /></a><p>Some months ago, I sat in the back of a taxi racing through Kathmandu and listened to an Evangelical leader bemoan contemporary grammar in secular America. "As a writer, you'll appreciate this," he told me, before launching into a eulogy for the subjunctive tense. At the time, I did not have a clear understanding of what that was. I nodded, under the spell of jet lag and wanting to focus on the city passing by my window rather than engage in a conversation on a topic where I had a hunch the guy was misinformed or under some idealogical skew.</p><p>The subjunctive, which is basically a hypothetical tense (as in "if there were...") I think he was trying to say, had fallen out of currency because this current generation (my generation, although he probably thought I was in his corner), was unable to imagine or believe in anything but the noise that surrounded them (us).</p><p>The conversation lingered in my mind, not because I agreed with what the guy was saying, but because he gave me more credit than I deserved, and then said something that I had a hunch I disagreed with. It was a conversation left dangling, and I rarely let those be.</p><p>A few months later, I was reading Thomas Pynchon's historical reimagination, <span style="font-style:italic;">Mason & Dixon</span>, and I noted the use of the word "Subjunctive," and a fairly substantial meditation on it. The word is used a few times in the book, which takes place before the revolutionary war in the colonies that would evolve into the United States, fracture again, and then reunite, leaving some discontented Confederates to echo down through the generations.</p><p>It struck me as I read the book that here was a novel from the nineties, mining and critiquing the use of the subjunctive! It was looking back at ideals yet to be formed, when America was pretty much a subjunctive idea, a beautiful hypothesis, an unexplored frontier, an unfought war.</p><p>As I plowed through the book and wrestled with the gap between Pynchon's imagined New World and the tumultuous America around me today, I began thinking on the so-called disappearance of the subjunctive. Maybe it is the result of an intentional shift of ideas, and maybe it's not so bad, if we are still aware of and willing to interact with the tense.</p><p>This thought sprung out of my reading of the book, and it has yet to be fully formed, but I thought that it would be worth mentioning here: Maybe my generation's failure, or refusal, to speak in terms of imaginations or what ifs comes from the fact that we see a dark cloud of unheeded fact that needs to be dealt with first. And perhaps it is our shortcoming, or perhaps it is a necessary step in the shattering and rebuilding of dreams that did not include the people or movements that we see around us.</p><p>I'm not trying to be all gloomy, but <span style="font-style:italic;">Mason & Dixon</span> did a good job of pointing out the fallacies planted in the American Dream from its inception, and many of us are wondering if all the subjunctive terms used to describe our utopia need to be reimagined.</p><p>So, in the interest of not sounding like I'm hanging on some generational pendulum, I will say that there is room for imagination, for the subjunctive, in our language today, but as we are all learning (thank the mighty internet) as we connect with those who have been overlooked or even actively abused in pursuit of an imagined future, it is time to do so with a little more care.</p><p>To the writers and thinkers of my generation, I say, use your subjunctives with great care, and dream new dreams carefully, knowing that you only have part of the narrative.</p>
<br />Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-48629959031647789512011-07-09T20:46:00.000-07:002011-07-09T21:24:17.441-07:00In the Air to Germany: A review of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9XUwAdG8ahErgiAiYYTyKYnxmekEJw0L3wyaff5qBMgPUp01eT2KykEPxdEBJybk-yH68DxMZfDg6QvLxXEXWE5q-id4rDPtQk7PZfi7_luD1CS57nhgiFbcaFR3uMB3BeXHeF_HQz2qI/s1600/Gravitys+Rainbow.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 213px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg9XUwAdG8ahErgiAiYYTyKYnxmekEJw0L3wyaff5qBMgPUp01eT2KykEPxdEBJybk-yH68DxMZfDg6QvLxXEXWE5q-id4rDPtQk7PZfi7_luD1CS57nhgiFbcaFR3uMB3BeXHeF_HQz2qI/s320/Gravitys+Rainbow.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5627565146622604898" /></a><p>If you must read <em>Gravity's Rainbow</em>, and I think it's a pretty good idea to do so if you're the type that reads a blog like this, I'd recommend you book a plane ticket from wherever you live (like, say, Atlanta, just for example) to some exotic destination (Nepal, if you have the urge to see some crazy Hindu [or "Hindoo" as Pynchon would spell it] stuff and the world's tallest mountain), with a layover in Germany. Here's why: planes serve you coffee all night, you will be surrounded by Germans, odds are in favor of a war movie, and as you lift off, you'll start to get a strange vertiginous feeling that you have lifted away from the rigid immediacy of your surroundings into some unknown cultural void.</p><p>In this hypercaffeinated, timeless traverse from Atlanta to Germany, you begin reading. Here's the opening paragraph: <blockquote>"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."</blockquote></p><p><em>A screaming?</em> you think, as your plane hums, vibrates, eases its way over the Atlantic.</p><p>You read on, hoping to learn what screams across what sky, when, over whom, and who the "he" is who flees beneath wherever the story is going.</p><p>Then, when Pynchon's characters start using words like, "Kraut," and "Nazis," you really start to squirm. You're in his world now, his war, his America, his London, his raging, spinning, spanning, ejaculating brain. I hope you stay there for a while. It's worth the difficulty.</p><p>That opening sense of wonder, of violent mystery holds throughout the book. Some passages are remarkable in their immediacy, their vulgarity, their hilarity, their poignancy. Most of the time though, you'll be haunted by the nagging question of <em>what in Pynchon's world is going on?</em></p><p>I will attempt to summarize. There are a lot of bombs going off, and there's rumor of one particular bomb that's the sort of platonic bomb, the ultimate design. The perfection of bombness. And almost everyone in the story is after some variation of this ideal.</p><p>Once you get to Nepal, assuming that you stayed with it for the bulk of the trip, only taking breaks to drink coffee, watch <em>The King's Speech</em>, which actually connects to parts of <em>Gravity's Rainbow</em> in surprising ways, and talk to your neighbor, the book will stay with you, since it is so fiercely entertaining, in the highest sense of the word. It engages. It truly, deeply entertains. It haunts you and flares up, even among the lurid, grainy streets of Kathmandu.</p><p>Only in the last pages, which you read somewhere in the jetlagged days after you return to the States, after he has rattled, shocked, confused, teased, aroused, dodged, lost, riddled, and ensared you, does he begin to unravel his symbols. And when he does, you realize that the math is deeper than you thought, and that it was easier not to understand than to do the work to follow the trails that his expositions offer.</p><p>It's one of those books like <em>Ulysses</em> or <em>Infinite Jest</em>, where you can't always be sure who is saying or doing what, where, and to what end. However, since you were disoriented by the trip anyway, and had a lot to think through upon your return, why not toss this masterpiece into the mix? It has a lot to say. It seems to ring out with a lot of the other madness you see in this strange place you've returned to where everyone seems to be chasing a vaguely defined, incinerating dream for reasons ranging from its inscrutability to its platonic perfection to its raw unattainability.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-55690987410186157132011-05-22T10:58:00.000-07:002011-05-22T12:04:13.737-07:00Highbrow Historical Pulp Fiction: A review of Them by Joyce Carol Oates<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzOjPjOlvH5w4CwGmAKvaZQekrDcm6uZxoelzCSmGemDyNAviwEGRaCz4RF-8mh284O4wsrJtnQG8vLnnvgKvqPPO-5OxF2lGrecyvmIRHwndm4yP8ffXxQIYHGOv0CMb9_bKvkgRm_tg8/s1600/Them.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 233px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzOjPjOlvH5w4CwGmAKvaZQekrDcm6uZxoelzCSmGemDyNAviwEGRaCz4RF-8mh284O4wsrJtnQG8vLnnvgKvqPPO-5OxF2lGrecyvmIRHwndm4yP8ffXxQIYHGOv0CMb9_bKvkgRm_tg8/s400/Them.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5609601611544279378" /></a><p><em>Joyce Carol Oates is the Tom Waits of highbrow pulp fiction.</em></p><p>My friend Jonathan Kotulski made the above statement, mostly in jest I think, during a recent phone conversation.</p><p>We had been talking about Kafka, Musil, Borges, and David Foster Wallace, then I mentioned that I was still feverishly reading novels and short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, and that I didn't completely understand why. The Tom Waits comparison came from the fact that she has produced a huge catalog, and managed to stay consistently challenging over the course of several decades.</p><p>My most recent JCO book is actually one of her earlier works. As illustrated boldly in the picture above, it is named <em>Them</em>. The title, which actually does help in the interpretation of the book, does very little to tell you what you are about to read. Nor does the illustration. Nor do maybe the first 400 pages, over the course of which a quarreling, unlikable family staggers through two generations of rapes, murders, beatings, racism, domestic violence, abandonment, bereavement, rebellion, infidelity, alcoholism, obesity, and cancer.</p><p>In general, I found the book to be melodramatic, overdrawn, miserable, and taxing. However, there are two tricks JCO pulls, which although they struck me as a little cheap at the time, in retrospect help to tie the thing together and make its reading worthwhile.</p><p>The first trick she plays twice. In her intro, she bills the story "a work of history in fictional form." Later in the novel, she prints several letters written by one of the protagonists to herself. She artfully pleads with her readers to accept that, "This is the only kind of fiction that is real."</p><p>The second trick, which is complicated by the first, is a bit of a <em>deus ex machina</em>, but in my opinion, it works. The history of the minor characters in the novel is, without much set-up or warning, suddenly linked to major historical events, and everything changes. Which I guess is how major historical events interact with the urban poor, striking without warning. The whole book, the characters seem like anonymous cogs in a big, crushing wheel, then without much warning or setup, the axle breaks.</p><p>So at the end of <em>Them</em>, readers are confronted with a story that seems too bad to be true, with a twist that seems too big to be true, yet the author repeateadly claims that the badness and bigness are both historical fact.</p><p>As a reader, I love stuff like this. It places me on a precipice. I am cynical, but as P.T. Anderson reminds pomo cynics in <em>Magnolia</em>, "These things happen."</p><p>I rarely encounter books that engage me in a struggle, that effectively prod me to reframe, or restate, how I think about the world, its workings, and my connection to them, but <em>Them</em> is one such book. And that doesn't mean I like all the grand gestures, the melodramatic sexual drama, the barrage of tragedies, or the absorption with violence and tension, but like they do in all JCO books, these things fill a space worth exploring, even if they leave me feeling ambivalent and more than a little disturbed.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-80688724151940408032011-05-18T01:30:00.000-07:002011-05-25T16:52:40.213-07:00The Japanese Tourist: A review of Arresting God in Kathmandu by Samrat Upadhyay<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHFsT3_tOQuVBtX6Bfo3n_PtPHCVVYG013AR1qvB0GZ3avOi9MYvY6JxhBQG9SGjkaptvIEznUZf38Cf40UlyhsVz4OLgOkphISKiA-r5xVJ0K8NlPIxwaai2h3REguR3bIkAXPBOvu6wf/s1600/Arresting+God+in+Kathmandu.jpg"><img style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 213px; DISPLAY: block; HEIGHT: 320px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5605485122319174658" border="0" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHFsT3_tOQuVBtX6Bfo3n_PtPHCVVYG013AR1qvB0GZ3avOi9MYvY6JxhBQG9SGjkaptvIEznUZf38Cf40UlyhsVz4OLgOkphISKiA-r5xVJ0K8NlPIxwaai2h3REguR3bIkAXPBOvu6wf/s320/Arresting+God+in+Kathmandu.jpg" /></a><br /><br /><p>Let's imagine that the literary scene in America was pretty quiet, and that Japanese was the international trade language, so Ray Carver learned Japanese and did his writing in Japanese.</p><br /><br /><p>You with me? Now, let's picture a Japanese tourist wandering into a bookstore in Los Angeles, wide-eyed about the glamour of Hollywood, the clash of ethnic groups, and the beautiful beaches and deserts he has seen. He loves how crazy America seems andwants to get a little more understanding of the country. He sees a copy of <em>What We Talk about When We Talk about Love</em> in his native language. Our tourist reads the rave reviews on the back, reads how well Carver captures American life, and purchases the book to read on the plane ride back to Tokyo.</p><br /><br /><p>What he discovers while he's in the air over the pacific is that Carver is pretty much copying some great Japanese writer with whom our tourist is already familiar, that the stories are about themes that have nothing to do with the America he witnessed during his travels, and that these themes are pretty much the normal day-to-day concerns of your average Japanese short story anyway. Disgusted, our Japanese tourist hurls the book out of the window of his plane (picturing this may require a little suspension of disbelief, but stay with me).</p><br /><br /><p>Now, let's assume that this Japanese tourist has a blog not unlike this very blog, where he responds in various ways to books, music, movies, and sumo wrestling matches. And he has been tasked with writing a review, and, upon further reflection, he wonders if maybe he should have given Carver a chance to do what Carver wanted to do, instead of reinforcing the wonder that this tourist felt about America.</p><br /><br /><p>My friends, after reading <em>Arresting God in Kathmandu</em>, I find myself in a very similar situation to this imaginary tourist.</p><br /><br /><p>I traveled to Nepal recently, and I spent a few days in Kathmandu before and after trekking to the base camp of Mount Everest. While in Kathmandu, I sought literature to help me understand and enjoy the culture I was witnessing. Samrat Uphadyay's collection of short stories seemed promising. However, in the air on my way back to Atlanta, I found the stories to be mostly like Carver's, except a little less good.</p><br /><br /><p>The writer spends very little time on the context for these characters. Absent are the lurid descriptions of Pashupati Temple or responses to the smog or the litter or examinations and riffs on the vibrant cultural whirlwind that I witnessed over there. Instead, I read straightforward accounts of Nepali people adrift in the face of sexual, family, and relational concerns.</p><br /><br /><p>Now, upon revisiting <em>AGiK</em>, I have to admit that I broke a basic rule to reading and responding to literature, which is to let it speak on its own terms first. I drowned the book in my own expectations, then discarded its breathless corpse.</p><br /><br /><p>Upon further review, I found stories which had a quiet kind of power to them. Upadhyay's tales rarely tell you what they are about. Instead, they paint understated portraits of characters suffering under massive emotional currents. I still found the writing style weak, but the characters and content took on new life once divorced from a tourist's expectations.</p><br /><br /><p>That said, I still don't really like these stories. But now for different, less prejudiced reasons. There are moving moments and keen observations, but overall, I just don't find the work that well-written or the stories particularly interesting.</p><br /><br /><p>Either way, I was glad for this book and the way it revealed the blinding power of my own context and expectations. I hope to find a book about Nepal that does the same thing, except leaves me more touched, challenged, and impressed at the end.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-25383286899576039482011-05-05T08:10:00.000-07:002011-05-11T08:20:49.310-07:00Classism vs. The Caste System: A Review of Fatalism and Development by Dor Bahadur Bista<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivoXM_SErWKBWjCTg5KqnYdaoHYL5a_vnvMQMFVvg2R8bjo_1wvWFmEzhBfgXvPR5vVPtabHf_4uxC1y0-nVYhuUH47rDDl1Ajm8pbSV79ul4WDcxUs-khwKxF5BAcuzjaN2IYI63Ex5xU/s1600/Fatalism+and+Development.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivoXM_SErWKBWjCTg5KqnYdaoHYL5a_vnvMQMFVvg2R8bjo_1wvWFmEzhBfgXvPR5vVPtabHf_4uxC1y0-nVYhuUH47rDDl1Ajm8pbSV79ul4WDcxUs-khwKxF5BAcuzjaN2IYI63Ex5xU/s320/Fatalism+and+Development.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5603249923631233570" /></a><p>While I was in Kathmandu on vacation, I asked the president of a local university if he could recommend any books. I felt enchanted and a little baffled by the social movements I saw around me. And the varieties of skin tone, appearance and religions suggested a storied history. Without hesitating, he offered me only one title. I immediately found the book, and as I asked other translators, missionaries, and teachers what I should be reading, they all recommended the same book.<p>You know that a book has something to say when the author disappears under mysterious circumstances soon after its publication. So it is with Dor Bahadar Bista's little critique of his homeland. In <em>Fatalism and Development: Nepal's Struggle for Modernization</em>, Bista searches through Nepali history to find the influences, patterns, and ideologies that make it so difficult for Nepal to meet the numerous challenges of adapting to a changing world.</p><p>What he turns up is fascinating. Bista suggests that despite numerous attempts by Indian immigrants, Nepal never fully adopted the caste system. Instead, it created a permeable set of classes with its own set of disadvantages. The main one being that once a Nepali makes it into political or economic power, he/she is taught to disdain work. So the resulting society has a group of wealthy leaders who, through a set of cultural loopholes and customs, don't do much work.</p><p>A lesson learned on this very blog in my review of <a href="http://bomumo.blogspot.com/2011/02/dim-light-shed-review-of-overnight.html">Overnight</a> suggests that when we receive our titles, when we get public approval, that's when we really need to get to work.</p><p>I am a fan of Nepali culture. I love the people of Kathmandu. But, as I read bits of this and other books by the light of my headlamp because of yet another power outage, I had to agree that the administration of the country could use some improvement.</p><p>I can't confirm or deny much of the material in the book because my entire time in Nepal consisted of about three weeks, but the study seemed to resonate with the patterns I saw around me. There may not be much here for your average reader, but for culture and history geeks, Nepal's developmental and political structures offer some compelling tensions.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-68971132857674847182011-05-04T07:37:00.000-07:002011-05-04T08:21:10.632-07:00To Sing His Praises: A review of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1iZegHU0eI0IxCN5vPCvynfufu4b74Zb6dtz-Ta7yiic_Uq514v-51DfcenFUSLTGCIGw8BdkEjmDvdHjincsaCQs3qqkE1Z4QcKh1GXSI5SmM0jLUeZ82KfTpJS2Q5q8ePCf8Uu3487m/s1600/Third+Policeman.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 211px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1iZegHU0eI0IxCN5vPCvynfufu4b74Zb6dtz-Ta7yiic_Uq514v-51DfcenFUSLTGCIGw8BdkEjmDvdHjincsaCQs3qqkE1Z4QcKh1GXSI5SmM0jLUeZ82KfTpJS2Q5q8ePCf8Uu3487m/s320/Third+Policeman.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602870106670645410" /></a><p>I do not know my audience, so I have the privilege of imagining them. I'm sure that a few of my friends from Facebook pop over to my blog, shake their heads at the amount of time I spend reading, and go back to watching that <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMtZfW2z9dw">Bed Intruder</a> song on youtube.</p><p>The other three readers are subject to my imagination, so I create the readers I want. Readers who will foam at the mouth when I say that the great Borges himself was a fan of Flann O'Brien, and marveled at the labyrinthine masterpiece <em>At Swim-Two-Birds</em>. They will nod with respect when they hear that Graham Greene championed the unknown Irish writer, and they will gasp when they learn that James Joyce himself, the exalted one, the reinventor of the novel, the pope of Irish literature, was a big fan of Flann O'Brien.</p><p>In the course of this review, I have captivated this imaginary audience. They are hanging on, teeth clenched, knuckles white, noses running. It must be flu season in imaginaryland. The problem with such a well-versed audience is that they quickly become agitated. Their illness makes them irritable. Their wealth of literary knowlege runs away from me, and they become an angry swarm. Quickly, I placate them with a summary of <em>The Third Policeman</em> to keep them at bay while I think of what to say about the book.</p><p>An unnamed character, vague in personality and motivation, obsessed with an obscure thinker name DeSelby (who presents a theory and defense of the idea that the world is sausage-shaped instead of round), commits a murder for money. After hiding the loot, he returns for it, and finds himself in an increasingly bizarre, aggravating, and insane loop of events which turns out to be... You thought I was going to give it away, didn't you? Hah!</p><p>Reading O'Brien is watching a great mind move unafraid. There is dark humor, bright humor, slapstick, tragedy, and, ultimately, underneath it all, a kind of subdued horror at human absurdities.</p><p>I assume that during the course of reading this review, all of my imaginary readers, unable to resist their massive intellectual curiosity, have gone out and read the book. Wasn't it great?</p><p>And finally, after the last page is closed and we are all reeling from the sheer originality of this work, here's the shocker: This book was never published during O'Brien's lifetime. No publisher would accept it! O'Brien, admired by the kings of literature in his day, could not get a reading with the masses outside of his newspaper column, and <em>The Third Policeman</em>, arguably his masterpiece (although I'm partial to <em>At Swim-Two-Birds</em>), perished largely unread, and has only found an audience in recent years, as it was unearthed.</p><p>So here, imaginary readers, is the question we must ask ourselves: who are we overlooking in our day? Who deserves a reading, but isn't getting one? Who is the Flann O'Brien of our era? I send you forth with this charge: find her or him and bring the writer to me, that I may review her or his work and thus claim a little bit of the genius apparent there.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-63486513916325288352011-05-03T17:23:00.000-07:002011-05-03T19:47:33.597-07:00Out of Balance: A review of Rabbit, Run by John Updike<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV0MJUdEceTA_nJa0NH-Wp9EIFZufLPd68EGMjIvUT9HOx8Newf0cZLJ67YFKkcUi4-JlGqqvPxARsFJVWTP5WOzq972dr-ZI004LRSFg7jBsUKHMX7jT4zBIWi6evDTLWZyE5NHwBBu4E/s1600/Rabbit%252520Run%252520Cover%252520Art.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5602650953758678306" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 178px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 283px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV0MJUdEceTA_nJa0NH-Wp9EIFZufLPd68EGMjIvUT9HOx8Newf0cZLJ67YFKkcUi4-JlGqqvPxARsFJVWTP5WOzq972dr-ZI004LRSFg7jBsUKHMX7jT4zBIWi6evDTLWZyE5NHwBBu4E/s320/Rabbit%252520Run%252520Cover%252520Art.jpg" border="0" /></a><p>It is hard not to hate Harry Angstrom. It is hard to hate Harry Angstrom.</p><p>Harry Angstrom is the American man who refuses to be the American man. He is the Kerouac who pays, whose leavings take a toll. He is Rabbit, John Updike's most notorious protagonist, and it's hard to read his story without feeling ambivalent.</p><p>I should say first that I don't like Updike very much, despite the fact that he is undoubtedly a master stylist and an engineer of perfect sentences. David Foster Wallace called him one of the "Great Male Narcissists," a label that fits, and which could offer a hint as to whether or not you like his work.</p><p>I must also say that without Updike's popularization of the present tense narrative, my fiction writing would probably be very different.</p><p>But to the story at hand: <em>Rabbit, Run</em> concerns former star athlete Harry Angstrom, nicknamed Rabbit, who refuses to settle into his adult life. He sees its horror and flees, but finds it inescapable, so he runs, returns, runs, and returns.</p><p>He is simultaneously rich, full, blunt, obtuse, lustful, loving, and detestable. He's basically everything at once, which makes him pretty much nothing in any given situation. He flees his family to mate with a whore, turns his whore into a mother, then, well, in case you haven't read it, I won't say, but it's a cyclical thing, and Updike doesn't leave the cycle, merely points eloquently to its existence.</p><p>The thing that makes RR almost unbearable to me is Updike's obsession with sex. While it does indeed define the main character, I think it neuters many of the other themes of the story. Where my other favorite authors, Keillor, Doyle, Pynchon, and Joyce are able to fit sex in as part of the psychological landscape, Updike seems to place it on an altar at the expense of other truths swimming through his tales.</p><p>My complaint here is hard to state carefully, but I think there's some merit to it. Reading Updike is like listening to music where the guitars are turned up so loud you can't hear the singer. Or like watching a movie where the reds are so saturated that they drown out the other colors. In <em>Rabbit, Run</em>, the sex is so prominent and definitive that Harry Angstrom becomes a part of its landscape instead of it being part of his. The same was true of <em>Terrorist</em>, the only other Updike novel I have read, an otherwise perfectly plotted book where the sex seemed grotesquely unnecessary and overplayed.</p><p>So I agree with those who assess Updike as a master of the English language, a prose architect, and an incisive examiner of the middle class. But his stories come off as phallic odes instead of well-rounded stories. And, as a result, they end up feeling grotesque and a bit cold to me.</p><p>In short stories with sex as the subject, Updike shines, but the theme gets stretched a little thin in longer form, as it did in <em>Terrorist</em> and <em>Rabbit, Run</em>. However, I still intend to read all the Rabbit novels. So my opinion, as always, remains open to influence.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-72265556402947397122011-03-23T07:17:00.000-07:002011-03-23T08:16:47.989-07:00Each Man Knows: A review of Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAJHZyw3Uqd6yY175PtFR0ODy11Ek4xtWzErcNbK2joTNVfXmUopMShwDGPgVPDHFp0Q5rvt447iYGhYP8GVQ7cR3wGfbOE5z2AHtx7dYFSkguhmvZTozmm14-kxkNUJWsJS3EA8JrgR6L/s1600/Mr.+Sammler%2527s+Planet.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 203px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAJHZyw3Uqd6yY175PtFR0ODy11Ek4xtWzErcNbK2joTNVfXmUopMShwDGPgVPDHFp0Q5rvt447iYGhYP8GVQ7cR3wGfbOE5z2AHtx7dYFSkguhmvZTozmm14-kxkNUJWsJS3EA8JrgR6L/s320/Mr.+Sammler%2527s+Planet.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5587279558508151858" /></a><p>I hope that Viking Press didn't pay too much for the cover design on their initial printing of Saul Bellow's novel <i>Mr. Sammler's Planet</i>. Although I could see them cycling through a host of options before finally throwing up their hands and deciding to just take a deep blue and slap some black and white letters over it. Then, of course, they had to make them overlap a bit, for creativity reasons.</p><p>As he often does, Bellow travels through whatever weaving line the story follows, painting an alarming, complex portrait of the mindscape of his protagonist. And what a protagonist Mr. Sammler is. A one-eyed Holocaust survivor in his twilight years, Sammler reflects and speaks to a lifetime of study and thought as characters around him fight recklessly to find their place.</p><p>He interacts with a princely black pickpocket, a dying doctor, a Hindu scientist interested in the colonization of other planets, a driftless entrepreneur, a coattail-riding artist, an adoring niece, and his own promiscuous daughter. In the face of these characters and their stabs at meaning, Mr. Sammler speculates. He pontificates. He wrestles.</p><p>And when he gets to where the story has been going all along, the mass of images and ideas forms a crystalline web that centers elegantly on Bellow's subject, which I would humbly submit is the question of how we respond to our destiny.</p><p>Like most of my Imaginary Readers, I cringe when I read the word <em>destiny</em>. It's a Disney word. A Pocahontas-type concept. In our culture, it's the stuff of lame self-help literature. But not in Bellow's hands.</p><p>In Bellow's hands, destiny is the sum of countless inscrutable factors. It's something you can't name, something you wrestle with, something that defies your best understanding, but that you can <em>recognize</em> immediately.</p><p>Sammler has plenty of ideas to keep his mind occupied, to get him through explanations, but in the end, after the death of a dear friend, Sammler says this:<blockquote>He was aware that he must meet-- through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding--he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows.</blockquote></p><p>And, despite all that Sammler doesn't know, can't understand, can't explain, the truth of his observation resonates. We are people of destiny. We are moving through a story with an ending out of reach.</p><p>We know this is true, but we fear it. We cringe from it. We squirm and argue our way out of it. And, in the end, when our hand has been played, our life is defined by how fully we live out the terms of our contract.</p><p>And perhaps those who designed the cover to this resonant novel felt that they had found the cover that <em>destiny</em> had ordained for the book. Which is a scary thought for several reasons which I do not aim to explore here.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-23901346049365992172011-03-19T09:43:00.000-07:002011-03-19T10:39:32.778-07:00Obscure Heart: A Review of My Left Foot<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKez9ACO_VwlXKMlvJpK4pRYij9oekv63Xqm43LnxxYCX2o7WsmMAkuFU-YPXSrhim6GSKaqLCGQRqxo-M4P34cbm3_m2wlZP3gOoYwbF4_hx0vFaxIti-49eg-Jt-8wpcTw3ktBe0tmo/s1600/My+Left+Foot.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5585833165329240722" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 300px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 300px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiIKez9ACO_VwlXKMlvJpK4pRYij9oekv63Xqm43LnxxYCX2o7WsmMAkuFU-YPXSrhim6GSKaqLCGQRqxo-M4P34cbm3_m2wlZP3gOoYwbF4_hx0vFaxIti-49eg-Jt-8wpcTw3ktBe0tmo/s320/My+Left+Foot.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div></div><p>A good friend of mine grew up with Cereberal Palsy. At a recent party, another of my friends asked him what he was going to do when he got to Heaven. While his disability obscures the impulses of his heart, his smile seemed sincere and sad at the same time.</p><p>-I dunno. I'll probably run I guess, he replied, pivoting his head toward the roof.</p><p>It was hard to keep the tone of the party light after that comment. </p><p>We tend to consider our bodies as the final expression of who we are. When we gain too much weight, when we sag around the edges, when our eyelids hang heavy, when our hands shake, when depression slogs through our veins, we tend to think, in one way or another, <em>Look at who I am. Here, now, it shows</em>.</p><p>We venerate the bodies that work best. The Anton Krupickas and Michael Jordans and Lance Armstrongs receive our worship because in their motion we see the poetry of the soul. Actors, models, and musicians all stand under on the altar of magazine covers, inviting our worship.</p><p>And there is some truth to this perception that our body, this collection of atoms, cells, impulses, and nerves, guides and creates who we become. But we can forget about the sheer power of the spirit. We forget or adamantly deny that the body is not all that makes us who we are.</p><p>Then, all at once, <em>My Left Foot</em> asks us, with its earnest portrait of love, relationship, and disability, <em>Really? That's all there is to it? What about this man? What do you say about him?</em></p><p>The film depicts the upbringing of Christy Brown, an Irish writer and artist who only had control of one foot. He uses his toes to convey his tremendous heart and spirit in books and images that arrest his family, his countrymen, and eventually an audience around the world.</p><p>Christy grows up amid a swarm of brothers and sisters, surrounded and sculpted by their love and by their battles. With their tremendous company and support, he seeks to make his spirit known, despite the overwhelming, obscuring power of his CP.</p><p>Christy presents a resounding challenge to me, because for most of his life, his brilliance was obscured by his body. I still believe that our relations with our body shape our hearts and souls.</p><p>But I realize as I watch Daniel Day-Lewis's portrayal of the tortured writer, that I underestimate the power of our spirits, their enduring legacy, and the fact that our bodies are only a frail surface, the tip of the iceberg, a twisted little expression of tremendous will, potential, and love.</p><p>If Christy with his foot can shake the world without the cooperation of the rest of his body, then our frailties should not be treated as obstacles for our souls. We have a choice as to how we perceive them. They can either stand as distractions or as monuments to the powers beyond them.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-40248892919171514432011-03-16T11:51:00.000-07:002011-03-16T11:53:16.614-07:00Shame, Shame: A link to a good article on book reviewingI am a man who uses lazy language.<br /><br />Here is the article that challenges me to repent: <a href="http://www.examiner.com/book-in-national/the-top-20-most-annoying-book-reviewer-cliches-and-how-to-use-them-all-one-meaningless-review">http://www.examiner.com/book-in-national/the-top-20-most-annoying-book-reviewer-cliches-and-how-to-use-them-all-one-meaningless-review</a>.<br /><br />Read and be blessed.Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-5154717431364951502011-03-14T13:55:00.000-07:002011-03-14T15:38:02.781-07:00Fighting through It: A Review of Running with the Buffaloes by Chris Lear<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjONgKIvIGC_el94A2Shz_1IbkvXR0lCM20oJxi3w_8_vKUUSJ5ipE0qOyDgvPLu6osBhpw11u79becBWaOrOooI0nFo-OWa_DdxveKrj24fW2RwZ3gstpc3Fo7-PcFtUOD_HvSJ7GC2Ly7/s1600/Runningwiththebuffaloes.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 219px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjONgKIvIGC_el94A2Shz_1IbkvXR0lCM20oJxi3w_8_vKUUSJ5ipE0qOyDgvPLu6osBhpw11u79becBWaOrOooI0nFo-OWa_DdxveKrj24fW2RwZ3gstpc3Fo7-PcFtUOD_HvSJ7GC2Ly7/s320/Runningwiththebuffaloes.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5584043683179899874" /></a><p>Somewhere out there, in some college textbook, there exists a guide that walks aspiring writers through exactly how to process and write about the books that they read. If someone were to walk up to me and offer me a copy of such a guide, I would thank her or him (I'm a very polite person, eager to please), and then go home and throw that guide in the trash or, if I lived in a house with a fireplace, burn it.</p><p>Because every book is different, and deserves to be processed and loved or hated on its own terms. That's what I'm trying to do on this blog. To let books, music, and movies speak to me, then to have a good time writing about what I heard.</p><p>I think that our official guide to reviewing books would have me poo-poo <i>Running with the Buffaloes</i> for its heavy use of runner's jargon, its typos, its lack of engaging sensory information, and its brief, episodic chapters. That alone is another good reason to scrap our theoretical guide, because outside of those technicalities, <i>Running with the Buffaloes</i> is a lot of fun to read. Especially if you're a runner, which is what I am.</p><p>In fact, author Chris Lear's decision to present a season in the life of Colorado University's notorious men's cross-country team without adornement, without much additional information, and with minimal dialogue, kinda works in its favor. At least to me.</p><p>Last April, when I read Christopher McDougal's <i>Born to Run</i>, it gave me this idea of the glory of running, the potential for exploration, and the possibility of running really, really far. Which, during the year after I read it, I did.</p><p>Now, in March of the following year, suffering from an injury, feeling discouraged at how slow I am, wondering if I'll be able to keep at this whole running thing, I feel a little ticked at <i>BtR</i> for its hyped-up promises. Which is why the sparse, brutal, and focused <i>RwB</i> works so well for me.</p><p>It talks about the injuries and fatigue that sideline even the best runners. It tackles the despair and emotional tension that attack endurance athletes, and examines how those who triumph do so. And its short, point-by-point chapters capture the blend of suffering, monotony, competition, and drive that make up the day-to-day training and life of a runner.</p><p>So, despite what a technical point-by-point review would say, <i>RwB</i> is a great read in its own way, and comfortably makes it onto a very short list of my favorite running books.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-67477548923100838472011-03-09T22:59:00.000-08:002011-03-14T13:40:31.934-07:00My Complaining Brain: A Review of Helvetica<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsDpjD9cZC4yyp3bHV9CRbsypVd9LjV4Xmnpc1seZZP5HDbHjnKWDj-F4M-FbE_K9eNqx4uEl2behWEhMXJkvdpsrLBNLU6BzC8RLKMIFqr75Nh4zZF-f9ZiiG1ChBI2WrteDr9lG9sP7d/s1600/helvetica-poster.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 218px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjsDpjD9cZC4yyp3bHV9CRbsypVd9LjV4Xmnpc1seZZP5HDbHjnKWDj-F4M-FbE_K9eNqx4uEl2behWEhMXJkvdpsrLBNLU6BzC8RLKMIFqr75Nh4zZF-f9ZiiG1ChBI2WrteDr9lG9sP7d/s320/helvetica-poster.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5582343459276138018" /></a><p>I consider myself a messaging geek. I go through my life listening, watching, and feeling for communication. I roll through stories in my mind when I have down time, thinking through how they came across, why, and through what channels. I cheer for a good commercial.</p><p>But while words and their import consume much of my brain activity, a vital component sneaks its way through my circuits without notice and does its work.</p><p>I'm talking about font here.</p><p>I never think about fonts, but they shape much of how I perceive branding, they guide how I understand a message, and they adorn the pages of every book I read. In short, they are a the big deal.</p><p>And <i>Helvetica</i> opens wide the theoretical, marketing, messaging, artistic, and historical aspects of font design. By interspersing montages with interviews with the geeks who design and use typefaces, the film provides tangible views of its subject matter, while its subjects grapple with what we see in text and what impact it has on us.</p><p>All of which is engrossing and beautiful, but my brain is a little upset about it. <i>Thanks a lot,</i> Helvetica, says my brain, <i>as if I didn't have enough to juggle while I'm walking down the street and watching movies and reading books. Now I have to obsess over font too?</i></p><p>To which I say, aloud, "Suck it up, brain. You're there to think, and think hard. That's what all that coffee is for."</p><p>To which my brain does not have much of a response, since it has learned to depend on coffee for much of its functioning.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-86108230559445223442011-03-04T15:47:00.000-08:002011-03-04T16:59:22.618-08:00Honestly, Joyce: A review of A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDHyCmk7njaOpto43fmxAcVuVyvm1SZNhIoZr9GY59Wk90LC5I47xSQce8-Hxzwfx-iKZgXfmEBNAdMdpzaQLl0y7GGPrYD-EpK2zAk1CRiOsX06fiNiF7Zu6KcO6pXYE3Ea0pOoJ2dVpd/s1600/Bloodsmoor+Romance.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; height: 278px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDHyCmk7njaOpto43fmxAcVuVyvm1SZNhIoZr9GY59Wk90LC5I47xSQce8-Hxzwfx-iKZgXfmEBNAdMdpzaQLl0y7GGPrYD-EpK2zAk1CRiOsX06fiNiF7Zu6KcO6pXYE3Ea0pOoJ2dVpd/s320/Bloodsmoor+Romance.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5580375837743112194" /></a><p>Joyce Carol Oates comes off as humorless most of the time. Not that I expect her tales of rape, hauntings, violence, isolation, infidelity, and despair to be lighthearted. But just as I expect any good humor writing to depict a kind of pain, I expect depictions of pain to have their own sense of humor. From my little worldview, it's part of being an honest writer.</p><p>In fact, right before reading JCO's sprawling epic <em>A Bloodsmoor Romance</em>, I told a friend that I liked everything about her books except that they were all so humorless.</p><p>Do you see where this is going, readers? Right after I made this judgment, I read a book by Joyce Carol Oates which was tragic, tangled, and consistently funny. OH, THE IRONY!</p><p>The unnamed narrator, a virgin, tries to keep her Victorian sense of propriety and decency as she details the lurid dissolution and reunion of an upper-class Pennsylvania family. She makes a great show of defending "proper Christian" conduct, then goes into painstaking detail about the unseemly events that bring the Zinn family into a new century.</p><p>There are infidelities, sex changes, ghosts, murders, meltdowns, spies, elopements, betrayals and abandonments, all tragic in their own way. All surreal and haunting. Cumulatively, however, in the voice of their virginal, self-righteous narrator, they make for a rollicking, jeering epic of a novel.</p><p>So I was wrong about JCO. In fact, I wonder if the same dark humor that infuses and carries <em>A Bloodsmoor Romance</em> isn't present in her other work as well. Maybe, like the narrator, I missed certain undertones and ironies in my rush to criticize.</p><p>Either way, <em>A Bloodsmoor Romance</em> joins the ranks of full-hearted epics like <em>Infinite Jest</em>, <em>Catch-22</em>, and <em>Lolita</em> that manage to elicit laughter, even as they batter and dissolve the relationships and spirits of their main characters.</p><p>So, I'm sure it offers Ms. Oates no small amount of relief to know that I no longer find her work humorless. In fact, Joyce, I salute you. You can be a very funny lady if you put your mind to it.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-88943968387933618732011-03-03T09:12:00.000-08:002011-03-04T12:33:34.784-08:00Movie Round-up: Short Reviews of Scarface, Postcards from the Edge, Pollock, and FridaMy Host of Imaginary Readers hates my success.<br /><br />I started a writing business a few months ago, and a few big projects materialized very quickly. Consequently, my time for review-writing has tapered off a bit.<br /><br />I've kept pace on the books, mainly because reading them takes way more time. But I'm behind on movies. So to keep my HIR happy, I'm going to bring the blog up-to-date with a roundup of the last four movies I watched.<br /><br /><p>"Four reviews in one?!" cries my HIR, delightedly. </p><p>"You bet your sweet imaginary butts," I tell them. And thus we begin:</p><br /><p><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmjpp3vD_WKQi4SPcPI_nz642r3a4ERhmmelKY-42eS1N7n6PSKyoPIjo8lpqz7Nfj4Fihlss5OrbsFK_x6cKl9XXUwbbJ5KJRnvT_a8L37oLF7FfuHMzDATBsIGRewQ6bwD7h2tTWJNm3/s1600/Pollock.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5579907806450456178" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 215px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmjpp3vD_WKQi4SPcPI_nz642r3a4ERhmmelKY-42eS1N7n6PSKyoPIjo8lpqz7Nfj4Fihlss5OrbsFK_x6cKl9XXUwbbJ5KJRnvT_a8L37oLF7FfuHMzDATBsIGRewQ6bwD7h2tTWJNm3/s320/Pollock.jpg" border="0" /></a> Artists are a tortured bunch. We want to recreate any beauty we see, and the impossibility of this desire torments us, and drives us to folly. Most of us are so plagued by self-doubt and emotional turmoil that our inspiration chokes before it produces.</p><p>Once in a while, someone comes along who has the right combination of productivity and inspiration to change his art form. But success doesn't usually calm a stormy soul. It amplifies it.</p><p>And so it did with Jackson Pollock, who made his name by perfectly and completely embracing the reality of a flat image on a flat canvas. Watching Ed Harris portray this volatile painter is a revelatory and terrifying experience. </p><p>I feel similar to Pollock in all the wrong ways. I am prone to recklessness, rage, selfishness, and despair if my impulses are allowed to grow. </p><p><em>Pollock</em> is a resounding, rattling challenge for this young creative to calm down, to let go of my raging desires, and to quietly go about the work of bringing my little inspiration to bear.</p><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW1OZRXxhfGKF0sgXtwsish9ApiFw9zCwAGPx12m7zDPJzXkGSJKVTvCU-gPgTNiw7RyYzXJqyY3zP7Uq_VufKcaFB9Bt7s27BFTMJ_2YnnsNAMF_dmZD1LlMqdcDuGdxskKTlRArQHoVp/s1600/Frida.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5579907806651145330" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 215px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgW1OZRXxhfGKF0sgXtwsish9ApiFw9zCwAGPx12m7zDPJzXkGSJKVTvCU-gPgTNiw7RyYzXJqyY3zP7Uq_VufKcaFB9Bt7s27BFTMJ_2YnnsNAMF_dmZD1LlMqdcDuGdxskKTlRArQHoVp/s320/Frida.jpg" border="0" /></a><strong>Warning- This will be a confusing sentence. Bear with me:</strong> <em>Frida</em> is one of those exceedingly rare movies about artists which emulates the form of that artist while successfully telling that artist's story while retaining its own power as a film, all at the same time.<br /><br />It belongs in a small camp with <em>Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas</em>, and maybe <em>Rushmore</em> if we are liberal.<br /><br /><em>Frida</em> is a sensual, stylized masterpiece which, as <em>Volver</em> did with Penelope Cruz, takes an actress who America pretty much sees as a vacuous sex symbol, and shows us that our obsession with appearances blinded us to a phenomenal talent.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-xkuEd7zwvgt37dQGB117kUIg1tPfS9ochgWtmDFX9LIlxJfvqDD87koQz6xdaib51QPljj3UZnfVNHSUMcteH6g2Cc_TvlYeuqh0Z3EgqYscKtCz1zG0Tm4lRcJGbTmWQw7CPNsYkzRP/s1600/Scarface.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5579907800666960914" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 90px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 139px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-xkuEd7zwvgt37dQGB117kUIg1tPfS9ochgWtmDFX9LIlxJfvqDD87koQz6xdaib51QPljj3UZnfVNHSUMcteH6g2Cc_TvlYeuqh0Z3EgqYscKtCz1zG0Tm4lRcJGbTmWQw7CPNsYkzRP/s320/Scarface.jpg" border="0" /></a>What does one say about a movie like <em>Scarface,</em> about which so much has been written and said?<br /><br />Nothing.<br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGPt0MFQFDWcXYZyoS1R29QmUjR9O8rCZLIeaupY6BskOGzlgqnCsbNclt1Wfs5Nuw8S3JnPAZWXHl7mDLt_sT0-hMzhS7tk1VijDV-fAH14FE5mX1Kx8YIqcvccT2XUFe1-np4mIwVWj3/s1600/PFE+Movie.bmp"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5579907795521753794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 215px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjGPt0MFQFDWcXYZyoS1R29QmUjR9O8rCZLIeaupY6BskOGzlgqnCsbNclt1Wfs5Nuw8S3JnPAZWXHl7mDLt_sT0-hMzhS7tk1VijDV-fAH14FE5mX1Kx8YIqcvccT2XUFe1-np4mIwVWj3/s320/PFE+Movie.bmp" border="0" /></a><p>I made the grave mistake of watching <em>Postcards from the Edge</em> right after I finished reading <a href="http://bomumo.blogspot.com/2011/02/self-speech-as-self-defense-review-of.html">Carrie Fisher's book</a> of the same title.</p><p>The movie retains few of the assets of the novel. Carrie Fisher adapted her own book, and she did an okay job. While the dialogue and characters have all been altered and amplified, the punchlines remain the same.</p><p>What made the book so powerful to me was the internal monologues of its characters. Their self-absorption is hilarious and captivating. The movie, by virtue of not being a book, can't really touch that theme. So instead it plays like an overblown Altmanesque riff on the novel. By the time I got oriented and stopped rolling my eyes at all silver-screen-Hollywoodization of the story, the movie was over.</p><p>If there was something here for me, I missed it.</p><p>And there we have it, my actual and imaginary readers: Four reviews in one. I hope you're happy. I know I am.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-28958523194005255152011-02-26T10:59:00.000-08:002011-02-26T15:17:25.666-08:00Imagining Our Souls: A Review of Seize the Day by Saul Bellow<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgA4LVO_0YvnBYzZcxcozK1bSw47eImDZjRCkT7kIoff1gR6HE0ApnfUaqU1w21Lf81kaV96RQYcRfo5332G6Ig9VI9YcuqVOjdnPpXYPedpEg4SsWiYnXOgNVafcQSdTz1YBURW4uYuhW/s1600/Seize+the+Day.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578075103404855362" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 203px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhgA4LVO_0YvnBYzZcxcozK1bSw47eImDZjRCkT7kIoff1gR6HE0ApnfUaqU1w21Lf81kaV96RQYcRfo5332G6Ig9VI9YcuqVOjdnPpXYPedpEg4SsWiYnXOgNVafcQSdTz1YBURW4uYuhW/s320/Seize+the+Day.jpg" border="0" /></a><p>Before I get into Saul Bellow's little powerhouse of a novel, a word about introductions, forewords, and prefaces.</p><p>Unless I finish a novel with a feeling of wonder, I rarely read the introduction. Any kind of foreword usually functions to inflate the page count, advertise the book (why, if I'm already reading a book, do I need to read an ad for it?), and attach some big shot author's name with the work at hand.</p><p>However, there are those few introductions which function as great literature in their own right. Tom Wolfe, in his introduction to <em>Bonfire of the Vanities</em> (I have yet to read the book, but I have read the introduction at least three times), offers readers a lucid, hilarious, paradigm-shifting look at the history of style and content in the modern novel. David Eggers, in the Preface to <em>A Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius</em>, confronts every imagined complaint about his memoir and vehemently defends his choices, offering a blazing portrait of the self-consciousness that he goes on to explore in the book. And, in the intro to <em>Seize the Day</em> by Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick effectively illuminates literature's unique power, and spotlights Bellow's work as a defining example of that force.</p><p>She compares literature, with its descriptions and suggestions, with the pre-processed sights and sounds of television and cinema. She mourns the time when novels were a shared language in our culture, saying the following:<blockquote>If literature can give new eyes to human beings, it is because the thing held in common is separately imagined.</blockquote><p>A world where we all share a certain bibliography, with which we all interact in our own imaginations, is difficult to imagine. We just don't read that much anymore, and the volume of books being published scatters the few readers left to their own favored genres and authors.</p><p>So, fellow readers, if we are to correct this problem, I suggest that we start with <em>Seize the Day</em>. I suggest this for a few reasons.</p><p>First, the book is notably short. Barely over one hundred pages, it is compact in its time span, plot, and action. Second, its density is astounding. It packs in stunning, nuanced explorations of loyalty, generations, marriage, financial stress, cities, psychology, spirituality, and the quest for the soul. Third, on the tail end of the second, it presents us with a shared Truth which we seperately imagine: We each have a soul that transcends our circumstances.</p><p>The book spends its time in the head of Tommy Wilhelm, a failed actor and an unemployed salesman, seperated from his family, living in an apartment near his retired father in New York. Wilhelm throws his money into one last gamble, trusting a purported psychologist and investing in lard.</p><p>While the mind of a character has been a common setting for novels in recent years, Bellow's choice to paint the landscape of his character's inner life was an innovation in its time, and it still astounds and inspires in its result, despite the flood of followers.</p><p>The final chapter, moving in response to Wilhelm's misfortunes and poor choices, plunges deep after the human soul, until it is out of sight.</p><p>The way Wilhelm falls apart, the way he rages and fumes and fights and grieves, all suggests some presence beyond comprehension. Some guiding platonic reality that requires the complete obliteration of his pride, self-delusion, and wealth.</p><p>Very little in the story goes the way we might hope. But when we leave Wilhelm's story, and we are filled with a new, deeper sense of hope that transcends the events of the book.</p><p>So the book leaves us with a sense of assurance that there is a soul within the man, but it allows us to wonder at its nature and to wonder at our own souls as well.</p><p>That, fellow readers, is an outcome well worth both our shared exploration and our individual imagination.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-52886330124991997982011-02-22T14:50:00.000-08:002011-02-22T16:48:47.751-08:00No Life Intact: A review of Dolls<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAAlwd-tHnh67S2AATH31MctMqoph11mCGwSePwfGu7IxZbzEyEsArkkS0qVQGy8yujW7YgH2QN6gbHeLZ0-PA8O1-t5HOugPP0THrFmEIsEUk61cSMeuboXq6ZEhI1w1pxOWJXCTaW0a2/s1600/dolls.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5576650974785740162" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 220px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgAAlwd-tHnh67S2AATH31MctMqoph11mCGwSePwfGu7IxZbzEyEsArkkS0qVQGy8yujW7YgH2QN6gbHeLZ0-PA8O1-t5HOugPP0THrFmEIsEUk61cSMeuboXq6ZEhI1w1pxOWJXCTaW0a2/s320/dolls.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><p>There was a director named Robert Bresson who refused to call his subjects "actors." He insisted on referring to them as "models." He always hired unknown talent and used them in only one movie before finding a new cast. He rehearsed only to drain the emotion out of his models. To flatten their performances. </p><p>Bresson made the following statement: </p><blockquote>My movie is born first in my head, dies on paper; is resuscitated by the living persons and real objects I use, which are killed on film but, placed in a certain order and projected on to a screen, come to life again like flowers in water.</blockquote><p> What I felt watching Bresson's <em>A Man Escaped</em>, <em>Au Hasard Balthasar</em>, and <em>Diary of a Country Priest</em>, I felt again watching Takeshi Kitano's <em>Dolls</em>, a quiet little film about people for whom love is an irresistible and fatal noose.</p><p>While Bresson's choice to minimize the emotion of his actors comes from a general philosophy of film, Kitano's flows from the story, as love entices, manipulates, and destroys his protagonists.</p><p>But while Kitano turns down the volume on drama, he cranks up the color, using vivid reds, sudden season changes and clear visual symbolism as the lovers adopt the outfits worn by puppets in the opening sequence, and as they stroll together bound by a scarlet rope.</p><p>Where Bresson did what he did for different reasons, Kitano ends up with a similar effect. Great minds think alike, but for vastly different reasons. The outcomes are worth observing, though.</p><p>Actors, stripped of their freedom to act, and placed in very carefully orchestrated shots and stories, seem to carry a paradoxically potent emotional kick. In <em>Dolls</em>, that minimalism communicates a fatalistic view of love, that it takes in who it wills and leaves no life intact.</p><p>Which is true, although I try not to think of it in such gloomy terms.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-26900182428991857572011-02-16T11:17:00.000-08:002011-02-16T11:52:20.247-08:00Mindblown: A Review of My Custom Van by Michael Ian Black<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYkXj9VfiSaqQ7K47zMeX1KP83xIywxTvTv0AGD26fa93GAS1iz2pXJqbLTSTVI-Phgod0klVVaHnhnxsI1gobktXrzjgUkw0i-ExQ1189KT5LIZexol6TjPyamDOl6J0f9e_lwv-ioEgP/s1600/my-custom-van.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5574370240663995490" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 212px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYkXj9VfiSaqQ7K47zMeX1KP83xIywxTvTv0AGD26fa93GAS1iz2pXJqbLTSTVI-Phgod0klVVaHnhnxsI1gobktXrzjgUkw0i-ExQ1189KT5LIZexol6TjPyamDOl6J0f9e_lwv-ioEgP/s320/my-custom-van.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><p><em>He won't really go there, will he? Looks like he will. Holy Cow. He went there and just kept going...wait. Did he just write what I think he wrote? I mean, yes, it's there in print, but still. It's hard to believe he would go that far.</em></p><p>The above is a selection from the internal dialogue of someone who has a sense of propriety and reads <em>My Custom Van ...And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All over Your Face</em> by Michael Ian Black.</p><p>Since I don't have much of a conscience when it comes to comedy, my internal dialogue was more like, <em>This creep is hilarious</em>. <em>hahaha.</em></p><p>I've been a fan of MIB since he played alongside Michael Showalter and David Wain in the short-lived Comedy Central series <em>Stella,</em> where the three comedians played three unemployed, suit-wearing roommates who live in a surreal version of the world. </p> <p>If I'm honest, I also have to admit that the fact that his middle name is my first name may have influenced my feelings toward him.</p><p>In fact, if I'm going to be completely honest, I have to admit that anyone with the name "Ian," be it her or his first, middle, or last name, deserves to be showered with money and venerated on a global scale.</p><p>To that end, I submit this modest review to my readers, and I will wait a few days for its truth to register before your money and worship come pouring in.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-11592844930017204562011-02-11T19:16:00.000-08:002011-02-11T19:52:56.897-08:00Too Many Tears: A review of Little Bee by Chris Cleave<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_E31fvOBbXpukVLkNGprjbspzU2rgSbz0ES4-N-BSpA0qUpJJiLfilFTVmd0roDJ3KH-Ed33BFp3LhF7r35JgS78aAYqB_sFR2tZSqTNYTRL_NeInV3UQ2s_aMKt_dqxTbJbCcHb6QisL/s1600/Little+Bee.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5572636869484967154" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 215px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg_E31fvOBbXpukVLkNGprjbspzU2rgSbz0ES4-N-BSpA0qUpJJiLfilFTVmd0roDJ3KH-Ed33BFp3LhF7r35JgS78aAYqB_sFR2tZSqTNYTRL_NeInV3UQ2s_aMKt_dqxTbJbCcHb6QisL/s320/Little+Bee.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><p>It's hard to quantify what makes writing bad, but about one third of the way into Chris Cleave's novel <em>Little Bee</em>, I had a wicked idea. I should count the instances of characters crying. The word, "cry" itself is used in abundance, but Cleave pretty much exhausts the Thesaurus for synonyms as the tears flow.</p><p>Crying punctuates every emotional conversation, along with gestures like turning dramatically away, holding one another, hitting things, holding one's own head in one's own hands, and so on.</p><p>Had I counted the cries, I would have a fact to substantiate my claim that Cleave took a great, relevant social concept, and wrote it into the ground. But I did not have the interest nor the patience.</p><p>So instead, I will just say so: Cleave took a great, relevant concept and wrote it into the ground. His characters acted in grand gestures, wore their symbolism loudly, overexplained their motivations, and seemed stuck in melodramatic loops that felt like they were created in a lab.</p><p>The story can be summarized like this: Two women, one Nigerian refugee and one English magazine editor, participate in the same horrible event in Nigeria. They end up together in England. Tears and revelations ensue. </p><p>Admittedly, the better I know a topic, the more critical I am about how it is presented. I work with refugees, and I have African friends. One of my closest ministry partners is Nigerian, specifically from the same tribe as the character in <em>Little Bee</em>. So when someone told me about <em>Little Bee</em>, I felt like I should read it. I was wrong.</p><p>What might have been an upsetting personal look at how rich countries deal with third-world suffering ended up feeling like a cross-cultural soap opera, with agonizingly obvious revelations, improbable twists that just kept coming, and some confounding moral questions which the author was, in my opinion, unqualified to address.</p><p>On the bright side, Cleave, a white man, made a lot of money off this piece about suffering women. Hopefully he spends it addressing the social problems introduced in the story, so that someone who the story purports to speak for will benefit from it.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-81417723143262533402011-02-10T19:07:00.000-08:002011-02-19T20:32:54.395-08:00Canyonlands: A review of 127 Hours<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7oXqZH97aTNUV3Nm5stjKGIGskZvuk11cYtu8G8NeokySEjWRMha9xmxjyAbltt22q_0sxZi89goXc2OQuRaQQColhPiTMJ90fH2aPh0dLb07Ewzf30WYuU32ueVaboyOjisB6b4NqvrB/s1600/127-hours-poster.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5572263492821179554" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 216px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7oXqZH97aTNUV3Nm5stjKGIGskZvuk11cYtu8G8NeokySEjWRMha9xmxjyAbltt22q_0sxZi89goXc2OQuRaQQColhPiTMJ90fH2aPh0dLb07Ewzf30WYuU32ueVaboyOjisB6b4NqvrB/s320/127-hours-poster.jpg" border="0" /></a> <p>Spoiler Alert: The guy cuts his arm off and survives.</p><p>I was aware of that much when I first saw the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlhLOWTnVoQ">trailer</a> for <em>127 Hours</em>. Aron Ralston is pretty much world famous for chopping his arm off after exhausting all his other options when he got trapped in a canyon. </p><p>What I missed in conversations about Ralston (I never read his book) was where his harrowing captivity took place. It's set in Canyonlands in Utah, a place where I spent a week last year with my brother and my good friend Charles Chung. </p><p>A sprawling, stunning array of rock formations, boulders, canyons, historical relics, and geological wonders, Canyonlands is about as remote as something that beautiful can be in the mainland USA. </p><p>It's a great place to go if you want to disappear. Which Aron Ralston did. Which is why he didn't tell anyone where he was going, which caused a lot of problems for him after his arm got pinned down by a boulder in an obscure crevasse.</p><p>The movie is cut together like a music video, pulling all sorts of cinematic stunts like split-screen montages, stock footage, dream sequences, massive aerial camera movements, and video-screen-within-the-film metanarrative. </p><p>I would think it would be enough to make me forget that the whole thing takes place in a canyon, under one rock. But it doesn't. All the gimmicks are used so well, and with such a sense of timing and story, that they enhance and heighten the Ralston's struggle to stay hopeful, funny, sane, and alive.</p><p><em>127 Hours</em> is a racous, full-tilt film that uses every tool at its disposal. It has a lot to say, but never does so too obviously. And that leaves room for plenty of thinking about what we hope for, what we believe in, what it means to really live, and who we are. </p><p>Or maybe just who Aron Ralston is, depending on how much you identify with his character. </p><p>Having been around Canyonlands myself, and having felt that childish impulse to drop off the map for a while, and having wondered at certain times why I should keep going, I found the whole thing invigorating, fresh, and celebratory.</p><p>Even during the whole arm-removal scene, which was vivid and gruesome, it's like the film was telling me, <em>Look here. See how bad it gets? See how much he suffered to keep going? Don't doubt for a second that it's worth it.</em></p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-66966875773300861392011-02-09T14:47:00.000-08:002011-02-09T17:31:52.916-08:00Self-Speech as Self-Defense: A review of Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUDs2Jb2ZHhY3CTyLEDJ_4k_6LLkoVAwLfsg3ZfOlUea4a9uXYr8adBqOJkBaoHeZtnIaxwcM4MUNmiJ2CnQs_4m0K0iYdZA3yorD9TtZc8p99TS6_ReAmlcXCg4h5qW4hud-wuU5oIAb_/s1600/PFE+Book.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 84px; height: 130px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUDs2Jb2ZHhY3CTyLEDJ_4k_6LLkoVAwLfsg3ZfOlUea4a9uXYr8adBqOJkBaoHeZtnIaxwcM4MUNmiJ2CnQs_4m0K0iYdZA3yorD9TtZc8p99TS6_ReAmlcXCg4h5qW4hud-wuU5oIAb_/s400/PFE+Book.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5571866292563772130" /></a><br /><p>Admittedly, I'm writing this review in a rush. <p></p>I made a resolution this year to review every book I read for this blog, and I finished this book <em>Postcards from the Edge</em> by Carrie Fisher, and I loved it so much that I ordered the movie from Netflix. The movie arrived in the mail today, and Ruthie and I are going to watch it after dinner, which Ruthie is currently preparing. <p>And I know that somehow, in some way I can't yet identify, writing a review of the book <em>after</em> watching the movie would be a whole different deal. How could I avoid a comparison? How could I speak to the content of the book when its images have been jostled around, overrun, and challenged by the movie?</p><p>And this book already has enough filmic baggage to deal with. For example, take the inevitably distracting fact that it was written by Carrie Fisher, who plays Princess Leia. It's hard, while reading, not to imagine Leia with her white gown and buns of hair narrating this story. It's also hard not to think of it as autobiography, which I'm sure much of it is. And then to wonder who did to her what the characters in the story do to the narrator.</p><p>And I suppose that layer adds to the whole story, which is good enough on its own. The main character essentially watches her own life and narrates it to those around her in witty one-liners, transcending her own pretensions by pretending to be honest by being honest.</p><p>As she runs through rehab, unemployment, a return to stardom, one relationship and one complicated unrelationship, Fisher does such a hilarious job, both as a character in the story and as an author fictionalizing her own very surreal life that I thought on more than one occassion of David Foster Wallace's <em>Infinite Jest</em>.</p><p>I told my friend this on the phone last night and I instantly wondered if that was a mistake. It might make it sound like I didn't understand <em>IJ</em>, or like I enjoy fluffy little Hollywood books as much as big blue masterpieces. I'll stand by the comparison, though. While Wallace treats the theme of honesty as a form of pretense incidentally, Fisher wallows around in it, draws it out, and tickles it. Her form is so understated and witty that I wonder if I should take it as seriously as I do, and feel so moved.</p><p>So there you have it, kids. If you liked <em>Infinite Jest</em>, you should check out <em>Postcards from the Edge</em>. It will blow your mind, but in a much smaller block of time, in a much more modest way, and with absolutely no endnotes.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-15922355464807674242011-02-05T14:45:00.000-08:002011-02-05T15:38:25.478-08:00Be Brave and Take Hold of It: A Review of Pontoon and Garrison Keillor's Books in General<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguBGRCCD4KLBeflv1TrScrHWBCZ6aIdOPOVJ52CmLPZoCUAsd-rAqSUidufzU1DZq3FmPDR1apkv_9lZsQAXgiQ9uK-49-xjZZFNbibXOt6jpO5orn4TYw_yjdFNbBj6J6HXzNvRn5xmS3/s1600/pontoon.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5570340596854259794" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 212px; CURSOR: hand; HEIGHT: 320px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguBGRCCD4KLBeflv1TrScrHWBCZ6aIdOPOVJ52CmLPZoCUAsd-rAqSUidufzU1DZq3FmPDR1apkv_9lZsQAXgiQ9uK-49-xjZZFNbibXOt6jpO5orn4TYw_yjdFNbBj6J6HXzNvRn5xmS3/s320/pontoon.jpg" border="0" /></a> <p>You can be a fan of Garrison Keillor without reading a word he has written. Most Garrison Keillor fans I know are that way. They saw the movie, they listen to his radio show, they love his voice and timing and wording, and they don't really need to sit down with his novels.</p><p>That's fine. His work seems to all be built on the same bittersweet humor, and whether you're watching him deliver it live, hearing him on NPR's <em>A Prairie Home Companion</em> show, or sitting down with one of his books, you're meeting the same people, hearing the same jokes, feeling the same chuckle-inducing sense of absurdity and nostalgia that blankets his stories.</p><p>But to those who have thought about reading a novel because they like GK on the radio or in his poetry anthologies or in the Robert Altman movie, I'd recommend diving in.</p><p>I just finished reading <em>Pontoon</em> this week. It's the ninth book by GK I have read, and it fits right in there. Like his better work, there are bits of high and low humor about sex, faith, death, coincidence, and revelation. He seems to be able to make fun of his characters and their ideas without bile, able to skewer and examine them and then send them back on their way.</p><p>His humor is in his ability to see how silly people are and can be, and the reason it doesn't get tiresome is because he seems to like them so much anyway. The fact that he keeps writing about the same town, and often the same people, seems to suggest that, with all their backwards ideas and quarrels and losses and blindnesses, they're worth coming back to.</p><p><em>Pontoon</em> is not the greatest of his novels. But it's good to settle down with a hot cup of coffee and this book or any of his novels when you have some time and feeling to invest. It also has some passages that warrant several readings.</p><p>In one of my favorite passages, a jet-setting mom writes a letter to her alcoholic daughter that ends with this line: "Life is unjust and this is what makes it so beautiful. Every day is a gift. Be brave and take hold of it."</p><p>Those are some words to think about. Everything breaks. We can live with that fact or rage against it. GK gently, hilariously, and consistently suggests that we embrace it. Being prone to rages and despair, I find that suggestion calming and hopeful every time I read one of his novels. </p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-65141837673624084062011-02-04T06:15:00.000-08:002011-02-04T07:04:30.206-08:00A Labyrinthine Entertainment: A Review of At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS0Vme1urPJLUSzyHyvqf38AE57Qp6RZS-YHVoASvWrDv2w-41vtLHDJYSOvoPwsYgHn4Z1rREp188VFAnQFNjVxDbM0hMmeM2OyIXiUR5QexVyJm4wO1qFberqDf3DW6v0Tr4nEsihNaj/s1600/At+Swim-Two-Birds.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 207px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiS0Vme1urPJLUSzyHyvqf38AE57Qp6RZS-YHVoASvWrDv2w-41vtLHDJYSOvoPwsYgHn4Z1rREp188VFAnQFNjVxDbM0hMmeM2OyIXiUR5QexVyJm4wO1qFberqDf3DW6v0Tr4nEsihNaj/s320/At+Swim-Two-Birds.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5569838179766298930" /></a><p>A few posts ago, I introduced my actual readers in cyberspace to my Host of Imaginary Readers (HIR), who question pretty much everything I write, and don't like me as a thinker, a builder of sentences, or as a person in general. The HIR badgers me every time I sit down to work on my novel, and the only thing that allows me to move forward under their crippling attacks is the fact that they're not really there.</p><p>I thought I had it pretty bad with my unseen critics, until I read Flann O'Brien's labyrinthine novel <em>At Swim-Two-Birds</em>.</p><p>See if you can follow this: An unnamed student spends most of his days in bed, taking occasional excursions to drink stout with his friends and wander the campus where he attends classes. He is working on a novel. His novel concerns an author named Dermot Trellis. Trellis creates characters for his stories and has them live in the same hotel that Trellis lives in. These characters tell stories of their own, creating more characters. That's four layers of narrative to keep track of so far.</p><p>Then it gets a little strange because, as our unnamed narrator traverses town, skips school, drinks stout, argues with his uncle, and works on his book, Trellis' characters realize that they are parts of his stories, and that if Trellis sleeps, they are free to do what they want with their lives.</p><p>So the characters band together with characters of their own creation to recreate Trellis' own story to put Trellis to sleep. Permanently.</p><p>In the meantime, there are diversions into dictionaries, commentaries, narrative subplots, poetry, folk tales, and scripture.</p><p>It's a work that captivated James Joyce, Graham Greene and Jorge Luis Borges, but failed to find such a large and enthusiastic audience. Which is a shame, because <em>At Swim-Two-Birds</em> is one of those books you get to just when you're starting to wonder if you've pretty much been around the block in terms of what books can do. It takes your brain, engages it, kneads it, tickles it, whips it around, delights it, confounds it, and then, lightly, places it back in your skull with a kiss.</p><p>So Trellis had it way worse than I have it, for his creative processes were not only criticized by phantom readers, but he was beset and plagued and attacked and drugged by his own creations. But the result for his readers is worth his pain, mainly because he isn't real and we are.</p><p><em>So Ian,</em> inquires my HIR, <em>where are you going with this? Are you just trying to tell us you liked the book? Isn't there a lesson? Are you trying to justify a book merely on its merits as entertainment? Its razzle-dazzle? Is this seriously where you're going to end this review?</em></p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8627357754142468412.post-57420326089086839272011-02-02T11:42:00.000-08:002011-02-02T15:04:12.745-08:00Dim Light Shed: A Review of Overnight<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_M-WznHOuezkxUfytx9stkSa12_pLZvtExaAE-nx9xcd5AhtKVhKcAspQAoGT0_0btvdEP0NIb8PGqQANKXcIKfb4n8jBc-t3e5uQrSXSX4hQESV9R82tMnABNmQRjC5CDS1b9Zxjei4q/s1600/Overnight.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 223px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_M-WznHOuezkxUfytx9stkSa12_pLZvtExaAE-nx9xcd5AhtKVhKcAspQAoGT0_0btvdEP0NIb8PGqQANKXcIKfb4n8jBc-t3e5uQrSXSX4hQESV9R82tMnABNmQRjC5CDS1b9Zxjei4q/s320/Overnight.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5569180427627497778" /></a><p>When I first saw <em>Boondock Saints</em> (heretofore referred to as <em>BS</em>), back in my early college years, I thought it was pretty cool. A cool mix of accents, a cat getting shot, bagpipes, brotherhood, drinking, and extreme violence. It had all the elements that get the neurons in a young geek's mind going. </p><p>I was not much for restraint at the time, nor did I think critically about the film until a friend smirked when I said I liked it.</p><p>He said something like, "It feels like a bunch of guys got drunk and just thought of everything cool they could cram in a movie, and did that."</p><p>Which moved the film from my "most liked" to my "most hated" list, in the way that someone else's opinion can when you're young and impressionable.</p><p>After watching <em>Overnight</em>, which details the rise and fall of the director of <em>BS</em>, Troy Duffy, I realized exactly how accurate my friend's assessement was. Duffy was a hard-drinking, self-righteous bartender with a bunch of hard-living friends who wrote a script between hangovers that turned a few of the right heads.</p><p>The story goes like this: when fame knocked on his door, he answered in his overalls, and immediately, before any movie was made, declared himself the future of Hollywood. He proceeded to drink away his success, alienate anyone who tried to help him, and by the time the movie came out in just four theatres and bombed even in that setting, he had no friends left.</p><p><em>BS</em> enjoyed a somewhat happy ending, and made wealthy whatever distributor picked it up and got it into the hands of high school and early-college aged men like myself, looking for something loud and flashy. Duffy didn't see any of that money, and he quickly drank away his own meager earnings.</p><p>The lesson is supposed to be that fame doesn't make you better. It just turns up the pressure.</p><p>For me, the lesson is that when you get that deal, when opportunity knocks, when the world starts listening, that's when the work really starts. It's not whether or not you get there so much as what you do once you get there.</p><p>Anyway, I don't feel exactly edified or enlightened either way. It's a true story, but its truth is not particularly surprising or interesting to watch. Once you realize that the lead is a self-destructive, delusional windbag, you pretty much know how things are going to go. It's maybe interesting as a bit of Hollywood history, for those who haven't heard its story a hundred different times before. It's a nice little glimpse behind the scenes of <em>BS</em>, for whatever that's worth.</p>Ian Northhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08315476277076903613noreply@blogger.com1