BoMuMo

Cleaning Up the Subjunctive: A Review of Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon

2011-08-08T16:05:00.000-07:00

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.

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).

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.

A few months later, I was reading Thomas Pynchon's historical reimagination, Mason & Dixon, 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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm not trying to be all gloomy, but Mason & Dixon 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.

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.

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.

In the Air to Germany: A review of Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

2011-07-09T20:46:00.000-07:00

If you must read Gravity's Rainbow, 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.

In this hypercaffeinated, timeless traverse from Atlanta to Germany, you begin reading. Here's the opening paragraph:

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now."

A screaming? you think, as your plane hums, vibrates, eases its way over the Atlantic.

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.

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.

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 what in Pynchon's world is going on?

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.

Once you get to Nepal, assuming that you stayed with it for the bulk of the trip, only taking breaks to drink coffee, watch The King's Speech, which actually connects to parts of Gravity's Rainbow 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.

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.

It's one of those books like Ulysses or Infinite Jest, 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.

Highbrow Historical Pulp Fiction: A review of Them by Joyce Carol Oates

2011-05-22T10:58:00.000-07:00

Joyce Carol Oates is the Tom Waits of highbrow pulp fiction.

My friend Jonathan Kotulski made the above statement, mostly in jest I think, during a recent phone conversation.

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.

My most recent JCO book is actually one of her earlier works. As illustrated boldly in the picture above, it is named Them. 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.

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.

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."

The second trick, which is complicated by the first, is a bit of a deus ex machina, 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.

So at the end of Them, 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.

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 Magnolia, "These things happen."

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 Them 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.

The Japanese Tourist: A review of Arresting God in Kathmandu by Samrat Upadhyay

2011-05-18T01:30:00.000-07:00

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.

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 What We Talk about When We Talk about Love 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.

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).

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.

My friends, after reading Arresting God in Kathmandu, I find myself in a very similar situation to this imaginary tourist.

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.

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.

Now, upon revisiting AGiK, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Classism vs. The Caste System: A Review of Fatalism and Development by Dor Bahadur Bista

2011-05-05T08:10:00.000-07:00

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.

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 Fatalism and Development: Nepal's Struggle for Modernization, 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.

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.

A lesson learned on this very blog in my review of Overnight suggests that when we receive our titles, when we get public approval, that's when we really need to get to work.

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.

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.

To Sing His Praises: A review of The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien

2011-05-04T07:37:00.000-07:00

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 Bed Intruder song on youtube.

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 At Swim-Two-Birds. 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.

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 The Third Policeman to keep them at bay while I think of what to say about the book.

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!

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.

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?

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 The Third Policeman, arguably his masterpiece (although I'm partial to At Swim-Two-Birds), perished largely unread, and has only found an audience in recent years, as it was unearthed.

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.

Out of Balance: A review of Rabbit, Run by John Updike

2011-05-03T17:23:00.000-07:00

It is hard not to hate Harry Angstrom. It is hard to hate Harry Angstrom.

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.

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.

I must also say that without Updike's popularization of the present tense narrative, my fiction writing would probably be very different.

But to the story at hand: Rabbit, Run 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.

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.

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.

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 Rabbit, Run, 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 Terrorist, the only other Updike novel I have read, an otherwise perfectly plotted book where the sex seemed grotesquely unnecessary and overplayed.

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.

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 Terrorist and Rabbit, Run. However, I still intend to read all the Rabbit novels. So my opinion, as always, remains open to influence.

Each Man Knows: A review of Mr. Sammler's Planet by Saul Bellow

2011-03-23T07:17:00.000-07:00

I hope that Viking Press didn't pay too much for the cover design on their initial printing of Saul Bellow's novel Mr. Sammler's Planet. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Like most of my Imaginary Readers, I cringe when I read the word destiny. 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.

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 recognize immediately.

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:

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.

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.

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.

And perhaps those who designed the cover to this resonant novel felt that they had found the cover that destiny had ordained for the book. Which is a scary thought for several reasons which I do not aim to explore here.

Obscure Heart: A Review of My Left Foot

2011-03-19T09:43:00.000-07:00

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.

-I dunno. I'll probably run I guess, he replied, pivoting his head toward the roof.

It was hard to keep the tone of the party light after that comment.

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, Look at who I am. Here, now, it shows.

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.

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.

Then, all at once, My Left Foot asks us, with its earnest portrait of love, relationship, and disability, Really? That's all there is to it? What about this man? What do you say about him?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Shame, Shame: A link to a good article on book reviewing

2011-03-16T11:51:00.000-07:00

I am a man who uses lazy language.

Here is the article that challenges me to repent: http://www.examiner.com/book-in-national/the-top-20-most-annoying-book-reviewer-cliches-and-how-to-use-them-all-one-meaningless-review.

Read and be blessed.

Fighting through It: A Review of Running with the Buffaloes by Chris Lear

2011-03-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

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.

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.

I think that our official guide to reviewing books would have me poo-poo Running with the Buffaloes 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, Running with the Buffaloes is a lot of fun to read. Especially if you're a runner, which is what I am.

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.

Last April, when I read Christopher McDougal's Born to Run, 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.

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 BtR for its hyped-up promises. Which is why the sparse, brutal, and focused RwB works so well for me.

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.

So, despite what a technical point-by-point review would say, RwB is a great read in its own way, and comfortably makes it onto a very short list of my favorite running books.

My Complaining Brain: A Review of Helvetica

2011-03-09T22:59:00.000-08:00

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.

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.

I'm talking about font here.

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.

And Helvetica 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.

All of which is engrossing and beautiful, but my brain is a little upset about it. Thanks a lot, Helvetica, says my brain, 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?

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."

To which my brain does not have much of a response, since it has learned to depend on coffee for much of its functioning.

Honestly, Joyce: A review of A Bloodsmoor Romance by Joyce Carol Oates

2011-03-04T15:47:00.000-08:00

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.

In fact, right before reading JCO's sprawling epic A Bloodsmoor Romance, I told a friend that I liked everything about her books except that they were all so humorless.

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!

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.

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.

So I was wrong about JCO. In fact, I wonder if the same dark humor that infuses and carries A Bloodsmoor Romance isn't present in her other work as well. Maybe, like the narrator, I missed certain undertones and ironies in my rush to criticize.

Either way, A Bloodsmoor Romance joins the ranks of full-hearted epics like Infinite Jest, Catch-22, and Lolita that manage to elicit laughter, even as they batter and dissolve the relationships and spirits of their main characters.

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.

Movie Round-up: Short Reviews of Scarface, Postcards from the Edge, Pollock, and Frida

2011-03-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

My Host of Imaginary Readers hates my success.

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.

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.

"Four reviews in one?!" cries my HIR, delightedly.

"You bet your sweet imaginary butts," I tell them. And thus we begin:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Pollock 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.

Warning- This will be a confusing sentence. Bear with me: Frida 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.

It belongs in a small camp with Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and maybe Rushmore if we are liberal.

Frida is a sensual, stylized masterpiece which, as Volver 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.

What does one say about a movie like Scarface, about which so much has been written and said?

Nothing.

I made the grave mistake of watching Postcards from the Edge right after I finished reading Carrie Fisher's book of the same title.

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.

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.

If there was something here for me, I missed it.

And there we have it, my actual and imaginary readers: Four reviews in one. I hope you're happy. I know I am.

Imagining Our Souls: A Review of Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

2011-02-26T10:59:00.000-08:00

Before I get into Saul Bellow's little powerhouse of a novel, a word about introductions, forewords, and prefaces.

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.

However, there are those few introductions which function as great literature in their own right. Tom Wolfe, in his introduction to Bonfire of the Vanities (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 A Hearbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, 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 Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick effectively illuminates literature's unique power, and spotlights Bellow's work as a defining example of that force.

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:

If literature can give new eyes to human beings, it is because the thing held in common is separately imagined.

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.

So, fellow readers, if we are to correct this problem, I suggest that we start with Seize the Day. I suggest this for a few reasons.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That, fellow readers, is an outcome well worth both our shared exploration and our individual imagination.

No Life Intact: A review of Dolls

2011-02-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

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.

Bresson made the following statement:

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.

What I felt watching Bresson's A Man Escaped, Au Hasard Balthasar, and Diary of a Country Priest, I felt again watching Takeshi Kitano's Dolls, a quiet little film about people for whom love is an irresistible and fatal noose.

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.

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.

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.

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 Dolls, that minimalism communicates a fatalistic view of love, that it takes in who it wills and leaves no life intact.

Which is true, although I try not to think of it in such gloomy terms.

Mindblown: A Review of My Custom Van by Michael Ian Black

2011-02-16T11:17:00.000-08:00

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.

The above is a selection from the internal dialogue of someone who has a sense of propriety and reads My Custom Van ...And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays That Will Blow Your Mind All over Your Face by Michael Ian Black.

Since I don't have much of a conscience when it comes to comedy, my internal dialogue was more like, This creep is hilarious. hahaha.

I've been a fan of MIB since he played alongside Michael Showalter and David Wain in the short-lived Comedy Central series Stella, where the three comedians played three unemployed, suit-wearing roommates who live in a surreal version of the world.

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.

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.

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.

Too Many Tears: A review of Little Bee by Chris Cleave

2011-02-11T19:16:00.000-08:00

It's hard to quantify what makes writing bad, but about one third of the way into Chris Cleave's novel Little Bee, 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Little Bee. So when someone told me about Little Bee, I felt like I should read it. I was wrong.

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.

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.

Canyonlands: A review of 127 Hours

2011-02-10T19:07:00.000-08:00

Spoiler Alert: The guy cuts his arm off and survives.

I was aware of that much when I first saw the trailer for 127 Hours. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

127 Hours 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.

Or maybe just who Aron Ralston is, depending on how much you identify with his character.

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.

Even during the whole arm-removal scene, which was vivid and gruesome, it's like the film was telling me, 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.

Self-Speech as Self-Defense: A review of Postcards from the Edge by Carrie Fisher

2011-02-09T14:47:00.000-08:00

Admittedly, I'm writing this review in a rush.

I made a resolution this year to review every book I read for this blog, and I finished this book Postcards from the Edge 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.

And I know that somehow, in some way I can't yet identify, writing a review of the book after 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?

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.

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.

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 Infinite Jest.

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 IJ, 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.

So there you have it, kids. If you liked Infinite Jest, you should check out Postcards from the Edge. It will blow your mind, but in a much smaller block of time, in a much more modest way, and with absolutely no endnotes.

Be Brave and Take Hold of It: A Review of Pontoon and Garrison Keillor's Books in General

2011-02-05T14:45:00.000-08:00

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.

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 A Prairie Home Companion 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.

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.

I just finished reading Pontoon 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.

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.

Pontoon 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.

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."

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.

A Labyrinthine Entertainment: A Review of At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien

2011-02-04T06:15:00.000-08:00

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.

I thought I had it pretty bad with my unseen critics, until I read Flann O'Brien's labyrinthine novel At Swim-Two-Birds.

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.

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.

So the characters band together with characters of their own creation to recreate Trellis' own story to put Trellis to sleep. Permanently.

In the meantime, there are diversions into dictionaries, commentaries, narrative subplots, poetry, folk tales, and scripture.

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 At Swim-Two-Birds 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.

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.

So Ian, inquires my HIR, 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?

Dim Light Shed: A Review of Overnight

2011-02-02T11:42:00.000-08:00

When I first saw Boondock Saints (heretofore referred to as BS), 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.

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.

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."

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.

After watching Overnight, which details the rise and fall of the director of BS, 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.

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.

BS 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.

The lesson is supposed to be that fame doesn't make you better. It just turns up the pressure.

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.

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 BS, for whatever that's worth.

Good, Evil, and the Rest of the World Between: A Review of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

2011-01-31T04:46:00.000-08:00

In my living room after church, we discussed good and evil.

The conversation began with a question about how we could claim that one faith was right and another wrong. What followed revealed the difficulty of that idea- establishing right vs. wrong, defining them in your terms, and then assuming that your brainpower, faith, fervor, or whatever is sufficient to guarantee that your terms are correct, and that they supercede the terms of others.

Then you have cultural complications, which it turns out vary from person to person, and adjust or often determine our terms. Then there's religion and all its nuances and claims. Add to that any number of confounding factors, turn up the volume, stir, and you get the world we live in.

So we westerners who tend to like the idea that there is a right and that it's pretty much exactly what we think, gravitate toward art which affirms this. I believe it's why The Lord of the Rings was so popular, why we loved Star Wars. Our fantasies smooth the edges and make perfect our imperfect ideas.

The challenging thing about David Mitchell's latest novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, is that it sets up its conflicts between faiths and cultures and ideologies, the twists them sideways and metes out justice in a confounding way.

The story revolves around Jacob de Zoet, a clerk, an underdog, who works on an island off the coast of Nagasaki in Japan at the turn of the 19th century. The manmade island, Dejima, exists to allow the Dutch to trade with Japan without setting foot on Japanese soil.

Dejima is a perfect setting for the story, an island between the East and the West, mistrusted and neglected by the surrounding powers, peopled by employees of a dying company.

Into this play of power, this mess of cultures, and this crux of history, Mitchell does some masterful dreaming. He spends the first act setting up his pieces, shifting allegiances, brewing a storm. Throughout the story, he sets a romantic or an idealist up against a corrupt system. The idealists and romantics are thwarted repeatedly until the final act, where those who survive see their virtue suddenly at the center of a struggle between nations.

In its own way, while it is far more nuanced and bold than the previously mentioned Star Wars and LOTR epics, Thousand Autumns is a moral tale for a postmoral audience. Its good guys bear the same traits-- They have progressive attitudes about equality between the sexes; They listen well to all viewpoints; Then, when all hands are on the table, they act according to their internal sense of conviction.

Their belief systems differ. One good guy is a Humanist. Another is a Christian. One is a Buddhist. But their values are unified, and they always supercede mere expediency. There is always a sacrifice. There is always something selfless. Their creeds vary, but their values are ultimately the same.

It is hard to make a statement about the conclusion without spoiling it, but I will say this. I think good wins out, if imperfectly. There is a cost. There is loss and sadness and complication and poverty waiting even after good has won. In the postmoral fable, there is no happily ever after, just a complicated moving forward.

It's easy to critique this outcome, this path of praising values while eschewing ideologies. You could call it the other side of the same coin.

What I appreciate is Mitchell's seriousness, his artistry, his passion in this experiment. He places us at the island between East and West, the heart of Christianity, Humanism, and Buddhism, and the crux of culture and commerce. Then he looks to see if, between all these absolutes, we still have something good to hang on to. It's a set of intersections worth exploring, and Mitchell leaves us with plenty of insights to challenge, tease, and enlighten us as we follow him, and explore the island ourselves.

No Kings on the Mountain: A Review of Everest: Beyond the Limit

2011-01-28T07:19:00.000-08:00

My interest in Everest is highly personal. In less than two months' time, I will be flying to Nepal to begin a trek to Everest Base Camp. EBC is situated at about 17,000 feet, and although it's at the bottom of the mountain, it's higher than any peak in the rockies.

The only things standing between me and the summit of the mountain are the mountain itself, 40,000 to pay for the expedition, years of mountaineering experience, physical fitness, and the nerve to make the attempt.

However, the mere fact that I will not climb the mountain needn't hinder me from popping some popcorn, getting into my pj's, and watching others brave the elements. I may have to take some breaks to get blankets and heat up more tea, but I too can share in the harrowing adventure, thanks to The Discovery Channel's groundbreaking series Everest: Beyond the Limit!

Like any good piece of Entertainment, Everest has its complexities. It offers a wealth of information about the mountain, climate, and characters that define the journey to the top of the world. It explores the motivations of complex people and follows them in their very real life-and-death quest to summit.

A few things worth knowing about the mountain: Removing bodies of dead climbers is next to impossible, so the route is peppered with frozen corpses. It takes several months to summit because of the logistics. Mountaineers have to strategically put their lives in danger based on weather conditions, traffic on the mountain, and wildly unpredictable circumstances. There are also a host of incompetent climbers on the mountain clogging up the route and endangering the lives of sherpas and stronger climbers.

Throw into this setting a team of characters with their demons, ambitions, and big hearts, along with some stunning advances in camera and film technology, and you end up with a series that makes you feel, between bathroom breaks and trips to the pantry for more snacks, like you are right there on the mountain, gritting your teeth and striving for the top.

Away from Our Moorings: A Review of American Appetites by Joyce Carol Oates

2011-01-21T20:55:00.000-08:00

I have read the following books by Joyce Carol Oates: Solstice, Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, Zombie, We Were the Mulvaneys, The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque, I Lock My Door Upon Myself, Black Water, and Beasts.

I believe the only book of these to get more than a three-star rating (out of five) from me was the novella I Lock My Door upon Myself, because I felt that it concisely and poetically probed the human heart cut loose from its usual moorings.

"So," my dear readers ask, "why do you keep reading her work then?"

(I have actually never been asked this, but I have a Host of Imaginary Readers challenging my choices and decisions. They keep me sharp.)

My feeling was that something about I Lock My Door Upon Myself would make more sense as I kept reading, would build and resound with the other books to make up a symphony of meaning (woah, Ian, tone it down here, says my H.I.R., you're getting a little dramatic).

It was with this promise in mind that I opened American Appetites, my ninth JCO book. And during the reading of this book, which bears few of JCO's usual divergences (no rape, no names dashed out, complete sentences elegantly and classically constructed), I realized what the promise was, and exactly what kept me reading, and exactly why I plan to keep reading until I've completed all of her fiftysomething novels.

But first, a little background: I was raised in a right-and-wrong environment. We learned about a God who made it abundantly clear exactly what he expected from us, and our actions were met with consequences according to that code (note: I'm thankful for this, and I retain some of it in a way that would warrant another entry not at all related to this book).

So here is the thing that JCO, an atheist, and a brilliant one at that, has to offer me, a young Christian man: a view of the human experience apart from its usual moorings. She has a thorough, if conventional, understanding of psychology, and the impact it has on us. Her characters act out passions and desires and subconscious impulses and complex relationships in a universe free from God's judging eye.

American Appetites is a bit of an expose of liberal wealthy academia, but that's a tired trope. What makes the novel great is what happens to its characters, and how, and who they end up. Ian McCollough, a great mind and a well-developed character, gets in an argument with his wife over an affair he hasn't had, and when she slashes and pushes at him, he pushes back, and she goes through a window and dies.

Ian McCollough, in all his suffering, in the guilt of what he has done, is accountable mainly to his own impulses, to his motives, his ego, his id, his sexuality and vitality.

Why, then, my HIR asks, would this be something you would seek, would pursue, would read over 50 novels in pursuit of?

Well, dear imaginary readers, because it's good to isolate certain components of life and see what they're made of. And certainly our psychological programming, our developmental makeup, our intellectual environment accounts for more of who we are than my upbringing gives it credit for.

Because for all I know, I am wrong about everything and psychological principles guide our experiences and beliefs. I don't believe this, but it's worth considering, and it's well worth reading the work of a novelist who masterfully narrates this belief into her violent, character-driven tales of pain, loss, horror, and, on rare occasions, of which American Appetites is one, redemption.

So Joyce Carol Oates is not someone with whom I agree on a fundamental level. And I think that critics who call her melodramatic and exaggerated are correct in their assesement, although I don't think those are necessarily negative traits in the world of the written word.

I think though that she provides a vivid, humanistic, gut-wrenching view of people in a world amoral, romantic, and horrific. And for this reason, I call American Appetites a great book. And for this reason, I keep reading.

Aliens and Strangers: A Review of The Stranger by Albert Camus

2011-01-21T14:17:00.000-08:00

Let us pretend that this book has not been the subject of a billion Freshman Literature papers.

When I picked The Stranger off its shelf at Borders, I picked a copy that was one among a long row of many copies of the same book. Even the cover, with its sharp dramatic black-and white needles is almost a trademark of Camus books. It's like J.D. Salinger's paperbacks. The book is so canonical that it gets stamped with a single, generic design and churned out for readers who want a copy cheap for college courses.

And then there were all the idealogical wars, where the world accused Camus of being an existentialist and he had to seperate himself from Sartre and make anti-existentialist claims.

Big deal. So now I, being a very casual reader who really doesn't enjoy reading about books or reading criticism, am in the position of writing about a book that most well-educated people have already written about back when they were in college.

But that's the point of this blog anyway. Not to provide a scholarly look but to talk mostly about how a book hit me, what sort of emotional life it entered into and what it said to me.

I think the reason The Stranger got its status is because, on a gut level, it's just so funny and relevant and insightful that people had to dissect it and name its parts.

The main character is a completely logical, honest guy faced with a bizarre world. And the system of how time progresses, how events happen, how relationships change, all conspire against the main character, who eventually must pay the price of violating the world's absurd norms.

I thought immediately of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Infinite Jest, and the film Idiocracy. There is hilarity and paradigm-shifting insight in entering the mind of someone unassuming, reasonable, and straightforward. We can't really understand how crazy our assumptions and norms are until we have someone like Camus come along and dissect them for us.

Part of the reason I love living and working with aliens is that they do this so naturally. "Gringo" behaviors are pointed out as such and ridiculed. Pretenses are recognized and ridiculed. And if something doesn't make sense, it gets noticed. And ridiculed.

It's good to get kicked around a little. It's good to have your absurdities pointed out. It's good to read books like The Stranger and think a little more humbly about who we are, how we all fit together, and what we take for granted.

On Potential: A Review of The Instructions by Adam Levin

2011-01-19T06:54:00.000-08:00

Adam Levin's The Instructions is a pretty book. Admittedly, I fell in love with it for surface reasons. I pulled it off the shelf upon noting its size, the simplicity of its design, the texture of its covers, the little McSweeney's chair on the spine. I ran the "opening paragraph" check next, and I read the following:

There is damage. There was always damage and there will be more damage, but not always. Were there always to be more damage, damage would be an aspect of perfection.

I saw that this book would have something to say, and kept reading, straight through its 1,030 pages, and a few days after, I am still trying to juggle the ideas it presented and how they affect the story at its core.

There is a lot going on in this book. The novel covers four days in the life of a ten-year-old scholar, lover, fighter, and potential messiah. Large passages are given to interpreting Torah. Others are given to a strange adolescent love story. There is ample violence, some literary theory (Philip Roth even makes a cameo during a hostage crisis), a few thoughts on education systems, some prophecy, invented vocabulary, and fierce humor.

At its heart, though, is a fairly simple story: A boy grapples with what it means to be chosen.

This thread propels the novel and makes its numerous pages move by quickly. And it resonates across faiths. Christians call it "election." New agey types like the word "destiny." Naturalists can call it "fate."

But we all want to know what put us here, why, and whether or not we have something important to do.

If The Instructions has its shortcomings (and I believe that it does), it certainly does this well: It examines what it means to be chosen.

The main character claims his chosenness, disowns it, doubts it, battles it, follows it, and then, finally, when the bloodshed is over, he leaves it to Adonai and waits for the next step.

I should hope to do all the same things with mine.

Sexy Old Cold Leopold: A Short Review of Water Drops on Burning Rocks

2011-01-18T17:21:00.000-08:00

Watching movies about sex is a risky business. I admit that. They have a host of potential effects on the mind, and you can't really know what a film will do to you until you have watched it. By that point, you've already gone and watched it.

But there are certain directors who seem able to explore the realm of sexuality with a kind of honesty, compassion, and candor that edifies the right viewer at the right time. So if I watch movies about sex, I tend to go to directors who I trust.

While Fracois Ozon, the director of Water Drops on Burning Rocks, has had his hits and misses in dealing with sex, he wasn't the reason I wanted to see this film. It was the involvement of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who wrote the story as a play when he was only 19. Fassbinder was a prolific and brilliant filmmaker who turned in a stunning body of work before he died of an OD at 36.

This early piece, about a 50 year-old insurance salesman named Leopold, reminded me of so much truth. Like any good film about sex, it's not just about sex, but about what plays itself out around and in the sex. Leopold is a real man. He is the one who uses sex as power, who wields it mercilessly, and who leaves a wake of broken lives behind him.

He's at least three people who I have known, whose victims I have sat across from in coffee shops and on sofas and whose lives I have tried to support and help hold together where I could.

The thing that made watching Water Drops on Burning Rocks so telling, and the reason I choose to watch films about sexuality at all, is because they tell you a bit about yourself. Because I felt, as the seductions began, turned on. Just like the characters. I took the journey with them. So when the toll is paid, it's hard to blame, it's hard to remain detached from the darkness of the end when I felt the magnetism of the events that preceded it.

In this way, a good sexy movie tells a truth. Not just in an arty, detached sense, but by igniting my own desires and revealing to me the shadows that wait in their embrace.

On Myth and History: A Short Review of Ondine

2011-01-17T14:01:00.000-08:00

I spend a great deal of thought on faith. I examine its objects. I see it as its own entity sometimes. I wonder whether it is a lens or a creative force, a reflection of truth beyond our reach or an idol to an unknowable God. At times, whether the effect is intentional of corollary, a movie places me between the cold edge of history and the whisper of hope.

The tale of Ondine begins when an Irish fisherman pulls a woman up in his nets. She is beautiful, speaks with a foreign accent, and sings mysterious melodies that put fish in his nets.

The characters in the fisherman's town build an elaborate mythology around the woman, "Ondine," who plays to their stories with a quiet grace, seeming to prefer their versions to her reality. But the darker edges of their stories reflect a history that draws a family into a collision between a thread of hope and the shards of their broken lives.

Ondine, in its final act, leaves slivers of its own mythology intact, and it seems to praise the power of myth even as it shatters it. Here, it suggests is where your myths fall short, and here is where they stand.

To me, a faith-hounded viewer, this film and the life it enters offers room to hope and wonder despite the incompletions that our histories would wield against belief.

Things You Can Get Away with on Letterman

2011-01-16T16:28:00.000-08:00

I don't get any channels on my TV. I use it strictly for DVDs or for shows on DVD. Usually, I'm glad to be free of its distraction. But I do miss late night talk shows. I am a fan of Letterman especially.

I love the live bands at the end of the shows the most. These are a few of my favorite Letterman performances, for three completely different reasons:

First, The Rapture. I have no idea who on Letterman's staff booked them or what they expected, but the Rapture pulled off a surprising bit of artistry:

Second, the Vines. I have no idea how much of this was planned, but it's hilarious to watch:

Finally, here's an Elvis Perkins number. It's perfectly structured and delivered. It's hard to imagine someone accomplishing more within the time constraints of Letterman's music spot:

Short Review of The Final Solution by Michael Chabon

2011-01-13T09:12:00.000-08:00

Michael Chabon is an unapologetic nerd, which is one of the things that makes his work so likeable to me. He wins a Pulitzer Prize for a piece of historical fiction about two friends during the golden age of comics, and follows that audacious victory by writing a piece of Sherlock Holmes fan fiction that's barely long enough to be called a novel. So he publishes it as "A Story of Detection."

Unfortunately, it doesn't work for me. Chabon's gift for long, eloquently crafted sentences and his prediliction for shifting perspectives get in the way of an otherwise great little yarn.

I never expect sparse prose from Chabon, nor do I think a short story can't sustain stylistic flair, but as a subjective reader, I feel the story slipping away from me.

There are reasons for the rules that govern genre fiction. Generally, if you write a detective story, it is best to use first person or, at the very least, to limit the perspective to one main character. This creates a sense of immediacy, a feeling of immersion, and a focus that you need for that edge-of-the-seat effect and that sense of epiphany at the solution.

Chabon's changes in perspective bother me. Each one happens quickly, without warning, and they do not remain in play long enough to engage me. I feel that the climax loses its gravity because of one such change. Just as I adjust to the inside of the head of an unconventional character, the section ends, the tension releases, and the story is over before I have a chance to care.

There's also a reason I typically see short sentences in detective stories. Detectives are fact-oriented. The emotional and artistic movements of a detective story usually flow from an interest in the facts. While this is another rule that can be well-broken, The Final Solution suffers for it, at least in the heart of this reader. Long sentences seem wasteful, excessive, and distracting. The facts and bits of information that are so central to the solution of a story get fluffed, obscured, and blunted by long sentences.

That Chabon is the master of the sentence, and a powerful storyteller, remains clear to me. I just feel that The Final Solution broke rules to its own detriment, where Chabon's other work seems to benefit from the same gestures. So I won't say The Final Solution wasn't a good book. All I can say is that, as a reader and fan, it didn't work for me.

Short Review of Ordinary Decent Criminal

2011-01-13T08:54:00.000-08:00

One of the pitfalls of using Netflix as opposed to the library or Blockbuster is that it makes you a completist. Now you don't go and pick out one movie that you want to see. You add all of a certain actor or director's movies to your queue. Sometimes it pays off. You end up seeing an Altman movie like A Wedding, which you would never go to the rental place and pick out, and it turns out to be a beautiful, funny, moving piece.

On the other hand, sometimes you go on a Kevin Spacey spree, then a year later, a movie like Ordinary Decent Criminal shows up in your mailbox, and you feel obligated to watch it because it's there, and because you can't get that Everest documentary you've been waiting for until you ship back the Kevin Spacey movie you didn't really want to see.

And the movie turns out to be one of those lifeless late-nineties thrillers with a lame twist at the end and a bunch of American actors using fake Irish accents while underusing the actual Irish talent (Colin Farrell) that could have maybe made for an interesting movie.

And you want to write some kind of meaningful something about it to justify the time you wasted on it, but nothing really comes to mind except that this came out the same year as American Beauty, and it's a good thing for Kevin Spacey that we remembered that one and forgot about Ordinary Decent Criminal. Think how many fewer Kevin Spacey fans would be out there if the opposite were true.

Short Review: Crazy Heart

2011-01-09T15:31:00.000-08:00

While country troubadors have been around for pretty much the entire history of our country, a little group of them sprung up in the 70's and saved what was left of country music. They are the subject of a beautiful documentary called Heartworn Highways.

Some of them found a niche in the industry (Rodney Crowell), Some of them burned out (Townes Van Zandt), some narrowly escaped self-destruction to find a second wind (Steve Earle), and some just sort of kept on keepin' on (Guy Clarke).

When I saw Crazy Heart advertised, it brought this group of musicians to mind. The main character, an alcoholic country legend way past his prime and out of ideas, could have easily started in the same place as any of these artists.

For that reason, and because of the involvement of Jeff Bridges and T-Bone Burnett, I expected to enjoy this movie.

Ruthie and I watched it on Saturday, and when it was finished, Ruthie said, "That was sad."

Which was true. It was. But it was the kind of sad you hear in this kind of music. The kind of sad that comes from trying to keep your story interesting, trying to sing and make something beautiful while the world shifts, breaks, and rebuilds itself around you.

I always liked country music for this reason. It often seems to find a good mix of heartbreak and hope. And when you mix those things in right proportion, and keep the tone honest, you end up with a song or book or movie that strikes a chord. Crazy Heart was that kind of a movie.

Short Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

2011-01-09T15:13:00.000-08:00

Michael Cera gets cast as a gawky young man on the fringes of hip society. Again. His character plays bass in an indie band and he sees the world in terms of video games and comics, neither of which interests me much. The theme is something about self-esteem and relationships.

None of this would suggest to me that I would like this movie, but it was a long Saturday, and Redbox was low on other options, so I gave it a shot. And it turned out to be funny, visually interesting, and constantly entertaining.

While the bottom of the film is somewhat shallow, it occupies its ample energy whipping viewers through the mind of its protagonist, taking whimsical stylistic turns, employing the vocabulary of classic video games, hip culture, and underground music, and skewering its characters with enough self-awareness to poke fun at its own form.

There is nothing much in terms of substance here, but Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is a good-natured, inventive little film that earns its laughs.

Short Review: Ravelstein by Saul Bellow

2011-01-08T17:13:00.000-08:00

Allan Bloom wrote a bestseller titled The Closing of the American Mind. I had not read this book when I began to read Ravelstein by Saul Bellow. Nor did I really know who Allan Bloom was, or even that the lead character in Bellow's novel was based on the real and famous professor Allan Bloom.

Nor did I know what Bellow was talking about in a good half of his allusions during the course of the book.

As I read it, I pondered the following questions: Is a novel without a plot still a novel? Or is it a character sketch? How many intellectual, sociological, academic, philosophical, religious, and literary allusions am I really interested in reading? How important is my comprehension of these allusions to my enjoyment of the novel?

And, perhaps most urgently, How much background should you need to know beforehand in order to enjoy a story? To this question, I would answer, a lot more background than I had before I began reading Ravelstein.

So you could blame me for most of this, but I found this novel to be a bit unrewarding and, to be blunt, boring.

Perhaps I'll return to Ravelstein in a few years after my brain grows a few sizes and I read several more books, and I'll slap my forehead and wonder how I missed the brilliance the first time.

Or perhaps by that point I won't be interested in reading a bunch of references and anecdotes about stuff I've already thought through and wrestled with. It's hard to know what the future Ian North will think about a younger Ian North's somewhat fierce and impulsive interaction with books.

Short Review: Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

2011-01-08T16:43:00.000-08:00

Chabon's other collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, felt to this reader like a bunch of deadline-pressed tidbits sandwiched between strong opening and closing pieces.

Maps and Legends, on the other hand, is compelling throughout as Chabon, a shameless geek, wanders through and across genre and high-art/low-art boundaries to defend, examine, and recover a lost sense of entertainment in literature.

Chabon loads his flawless prose with meaning, humor, and insight into what makes stories work, how we read them, and how we should categorize them if we should at all.

His closing essay works wonders with the theme of storytelling as the art of lying. Although he's not exactly the first writer to speak of this, the way he embeds his message in the structure and narrative of the piece is a thing to behold.

Short Review: Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence

2011-01-08T16:32:00.000-08:00

While it may be true that this book was groundbreaking in its time, and that it necessitated some important legal battles about freedom of speech in literature, I had to plod my way through it with the aid of caffeine and a sense of historical import.

Its characters are walking ideologies who interact with so much melodrama that they're difficult to believe in.

I'm sure Lawrence's approach to the spirit/body dynamic was fresh in its time, but this reader/reviewer finds it fresh no longer. And the explicit language, so horrifying to our ancestors, seems more than a little cheesy in retrospect.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lawrence's earlier novel Sons and Lovers, and I intend to spend time with his other books in the future, but I ended this one with a sense of disappointment. I gave it some credit for being a brave effort by an author I like, but I can't offer any real praise for the content and approach of this novel.

Resolution

2011-01-08T16:28:00.001-08:00

Last year, I resolved to read 52 books. That's one for every week of the year. I passed my goal somewhere before six months was up. I went for double, and fell one book short. I was able to read 103 books.

I hope to read fewer books this year, and spend more time writing my own. I have also resolved to do a better job of responding to books I read, so to that end, I will be posting a brief review of every book I read on this blog, which may have seemed like a ghost town to my three faithful followers.

Ghost Town, come alive!

March Media Round-Up

2010-04-05T08:01:00.000-07:00

Books took a resounding lead over movies this month, with fifteen books read and only seven movies watched. So after only three months, I have read thirty five books toward my goal of fifty-two this year.

I'm reading more than the required pace for a simple reason: I love reading. More specifically, I love reading good books. When I read books that aren't good, my desire to move on to better ones compels me toward that last page.

That said, here's a list of this month's books:

The Castle by Franz Kafka - This book was slow going, and the main character, K, was a bit of a non-character. But the humor, the imagery, and the painful truth of the story took center stage. I was bummed that Kafka never got to finish writing it.

Body Piercing Saved my Life by Andrew Beaujon - A writer for Spin investigates the world of Christian Rock. I expected all my Christian embarrassment to come flaming back up to the surface, but Beaujon is fair, funny, and gracious, even giving DC Talks props for being innovators in the rap genre.

We Were the Mulvaneys by Joyce Carol Oates - My one complaint about Oates is that she is usually humorless. She seems intent on not alleviating the suffering of her characters or her readers with any tender moment until everything has run its course. As a result, a very profound, well-written book ended up feeling a bit agonizing and manipulative.

Lake Wobegon Summer 1956 by Garrison Keillor - Keillor does his usual sentimental satire thing here, which is a great thing, which is why I keep going back to his books. The one memorable feature of this book is the way he relates an adolescent's early encounters with pornography and lust, addressing them with warmth and humor.

Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence - It's hard to believe that this is a British novel written in 1913. While it's not lurid by today's standards, the book deals with a series of complex relationships and addresses sex and all its accompanying complications with frankness and insight. It's a direct, fast-moving, beautiful novel. Lawrence is now on my to-read list.

In the Presence of my Enemies by Gracia Burnham and Dean Merrill - I guess I'm not the target audience, but I was really hoping to like this story. My family knew the Burnhams, I had met them, and the story takes place where I grew up. But the writing was so sloppy, the prose so limp and artless, the moral lessons so blunt, that I just wanted to be finished.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner - Say what you will about Faulkner, and I'll probably even agree with you, but this little book is a powerhouse. It got me inside some demented minds, whipped me through some crazy scenarios, and told one heck of a story. Faulkner touched all the emotional and intellectual bases so lyrically and effortlessly.

Reflections in a Golden Eye by Carson McCullers - Good enough, but not quite up there with The Member of the Wedding and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. I felt a little less interested in the characters, a little less engaged by the flow of events, and a little less haunted when it was all over.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - I understand why Chinua Achebe hated this book and called it racist, but I felt like Conrad was doing something quite different. To me, the book seemed blatantly critical of imperialism, and seemed to show Western incompetence and racism in a horrific light. And it's a great yarn.

The Metamorphosis, The Penal Colony, and Other Stories by Franz Kafka - Kafka is becoming a hero to me. He treats his absurd premises with deep compassion, insight, and seriousness, leaving the stories open to pretty much any reaction except indifference. My writing has been changed by reading this book.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan - I've had my eye on this book for a while, and since it's only 166 pages long, I figured it would be a good way to come back to earth after Conrad and Kafka. What a book. I've never read such a powerful book about the things we don't say, and how they change us.

Something Missing by Matthew Dicks - The remarkable feature of this book is its premise. An OCD burglar treats his marks like clients and takes great care to steal only the things that won't be missed. Dicks is obviously heavily informed by Stephen King's On Writing, creating a straightforward, often clever novel that goes down easy.

Native Son by Richard Wright - A good, revealing story turns suddenly into an essay on race relations. Perhaps this was an effective wake-up call in its time, but I don't like it when authors go all Ayn Rand on me, getting me into a story just so I will read a 100 page-long sermon on their political opinions. It's a shame, because I really enjoyed the narrative.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight by Vladimir Nabokov - Hard to believe this was Nabokov's first novel in the english language. It's so complex, savvy, and rewarding. His plays on criticism, narrative, and syntax fit beautifully within a portrait of a man on the trail of his genius brother's legacy.

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky - Granted, this does have a bit of the sermonizing that I complained about in Native Son, but Dostoevsky does a good job of embedding his ideas in the psyche of his characters so it doesn't feel cheap. I felt alternately bored, engaged, and exhausted by this book. In retrospect, it's a beautiful story and well worth the work, but it didn't always feel like it while I was reading.

And now for the movies, of which I didn't see many this month:

The Full Monty - A tastefully done comedy about some out of work blokes in a steel town who decide to strip to earn some money. It was not a great film, but it was well-conceived and extremely likeable.

Shine - This film felt a bit like a Ron Howard biopic, which is heartwarming and inspiring until you learn about the liberties they took with the story. The acting and technique were top-notch, but I wondered why they didn't address the main character's mental illness or suggest that his relationship with his father wasn't the only thing that plagued him.

Precious - It's unfair to a film to hear its hype for months before you get to watch it. I felt moved by parts of this, repulsed by others, and bored by some of the techniques it employed. All in all, it was pretty good, but I couldn't get into it as much as I wanted to.

Billy Elliott - I guess this month was "Acclaimed British Films from the Nineties" month. Billy Elliott was my favorite of the bunch. It was funny, convincing, kinetic, and it earned the joyous feeling it left me with.

Cecil B. Demented - Either I've been desensetized or John Waters has lost his edge. This film was certainly vulgar, but it seemed to be lacking in the charm or warmth that marked his earlier movies. I did enjoy all the shout-outs to other, better directors like Sam Fuller and Sam Peckinpah.

Touch of Evil - This was no Citizen Kane, but it was one whiplash-inducing, twisty piece of noir. Orson Welles does a great job as a corrupt, alcoholic sheriff in a small border town across from Charlton Heston as an upstanding Mexican narcotics officer.

Palindromes - I loved this movie. See previous post for more.

On to March!

Aviva Goes Around

2010-03-30T09:45:00.000-07:00

In casual discussions about a given film, there is one word which alerts me to the fact that the person with whom I'm speaking did not understand the piece, or does not possess the vocabulary to interact with it. The word is weird.

In fact, with the exception of Hunter S. Thompson, no one seems able to artfully use the word. Given the chance, I'd gleefully scratch weird, along with its companions, beautiful and something, from the American vernacular. I think that doing so would force my countrymen to think a little more specifically about what they want to communicate.

Point in case: Todd Solondz' weird film Palindromes, which features five different actresses as its main character, Aviva. Aviva, more than anything else, wants to have a baby. As a young teenager, she couples with an awkward young man to achieve this goal. Upon learning of her pregnancy, Aviva's parents force her to abort. After recovering, Aviva hits the road.

Aviva's own name is a palindrome. It starts at the same place it ends up. You can turn it around, travel it backward or forward, start and finish it at either end, and you get the same character. What's more, you can swap ages, actresses, races, places, families, times, and opportunities, and you still come around to the same person: Aviva.

Even if you haven't seen Solondz' other films (Welcome to the Dollhouse, Hapiness), you can probably guess from this cyclical concept that Palindromes is not going to be a story that ends up any happier than it begins. And it begins with a suicide.

So early into the film, as the actors wavered between dramatics and realism, seeming to recite lines, but then seeming to do a good job of acting like the type of characters who would recite lines that way, the word weird came to my mind, and it most certainly fit.

But gradually, as the character became real, as she acted in pursuit of her dream, and as she stumbled from one calamity to the next, I began to realize that every oddity was in the movie for a purpose, and that the film is as artfully symmetrical as its title would suggest, and that, despite the deep despair inherent in its message, this movie is something beautifully weird.

In pursuit of comedic tragedy or tragic comedy (the emphasis chosen might merely reflect the mood of the viewer), Solondz runs from sorrow to sorrow, swapping scenarios, liberally discarding conventions to say to his audience that, despite the conventions of our stories, despite their arcs and twists and reversals, we are who we are.

It would be hard to explain why I felt uplifted by this movie. Perhaps because the vitality of the artistic voice outweighed the gloomy message for me. Perhaps because I enjoy intellectually challenging art. Perhaps because these days I feel so free from the despair the movie plumbs.

Either way, backwards or forwards, tragedy or comedy, Palindromes is a challenging, original, and decidedly weird movie. And I love it for that.

On African Music

2010-03-10T07:23:00.000-08:00

So I've been into African hip-hop lately, which I touched on briefly in my recent post on K'NAAN, but a recent YouTube search turned up some great results. I tend to like the artists that employ African-sounding instrumentation and melodies, and my favorite videos show Here are a few of the videos I most enjoyed.

Justice by Muki Garang and Mwafrika
Constantly by Kalamashaka
Sou Mey Rap by Dakar All-Stars
Mother Africa by Hip Hop All-Stars

I can't vouch for lyrical content or quality, since I don't speak Swahili or French or whatever language these cats are rapping in.

February Media Round-up

2010-03-01T15:35:00.000-08:00

February 2010 - probably the first month of my lifetime where the books I read outnumbered the movies I watched. The reason for the drop in movie viewing was James Joyce's Ulysses, which consumed so much time and energy that it began to feel like an obsession, which left very little room for cinematic exploration.

Without further delay, books and movies for February...

Books read in February (with brief reviews):

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov - often agonizing, occasionally touching, and always always funny, Nabokov's novel deserves every bit of praise and outrage it evokes. It's wonderfully offensive.

Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order by Robert Kagan - An interesting argument that postmodern, antiwar Europe was able to thrive because America's military did the dirty work of protecting them. I didn't buy it wholesale, but at least now I know a bit of the history of the tension between the US and Europe.

After Dark by Haruki Murakami - This little book felt like a minor work by a major author. It was intriguing, but not all that powerful.

O Pioneers! by Willa Cather - Cather created an interesting web of relationships, but in the end, there were too many melodramatic monologues and boilerplate plot devices for me to really enjoy the book.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories by Carson McCullers - I think McCullers loses a great deal of her impact in the short story arena, and out of the South, which she evokes so well in the novels I've read.

Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - A lyrical, incisive little novel that explores connections between human sensuality and spirituality. Stuck with me long after I put it down.

No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe - A bit of a disappointment after Things Fall Apart. While it uses idiomatic language, the folktale tone of this book's predecessor is replaced by what feels like a conventional morality tale set in the third world.

Blessed Unrest by Paul Hawken - This book, while difficult to get through and occasionally preachy, opened my eyes to the power of grassroots, community-based movements to create positive change. Very inspiring.

Ulysses by James Joyce - So much has been said about this book, but I'd like to add that I felt like reading it reshaped my brain. I plan to revisit it regularly.

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut - Did this book seem a bit lame to me because I read it right after Ulysses? Probably. But still, I get tired of Vonnegut's contempt for his characters, and his snarky tone. Sure, it's funny and insightful on occasion, but I was glad to be done with it.

A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham - Cunningham is one of my favorite contemporary novelists, and this is one powerful book. The characters, rich, broken, and utterly believable, are rendered in such rewarding prose.

Miami by Joan Didion - Poetic journalism. This book is compact, eye-opening, and masterfully written.

Movies watched in February (with brief reviews):

The Hurt Locker - This movie may make it into my top 25 movies of all time. It was visceral, emotional, and ultra-realistic in its portrayal of a squad assigned to diffuse roadside bombs in Iraq.

The Lady from Shanghai - A pretty good film noir from Orson Welles.

The Band Wagon - a musical which my friend recommended to me as one of the best, directed by Vincent Minelli. It was enjoyable, but musicals just aren't my thing.

Journey from the Fall - A Vietnamese-made movie about the plight of refugees and political prisoners. I found it very moving and totally believable.

Paul Robeson: Portrait of an Artist - A short documentary about what it cost a black performer when he spoke out against racism in America.

Casino Royale - A perfect reinvention of Bond for the new millenium. Casino Royale was a popcorn movie of the highest order.

My Darling Clementine - One of the great westerns. Epic, engaging, and character-driven.

Goodbye Solo - Director Rahmin Bahrani might become one of my favorite. Goodbye Solo and Chop Shop both surprised and uplifted me with their unflinching look at what it takes to keep going, and what happens when you give up.

The End.

A Few Thoughts from Nabokov

2010-02-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

Just this morning, I read a 1964 Playboy interview where author Vladimir Nabokov discusses, among other things, his book Lolita. I thought the following quotes were noteworthy:

"But when I was young, in my 20s and early 30s, I would often stay all day in bed, smoking and writing. Now things have changed. Horizontal prose, vertical verse, and sedent scholia keep swapping qualifiers and spoiling the alliteration."

"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me."

And finally, in response to a question about whether or not he believed in God, Nabokov replied:

"I know more than I can express in words, and the little I can express would not have been expressed, had I not known more."

The interview, which is quite good if you've read Lolita and potentially inscrutable if you haven't, can be read in its entirety here.

A Call to Freedom

2010-02-17T06:04:00.000-08:00

A good friend recently loaned me a mixtape by Lil Wayne, supposedly his best, called Dedication 2. Critics seem to love this guy for his passion and playful approach, which are notable.

While the general public may complain about the violence and obscenity, I take it the same way I'd take a western or a Schwarzenegger movie. It's there for entertainment. If kids wouldn't take it so seriously, I wouldn't really have a problem with gangsta rap. That said, I have a hard time being entertained. Most of the radio hip-hop around (with some notable exceptions, eg Jay-Z) seems flat, unfun, and repetitive. Between mundane, bragging skits, rappers find time to grunt out cliches about the streets where they grew up or how much money they have.

That said, I don't think hip-hop is anywhere near dead. With artists like Jay Electronica and Lupe Fiasco dancing around the edges of the mainstream, and The Roots enjoying their tenure as Jimmy Kimmel's band, there's plenty of fresh material for those willing to dig a little. That's not to mention a lively underground, where all sorts of good stuff goes on, whenever rappers can get past rapping about their distaste for the mainstream.

Thankfully, the scene is also getting a boost from Africa. While former child soldier Emmanuel Jal is not very visible in the US, he's been getting nods worldwide for his harrowing story, and his courage in telling it through hip-hop. My wife and I run an afterschool program for international kids in a poor neighborhood, and they love this guy's stuff. It's hard for me to listen to his War Child CD without getting cloudy-eyed.

This week, I learned about another African rapper, this one from Somalia, and after a single listen, I ran out to pick up his latest album. K'NAAN claims that english is not his first language, but he wields it with such precision, playfulness, and fierceness, that I find his claim hard to believe. From his opening track "T.I.A." K'NAAN drops his listeners into a complex, violent Africa, where he grew up dodging grenades, bullets, and thugs that make america's hood seem placid.

While his story (my block is way worse than yours), could get boring in lesser hands, K'NAAN spins it into a funny, tragic, enlightening hip-hop journey which takes seamless turns into rap-rock, reggae, and the anthemic song which has become the theme for the 2010 World Cup, Waving Flag.

The thing that makes Sojourner such a powerful album for me, and the reason it merits play after play, beyond its brilliant musical range, is the view of violence that he takes. While American rappers seem to relish the beefs, guns, and street warfare because they give street cred, K'NAAN dreams of a world without terrorism and piracy, without refugees, where young lovers can grow up without being torn apart by violence.

He celebrates the kinds of love that survive in a war zone, and the brilliant album examines the way all people act under dire circumstances. His music breaks through Western comfort and shows me the chaos that waits at its edges. On Monday, after my first listen-through of this album, I felt awakened. I could barely stand the excess, the false comforts, the glitzy lies that we surround ourselves with here in America.

The world out there, the world we hide from in our big expensive fortress of a country, is bustling with life, and has some things to teach us. Thank God hip-hop provides a voice to that experience.

One Month Down

2010-01-31T19:48:00.000-08:00

I have been following two New Years' resolutions. One was to read one book per week this year- while some books will take months (Ulysses, Infinite Jest and Moby Dick, all of which I hope to read in 2010), there are other books I'll blast through in one sitting. The goal is to have it all balance out to at least 52 books when 2011 rolls around.

The other goal is to track the books I read and the movies I watch this year. I have two pieces of paper taped to the wall above my desk, one listing books read and one listing movies watched. January was a good media month, with 18 movies watched and 8 books read.

Books read in January (with brief reviews):

Dubliners by James Joyce - may end up being the best story collection I read all year

Wobegon Boy by Garrison Keillor - no one does sentimental satire like GK

Sanctuary by William Faulkner - his language is masterful, but I'm not sure he speaks to me

Emma's War by Deborah Scroggins - one heavy, masterfully written true story. See the previous post for my thoughts

The Best of Roald Dahl - while clever and funny, Dahl's mean-spirited shorts got on my nerves pretty quickly

Light in August by William Faulkner - this is undoubtedly a masterpiece, but Faulkner's storytelling can distract me from the story sometimes

A Map of the World by Jane Hamilton - I was shocked by how rich, relatable, and well-paced this novel was

The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers - i found this book far more focused and affecting than her more famous The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. McCullers is becoming a favorite. I hope to read the rest of her novels in next few months.

Movies watched in January (with brief reviews):

Merrill's Marauders - I can see why director Sam Fuller was ticked about the final cut of this movie, but there were enough signature Fuller moments to make it worth the watch.

Dancing to New Orleans - There wasn't anything special about the way this doc was put together, but I love NO and its music scene so much, I didn't care. It was great to see musicians talk about the scene, and to see them perform.

The Stunt Man - One of my mentors loaned me this film, saying it was "kinetic filmmaking at its finest." It's a b-movie masterpiece, with terrible acting adding to its odd, delightful impact.

The Orphanage - The farther away from America a horror movie is made, the better it is. This film was great as drama and as horror. I found it creepy, rich, and touching.

Elizabeth - Brilliant Eastern take on European history. One of the most visually rich movies I've seen in ages.

Zombieland - The gory, super dark humor in this movie worked for me, despite a few boilerplate romantic moments. I like actor Jesse Eisenberg more every time I see him.

Too Late for Tears - This classic Noir film has some great twists, but I had a hard time getting past the dated acting style

Elizabeth: The Golden Age - While it was just as visually stunning as its predecessor, I found this sequel less nuanced than the first Elizabeth, although my wife thought it was the better of the two.

Casino Royale - A hilarious send-up of all things James Bond. Admittedly, this movie was weird, but it worked for me.

Where the Wild Things Are - I was told that this movie was a confused, depressing mess. I disagree. I found it to be wholly original, culturally fascinating, and beautifully directed.

Zatoichi 1: The Tale of Zatoichi - I knew that an old Japanese movie about a blind swordsman was gonna be good, but I had no idea how complex and tormented the main character would be, nor how masterfully the cinematography would engage me in his story.

Synechdoche, New York - Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman proved that he can direct his own bizarre metanarratives just as well as the directors who helmed his other screenplays. SNY is funny, insightful, and unnerving in the best possible way.

Zatoichi 2: The Tale of Zatoichi Continues - Anyone involved in making a series of movies needs to study Zatoichi. The sequels manage to keep getting better as they delve deeper into this fascinating character.

Zatoichi 3: New Tale of Zatoichi - See last review.

Zatoichi 4: The Fugitive - See last review, but imagine an even better film than the preceding three.

Chop Shop - Joined the ranks of City of God and Gomorrah as one of my favorite hyper-realistic, beautifully composed expose films about people living in the slums.

Ichi - Although I'm a huge fan of the Zatoichi franchise, this melodramatic, exploitative spinoff was disappointing. The female lead was less compelling than the original actor, the voice-over narration was annoying, and pretty much everything was overdone.

That sums up my media consumption for January. I'm going to try to do these monthly recaps as we go along to a) keep me accountable for my resolutions and b) draw traffic and comments to this side-project blog of mine.

To What End?

2010-01-12T08:28:00.000-08:00

I first heard of Emma McCune while cruising the internet for African music. A Sudanese rapper named Emmanuel Jal credits her with his rescue, and his song "Emma" is a moving tribute to her compassion and to the fruits of her work.

When I searched for Emma online, I learned that not everyone shares Jal's adoration for her.

To learn more about this controversial crusader, I ordered a copy of Emma's War, by Atlanta-dwelling writer Deborah Scroggins. This thorough, beautifully-written book chronicles not only Emma's life, but the long history of Western involvement in Sudan.

A low-level aid worker, Emma worked building schools for children in the war-torn south of Sudan, among the warring Dinka and Nuer tribes (among others). She was one of hundreds of Western expats caught up in a movement to bring relief to the suffering in Africa.

In her travels, she met a charismatic rebel leader, fell in love, and married him. She fell into bad repute when her husband, a ranking official in the Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), rebelled against his commander, starting a bloody war that multiplied already alarming levels of famine and violence in southern Sudan. Soon Emma was acting as a press secretary and political advocate for her husband, clearly taking a side in the conflict and apparently turning a blind eye to some of the most offensive atrocities in the history of a long and atrocious war.

Scroggins uses Emma's story to exemplify what she sees as an often well-intentioned, but misguided, delusional, costly, and ultimately ineffective effort to bring our type of peace to Sudan. At first, I thought that this might be an unfair way to use a woman's life, especially in light of the impact it had on Jal, one of my favorite musicians.

However, the book gives voice to those who felt that Emma had done good work. Scroggins acknowledges the high regard with which the Nuer people viewed Emma, and she recounts how Emmanuel Jal was smuggled out of Sudan to Kenya.

I felt depressed all day yesterday after reading the book. It mounted a significant attack on my ideas about helping the poor, and displayed tragic consequences to some of the most well-intentioned, well-planned aid efforts. Scroggins seems content to lament the tragedy, and she offers little hope for improved models and positive results for Western aid efforts.

In the world of cross-cultural ministry, we can rarely foresee the results of our work. We can plan carefully, step cautiously, and respect boundaries, but sooner or later, to do any good, we must act, and we can't always know what will happen as a result. It may sometimes be better not to act at all- Emma's story, at least Scroggin's telling of it, seems to imply this.

But who knows? The bloodshed probably would have happened with or without Emma there, and even if one disregards all her other relief efforts, the saved life of Emmanuel Jal and his subsequent impact on his home country seem worth the venture.

This is where I have to place my mind if I am to continue this kind of work. The poor will always be with us. I can't even solve one kid's problems, much less those of a whole community. I am responsible to plan as well as I can, but in the end I am acting in good faith- faith that love, tempered with as much wisdom as is available to me at this point- will bear good fruit.

If Emma McCune, with all her missteps and her moments of blindness and romantic delusion, was able to influence one Nuer kid to turn his life around and reach back to his own people, then I have to believe that something good can come of our work here.

Math vs. the Tornado

2009-11-25T07:19:00.000-08:00

When I heard that the Coen brothers were making a new film about a physics professor whose life is quietly falling apart, I had mixed feelings. The premise sounded a bit too much like Garden State for middle-aged people, without the indie music. The Coens have been on a bit of a roll lately, though. No Country and Burn after Reading were two of my recent favorites.

In the end (which should be obvious by the fact that I'm even writing this entry) I gave it a shot.

Two elements took me completely off guard, considering the premise: the offbeat humor and the breathtaking spiritual angst. One scene finds our protagonist, Larry Gopnik, sitting in a room with a Rabbi. In a moment of desperation, he asks, "Why does he (Hashem) make us feel the questions if he's not gonna give us any answers?"

The rabbi responds with a blunt, "He hasn't told me."

This may be a bold or foolish confession, but I wake up many mornings wondering if I'm wrong about the things I believe. Much of my upbringing, even through the end of college, bears a stark resemblance to brainwashing. After walking away from my faith for a time, I felt called back, but it's hard to know why you believe when so much of it was forced on you so early.

Anyway, this movie puts us in a world full of people of straightforward faith, and introduces us to a man on a search for something else. As he wanders through the inconsistencies of his stated beliefs, his profession as a physicist, and his complex, crumbling life, Larry grabs at any proposition that might help.

David Foster Wallace, in an essay titled "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," writes about his keen sense of mathematics and how it helped him develop a strong game of tennis. At the end of the essay, a tornado builds while he is in the middle of a volley with a friend. The tornado heralds the end of his development, since he cannot move beyond the math of the game.

I had to wonder if the Coens read Wallace's essay. The two seem to pair so perfectly together.

Our maths, the concrete symbols we ascribe to our universe, the bare facts and our ability to connect them logically, hit a wall in the face of life. We must either turn away from the unquantifiable, or we must leap into it by faith. Both positions leave us (or maybe it's just me - I know many people who don't seem to have a problem with this) with plenty of room for doubt.

After watching A Serious Man, I feel (once again) like I'm witnessing a tornado just when I thought I had the math figured out.

Go to Hell, Pop Culture

2009-11-18T10:45:00.000-08:00

The most recent cover given to Gay Talese's cultural chronicle Thy Neighbor's Wife has an image of an unclothed woman sitting on some rocks on a beach. While she is sitting at an angle that covers all the odds and ends that would render the image explicit, it is still clearly suggestive.

It didn't really occur to me that this cover would be a problem, considering that the book was the definitive piece of journalism on the sexual revolution, and the image was clearly a relic of a bygone era, revealing less than you would see at the average neighborhood pool nowadays. So I bought the book at borders and dove in.

My dear wife did not see things the same way I did, so out of consideration for her feelings, I went ahead and took some sharpies and drew a modest skirt and T-shirt on the woman. Enjoying this creative coverup, I went ahead and added some Nike sneakers, a baseball cap, a fish in her hand, and a text bubble that says, "mmmm...sushi."

So in this way, I ended up censoring the cover of a book which is essentially about the battle between censorship and sexual liberty in America. That would place me squarely in the same camp as most of the Christians in the book, with the exception of a liscentious cult leader named John Humphrey Noyes.

In fact, I read the book with a sort of perpetual cringe, waiting to find out what kind of cruelty and repression the Christians would come up with next. As Americans from all sectors of society began openly discussing, portraying, and practicing the kind of sexual (mis)behavior that had, according to the Kinsey Reports, been going on for generations, the Church moved in with its giant political claw to smother the movement.

The tactics employed included intimidation, imprisonment, smear campaigns, and various ill-conceived political maneuvers. It's not too difficult to see why people define Christians by their hunger for power and their ignorance.

Where does anyone get the idea that a Christlike response to "sin" is to crush it with all the political muscle we can muster? I think this response is exactly the opposite of Jesus' teaching, which pierces past appearances and deeds to the heart, and addresses pain, need, and perversion that lies there with love.

Although I've only skimmed it, Rob Bell's recent book Sex God seems to herald a changing voice in the dialog between Christians and pop culture on sex, which used to go something like this:

Pop Culture: Isn't sex awesome?
Christians: Sure, as long as you don't enjoy it.
Pop Culture: But sex is wired into us. It's a biological part of who we are.
Christians: Your wiring is evil. Sex is only for making babies.
Pop Culture: You're irrelevant.
Christians: You're perverted.
Pop Culture: F**k you, Christians.
Christians: Go to Hell, pop culture.

That's a paraphrase, but I think it pretty accurately sums up the tone.

I'm a big believer in the idea that our understanding of, and more specifically our relationship with, Jesus gives us a perspective that can be both illuminating and liberating (although some would argue with my use of that word) if we can be a little less spiteful in how we listen to and speak with those who disagree with or don't understand us.

That goes for sexuality and dozens of other issues on the cultural radar these days. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have convictions and opinions. It means we should always let our speech be seasoned with Grace. We should be quick to listen and slow to speak, and we must understand that nothing short of love really makes a difference, anyway.

Steinbeck and My Hermeneutic Grid

2009-10-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

One can read a certain edition of a book then, on the blog post wherein she or he speaks of said book, insert a completely different cover, for certain creative reasons. It is in this freedom that I post the image above, which is not only different from the cover of the book that I read, but is also almost entirely out of touch with the book itself.

But, self, you might be asking yourself, why would he choose such a lurid paperback cover when the book is such a masterful piece of literature?

Fear not. The answer is forthcoming.

The book itself, Cannery Row, is much like a Robert Altman film or a Garrison Keillor book (or a combination thereof). Its structure, if you can call it that, weaves in and out of lives, drawing sketches of immensely interesting characters, then leaving them half-done. John Steinbeck, the author (in case you didn't pick up on that from the picture), returns every other chapter to a narrative thread, but even that seems to move around in its own way.

The book is about a place called Cannery Row in Monterey in California. Or no, it's about the people who inhabit the place. Wait, actually, it's a parody of the American dream. Well, yes and no, it's about how to live freely. Hold on, maybe it is actually about a place called Cannery Row.

We could go in circles like this for pages.

This problem has been facing me in the arts quite a bit lately. A good book or a song or a movie takes however long it takes because it has a lot to do, and it works on so many different levels that summarizing it is next to impossible. Still, we fans keep trying.

The same is true of the Bible, which is a book whose identity I've been reading about quite a bit lately. It seems that if I adopt one view on what it really is, I have to chop it up and filter it and do a lot of analysis that seems a little removed from the heart of the thing. Anyway, I digress.

So the reason I chose a different cover for Steinbeck's book (the other, newer cover shows frogs scattering before a group of hobo types, which could serve as a pretty good hermeneutic key to the whole thing, seeing as how it highlights what is perhaps the central symbol of the book) is to avoid "let's run this through our hermeneutic grid and see what we come up with"-type thinking.

Try the book yourself. I'd say the best approach is to read it for the characters, and let the symbolism and statements bounce around in your head during the aftermath. That's what I did half a week ago, and they're still bouncing around in there, asking me questions, striking chords with my experiences, bringing certain characters to light, and calling me to rethink, rethink, rethink (word repeated for echo-type effect).

Poetic Facts

2009-10-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

My official writer's bio reads:

Half-American, half-Australian, Philippine-raised, Chicago-educated, Atlanta-dwelling writer Ian North lives and works with immigrants and refugees. He mentors and equips members of the international community to tell their own stories through writing, visual art, and music. He is also involved in several creative projects, including a blog of off-kilter folk stories and songs at http://ghosttownrevival.wordpress.com.

But if I were to write my story, to really write it as I'm learning to see it, it would be the story of a movement from Scotland to Australia to India to China to Indonesia to the Philippines. It would be short on memoir, long on family history. It would take years of research that I don't know how to do, and it would owe its scope to a book called Unto the Sons by Gay Talese.

Talese is the son of an Italian-American tailor named Joseph Talese, himself the son of an Italian immigrant to the United States. I'd read some of Talese's work in The Gay Talese Reader a few years back, so I was aware of his ability to make nonfiction reports resonate with narrative immediacy, a trademark common to practicioners of the "New Journalism," a writing movement spawned by reporters and nonfiction novelists like Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.

While other writers in this movement employed a cavalier approach to phrasing, language, and self-characterization, Talese maintained a style that may have cost him the celebrity that visited many of his contemporaries: formal, immaculately structured portrayal of fact.

The reason that I find Unto the Sons so compelling is the subject: Talese turns his journalistic eye on his own family history. He sees himself as part of a massive movement, discussing Italian history, moving seamlessly from Roman Empire to World War I to the formation of the Mafia and its roots in America to his own childhood as an Italian-American during WWII.

So, where I always saw Talese as a brilliant collector of fact and a masterful essayist, I now see the roots of his talent, the development of his eye for minute but significant details, and his comfort with a formal, well-dressed approach to examining the human soul.

What does this have to do with me? It makes me want to know where I come from. I want to understand where my little life, my interests, my movements, my troubles, my talent all come from, and where they all lead.

What of my great uncle who played harmonica with the Sydney Orchestra? Has anyone upstream battled depression like me? Who left the Christian faith, and who stayed? Were the evangelists to China and India ever doubtful of their work or purpose? What drove them forward or slowed them down?

There are dozens of relatable movements in Unto the Sons, especially to someone who comes from a well-traveled line. But the main drive it leaves me with is the desire to be the Gay Talese of my own family line.

The gift given to me by God and/or genetics and/or a few encouraging teachers was to write. So when this gift turns to a profession and I have the time and resources, the North family will have its own book which looks back and finds the poetry in the facts of our heritage, and hands it forward as a legacy for our children to do with as they see fit.

Deaf and Depressed

2009-10-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

Evelyn Glennie draws rhythm from pretty much anything she can find. She goes into an abandoned factory and beautiful sounds emerge. With a single snare drum, she can freeze commuters in a busy train station. Her childhood farm holds rusty pipes and tubs which, under her percussive hand, ring out their age and texture in rhythm.

Evelyn Glennie is one of the world's most impressive percussionists. She jams with other masters like KODO and Fred Frith, and the outcome is breathtaking. The question that comes to mind upon watching director Thomas Riedelsheimer's masterful documentary Touch the Sound, is would I be this amazed if she wasn't also deaf?

The back cover of the DVD announces her hearing impairment, and I'm sure it was a significant factor in the marketing because obviously a brilliant percussionist is so much more interesting if she can't hear. On the other hand, the musical moments in this film would floor me whether I knew she was deaf or not.

It was interesting to watch this film for the first time this morning, in the middle of a fight with my own disability, a major depressive disorder. Last night, I had an impulse to write the single most tragic piece I ever conceived, to mourn the temporary losses of faith and hope that accompany the stronger waves that move through me. Like most depressed artists, I despaired of ever being able to communicate the soul of the story, and didn't even start, opting to lounge on my couch and watch an old movie instead.

The thing about Glennie's story is that her deafness is not an obstacle to her gift. It's a doorway. When she lost her hearing as a child, she began to discover that she could feel sound in a new way. She could trace its movements through her hand, into her arm, and around her body. She could sense textures, rhythms, and echoes not available to her when she relied too heavily on her ears.

So as to whether or not her music would be as impressive were she not deaf, I say "no." I do not say this because of the novelty of a deaf musician. I say this because her failing ears opened her up to new channels of experiencing sound which transformed her music. So whether or not you are even aware of her deafness, Glennie's music benefits from its fact. She understands sound in a way that no hearing person can.

So as someone who loses his sense of balance sometimes, who can't grip hope like any normal person, who cannot feel joy in these times, how can I feel and connect with beauty? How can I perceive and convey joy beyond what comes naturally to me? How can I sense truth beyond the dead nerves in my heart?

So woven through all my diseases and irrational flaws and fears and hungers, maybe there's a sense that reaches beyond what I'd experience otherwise.

Seeing Glennie play her drums, and watching her teach a younger, deaf student how to feel the rhythm she plays, I get a new sense of discovery and a new desire to write, which led specifically to the creation of this blog, which does not do much in the way of making any objective claims about the quality of any artistic expression, but takes it subjectively and digests and integrates it into my own story, which I think is what artists want us to do with their work anyway.