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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.