This McSweeney’s bit is an instant classic.
Polonius says Hamlet’s crazy … crazy in love!
Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Hamlet are now friends.
Hamlet wonders if he should continue to exist. Or not.
The Good Soldier Schweik— I bought a copy at a used bookstore on our recent trip to Virginia/DC, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s sort of a World War I classic that’s fallen off the radar about a Czech soldier who’s basically an idiot who not so stupidly manages to avoid ever making it into combat. SchweikThe novel starts in Prague, and weirdly, the humor reminded me of Kafka, and there’s probably a thesis in comparing Schweik and K. from The Castle; where K. employs all the intelligence at his disposal in struggling against a vast, almost metaphysical bureaucracy to gain admittence to the caslte, Schweik uses his idiotic blank grin and the deep incompetence of the Austrian army bureaucracy to constantly frustrate their efforts to get him to the front. Seems like it’s often called an anti-war novel, and the novel does preach at times, but Schweik’s honest idiocy seems impervious to all kinds of cant, and he seems like as basic and original a comedic character as Don Quixote. It ends abruptly when the author died of TB.
The Last Tycoon— We got this in our great plundering of Terri’s parents’ book and record collection last weekend and I blew through it in a couple of evenings. It’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s final novel (which ends abruptly when the author died of a heart attack) about a movie tycoon. Seems patterned after any number of film tycoons, but the one that comes to mind most to me is Irving Thalberg. It’s pretty uneven at times, and you suspect that it would have been seriously rewritten and cleaned up a lot once it was finished. But that in itself is part of the charm; the edition I read had author’s notes and outlines of what Fitzgerald expected to happen, so you get the interesting task of finishing the novel for yourself, as well as an interesting vivisection of a novel in progress. The main character Stahr is a workaholic producer who, while driven into the future out of dissatisfaction with his past a la Gatsby, seems to genuinely love his work, and the scenes where he is prodding his writers and directors to work creatively are alone unlike anything I’ve read elsewhere and are themselves worth the price of admission.
I Will Soon Be Invincible by Austin Grossman — a friend recommended this novel about superheroes and supervillains that are all too human. I liked it a lot (I blew through it it last night and this morning), but if you’ve seen The Incredibles, imagine it as novel, make it slightly moodier and less cartoony, and you’ve got the idea.
From Last Train to Jakarta (John Darnielle(Mr. Mountain Goats)’s blog):
…your content can be 100% seen-it/heard-it nothing-new and you can still come off like a shiny new quarter if your writing is good enough. I’m bourgeois, right: in my life, knowing whether somebody is a snitch or not has exactly zero practical applications, and I only vaguely care on principle: at the end of the day, people protect their own asses, that’s not exactly news. But when Scarface hates on a snitch, his tone is so measured but passionate and the writing so tight that I’m able to share his outrage, even though for all practical purposes he might as well be calling out the guy who fucked up his topiary or something: my level of real-life engagement is about the same. That’s what good writing is about, as far as I’m concerned - drawing things so vividly that you can make people give a shit about stuff they needn’t actually even know about.
Which until now has been a secret crackpot theory.
I was checking my feedreader this afternoon, after being about a week out of date, and in my RSS feed for all flickr photos tagged “letterpress”, I saw something for the Oblation Press of Portland, Oregon, and it made me think about the Oblation Board in Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and that great situation where Lyra is dressed up at an elegant dinner party with Mrs. Coulter and she starts to get a glimmer of the horrible truth about the Oblation Board, and decides to run away. That whole scene, and that feeling of fear, just came alive in my brain, like the fear and imagery of a super vivid dream.
Which leads me to share my crackpot theory. Good fantasy (and I just don’t have the energy now to define my terms, so there) somehow actually is a map of the subconscious, and (even farther out on the limb…) that it actually somehow triggers biochemical reactions in the brain.
I’ve mentioned a favorite Borges quote before, and I think it gets at the same idea: “We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way that we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe; but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods.”
Crackpot theory #425 appeared first a few years ago when I was re-re-re-reading the Lord of the Rings just after the first of the movies came out. The part where Frodo and Sam are in Mordor feels like it goes on forever, there’s such a grey, weighty, washed-out feeling that weighs that whole section down; the landscape seems paradoxically both precisely described but also strangely without landmarks or differentiation. I started wondering why such a place would take shape in Tolkien’s mind, and why it could also appear with such vividness in my own. But simultaneously, it occurred to me that I couldn’t imagine a better depiction of what depression feels like. I don’t know. Maybe your experience of depression is not illuminated by the presence of hobbits, but mine is.
Anyway. Discuss.
*I’m not really counting. There are too many to actually bother counting.
This weekend I read Gun, With Occasional Music, one of Jonathan Lethem’s genre fiction novels, before he got all award-winning and respectable. It doesn’t just mimic one genre, it’s both a Raymond Chander detective novel as well as a dystopian science fiction novel. It’s pretty entertaining, but I found it much less substantial than than Amnesia Moon, which was published the following year.
The structure, style, dialogue, and overall worldview couldn’t be a bigger Chandler rip-off without actually just calling the hero “Phillip Marlowe” (nb, see Lethem on plagarism). Except that that the actual mystery wasn’t that good; the clues were clunky enough that I had it figured out halfway through, and I’m pretty dense when it comes to mysteries, guessing right up to the end.
I thought the technique of setting the first chunk of the novel in the future, having a bunch of time elapse, and then setting the second chunk six years later was an effective technique, giving this science-fiction-within-science-fiction effect. (I don’t read much sci-fi, so maybe it’s actually a hackneyed idiom that’s just new to me).
One small-ish detail late in the book resonated with me. In the novel, the future police state encourages heavy drug use to keep the populace under control, and the standard issue mixture is largely composed of “Forgettol” (which does what it sounds like). But memory is occasionally necessary, so people have these small devices, which they refer to when they need to remember something. The devices speak in the person’s own voice, but give a notably rosy version of past events. The main character thinks
I was beginning to get it. Memory was permissible when it was externalized, and rigorously edited. That left you with more room in your head for the latest pop tune— which was sure to be coming out of the nearest water fountain or cigarette machine.
It hit home because I’ve sort of come to depend on this blog to actually remember when and what happened in my life. But at the same it’s such a tiny sliver of the whole story: I don’t get it all down from a lack of gumption or time to write, or I intentionally edit out things because they’re about other people or I just don’t want anybody to see it or I don’t want my account to live beyond my ability to control it. Not to mention the inherent limitations of language and medium: the Tao that can be blogged is not the eternal Tao.
Anyway…. the novel was published in 1994, well before blogs and digital cameras and cheap tiny video cameras and infinite storage and the Internet (yeah, it existed, but you couldn’t depend on it to find almost anything you wanted to know). So it struck me as pretty prescient and disturbing— people with no on-board memory are a pretty pathetic lot. (And yeah, it’s a dystopian reductio ad absurdum, and no, things will probably never go to that extreme, but the possibility is worth considering if only to galvanize the feeling that things shouldn’t go to that extreme).
As I mentioned earlier, while Gun, With Occasional Music is pretty entertaining, I don’t think it’s nearly as good as Amnesia Moon. Part of why I love Amnesia Moon is that it rips off Philip K. Dick, even down to the way that the premise seems to turn inside out after almost every chapter as in the better Dick novels. What really knocks me out about it is that it conveys things that I just can’t imagine being conveyed nearly as beautifully or precisely or convincingly in anything other than a science fiction novel. And it’s not some bogus crap about aliens or robots or New World Orders: I think he’s talking about things that are central to the human experience and timeless, and paradoxically also completely of the zeitgeist.
Anything else that I have to say will sound even stupider unless you’ve read it. So go, read it, and come back and let me know when you have, and then we can talk about it. OK?
You know, the virtues of David Mitchell’s most recent novel are almost unreviewable, and it’s because of the reviews that I put off reading it for almost a year. The Globe reviewin particular put me off (”Jason Taylor, 13, is a Holden Caulfield for the Margaret Thatcher era.” GAG). I just didn’t see why I had to spend more of the finite minutes of my life reading another coming of age story about a sensitive, artistic small-town youth, despite how utterly taken I was with both Cloud Atlas and Ghostwritten. (Have yet to read Number Nine Dream).
It’s too bad, because it really does avoid almost all of the perils of cliché that the premise holds. But again, it’s almost impossible to talk about it without it sounding like it’s the most awful, clichéd crap. I think the best I can do is to say that it really reads like Mitchell wrote it without ever having absorbed anything else in the genre. Yet it feels somewhat wrong to assume that it’s all autobiographical drawn-from-life stuff, either.
All I can surmise is that much of the material has been sitting in Mitchell’s files for years, and with a few heavily praised and unquestionably non-autobiographical novels with plenty of pomo pyrotechnics under his belt, he felt safe enough to publish this without fear of being pigeonholed as an autobiographical writer of coming of age stories.
And if you’ve been put off by Mitchell’s pomo pyrotechnics in the past (I’m talking to you, Terri Wise), I’ll vouch that there is almost none of that here. Though, for those of you who enjoy that kind of thing, the rather stunning appearance of one of the characters from Cloud Atlas alone is worth the price of admission.
Looks like a site is up. I’m really glad that it’s going to be animated.
I enjoy reading the Xooglers blog; it’s like readingMicroserfs
Aside: every year there’s always all this talk about all the new words that get put into the dictionary, but I think it would be just as interesting to acknowledge and memorialize the words that are getting retired.
No, the world doesn’t need Harry Potter to survive book 7. I’m hoping he doesn’t. Happy endings are a dime a dozen. Escapist fantasy and action movies and romanic comedies are everywhere, and like all junk food, leave you feeling hungrier than when you started.
I have always hypothesized that the reason that these books are wildly popular is that the heroes suffer in ingenious and extremely satisfying ways.
Case in point. Terri and I just watched the movie version of Book 4 the other night, and while I think they did an impressive job of condensing an 18,000-odd page book into a pretty good movie, the one scene they botched was the Yule Ball. And it only seemed botched because it’s so perfect in the book: it’s as good a depiction of a junior high dance as I’ve seen in anything, ever. It brilliantly captures the volatile mix of innocence, hormones, and hideously inflated romantic expectations. It captures the terror of actually asking someone to go with you. Nobody ends up going with who they should be going with. Everyone is miserable the whole way through, and it ends in tears, with nobody speaking to each other. And it has that “Oh, my god, my life is over!” feeling.
It’s awful, it resonates, it’s true. Compare and contrast with, say, Sixteen Candles, where after medium-intensity pouting for two hours, Molly Ringwald is swept off her feet by her Ferrari driving bo-hunk. Escapism just doesn’t give you the entertainment bang for the buck that misery does. Admit it!
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette is reporting that the Mysteries of Pittsburgh movie will probably be shot it the ‘burgh, contrary to earlier reports.
This is probably the most junk-food book I read in a while. I got it when we went to the AAUW book sale in State College. I actually goofed and meant to get the copy of MASH.
The main thing I wanted to point out was, as someone who grew up watching the preachy 70’s TV show, it was surprising to see how the book version of Hawkeye is pretty racist and sexist. He clings to his small-town Maine outlook, and he doesn’t seem to have much moral agenda beyond being a good doctor and having a good time.
Some parts are pretty good, but overall it was a little forced and it was never really well written. I read it in about 3 hours, and it was fairly entertaining, but I still felt like I could feel some brain cells dying.
I wanted a biography of Philip K. Dick, because I was curious how much of some of the details of his last three books were biographical. The answer to that question is both more and less than I thought, which is about what I expected. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer is really almost not science fiction at all, it’s really more a portrait of Berkeley and the wacky spiritual quests of its overeducated denizens, which are often painfully transparently motivated by their inability to deal with their personal relationships. I was especially curious to see if the Episcopal bishop (who sort of reminded me of someone who would have been in my sister’s ex-boyfriend’s crowd) was based on a real person, and he was, sort of.
Anyway, it confirmed a lot of what I had guessed. Dick was a dick, especially to his wives. He was really crazy, though at times it seems almost willfully so. Reading it kind of got me over him, which I was also sort of hoping to do. I still want to get around to reading The Man In The High Castle, but it might be a while.
The author only frothed into raving fandom intermittently, but did seem to write the book as an excuse to write little expositions on his favorite novels. I guess that’s not uncommon in biography, but still, I think it was a little annoying.
You do have to love a Pulitzer Prize winner who does his own CSS:
Hours spent learning Movable Type and CSS in order to create this site: 239,222,032
Bookslut points out a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette story saying that the Mysteries of Pittsburgh movie might not be shot in Pittsburgh. That’s crazy. Pittsburgh used to be where people shot movies because New York was too expensive. And they just have to get the real Cloud Factory in there. When I read about that place, I knew exactly where it was; it’s a little factory in the ravine behind the Carnegie Library, and I used to park near there on Friday mornings in high school when I had that internship at Pittsburgh Filmmakers (just two years after TMOP was published, though it seemed like such a longer span of time then). I’ve had so many “Pittsburgh moments” within a quarter mile radius of there, I would just be personally wronged if the film Cloud Factory were in British Columbia.
But. What possibly irks me more is that the screenplay apparently munges the characters Cleveland and Arthur. That’s just not right. It’s been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly, the two really kind of need to be distinct. Cleveland is an unschooled live-fast-die-young Neal Cassidy type. Arthur is a sassy, articulate gay bookstore co-worker of the hero (not really Allen Ginsberg-like, but let’s go with the parllel). The young hero is still figuring himself out and is attracted to both for different reasons, and that’s kind of a major part of the novel.
Oh, and it’s directed by the guy who did Dodgeball. What’s up with that, Mr. Chabon?
Every time I hear the name of David Mitchell’s new novel
Perhaps it’s the same demon which drives Terri to sing “If you like Jorge Posada” to the tune of the Pina Colada song every time the Sox play the Yankees. And this season has added “Why do you pull the ball, Toby Hall?” (of the TB Devil Rays) to the tune of… [guess]