REMEMBER:
1. I’m not a genius. I just like books.
2. I can be a little off-task at times.
3. I’m not exactly topical.
4. I never claimed to have good taste.
Okay, if I can't maintain order in my freaking life I'm not sure how I expected to be able to blog with some kind of pattern or regularity. I mean, shit, I'm the guy who's never been successfully medicated for his ADD, not because the drugs didn't work but because I couldn't remember to take them in the first place. So here's the deal: I'll blog when I can and you'll like it.
In all fairness it's been a hectic month. I spent ten days of it out of town and I'd like to tell you about that before I get down to the bookishness. Is that okay?
Well, I know you probably don't care, but while I was out of town I lived up to my highest musical aspiration. Since I can't sing, or play any instruments, not even the drums, that can mean only one thing. You guessed it: I was a roadie. I went on tour with a local band called the Antique Curtains and it was probably (no shit) as much fun as I've ever had. If that sounds lame, well, maybe it is, but I don't care. It's the fucking truth.
We swung northeast from Memphis, playing in Asheville, Chapel Hill, Baltimore, Philadelphia and NYC. With the exception of Asheville I'd never been to any of these places before. I loved New York, and I wanted New York to love me, but the Gods intervened. As soon as I entered the city it seemed like what little coolness I can lay claim to changed its name and moved to France. I tripped, I spilled drinks on myself, I got caught in subway doors and turnstiles. In short, if it was uncool, if it was clumsy, if it was painfully bumpkinish, I did it.
Ah well, that's what I get for trying to impress people. To my credit I developed a whole new profession while on the tour; I'm calling it Rock n' Roll Road Sherpa. It all came about as a result of something I saw in Gigantic (a documentary on They Might Be Giants, it's good, check it out) and it was this: at one point John Linnell talks about the way in which, after they've been on the road for a while, he begins to resent the way John Flansberg breathes. That scared the hell out of me.
Now, it really shouldn't have, the Curtains are about the nicest freaking human beings you ever met in your life. But this was, after all, my vacation, and I didn't want any Bad Times. I wasn't going to risk it (I like breathing, you see, and do it often). I decided the best way to defeat any potential on-tour bad feelings was to ensure that everything went as smoothly as was humanly possible. To bring this about I had to transcend mere manager-dom, I had to become the Road Sherpa. A roadie, you see, is a drunk guy in a sleeveless teeshirt who moves amps from one place to another, a manager (at least at the Curtains-scale) is usually more or less the same but has sleeves and a map and might think he's too good to move amps. The Road Sherpa, however, is a guy with sleeves and only a mild buzz on, who has cough drops, mapquest printouts, TWO flashlights, internet access, a pen and paper (just in case anyone ever says "Britton, could you take a note?") earplugs, change for the meter, TP, Aleve, and a camera always at the ready. I was the all-purpose, go-to, swiss army human and it felt good. The Sherpa moves amps as well.
We all had a fucking awesome time, but I won't go into it. This isn't a music blog, after all. I want to talk about Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, to the best of my feeble ability.
I would really like to tell you what The Moviegoer was about but I'm afraid I can't really say. This is a problem I frequently have after reading one of the Great Literary Novels; a feeling that I failed to interact with the book at its deepest level of meaning.
The Brothers Karamazov was the first, and still the ultimate, book to cause that feeling inside me. I've tried, and failed, to read this book probably five times. It's my Everest. Maybe you know the feeling that causes me to always throw up my hands in despair: it comes on as you're reading, and enjoying, a novel. You can be moved by its beauty, and challenged by its ideas. You can love its characters like family. But eventually you become vaguely aware of all the ideas that are flying right over your head, and all the currents of meaning that flow beneath the surface, undeniably there but beyond your reach, and you understand that these ideas, the ones you're failing to grasp, are what make the book what it is. You understand that really all you're grasping is the plot, and with a book like Karamazov that's kind of like going to the beach and doing no more than standing around in water wings, letting the surf wet your feet. And you give up, pretty disgusted with yourself for being such a clod.
Well The Moviegoer held a similar struggle for me. It follows some events in the life of Binx Bolling, a seller of mutual funds, an attender of movies, a perpetually distracted observer of life and also, ESPECIALLY, of his own feelings. He constantly dissects his social interactions, and the random march of his own thoughts. He theorizes on where "malaise" comes from, and adopts strategies for dealing with it; a mild car wreck, for instance, proves a useful means of shooing off malaise.
He's weird.
Towards the beginning of the novel, he declares himself to be on a search for...well, I never was quite clear on that point. He refers to this Search throughout the whole rest of the novel. He Searches as he chases his secretary, as he conducts his business, as he visits his family members, as he reflects and reflects and reflects and REFLECTS on the events of his life.
In the end, this book was about an oddball pondering his own oddness, and I felt rather shut out of the whole thing. I managed to find some liking for Binx, and I took some interest in the concrete actions he took in his life, such as when he defies his overbearing matriarch of an aunt, and runs off with his step-cousin Kate. She's a maladjusted weirdo no less than Binx, and I was glad they found each other. But their constant introspection was, I thought, fairly ho-hum.
With the The Moviegoer I suspect that you either get it or you don't. I didn't. This is probably my failing more than Walker Percy's. If you're like me, and you don't have the ability to connect with Binx's personal philosophy, and statements like "How could I deal with ten thousand people's personal rays" leave you going "hmm?", here's what you'll carry away from a reading of this novel: a little good dialogue, some moments of real pathos (such as Binx's beautiful connection with his crippled half-brother), and a bunch of really good descriptions of New Orleans in its glory days.
Also (and this is a moment in which I know full well I'm leaving myself wide open to a devastating broadside from anyone who loves this book, and who might have given it a more careful reading than I did) who the fuck is Rory? About two thirds of the way into the book, Binx (who has been narrating in a fairly straightforward first person voice) suddenly starts talking to this guy named Rory. "I tell you what, Rory, if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes I wouldn't have believed it", stuff like that. What? Calling all nerds, someone make this make sense to me.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
There might be such a thing as ghosts, but they rarely say "boo."
Well, readers, it would seem that any devotion you have shown my humble blog has been pretty poorly rewarded. It has been nearly a month since my last post and I can't make a very good accounting for myself: a little writing, a bit of socializing, too much Medieval II, Total War (yeah, I'm still on that kick. You'll be pleased to know the Venetian Republic won their war with Milan). But very little reading, I'm afraid.
Luckily, I do happen to have a cultural axe to grind–it stems from cinema rather than literature, though. Have you guys seen the movie Waitress? Well, I had high hopes for it; I mean, it has Andy Griffith in it for fucksake, it also has Nathan Fillion (did I spell that right? Anyway, he played Captain Reynolds on Firefly. He rules. I was glad to see him getting work).
I initially struggled with my opinion of the movie, because there was a lot right with it, but what was wrong eventually won the thumb war. As an adopted semi-southerner I've grown more and more impatient with movies that assume the South, and its people, to be what I call QCQHW. This stands for Quaint Cute Quirky and Heart Warming–sort of the Fried Green Tomatoes effect. This movie is so full of folksy wisdom, ol' fashioned home-cooking, and guys named Earl it nearly collapses under the weight. I do believe the South has its own unique culture and aesthetic, but somehow it never makes it into movies. Southerners are generally smarter and a lot less friendly than they come off in films. Your typical movie-land Southerner is a drawling, sweet-natured simpleton. I'm not really sure where the myth of Southern hospitality comes from; it's always seemed pretty far-fetched to me. Here's the facts as I see them: I never saw a fist fight in my life, until the first hour of my first day of school in Memphis. I find rural Yankees to be more consistently friendly than rural Southerners. I think the Civil War left us with a feeling of needing to prove something. Who knows. Anyhow, Waitress was pretty lame.
Speaking of the Civil War, me and my friends have been playing a drinking game derived from Ken Burn's Civil War on Sundays for the last month. The rules are fairly complex, but here's the gist: You pick a side, North or South (I'm drinking for the North) and when your side is beaten in battle, or has some general feat of badassness perpetrated against it, you drink. That's the basic rules, but for advance players there are bonus drinkies: DRINK when Shelby Foote shows bias, DRINK when there's a "That's what she said moment" (i.e. "the balls were flying withing inches of my face"), adopt a personality, like Frederick Douglass or P.G.T. Beauregard, and DRINK when they're mentioned. And, of course, "Mary Todd Drinkin": act crazy for a second then take a shot whenever Mary Todd shows up. If this seems a little disrespectful...well...there's a reason.
OR WHATEVER. This is supposed to be a blog about books, remember? And I do have one good book to talk about: Ghost Hunters, William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, by Deborah Blum. The title pretty accurately sums up what the book is about: It focuses on a period in the late 19th century during which an extraordinary collection of men and women addressed the question of the supernatural using sound scientific research. These people were not hobbyists or homeopathic crackpots, they were Nobel prize winners, writers, and academics. Their numbers included William Crookes, William James, Oliver Lodge, Lord Rayleigh, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Lewis Carrol.
This is a book that has the power to alter one's worldview (or, if you are a person with some spiritual/supernatural beliefs, reinforce it). It details many, many experiments that were conducted by this group in their efforts to prove the validity of supernatural phenomenon, and to go into all of them would take more space than is proper for a blog, but the plain truth is that–if you credit that these respectable, educated, stodgy, 19th century scientists knew their business, and conducted it scrupulously–well, dammit, they proved their case. Their tests showed, again and again, credible evidence of telepathy, telekinesis, and even communication with the dead.
I know what you're thinking: "If the father of Psychology, the grandfather of radio, and a few other various Nobel prize winners got together a hundred years ago and proved the existence of life after death, why haven't I heard about it?" Well, one of the great things about Blum as a writer is that she never breaks from her narrative to address this question, rather she writes, alongside her history of parapsychology, a history of mainstream science's hostility
to parapsychology. Again and again throughout Ghost Hunters the reader is no sooner floored by the discoveries of the psychical researchers, than he is again floored by the pigheaded disregard paid to those discoveries by the science world at large. One sees the careful, meticulous rigor that these early parapsychologists applied to their discipline, and then reads the hollow, uninformed dismissals of the traditional scientists: "Oh, you clearly weren't careful enough with your record keeping," "Ah you were clearly hoodwinked by a clever fraud," and, if all else failed "Well, clearly that couldn't have happened, so you must be making it all up." Blum paints a portrait of a young, struggling branch of learning that exists half-way between religion and science and is hated by both. The church saw Psychical Research as encroaching on its turf, and science saw it as asking questions that were inappropriate for science.
In the end, I think that what one takes away from Ghost Hunters is dependant on one's particular usage of an old philosophical device known as Occam's Razor. The Razor says that if two explanations for a given event are put forward, all things being equal, favor the simpler. So: William James, Henry Sidgwick, and their team of researchers conducted probably thousands of tests with the aim of ascertaining the existence of telepathy, life after death, and other supernatural phenomenon, and they found evidence that is solid enough that I wouldn't think twice about calling it "proof". So, you tell me which of the two following explanations is the simpler:
(1) This group of notable scientists, philosophers, and researchers, including some Nobel laureates, for no monetary gain to themselves, and at the cost of serious harm to their own reputations, devoted 30+ years of their lives to orchestrating a huge, pan-continental conspiracy with the aim of faking the existence of the supernatural. Or, (2) they did their jobs honestly, wrote down the results, and found some truth.
I think #2 is simpler, but I know many will side with #1. And never the twain shall meet. Anyhow, READ THIS BOOK. It's Amazing.
Luckily, I do happen to have a cultural axe to grind–it stems from cinema rather than literature, though. Have you guys seen the movie Waitress? Well, I had high hopes for it; I mean, it has Andy Griffith in it for fucksake, it also has Nathan Fillion (did I spell that right? Anyway, he played Captain Reynolds on Firefly. He rules. I was glad to see him getting work).
I initially struggled with my opinion of the movie, because there was a lot right with it, but what was wrong eventually won the thumb war. As an adopted semi-southerner I've grown more and more impatient with movies that assume the South, and its people, to be what I call QCQHW. This stands for Quaint Cute Quirky and Heart Warming–sort of the Fried Green Tomatoes effect. This movie is so full of folksy wisdom, ol' fashioned home-cooking, and guys named Earl it nearly collapses under the weight. I do believe the South has its own unique culture and aesthetic, but somehow it never makes it into movies. Southerners are generally smarter and a lot less friendly than they come off in films. Your typical movie-land Southerner is a drawling, sweet-natured simpleton. I'm not really sure where the myth of Southern hospitality comes from; it's always seemed pretty far-fetched to me. Here's the facts as I see them: I never saw a fist fight in my life, until the first hour of my first day of school in Memphis. I find rural Yankees to be more consistently friendly than rural Southerners. I think the Civil War left us with a feeling of needing to prove something. Who knows. Anyhow, Waitress was pretty lame.
Speaking of the Civil War, me and my friends have been playing a drinking game derived from Ken Burn's Civil War on Sundays for the last month. The rules are fairly complex, but here's the gist: You pick a side, North or South (I'm drinking for the North) and when your side is beaten in battle, or has some general feat of badassness perpetrated against it, you drink. That's the basic rules, but for advance players there are bonus drinkies: DRINK when Shelby Foote shows bias, DRINK when there's a "That's what she said moment" (i.e. "the balls were flying withing inches of my face"), adopt a personality, like Frederick Douglass or P.G.T. Beauregard, and DRINK when they're mentioned. And, of course, "Mary Todd Drinkin": act crazy for a second then take a shot whenever Mary Todd shows up. If this seems a little disrespectful...well...there's a reason.
OR WHATEVER. This is supposed to be a blog about books, remember? And I do have one good book to talk about: Ghost Hunters, William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death, by Deborah Blum. The title pretty accurately sums up what the book is about: It focuses on a period in the late 19th century during which an extraordinary collection of men and women addressed the question of the supernatural using sound scientific research. These people were not hobbyists or homeopathic crackpots, they were Nobel prize winners, writers, and academics. Their numbers included William Crookes, William James, Oliver Lodge, Lord Rayleigh, Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Russel Wallace, and Lewis Carrol.
This is a book that has the power to alter one's worldview (or, if you are a person with some spiritual/supernatural beliefs, reinforce it). It details many, many experiments that were conducted by this group in their efforts to prove the validity of supernatural phenomenon, and to go into all of them would take more space than is proper for a blog, but the plain truth is that–if you credit that these respectable, educated, stodgy, 19th century scientists knew their business, and conducted it scrupulously–well, dammit, they proved their case. Their tests showed, again and again, credible evidence of telepathy, telekinesis, and even communication with the dead.
I know what you're thinking: "If the father of Psychology, the grandfather of radio, and a few other various Nobel prize winners got together a hundred years ago and proved the existence of life after death, why haven't I heard about it?" Well, one of the great things about Blum as a writer is that she never breaks from her narrative to address this question, rather she writes, alongside her history of parapsychology, a history of mainstream science's hostility
to parapsychology. Again and again throughout Ghost Hunters the reader is no sooner floored by the discoveries of the psychical researchers, than he is again floored by the pigheaded disregard paid to those discoveries by the science world at large. One sees the careful, meticulous rigor that these early parapsychologists applied to their discipline, and then reads the hollow, uninformed dismissals of the traditional scientists: "Oh, you clearly weren't careful enough with your record keeping," "Ah you were clearly hoodwinked by a clever fraud," and, if all else failed "Well, clearly that couldn't have happened, so you must be making it all up." Blum paints a portrait of a young, struggling branch of learning that exists half-way between religion and science and is hated by both. The church saw Psychical Research as encroaching on its turf, and science saw it as asking questions that were inappropriate for science.
In the end, I think that what one takes away from Ghost Hunters is dependant on one's particular usage of an old philosophical device known as Occam's Razor. The Razor says that if two explanations for a given event are put forward, all things being equal, favor the simpler. So: William James, Henry Sidgwick, and their team of researchers conducted probably thousands of tests with the aim of ascertaining the existence of telepathy, life after death, and other supernatural phenomenon, and they found evidence that is solid enough that I wouldn't think twice about calling it "proof". So, you tell me which of the two following explanations is the simpler:
(1) This group of notable scientists, philosophers, and researchers, including some Nobel laureates, for no monetary gain to themselves, and at the cost of serious harm to their own reputations, devoted 30+ years of their lives to orchestrating a huge, pan-continental conspiracy with the aim of faking the existence of the supernatural. Or, (2) they did their jobs honestly, wrote down the results, and found some truth.
I think #2 is simpler, but I know many will side with #1. And never the twain shall meet. Anyhow, READ THIS BOOK. It's Amazing.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Humbletron 2000
REMEMBER:
1. I’m not a genius. I just like books.
2. I can be a little off-task at times.
3. I’m not exactly topical.
4. I never claimed to have good taste.
This week: How to keep writing even when you’re pretty sure you suck at it. The advantages of brain damage. Does anyone know some good work music?
So I’m writing a book. I’m about 250 pages in, which I suspect is a little over halfway. It’s a historical adventure set in the Republic of Venice in the early Fourteenth Century. It won’t change anyone’s life, but I think it will be good fun to read: and I don’t think there’s anything essentially ignoble about a little escapist literature. I had a title I thought was pretty good, but then I found out that another book had pretty much the same one. Clearly that won’t do, so the book is a bit unnamed at the moment. The closest thing I’ve got at to an idea at the moment is The Arrowcatcher, but that seems a bit corny. I’m open to suggestions.
Anyhoo, I sent the first chapter to fifteen literary agents a month or so ago. And I’ve heard back from all but three of them (rejections) so that’s a bit of a bummer. But that’s part of the process. I’ve started hanging all my rejections around the full-length mirror in my hallway, the one I always look in right before I leave the house. I’m calling this device the “Humbletron 2000,” and it’s a revolutionary new weapon in the fight against ego. I’m working on a model for the general public, it will utilize DMV photographs, love letters from girls who don’t love you anymore, and reminders of times you were publicly embarrassed, typed out in haiku-form like this:
An outdoor lunch date
Sticky birdshit in my hair
Freshman year sucked bad
It’ll catch on, just wait; everyone will have a Humbletron.
Enough. Let’s talk about Solnit’s River of Shadows, like I’ve been threatening to do for weeks.
This book is difficult to discuss because it’s hard to pin down what exactly it’s about, or even place it in a definite genre. One could point out that it focuses on the life and career of a man named Edweard Muybridge, and thus call it biography. Or one might notice how much it has to say about his work (photographer, photographic innovator) and call it art history. Then again, it lovingly describes the society and conflicts of California in the 1870’s, so maybe it’s just plain history? Of course, one can’t discount Solnit’s careful, scientific analysis of the changes wrought on the human psyche by the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the invention of the motion picture…so, sociology maybe?
Enough. This book, finally, reminds me of a number of other titles I’ve read and enjoyed that use a human life as a lens through which to view a distant time and place. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror is a famous example of this kind of writing, and also, more recently, The Devil in the White City. I love these kind of books, they have the combination of escapism, exoticism, and education that one finds in the best histories, but they also give the reader a protagonist to root for.
The main character in River of Shadows is the above-mentioned Muybridge. He is the daddy (or at the very least the granddaddy) of the motion picture. Apart from his passion for pushing the boundaries of photography, he was also a pretty interesting cat in his own right. He comes off the page as a kind artistic Prophet of Doom: an unkempt, excitable, glowering Michealangelo with vats of volatile chemicals (essential for that era’s cumbersome photography) rather than a serene painter’s palette. He is one of the horsemen of an apocalypse long-past: the end of the natural world that included humans as an integral part, and the beginning of our own age of separation from nature. He was one of the men who helped, as thinkers of his era phrased it, to “destroy time and space.” For the motion pictures he helped create can be thought of, at their core, as a technology for nullifying the effects of time.
The nineteenth century was all about destroying time and space; with the advent of the railroads time needed to cross vast areas was so reduced that the world seemed to shrink. The human race stopped living by the natural rhythms of sunrise and sunset and began to live on the industrial standard of railroads and factories. Muybridge’s part in all this was multifaceted, which is why he is such a good subject for this book. Solnit makes a compelling case for this man being the zeitgeist. He was a photographer who took pictures of the world as it was ending: capturing the transcontinental railroad’s inexorable march across native America, with each tie laid bringing death to herds and tribes. He documented Indian wars, ruins, and earthquakes. His photographs were some of the first to have a mood to them. Before him landscape photography was a collection of clear, still, straightforward pictures of mountains and rocks, images fit to be painted on teacups. Muybridge was the first photographer to prize cloudy, brooding skies and heaps of jagged rubble, to prize a landscape for its upheaval and disorder. He enjoyed photographing falling and running water, which appear white and ghostly at 1870’s shutter speeds.
One aspect of Muybridge’s life I found very interesting was the theory put forward by Solnit that the man’s passionate, moody, and at times maniacal creativity was the result of brain damage. The artist’s life can be divided neatly into a before-and-after, with the central event being a grisly stagecoach accident that nearly killed him. Before, he was a prosperous San Francisco bookseller, seemingly self-satisfied. Afterwards he was Edweard Muybridge: artist, innovator, and future murderer (he shoots his wife’s lover, good for him). So, in short, in the pursuit of personal creative development, I’m currently seeking volunteers to bash me in the face with a sledgehammer.
In other news: I’m looking for some good writing music. I like writing while listening to things that are cool and have no lyrics. I normally write to Erroll Garner’s Body and Soul, but I’ve completely worn it out. Suggestions?
1. I’m not a genius. I just like books.
2. I can be a little off-task at times.
3. I’m not exactly topical.
4. I never claimed to have good taste.
This week: How to keep writing even when you’re pretty sure you suck at it. The advantages of brain damage. Does anyone know some good work music?
So I’m writing a book. I’m about 250 pages in, which I suspect is a little over halfway. It’s a historical adventure set in the Republic of Venice in the early Fourteenth Century. It won’t change anyone’s life, but I think it will be good fun to read: and I don’t think there’s anything essentially ignoble about a little escapist literature. I had a title I thought was pretty good, but then I found out that another book had pretty much the same one. Clearly that won’t do, so the book is a bit unnamed at the moment. The closest thing I’ve got at to an idea at the moment is The Arrowcatcher, but that seems a bit corny. I’m open to suggestions.
Anyhoo, I sent the first chapter to fifteen literary agents a month or so ago. And I’ve heard back from all but three of them (rejections) so that’s a bit of a bummer. But that’s part of the process. I’ve started hanging all my rejections around the full-length mirror in my hallway, the one I always look in right before I leave the house. I’m calling this device the “Humbletron 2000,” and it’s a revolutionary new weapon in the fight against ego. I’m working on a model for the general public, it will utilize DMV photographs, love letters from girls who don’t love you anymore, and reminders of times you were publicly embarrassed, typed out in haiku-form like this:
An outdoor lunch date
Sticky birdshit in my hair
Freshman year sucked bad
It’ll catch on, just wait; everyone will have a Humbletron.
Enough. Let’s talk about Solnit’s River of Shadows, like I’ve been threatening to do for weeks.
This book is difficult to discuss because it’s hard to pin down what exactly it’s about, or even place it in a definite genre. One could point out that it focuses on the life and career of a man named Edweard Muybridge, and thus call it biography. Or one might notice how much it has to say about his work (photographer, photographic innovator) and call it art history. Then again, it lovingly describes the society and conflicts of California in the 1870’s, so maybe it’s just plain history? Of course, one can’t discount Solnit’s careful, scientific analysis of the changes wrought on the human psyche by the completion of the transcontinental railroad and the invention of the motion picture…so, sociology maybe?
Enough. This book, finally, reminds me of a number of other titles I’ve read and enjoyed that use a human life as a lens through which to view a distant time and place. Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror is a famous example of this kind of writing, and also, more recently, The Devil in the White City. I love these kind of books, they have the combination of escapism, exoticism, and education that one finds in the best histories, but they also give the reader a protagonist to root for.
The main character in River of Shadows is the above-mentioned Muybridge. He is the daddy (or at the very least the granddaddy) of the motion picture. Apart from his passion for pushing the boundaries of photography, he was also a pretty interesting cat in his own right. He comes off the page as a kind artistic Prophet of Doom: an unkempt, excitable, glowering Michealangelo with vats of volatile chemicals (essential for that era’s cumbersome photography) rather than a serene painter’s palette. He is one of the horsemen of an apocalypse long-past: the end of the natural world that included humans as an integral part, and the beginning of our own age of separation from nature. He was one of the men who helped, as thinkers of his era phrased it, to “destroy time and space.” For the motion pictures he helped create can be thought of, at their core, as a technology for nullifying the effects of time.
The nineteenth century was all about destroying time and space; with the advent of the railroads time needed to cross vast areas was so reduced that the world seemed to shrink. The human race stopped living by the natural rhythms of sunrise and sunset and began to live on the industrial standard of railroads and factories. Muybridge’s part in all this was multifaceted, which is why he is such a good subject for this book. Solnit makes a compelling case for this man being the zeitgeist. He was a photographer who took pictures of the world as it was ending: capturing the transcontinental railroad’s inexorable march across native America, with each tie laid bringing death to herds and tribes. He documented Indian wars, ruins, and earthquakes. His photographs were some of the first to have a mood to them. Before him landscape photography was a collection of clear, still, straightforward pictures of mountains and rocks, images fit to be painted on teacups. Muybridge was the first photographer to prize cloudy, brooding skies and heaps of jagged rubble, to prize a landscape for its upheaval and disorder. He enjoyed photographing falling and running water, which appear white and ghostly at 1870’s shutter speeds.
One aspect of Muybridge’s life I found very interesting was the theory put forward by Solnit that the man’s passionate, moody, and at times maniacal creativity was the result of brain damage. The artist’s life can be divided neatly into a before-and-after, with the central event being a grisly stagecoach accident that nearly killed him. Before, he was a prosperous San Francisco bookseller, seemingly self-satisfied. Afterwards he was Edweard Muybridge: artist, innovator, and future murderer (he shoots his wife’s lover, good for him). So, in short, in the pursuit of personal creative development, I’m currently seeking volunteers to bash me in the face with a sledgehammer.
In other news: I’m looking for some good writing music. I like writing while listening to things that are cool and have no lyrics. I normally write to Erroll Garner’s Body and Soul, but I’ve completely worn it out. Suggestions?
Monday, May 14, 2007
Shooting puppies is just wrong, even if it is literary.
REMEMBER
1. I'm not a genius. I just like books.
2. I can be a little off-task at times
3. I'm not exactly topical.
4. I never said I had good taste.
1. I'm not a genius. I just like books.
2. I can be a little off-task at times
3. I'm not exactly topical.
4. I never said I had good taste.
Howdy,
I say howdy because it's been Wild West week in my reading life. Apart from my continuing work on the Inferno I've wrapped up Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and started work on Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows (which I'll talk about next time). In other news, there is now a picture of me on the blog, so you know what I look like. Exciting, yes? No? Not even a little?
You're a fucker.
So, fucker, have you read Blood Meridian? It's. . .ah. . .good. Possibly.
Listen, I'm not really sure what to say about this book. It's definitely bold, definitely unique, definitely orgasmically violent, but if you're idea of a good Western includes any of the following elements: rough-hewn, plainspoken heroes, black-hatted villains, great-hearted heroines in gingham dresses meeting life's hardships with stoic courage, a moral universe looked after by a just God, or The Duke, then I don't think this book is for you.
The book is set primarily in the southwestern U.S. and Mexico during the 1850's, and centers on the. . .eh. . ."adventures" of a character known only as The Kid. He joins up with a group of mercenary Indian killers contracted by the Mexican Government to collect Apache Scalps. Cormac McCarthy's West is a place of unrelenting and senseless bloodshed, with all parties killing all parties for any (or no) reason throughout the book. Thus, it is only a matter of time before this little army starts killing pretty much anyone they run across.
McCarthy's West is also a land of almost supernatural beauty, of dense primeval forests and high mountain passes, of volcanoes where the prints of cloven hoofs can be seen in dried lava, of deserts where lonely trees are decorated by the dead, or burn for no reason, where blue fire and lightning dance around horses and riders. The petty, pointless brutality of The Kid and his companions stands out even more starkly against this backdrop of lovingly-described natural grandeur. The humans are like cockroaches scuttling through the walls of Versailles.
His writing is, for the most part, very minimal. The thoughts and emotions of his characters are almost never revealed, and dialogue is pared down to almost nothing (FUN LITERARY DRINKING GAME FOR BLOOD MERIDIAN: every time a character spits instead of talking, chug a beer! Also: anytime anyone dies, in any way or for any reason, take a shot. . .no wait, that would kill you) There are only two things Cormac McCarthy seems to really enjoy describing: landscapes and gore. His writings about death and dying, and all the many, many wonderful ways in which they can be brought about, are almost erotic. He loves to talk about blood, how it squirts and flows and arcs from wounds (skeet skeet), and how it congeals on stone floors and soaks into one's hair and clothing. There are corpses of all kinds, minutely described, in varying states of freshness, littering his landscape. I enjoyed the dead baby tree particularly. There's also plenty of fun for animals: donkeys falling off cliffs, snake-bit horses with hugely swollen heads, and let's not forget when the Judge buys, and immediately shoots, some puppies. Mr. McCarthy likes some death. I've heard some of his other books flirt with Necrophilia. Hmmm. . . I wonder.
But...did I like it? Yes, I'd have to say I did. It was weird, it disturbed me, but at least it was different. One of the book's saving graces is the character of Judge Holden (the above-mentioned puppy-shooter), who is perhaps the best villain in American literature. He is colossal, obese, pale, hairless and gleefully, insanely amoral. And there is also some strong evidence that he's not entirely human. First of all, he's omnipresent, appearing as if by magic whenever there's some good quality killing to be done. He never ages, he apparently knows everything, and whenever he opens his mouth you can count receiving a first-class mindfuck.
I'm not sure what the hell the Judge is, other than scary. So I consulted my brain trust (folks I know who are just as nerdy as I am) and asked them what they thought. Among those who've read Blood Meridian the answers were diverse; one guy though he was god, another thought he was the spirit of war, most thought he was the Devil. I'm nursing a theory that the Judge is the spirit of the modern age, but I'll need to make some notes before I defend my case.
In other news: I WON FIVE GRAND!
I'm not really sure how this happened. All I know is that my school, the University of Memphis, has elected to give me something called the Graduate Research Award. I don't really know what it is, I've never heard of it, and I didn't apply for it, but I'm gonna ride that $5,000 into the damn sunset. I may have to reconsider that whole "worst student in my program's history" thing, though. It's a shame, I kinda liked the distinction.
The most positive thing about the money is that it will give me the financial ability to not work this summer, so I can focus on My Book. This entry is running long, so I'll tell you about it next time.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Sending Your Enemies to Rot in Hell for Fun and Profit
So I'm reading The Inferno right now and I can't think of a better way to kick off a summer in Memphis. It's May 11 and we're already pushing 90 degrees, with a humidity factor of...well...too damn high anyway. To be accurate, there isn't nearly as much fire in the Inferno as one might expect. So far Hell's only had gale-force winds, chilly rain (which falls forever on the gluttonous) and stinking bogs full up with sinners. Fun!
Some people think Dante was an egomaniac, which is understandable considering that he pretty much comes out of the gate saying he's the greatest poet ever, the successor of Homer and Virgil, and a man for whom God is bending the rules of the universe. Far from being turned off, I'm awed. I mean, check out the balls on this guy. In modern parlance he's basically grabbing his crotch, throwing the goat, and shrieking "I'm motherfuckin' Dante, Bitches, whooooo!" Considering what the man had been through (exile, accusations of treason, the loss of family and friends and his nice cushy political career) he'd have to be an egomaniac just to keep going. And how therapeutic must it have been to write the Divine Comedy? Living well might be the best revenge, but if you can't live well then you can always write a long poem in which you send your loved ones to heaven and your enemies to hell, where they rot and fester and have their heads turned around backward so their tears fall down the cracks of their asses.
But Seriously Folks, this IS a good read (the translation I'm using is bad ass, it's by Anthony Esolen and has beautiful engravings by Gustave Dore). Many people are smart enough to not enter into battles they cannot win, and even good readers will shy away from six hundred year old poems. I am pleased to say that Dante's Inferno is in no way the uphill struggle I feared. You see, I recently read Paradise Lost, and while I did eventually get through it, and even enjoy it, and not just in that "hah, another one bites the dust" kind of way, it was the reading equivalent of trench warfare. I lost a leg. Dante's reading difficulty, to extend the battle metaphor, is more like a pillow fight with the elderly: don't worry, you can handle it. Take the appropriate precautions, of course, carry a pocket dictionary, have two bookmarks (one for the end notes, one for your place), and drink a cup of coffee (because coffee is tasty).
And, before my sarcasm runs off with the show, let us not forget to mention how beautiful it is. True, I am reading it in translation, so I cannot grasp the fullness of the poet's intention, but I can respond to the story that is being told. The Inferno, very simply, has a lot to say about love, justice, and the importance of overcoming fear and living well. These are all undying issues, and explain to a great extent why the work has endured.
So anyway. In this, the second installment of BASSD, I have decided to take a que from Dante Alighieri. Ahem: "I'm motherfuckin' Book Guy, bitches. Whoooooo!"
There, if that doesn't keep you reading I don't know what will.
Some people think Dante was an egomaniac, which is understandable considering that he pretty much comes out of the gate saying he's the greatest poet ever, the successor of Homer and Virgil, and a man for whom God is bending the rules of the universe. Far from being turned off, I'm awed. I mean, check out the balls on this guy. In modern parlance he's basically grabbing his crotch, throwing the goat, and shrieking "I'm motherfuckin' Dante, Bitches, whooooo!" Considering what the man had been through (exile, accusations of treason, the loss of family and friends and his nice cushy political career) he'd have to be an egomaniac just to keep going. And how therapeutic must it have been to write the Divine Comedy? Living well might be the best revenge, but if you can't live well then you can always write a long poem in which you send your loved ones to heaven and your enemies to hell, where they rot and fester and have their heads turned around backward so their tears fall down the cracks of their asses.
But Seriously Folks, this IS a good read (the translation I'm using is bad ass, it's by Anthony Esolen and has beautiful engravings by Gustave Dore). Many people are smart enough to not enter into battles they cannot win, and even good readers will shy away from six hundred year old poems. I am pleased to say that Dante's Inferno is in no way the uphill struggle I feared. You see, I recently read Paradise Lost, and while I did eventually get through it, and even enjoy it, and not just in that "hah, another one bites the dust" kind of way, it was the reading equivalent of trench warfare. I lost a leg. Dante's reading difficulty, to extend the battle metaphor, is more like a pillow fight with the elderly: don't worry, you can handle it. Take the appropriate precautions, of course, carry a pocket dictionary, have two bookmarks (one for the end notes, one for your place), and drink a cup of coffee (because coffee is tasty).
And, before my sarcasm runs off with the show, let us not forget to mention how beautiful it is. True, I am reading it in translation, so I cannot grasp the fullness of the poet's intention, but I can respond to the story that is being told. The Inferno, very simply, has a lot to say about love, justice, and the importance of overcoming fear and living well. These are all undying issues, and explain to a great extent why the work has endured.
So anyway. In this, the second installment of BASSD, I have decided to take a que from Dante Alighieri. Ahem: "I'm motherfuckin' Book Guy, bitches. Whoooooo!"
There, if that doesn't keep you reading I don't know what will.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Howdy, Acolytes!
Memphis is a surprisingly good town for a reader. This has much to do with the way that summer here is so goddam hot that all one wants to do is sit naked in front of an AC unit with a beer. Such immobility lends itself very well to reading, and it's one of the curses and blessings of books, and the curses and blessings of books are what I want to talk to you about.
My name is Colin, I'm 28, and I've been a reader all my life, or since age seven, anyway, when I participated in Lake Louise elementary school's "Read-Aloud Crowd". I had the book The House with a Clock in its Walls read to me by my Mom, and for this non-feat won a trip to the Museum of Science and Industry. I would still recommend this book to anybody, by the way. What could be a better intro to the universe of letters than a story about bright, apple-cheeked kids raising evil corpses from the dead? Nothing, of course. I maintain, to this day, a great love of evil, reanimated corpses, but now I tend to get that fix from the movies.
So, why am I doing this? I guess what fired me up to try the new-fangled blogging thing was a statistic I heard the other day (you'll find I'm a person who is troubled perhaps too much by statistics; I've been hoarding canned goods and sucking my thumb since I saw An Inconvenient Truth). What I heard is this: people in their forties read 10% less than people in their fifties, and people in their twenties read 10% less than people in their thirties, and so on down the line.
I find this ominous, not only because I'm an aspiring writer, but also because it reminds me of my absolute favorite quote: W.C. Fields said that "Life is a banquet, and everywhere you look some poor son of a bitch is starving to death." I doubt he was talking about reading, specifically, but more about using your time on earth to enjoy the full spectrum of pleasures. To me reading is the main course at the bar-b-que of the arts, and art accounts for a little over half of that aforementioned pleasure spectrum. Books get us all the way to ROY G, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Sure, a lot of people go in for BIV and BIV alone, and I'm not faulting them–I think bowling's awesome too– but if BIV was all I had I'd be pretty bored pretty quick.
Has the world reached a point where it no longer wants or needs books? I'm afraid it has. I'm trying be a writer, as I mentioned earlier, and the decline of readership wouldn't worry me so much if I was better at it. I am, at best, a B- writer, and I don't think the industry can support anything less than A+'s anymore. So what do I do? I do what I can. I buy books, I write, I light a candle and sing hymns and ritually smack my head with a splintery board. Mostly, I start a blog to talk about reading and life.
So let me tell you about The Stack.
The Stack is a complete denial of conservation physics: it gets taller, it gets shorter, parts are added, parts taken away, but it never disappears. It's the three foot, papery monster that sits by my turntable, flipping me the bird and scratching itself. It's the books I have (for some reason) paid for, and that I'm determined to read. I do not remember a time when The Stack didn't, in some form, exist. If you're a reader you might understand this urge to hoard, or if not understand then at least recognize it and sympathize, as one junky to another.
This blog is about my ongoing struggle with The Stack, and I hope you will join me as I duke it out. There's four things I want you know on the front end (and these will be placed at the front of every posting).
1. I'm not a genius. I just like books.
What qualifies me to write about books? Absolutely jack shit. Nothing. Nada. My undergrad degree wasn't even in English, and while I am currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing, I'm confident that I'm one of the worst students in the history of my program. After two and a half years I'm still a little hazy about what "modernism" actually means. So don't talk theory with me, we won't get far. I want to shoot the breeze about books, not dissect them. Also, I'm self-editing, so forgive the occasional typo.
2. I'm not exactly topical.
What ends up in The Stack is governed by no other force than my mood the last time I was at the bookstore. It's a mixed bag, you're going to get novels, history, biography, science and whatever else. Some of the books will be current, many will not. It could be David Sedaris this week and Homer the next. But that's how people read, isn't it?
3. I can be a little off-task at times.
I'm a culture junky and I have adult ADD, so forgive me if I get a bit tangential. While I love books more than anything else, I might occasionally have something I'm dying to say to you about movies or music or TV, bear with me.
4. I never claimed to have good taste.
This last one is important. I love Filet Mignon, but sometimes I just want a damn cheeseburger. It won't all be Anna Karenina around here, as you'll find out when I get around to Bruce Campbell's biography If Chins Could Kill (currently at the bottom of The Stack).
So, I guess that's it for now. Stay tuned, folks, next week I'll be talking about The Inferno, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Edweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.
My name is Colin, I'm 28, and I've been a reader all my life, or since age seven, anyway, when I participated in Lake Louise elementary school's "Read-Aloud Crowd". I had the book The House with a Clock in its Walls read to me by my Mom, and for this non-feat won a trip to the Museum of Science and Industry. I would still recommend this book to anybody, by the way. What could be a better intro to the universe of letters than a story about bright, apple-cheeked kids raising evil corpses from the dead? Nothing, of course. I maintain, to this day, a great love of evil, reanimated corpses, but now I tend to get that fix from the movies.
So, why am I doing this? I guess what fired me up to try the new-fangled blogging thing was a statistic I heard the other day (you'll find I'm a person who is troubled perhaps too much by statistics; I've been hoarding canned goods and sucking my thumb since I saw An Inconvenient Truth). What I heard is this: people in their forties read 10% less than people in their fifties, and people in their twenties read 10% less than people in their thirties, and so on down the line.
I find this ominous, not only because I'm an aspiring writer, but also because it reminds me of my absolute favorite quote: W.C. Fields said that "Life is a banquet, and everywhere you look some poor son of a bitch is starving to death." I doubt he was talking about reading, specifically, but more about using your time on earth to enjoy the full spectrum of pleasures. To me reading is the main course at the bar-b-que of the arts, and art accounts for a little over half of that aforementioned pleasure spectrum. Books get us all the way to ROY G, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Sure, a lot of people go in for BIV and BIV alone, and I'm not faulting them–I think bowling's awesome too– but if BIV was all I had I'd be pretty bored pretty quick.
Has the world reached a point where it no longer wants or needs books? I'm afraid it has. I'm trying be a writer, as I mentioned earlier, and the decline of readership wouldn't worry me so much if I was better at it. I am, at best, a B- writer, and I don't think the industry can support anything less than A+'s anymore. So what do I do? I do what I can. I buy books, I write, I light a candle and sing hymns and ritually smack my head with a splintery board. Mostly, I start a blog to talk about reading and life.
So let me tell you about The Stack.
The Stack is a complete denial of conservation physics: it gets taller, it gets shorter, parts are added, parts taken away, but it never disappears. It's the three foot, papery monster that sits by my turntable, flipping me the bird and scratching itself. It's the books I have (for some reason) paid for, and that I'm determined to read. I do not remember a time when The Stack didn't, in some form, exist. If you're a reader you might understand this urge to hoard, or if not understand then at least recognize it and sympathize, as one junky to another.
This blog is about my ongoing struggle with The Stack, and I hope you will join me as I duke it out. There's four things I want you know on the front end (and these will be placed at the front of every posting).
1. I'm not a genius. I just like books.
What qualifies me to write about books? Absolutely jack shit. Nothing. Nada. My undergrad degree wasn't even in English, and while I am currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing, I'm confident that I'm one of the worst students in the history of my program. After two and a half years I'm still a little hazy about what "modernism" actually means. So don't talk theory with me, we won't get far. I want to shoot the breeze about books, not dissect them. Also, I'm self-editing, so forgive the occasional typo.
2. I'm not exactly topical.
What ends up in The Stack is governed by no other force than my mood the last time I was at the bookstore. It's a mixed bag, you're going to get novels, history, biography, science and whatever else. Some of the books will be current, many will not. It could be David Sedaris this week and Homer the next. But that's how people read, isn't it?
3. I can be a little off-task at times.
I'm a culture junky and I have adult ADD, so forgive me if I get a bit tangential. While I love books more than anything else, I might occasionally have something I'm dying to say to you about movies or music or TV, bear with me.
4. I never claimed to have good taste.
This last one is important. I love Filet Mignon, but sometimes I just want a damn cheeseburger. It won't all be Anna Karenina around here, as you'll find out when I get around to Bruce Campbell's biography If Chins Could Kill (currently at the bottom of The Stack).
So, I guess that's it for now. Stay tuned, folks, next week I'll be talking about The Inferno, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and Rebecca Solnit's River of Shadows: Edweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West.
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