Ian McEwan is a swell writer I just can't get passionate about

Ian McEwan is a swell writer I just can't get passionate about.  Most of the time, when I read a new author, if I like him (or her) I read more.  That makes sense.  In some cases, I don't like the book I read, but I can tell there's more there--that the author in question has a ton of talent and a good voice and a masterpiece somewhere in his back catalog, or in his future for that matter; so in some of these cases, I'll read and read until...well, until I finish the next book, find myself mildly disappointed, and put it on the shelf, and after a year or two, I'll find another book by said-same author in a store and decide to give them another shot.

 

New Media Wedding Cakes

Feminist Noir and the Rare Pathetic Sociopath: Natsuo Kirino's "Real World"

When I decided to read "Real World" by Natsuo Kirino I was looking at it online, and I wanted it right now so I drove over to the Grove, the only Barnes & Noble in L.A. that I could find had it in stock.  It was only after I bought it that I read a blurb on the back cover that would have sold me on the book twice over: the Plains Dealer describing it as a "feminist noir."

The story of "Real World" is simple: most of it is told from the points-of-view of four Japanese girls who befriend--or at least are fascinated--by a boy, called Worm, who has killed his mother.

The VALIS Trilogy leads to one conclusion: Philip K. Dick was fucking nuts

I have read, now, all of Philip K. Dick's final works, his so-called "Valis" trilogy, although "Valis" should technically be capitalized, as it is an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System.  It was also, apparently, a very real hallucination that sent a pink laser into Philip K. Dick's brain after he saw a fish necklace around a door-to-door proselytizer's neck.  So you know all of this is going to be pretty much totally-****ing-insane.

That cat is terrified.

For the uninitiated: Philip K. Dick was a science fiction novelist from the nineteen-fifties to the eighties when he died, and is the mind behind the stories later adapted into movies like "Total Recall," "Minority Report," and "Blade Runner."  His earlier books are chock-a-block with humor and mindscrews and generally uneven wackiness, sort of like if Jorge Luis Borges stretched his stories to two-hundred pages and included a lot more in the way of drugs and robots.  Later in life, Dick did indeed have some crazy sort of vision, and it made his books in most cases better, a little more psychologically grounded (in terms of characters, if not in terms of plot) and it is my opinion, regarding said vision, that no matter how long the explanation it will not make a whole lot of sense to a sane person, so just stick with what I wrote earlier: pink laser, fish, meaning of the universe.  Or something.

Commercials are the New Surrealism

I don't know what to make of this Japanese commercial for ramen soup.

An Open Letter to Miley Cyrus

Dear Ms. Cyrus,
Sorry to bother you.  I just want page hits.
Have a great day,

Alex Crist

The Incomprehensible Greatness of Dante

Years ago, when I first started reading seriously, trying to go through most if not all of the classics, I picked up and read Dante's Inferno, the Longfellow translation, because that was the one available at Barnes and Noble.  I didn't get much out of it: the next year, when I read Purgatorio and Paradiso in Mandelbaum's translation, I still didn't get much out of it; I was aware that Dante was important, the national poet of Italy--and you can tell, flipping through the endnotes of these volumes, that there is a lot of esoteric stuff you're just not going to get without a lot of work.  In all of the Divine Comedy there are figures from history both famous (Judas, Cassius, Brutus) and mildly famous (Pope Boniface) as well as obscurities, like Dante Alighieri's contemporaries, who he either wanted to praise by putting them in the empyrean or criticize by putting them in one of his circles of Hell, because when you don't get along with someone, writing an epic poem and including them getting tortured for eternity is the best revenge.
 

In any event, I read the Comedy, found some of the poetry moving and found much of it going over my head in a way where I said to myself, I'll figure it out later, and by later, I meant never.  I can't imagine ever putting in the effort to get Dante properly, but because of his place in the Western Canon (he's up there) I did want to get some appreciation of his impact.  And so it was that I picked up Erich Auerbach's short study, "Dante: Poet of the Secular World," which is illuminating in large part if aimed at a more scholarly audience than myself.

Lost in the rain in Juarez

I'm a nihilistic pessimist at the best of times, so when a non-fiction book about some serious problem--the drug war, Afghanistan, political corruption, fiscal corruption--ends with a chapter on how things are really turning around, how there are good people fighting the good fight, it disappoints me to no end.  That's because it's a compromise: it suggests hope where there might not be reason for it, giving a tragic situation a Hollywood ending, and ironically, depressing me, at least, even more.  If a book about the banking crisis of 2008 ends with the inspirational story of ten different people all doing the right thing, I think: there are only ten people doing the right thing?  And they're supposed to stop all this horrible shit?  Acting like the problem is being solved negates the tragedy of the problem in the first place.

So it's a very dark relief to read "Murder City," by Charles Bowden, about the violence from the war on drugs in Juarez, Mexico.  There is little sentimentality.  There are many slaughters.  The problems he addresses are not insoluble, but nevertheless they will not soon be solved.  And throughout the whole thing, he only describes--albeit very sympathetically--three or four residents who fight the noble fight, and it is all the more affecting because the reader is made to understand that they are just drops in the bucket.

NY Times on Pynchon's New Book

I've already ordered my copy of the new Thomas Pynchon novel, "The Bleeding Edge."  I am excited for several reasons--so many, in fact, that as I already said, I pre-ordered a hardcover book that will probably cause my backpack to double in weight.

Then this, in the New York Times review:
"The result, disappointingly, is a scattershot work that is, by turns, entertaining and wearisome, energetic and hokey, delightfully evocative and cheaply sensational; dead-on in its conjuring of zeitgeist-y atmospherics, but often slow-footed and ham-handed in its orchestration of social details."
To which I say: isn't that the point of Thomas Pynchon novel?
Also, New York Magazine had a pretty interesting essay on Pynchon the-guy-himself, who yada-yada-yada is notoriously camera-shy/reclusive/private/etc.  Still worth reading.

Jim Thompson goes to Hell

Of course I've read Jim Thompson before, probably the darkest of the great hardboiled crime novelists, and the most cursory knowledge of his writing bears out that title.  He's a great writer with that age-old problem of having written many good books but perhaps not great ones; and he's probably too dark to gain too large a following, the way another great writer with no clear cut masterpieces, Philip K. Dick, has.  Despite his obscurity, Thompson is a fascinating case study in terms of learning how fiction does what it does.  Example 1.  (How's that for a segue?) Lou Ford in "The Killer Inside Me" is his own kind of Satan, creating his own kind of Hell, but the motif I'm talking about comes at the end, when he's in the asylum.

This is what his books looked like when they were published. 

The cover/content discrepancy has seldom been so high.

Jim Thompson is an interesting writer.  I first read him years ago (by which I mean, like, five years ago) after going through all of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett's novels; I had an affinity for him the second I read that he thought of himself as a "dime-store Dostoevsky," and an even deeper affinity when I read on his Wikipedia page that he had gotten married in my home town of Marysville, Kansas.  Whether or not the latter is true--it's not the kind of town people lie about to tenuously link it to semi-obscure pulp writers--the Dostoevsky thing is pretty far-fetched.

"Rio"

Great band, great song, amazingly awful video.

"Fleur de Saison" by Emilie Simon

This song is too catchy for its own good.  Also, not speaking French, I don't understand the lyrics, but the techno-beat does not match up in my mind with "girl being taken over by plants."

RIP Elmore Leonard

Elmore Leonard has died.

New York magazine has the best obit.

My personal favorite is probably "Split Images."  "Killshot" is good too.  Also good: everything else he ever wrote.

Nighthawks at the Flatiron

In celebration of Hopper Drawing, a life-size window installation of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942) is on view inside the landmark Flatiron Building's prow, one of the original architectural inspirations for the iconic painting.

From the Whitney Museum's tumblr, via Metafilter.

"Illuminatus!" and the Midgets in Pynchon's Shadow

After hearing a lot about the book and hating the idea of carrying around any book that manages to be two inches thick, I found, a few years ago, a paperback copy of "The Eye in the Pyramid," the first book in Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus!" trilogy.  I first saw it in a friend's dorm room; I read about it when reading up on conspiracy fiction and counter-culture literature.  It has a reputation as a cult novel, a crazy libertarian magnum opus.

"The Great Inversion": Urban Planning and Learning to Let Go (and also a Lou Reed/David Bowie video)

So I enjoy, or at least I like the idea of myself, being someone who enjoys, learning new things, and so occasionally at a bookstore I'll go kill a few minutes looking through a shelf or even an aisle I don't regularly go down.  Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City" came in on the shelf side of that rather irrelevant little equation.
All I knew about urban planning was that it existed, that there was someone named Jane Jacobs, and that the older parts of European cities possess the kind of topographical geometry would drive Euclid himself to suicide.  Also, that the conventional model of urban sociology in the twentieth century involved poor people living in the heart of the city, and the richer folks moving the suburbs.  Ehrenhalt's thesis is that that process has been (wait for it) inverted, and that in many cases (although not all) the inner cities are gentrifying.

Whither Authorial Intent? "The Petting Zoo" by Jim Carroll

Not that authorial intent should have anything to do with it.  "The Petting Zoo" is an interesting book on several levels, least of which is the question of whether or not I would recommend it to someone else: I'm not loving it, but I could easily see why people would.  This is problematic for me.  The main character is fairly likeable, except that he's an artist who found success early in his life, which, as a frustrated creative type, I find envy-inducing, and with the envy comes contempt.  That's a personal hang-up; furthermore, Billy Wolfram, the protagonist, is overly serious, dismissive of rock music, self-involved, etc.  When a protagonist fills the book the way Billy does here, it's easy to assume that he is an author's stand-in, but here, despite no doubt having much in common with Jim Carroll, the main character is somewhat at odds with the world he lives in, as the narrator describes it.  Billy and the narrator are not one.  Whatever Billy's faults, I find myself suspecting that that was an authorial choice, not the non-decision of an obviously narcissistic creator.  Billy's limits--as an artist, as a person--make him real, and the distance between the narrator and Billy are key to making the book work.

 

"The Good, the Bad and the Queen" by The Good, the Bad and the Queen, from the album, The Good, the Bad and the Queen

One of Damon Albarn's things.

"The Affirmation" by Christopher Priest is pleasantly dissembling my brain

I am almost done reading Christopher Priest's novel, "The Affirmation," and I have a dilemma: as soon as I finish a book, my brain immediately moves on to whatever is next, allowing myself only an hour or two to properly process what came before.  In this case, I'm writing forty pages from the end, before I lose track of what happened and start staring at my "To-Read" pile.  So:

 "The Affirmation" is about a young British guy named Peter Sinclair whose life has gone to shit.  He's lost his girlfriend, his job, so on and so forth, and so he moves to the country and tries to a write an autobiography so that he can gain some understanding of where his life went wrong.  The problem is, because everything that he's trying to write about has so much baggage, he can only touch on the truth by camouflaging everything.  He gives his parents, his girlfriend, new names; London becomes Jethra.  A few chapters later, we're reading Peter Sinclair's memories of growing up in Jethra, where he has recently won a lottery allowing him to undergo a procedure that would allow him a kind of immortality: really, just an extensively increased lifespan.  The trouble is that the procedure induces amnesia, and so before the operation, Peter Sinclair has to write an autobiography so that he can revisit the details of his life.  However, Jethra's Peter Sinclair has already written an autobiography, except that to get at his own deeper truth, he had to change the names: his family's, his girlfriend's.  Jethra becomes London.

Bovine Folk Dancing

A friend was watching this on Youtube and I told him that cows actually do this in Kansas, it's just that normally they do it at night, a little more slowly, and that the video only went viral because someone finally filmed it during the daytime.

 
He did not believe me.

Papercraft Cthulhu

Got bored today and, like someone wanting to please an ancient god, sleeping beneath the surface of the ocean, waiting for the time to come and dwarf the Earth in its cosmic, eldritch enormity--fearful of the Great Old Ones--knowing the veritable hell that awaits humanity when their omnipotent whims turn toward mankind, I decided to make a minimalist paper Cthulhu.

For more information on Cthulhu (pronounced "Kuh-too-loo" by those not gifted with the ancient tongue of the Shoggoths) go to Wikipedia.  Or read my older post about H.P. Lovecraft.

You can also read "The Call of Cthulhu" online, go to TV Tropes, or go to Rhode Island where surely your soul shall not be stolen, but rather rendered meaningless by the cosmic horror that awaits you at the H.P. Lovecraft convention, which I guess they have.

Appropriate music:

"Common People" by Pulp

I visited a billionaire's house today for work-related reasons and, outside of being an amazing estate, it made me reconsider Marxism and etc., etc., gave me an excuse to listen to Pulp, and as you see here, to post the epic song "Common People."  What a very 90s video it is, too.

Paul Theroux writes like he has a hangover

The function of travel writing, if it needs one--the function of any writing, really, or any art--is to either entertain, or interest, or inform, or express some great pretentious truth.  Travel writing is fun, or should be fun, because it should be a.) entertaining--boy, vacation, that's gotta be good times! b.) informative, because hey--other countries?  Surely I'll learn something!  and c.) interesting, i.e., surely there's a reason to keep reading.

"Deep Night," by Sonny Clark

One of the better tracks from "Cool Struttin'" by Sonny Clark, one of those jazz albums I bought years ago but haven't listened to nearly enough.  Hard bop is the term for it, according to Wikipedia.
Fun Wiki-fact: trumpeter Art Farmer, who plays on this track, rented his trumpet out to Miles Davis who had had to sell his own for drugs.  Not-so-fun-fact: Miles Davis died in Santa Monica, not so far from where I live.  I'm going to have to go pay my respects some time, In a Silent Way.  The thought makes me Kind of Blue--he really was Somethin' Else!*

*Somethin' Else is a great album, and he plays on it, but it's Cannonball Adderley's claim to fame, so I'm only including this in the Groaner-Title-Drop-fest because I couldn't think of a better third without using one of the albums with the word 'Miles' in the title.

H.P. Lovecraft: why the Old Ones belong in the canon

Holy shit.

I had never avoided H.P. Lovecraft, not the way I avoided, say, “Gravity’s Rainbow.”  He was always on the margins: part of the problem is that I have a real tough time getting into short stories, and the majority of Lovecraft’s output is in short stories.  The other day, though, I was at the library bookstore and—while I do not generally look at their science fiction selections, because I do not need to read a Dune-sequel when I have not yet read the first—I found an old paperback with a cheesy cover that features a monster out of the movie “Yellow Submarine.”  I bought it for a dollar.  I haven’t finished it.  I feel premature, writing this, without having finished the collection, but at the rate I’m going…okay, I've read the first few.

Radiohead on a Dead Tree

Via http://www.gizmodo.com. "Idioteque" by Radiohead etched onto a wooden LP and played. Fascinating stuff.

Gravity's Rainbow vs. The Brothers Karamazov

Two caveats, to start with.  The first is that I got a letter today (a real live letter) from Google suggesting, among other things, that if I were to focus my blog on one subject--or even two--I might receive more hits.  I thought this was interesting, and a good suggestion, and I resolved to focus more on retro-futurism, Buckminster Fuller, and century-old illustrations of hypothetical astronauts.
However (caveat two) I was walking back from the coffee shop after finishing my German homework and got to thinking about the two BIG books I read last year, "Gravity's Rainbow" by Thomas Pynchon, and "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

On the surface these books have nothing in common except that they are both long and difficult; the Pynchon is more difficult than the Dostoevsky, I would say, but they are both supremely rewarding masterworks of modern literature.

Christopher Nolan vs. David Fincher

I am not among the first thousand people to write about “The Social Network,” but to be fair, there is a lot to discuss in that.  I’ve been a fan of David Fincher since “Fight Club” and, rewatching this one for the third time, I’m struck by how distinct his style is: high contrast cinematography, all very dark, and a pace—and editing—that is, as far as I can tell, without parallel among modern auteurs.  I used to get into a nerd debate with a friend over who was the better new director: Christopher Nolan or David Fincher, “new” in this usage referring to them being, basically, younger than Martin Scorsese—and I will always vote for David Fincher. 

Iris Murdoch's "The Black Prince" and the two biggest themes I could cull from it

I recently realized, to my great embarrassment, that all of my favorite writers were men.  What's more is all of my favorite books are by men.  Some of them were of course gay, but I doubt that that should make any difference in terms of gender--although curiously a character in Iris Murdoch's "The Black Prince," Francis Marlowe, suspects all writers of being homosexual.

Along with Jane Austen, Iris Murdoch is one of those writers that I will probably soon revisit.  "The Black Prince" struck as a fairly excellent dramatic novel, situated, in modern terms, equidistantly from Martin Amis' "The Information" and Nabokov's "Lolita."  It features the academic and literary envy that is the theme of the former and the forbidden romance of the latter, although handled very differently, along with the question of the unreliable narrator.