a chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure....
Who said Saddam Hussein was like Hitler? All the TF121 guys laughed at him, shouted "Wuss!", threw playing cards at him (the Ace in the hole), offered pistol ammunition. They initially thought they'd captured Fidel Castro, but then he started speaking in English, so they figured it was the Unibomber. He even had a manifesto down there next to his box of money; it begins: "I'm a sick man... a mean man. There's nothing attractive about me. I think there's something wrong with my liver."
"He even stole his manifesto!" remarked one soldier in dismay. "We were all shocked when it turned out to be Saddam," said another. "It was the grey hair dye that threw us off."
When he heard the news, President Blackface ran outside and shot his gun into the air. But then the police came and tried to arrest him. "Haven't you heard?" he cried. "Saddam has been captured!" So then the police shot their guns into the air, then more police showed up, and it was like a fission of falling slugs all around Washington -- a new tale of two cities.
Later, the President addressed the country:
"My fellow Americans,
"We have found Saddam; he was cowering in a hole with a box of money down by the river. But I have learned the hard way this is not an excuse to shoot guns in the air. Recently you have seen video of many Iraqis doing this. For your own safety and dignity I implore you not to imitate them. Or me. This is a strange custom that we've outgrown even in Texas. We now know that reports over the past few months of sporadic gunfire throughout Baghdad were not indications of insurgents, but rather of birthday parties and weddings. So many lives lost needlessly! One Iraqi custom that I wish Americans *would* emulate, however, is the parading of giant portraits of the Glorious Leader down the street...."
And so on like that about customs.
After the speech was over the President went to the Saddam is Dead party over at the Pentagon (he's actually alive but the signs had already been made) where he met Don Rumsfeld already deep in his cups (as the SECDEF likes to phrase it). "Ya know..." slurred Rumsfeld, "I always knew we'd catch Santa Claus some day. Oh there were doubters! Naysayers and detractors! But I told them... I told them..."The President then watched some movies:
Last Samurai
At least nobody had the line: "Today is a good day to die" (which everybody knows is a Klingon proverb) ("Klingon" btw is NOT in the MS Word dictionary, even though "Spock" is). This movie has some clichés -- for instance he earns their respect by getting up every time they knock him down -- and it has Tom Cruise, who never feels right in the part, but it also has Samurai and Ninjas (like pirates and mutants, Ninjas always make a thing better), some cool sword fighting, costumes, beautiful locations, and a Gatling Gun. So 7of10.
Bad Santa
I suspect the script for this movie may have been inspired by the classic drunk suicidal Santa photo (about which I once wrote my own doodad). It's very funny in an awful way (but not as awful as something by Neil LaBute for instance). 7of10.
Much better than I expected it to be, especially for a Sciffy production. I'm still unclear on whether this is just a miniseries or a full series, but I would watch more if they make more. 6of10.
Hmm, the Times' Notable Books of 2003. The majority of my experience with it has been negative in the past, as the books I've read from recommendations there have largely wasted my time. Sometimes I get to say, "Oh, that person wrote a new thing huh?" about someone I've read before (and probably dismissed), but mostly I get a reminder of how out-of-touch I've become with either a) the literary world, or b) the Times' idea of the literary world.
What's interesting to me is reading it as a series of quick capsules describing what people felt important or engrossing enough to write about for a year, two years, ten years. We find legions of sick children, spiritually adrift adults, obsessed scientists; we're escorted through miles of WWII ruins, Midwestern colleges, antebellum plantations; we watch as people solve murders in urban high-rises, make love to strangers in Alpine ski resorts, and generally dwell on things to an extent only possible in literature. The cataract of voices has never seemed louder.
Another interesting angle to take with this list is as a zeitgeist thermometer. The things people write about, choose to read, and recommend to others says something about those people, and about the group of people to which they belong. Admittedly, the Times is often selective about who gets included in that wider group, but for good or ill it does belong to that elite set of publications and media that help to influence (not to say manufacture) culture, and in that respect the Notable Book List acts as a record (or perhaps a palimpsest) of its influence throughout the year. This is where the elect are nominated, and of that elect, this is what's on their minds; these are the meme pills the Times wishes us to swallow. So then, my findings:
One big trend is recovery from tragedy, which isn't surprising since most of these books were written around 2002. However it's staged -- illness, death of a loved one, war, etc -- the shadow of airliners crashing must always be sensed. Similarly, one finds a preoccupation with endings: old age, retrospection, dénouements. Now that the BIG or BAD thing is over, what happens, what do we do, how do we live. Quick conjecture: we seem to be returning to product rather than the process that was the post-modern vogue. Could the process be over now? What's post-process mean to us? Again I am reminded of Franzen's idea about retrenchment....
Another trend is East Meets West, mostly Anglo/American meets Middle Eastern in some form: usually not violently, usually in some form of reconciliation or consolation. Interestingly, it's almost always Anglo/American West meeting East, and not the other way around; the titles by Eastern authors are almost always concerned with Eastern places and people. Quick conjecture: Anglo/America trying to define or understand its relationship with the rest of the world.
Also abounding are retellings and further-tellings of well-known stories, including Frankenstein, Gilligan's Island, Tiny Tim, and the Minoan Minotaur; as well as fictional treatments of historical persons, including Napoleon, Picasso, and Isaac Newton. Capitalism shows up here and there, usually equated with greed (*yawn*). There are also many novels (typically first novels) about unhappy families that seem similar to Franzen's (overrated but well-selling) The Corrections. Then the familiar themes of course: introspection and obsession, new ways of doing or seeing things, self-discovery, mental illness, and so on.
Gibson's Pattern Recognition made it in, as did Stephenson's Quicksilver. One book here I might actually read is called Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson: "A loopy, exuberant novel-type prose event that sees 20th-century America through the lives of the castaways on 'Gilligan's Island.'" I'm curious to see why he references Joyce in his absurd title (properly punctuated). (And btw it's definitely Mary-Ann; Ginger is a tramp!) Also interesting is Max Ludington's Tiger in a Trance about teenagers following the Grateful Dead on tour in the 1980s; it could -- I'm awkward to admit -- be about me and friends (only we didn't sell t-shirts to support ourselves).
A final observation: the Times still isn't on board with placing commas before concluding conjunctions in lists. I guess they never claimed to be logical.If you like Perdido Street Station and want to poke around in this emerging sub-sub-genre of "Next Wave" fantasy, here's a list of authors I've culled from interviews and weblogs and so on: Paul di Filippo (a former pynchon-l member, his recent story collection Babylon Sisters has been recommended), Jeffrey Ford (his first novel
I'm presently sloughing off pages from two very different reads: Jonathan Franzen's much mentioned novel The Corrections and China Mieville's slightly less mentioned novel Perdido Street Station. It was not by any design that I came to read these two books simultaneously: I began the Franzen novel, found it annoying, turned to the Mieville novel, found it engaging, wondered if I should finish the Corrections at all.
Franzen's anti-family micro-saga is not really my kind of book: it's populated by annoying people doing annoying things for annoying reasons. That in itself doesn't necessarily make a bad novel; much the same could be said of The Brothers Karamazov or A la recherche du temps perdu. But Franzen's Lamberts are not only annoying, but seem somehow false, the props of their creator. They do things because something has to be done in a novel. And so they do what they do in order to demonstrate the author's ideas; and what ideas they are! These people hate each other and themselves; they are consumed by greed; they are petty and spiteful; they are impossible to care about. If I were a member of that family I wouldn't want to go for Christmas dinner either. Luckily I'm not, and I can't relate well to them: if intended as an example of the American Family, then Franzen must have a pretty dim view of it.
For some reason, most of what's written about Franzen mentions Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace (now including this rant). I find this at first incomprehensible, then absurdly logical -- it may be useful to look at Franzen in terms of who he is not -- in the harsh glare cast by the parallax of American letters.
He's most like Wallace in the obsessive detailing of largely trivial information; like Wallace's (current) primary text Infinite Jest, The Corrections depletes its world of images, grasps onto whatever might be lying around seemingly in the hope that it might add something intangible that the author himself didn't know to expound upon. This is relying on the reader to supply meaning, and has proven a safe if sloppy method of simulating depth. It reminds me of Blixa Bargeld's theory of musical composition, which goes something like (don your cheesy German accent here): "[It's] a good plan for me to say I am a musician and then to bring in something from the outside all the time, to keep expanding the music, forcing people to keep redefining the boundaries and then to go outside it again and expand it again and so on, until there is nothing left that is not music!" Wallace is the literary master of this, Franzen just an apt pupil, and where Wallace obsesses over everything slightly connected to the core of his ideas, Franzen obsesses over his annoying characters. Most dedicated writers will have character sketches, sometimes dozens of pages of them; the difference with Franzen is that they usually don't include them in the novel. His prose is too often undisciplined; he writes like a house painter who coats an entire neighborhood in order to touch up some shingles. He gives the false impression that his intention is difficult to express, and so he must trace around it, fill in what it is not, rely upon disconnection; and often gets lost in the process. But that may be too generous: part of me suspects he's just filling space. (Computers have made it far too easy to write without discipline -- it's an epidemic.)
The sudden intrusion of slapstick into the behavior of the characters of course implies Pynchon, but there the similarity ends. Franzen isn't nearly as deft as TRP, lacks his timing and imagination, and never provides a context to make the device appropriate. Any other comparisons are wasted: the difference between Franzen's writing and Pynchon's is like that between comic strip blurbs and Melville. Not that it's poorly written; just that one shouldn't make unfair comparisons: nobody writes like Pynchon.
The absurd plot twists remind one of DeLillo -- one character goes from broke and wastrelly in Manhatten to defrauding an entire country in Lithuania -- but lack the larger structures, the Big Ideas, that DeLillo employs to sustain them. Reading Mao II we struggle to make sense of the sudden divergence, try to determine how it relates to the rest of the book and why the author chose it; with Franzen we shrug and accept it and go on. It's as if we understand already that there's nothing to find. Or at least I do.
I have trouble finding anything original in The Corrections, and what's been recycled isn't as good as it was in its original form (like that recycled paper the greenies want us to use). Which shouldn't imply there's nothing to like in it: there are genuinely funny moments, genuinely good passages, genuinely profound insights into human behavior. But I can't help feeling that all that stuff should have been saved for a future better novel.
On the other hand....
I tossed Franzen's bloated novel about unhappy families (which are more or less alike on Anti-Terra) onto the book-strewn coffee table, and picked up China Mieville's Perdido Street Station. Vive la difference! This is one of the most original and compelling novels I've read in years. It's an "urban fantasy" (a term which means more than most glossaries will admit), or a "weird fantasy," distinctly not in the tradition of Tolkein, more in the literary set of Moorcock and Leiber. Like Moorcock and the "New Wave" of nontraditional SF of the 60s, Mieville and his peers -- Michael Swanwick, Paul di Fillipo, Jeff VanderMeer, and many more I haven't kept up with -- seem to belong to some new and different aspect of a categorized and dismissed genre: "fastasy" with all its elves and goblins and magic swords (or as Mieville himself describes it: "the wen on the arse of fantasy literature"), a movement of radicalized and satisfyingly literary fantasy writing that Gabriel Chouinard has dubbed the "Next Wave."
This is an urban fantasy: it has a city -- New Crobuzon -- that's as much a living, acting character as its protagonists. Cities have parts, sections, diverse communities; those of New Crobuzon are teeming with sentient races never seen on Earth, each connected to the other in mundane and exotic ways, each behaving as they behave: khepri sculptors spitting out art, vodyanoi stevedores on strike, bantam wyrmen moving messages on little wings, majestic garuda soaring high overhead; and cities have their own order, their own control structures: the despotic Mayor poises mightily in the cavernous and forbidding Parliament while his militia patrols the streets with hidden faces and underground networks of informants; the social stigma of interspecies coupling is more pronounced in Brock Marsh than in Salacus Fields, so the lovers must meet in secret at times, then openly on other days; all sprawling around the central hub of Perdido Street Station, the vast and thriving nexus of the trains that run through New Crobuzon like threads in the weave of their world. Mieville's city is more fully realized than Cleveland.
I am of course reminded of Helprin's Winter's Tale, and tempted to compare the two. But despite some similarities in the extent of the achievement, the spirit of Perdido is very different from Helprin's New York: Helprin's snow is Mieville's dirt; Perdido is less idealistic, less transformational, and less concerned with individuals (which brings us to a great difference in political slant). Like the New Wave writers, Mieville is partly driven by political obsessions (he seems to be a Marxist, which to my ear is like being a phrenologist or a Molly Maguire), and has implied that his politics, while never too overt, play some role in his narrative form. Detached signifiers perhaps? Perdido does suffer from some abstract bloat: images that seem more intended to suggest that to evoke ("the putrefaction of architecture", "some monstrous organic weapon rending the sky") but they're mostly confined to exterior shots, and are beautiful even if meaningless. Other political manifestations are similarly inoffensive: racism, class inequality, government oppression -- subjects not relegated to any specific political position. As with Moorcock, he's too gifted a writer to let that stuff seep in too much. In interviews he expresses antipathy toward "Nietzscheans," uses the word "fascist" without seeming to blink or cringe, and dislikes Frank Miller's Batman because "the underlying idea is that people are sheep, who need Strong Shepherds," that it's "about the Will To Power Triumphing Over Chaos." Which is one of the reasons I like Batman of course. But I threaten digression. (I think I'll have more to say on this subject soon.)
Ultimately, given how rich and expansive New Crobuzon is, the book begins to suffer from an excess of plot and weird events. I think it would have been more satisfying to do nothing more than dwell there a while, a weird sandbox where nothing much really happens. (Isn't plot fascistic, China?) But I have peculiar tastes.Now is the time of year -- that oddly miserable zone between Christmas and New Years, soiled genre days between immortal tomes -- when everyone makes lists to prove how well they've been paying attention. My list this year is quite dull:
- Best movie of 2003: LOTR: Return of the King
- Best movie of 2003 (runner up): Kill Bill vol. 1
- Best movie of 2003 (honorable mention): Lost in Translation
- Worst movie of 2003: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen [Alan Moore rolls in his future grave]
- Most disappointing movie of 2003: Matrix Revolutions [even worse than Matrix Reloaded]
- Most overrated movie of 2003: S.W.A.T. [not everybody reported that it sucked]
- Most surprising movie of 2003: Pirates of the Caribbean
- Best book of 2003: China Mieville's Perdido Street Station
- Worst book of 2003: Robert Jordan's latest dandruff flakings
- Most disappointing book of 2003: Neal Stephenson's
- Most overrated book of 2003: Franzen's
- Most surprising book of 2003: William T. Vollman's Rising Up and Rising Down
- Most surprising book of 2003 (runner up): David Foster Wallace's Compact History of Infinity
- Most disappointing book of 2003: Neal Stephenson's
- Best music of 2003: Children of Dune soundtrack [another bad year for music]
- Worst music of 2003: How about anything on MTV?
- Most disappointing music of 2003: Placebo, Sleeping With Ghosts
- Most disappointing music of 2003 (tie): Radiohead, Hail to the Thief [because it's
- Most overrated music of 2003: I don't know, Pink? Is that music?
- Most surprising music of 2003: The Postal Service, Give Up [emo-tronica?]
- Best TV show of 2003: Six Feet Under
- Best TV show of 2003 (runner up): Carnivale [mostly still potential, but it's great that something like this could be made at all]
- Worst TV show of 2003: Paris Hilton and the other chick down on the farm
- Most disappointing TV show of 2003: K-Street [only because it was cancelled prematurely]
- Most overrated TV show of 2003: Anything involving groups of people vying to marry someone (ie "reality tv")
- Most surprising TV show of 2003: Battlestar Galactica [I didn't hate it!]
- Best News of 2003: Saddam Hussein captured
- Worst News of 2003: Shuttle Columbia explodes on reentry
- Most disappointing News of 2003: NASA remains intact
- Most overrated News of 2003: Scott and Laci Peterson
- Most surprising News of 2003: US troops in Baghdad already
- Best Person of 2003: Tommy Franks [great generals have not yet left this earth]
- Worst Person of 2003: Kim Jong Il [who would be a comic book supervillian if he weren't so pathetic]
- Most disappointing Person of 2003: Vladimir Putin [he seems to be pulling a Saruman over there]
- Most disappointing Person of 2003 (tie): Howard Dean [spiraling down past mediocrity]
- Most overrated Person of 2003: Jessica Lynch [they give out Bronze Stars now for getting lost]
- Most surprising Person of 2003: GWB [according to the Nolan Chart, fiscally liberal and socially conservative tends toward Authoritarian....]
- Best Politics of 2003: Only those who helped conquer Iraq can get paid in Iraq
- Worst Politics of 2003: $400 Billion Medicare Pork Package
- Worst Politics of 2003 (tie): Campaign Finance Reform bill undermines Constitution, Supreme Court doesn't mind
- Most disappointing Politics of 2003: Nine Democratic Party candidates, zero that don't suck
- Most overrated Politics of 2003: Gay marriage debate
- Most surprising Politics of 2003: Al Gore endorses Howard Dean, drawing a fat line between himself and the Clinton faction
- Best announcement of 2003: Elizabeth Smart returned home
- Best announcement of 2003 (runner up): Farscape miniseries!
- Worst announcement of 2003: New York City bans smoking in indoor public places
- Most disappointing announcement of 2003: NASA calls for major changes to the U.S. space program that change nothing
- Most disappointing announcement of 2003 (runner up): David Kay's report on WMD search in Iraq
- Most overrated announcement of 2003: Wesley Clark decides to run for President of the United States
- Most surprising announcement of 2003: GWB considers sponsoring another moonshot
- Best Show of Respect of 2003: Every tribute to US troops
- Worst Show of Respect of 2003: Kelly Lynch awarded Bronze Star, insulting the men and women who actually earned that citation
- Most disappointing Show of Respect of 2003: Democratic candidates' hyper-hyperbolic attacks on GWB [come on, he's done
- Most overrated Show of Respect of 2003: John Ritter memorials [he was probably a great guy and everything but...]
- Most surprising Show of Respect of 2003: dunno
- Best Organization of 2003: US Military
- Worst Organization of 2003: The United Nations [it's time they got off our lawn already!]
- Most disappointing Organization of 2003: NASA
- Most overrated Organization of 2003: al Qaeda [two years running!]
- Most surprising Organization of 2003: US Military [mind-bogglingly effective at doing what they're trained to do, not so great at police-work]
- Best Country of 2003: USA! [screw you guys, it's always USA]
- Worst Country of 2003: France
- Most disappointing Country of 2003: Iran [still under the yoke]
- Most overrated Country of 2003: Iraq
- Most surprising country of 2003: Spain
- Best Me of 2003: Pale Fire notes
- Worst Me of 2003: I live in the same squalid place, I drive the same persecuted car, and most people I know are still annoyed with me [two years running!]
- Most disappointing Me of 2003: I missed NANOWRIMO due to other indexing-and-measurement-system constraints [two years running!]
- Most overrated Me of 2003: My map [it's actually a redrawing of the map of Middle-Earth with Mordor at the center]
- Most surprising Me of 2003: dunno
I realize that The Corrections was published in 2001 and that Perdido Street Station was published in 2000. I just didn't get to them until this year; I rarely read books in the year they're published (aside from the several genre series I read, and the less said of them the better), so for me they're new. Everything else in the list is bona fide 2003. So stop nagging me!
I'll explain why Howard Dean is a Great Disappointment at a future date. I'm not very into politics at the moment -- I'm into comic books, and more specifically supervillains. If anybody knows of a supervillain in literature (aside from Milton's Satan), please email me. (And I'm not talking about James Bond nemeses and other similar cold war genre creations, nor golden age SF pulp characters -- I want a supervillain that Howard Bloom would be aware of.)I love how movie advertisements now give Philip K. Dick a writing credit on their Hollywood splooges of his stories. "Paycheck! From the author of Blade Runner and Minority Report!" I sense that PKD would be appalled (through my daily séances with him).
I'm also beginning to notice that campaign ads have begun blistering our television screens, each of them reminiscent of this one, or of the ill-fated Bill the Cat campaign. Speaking of Bloom County, it looks like Berkeley Breathed is returning there with a new strip called Opus and plans for a film about that particular penguin.The isolation of the protagonists is further mirrored by the viewer through an unsettling sense of voyeurism that's reminiscent of Bergman (did I just compare Sofia Coppola to Ingmar Bergman...?) During the opening shot of a slightly clothed girl on a bed we wonder whether we should be looking at this -- how old is this girl? (a reaction that may be particular to men; I'm not sure, I'll check it out) -- and beautifully paralleled at the end where the Bill Murray character's whispered words to the girl are too low for the audience to hear: no, this is none of our business. The contrast between the older man and the young girl has nothing of Lolita in it, but there's always that question of the nature of this unusual relationship. It seems paternal most of the time, but only most of the time. And maybe it's because we so desperately want it to remain paternal and innocent that we cringe a bit and look away from the screen when he carries her back to her hotel room at night or falteringly leans in for a goodbye kiss.
The hype over Bill Murray's performance in this movie is not exaggerated. It is subtle and understated and fits the tone of the film like its natural extension. Even when faint echoes of Saturday Night Live threaten to break the mood, he uses that tension of expectation and recognition to further develop his character, and deepen the reflections between real life and the temporary exile of film and this film's setting. The karaoke scene in particular stands out like that: Murray is completely aware of the way audiences know him, and plays upon the allusion to his old lounge singer act by not hamming it up, by not performing in the manner expected of him, and so we get the sense of seeing a real life rather than a staged one.
And before dismissing any superficial similarities between Lost in Translation and About Schmidt (the former is by far the better film) it's worth noting the difference between the quality of Murray's performance and that of Jack Nicholson. The star of Meatballs, Caddyshack, and What About Bob has far outdone the star of Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest, and As Good As It Gets. Where Murray shines through Lost in Translation as a sad, drunken hasbeen, Nicholson sleepwalks through About Schmidt like a sad, drunken hasbeen. Murray deserves the Oscar that Nicholson was rightly denied last year and which he himself failed to receive with Rushmore. Along with Rushmore, Lost in Translation should cement his status as a (sometimes) great actor. 9of10.