Late Reviews and Latest Obsessions

The Wild Audacity of a Perfect Triumph

2011-05-03T08:19:00.004-05:00

The Edgar Allan Poe Audiobook Collection 11-13: The Tell-Tale Heart and Other Stories, by Edgar Allan Poe, Read by Christopher Aruffo, Acoustic Learning Inc., 2010.

To listen to Christopher Aruffo's latest collection of stories by Edgar Allan Poe is to hear a voice rich with purring menace. If a great jungle cat could slowly monologue how you are going to be killed, how the flesh is going to be stripped from your bones, how those bones will then be chewed to bits, shortly before her pounce, that feline voice would be steeped in a similar coiled violence.

It is the voice of every campfire storyteller who asks, "Do you want to hear something really scary?" but it's devoid of the campy wink that says, This is just a story. There's a smile, all right, a smile that says things are about to get quite quite bloody and I wouldn't have it any other way. That makes for a real treat when you're listening to Poe's stories. You need someone with a voice full of dread and suppressed thunder, and on that score Mr. Aruffo delivers and then some. There's a thick as molasses timbre going on here, a gentleness that belies the voice's strengths.

And then there are the stories.

To start with, this is hardly the first of Aruffo's collections I've reviewed. Long ago, he made it quite clear that his intention was to tackle the complete works of Poe and with an output that has put other narrators to shame, I'd be quite surprised if he doesn't pull it off. With thirteen volumes, including many of Poe's most famous stories as well as obscurities that most audiobook companies skip, Aruffo has done a great service if you love the work of Poe. There are, at this point at least twenty nine separate recordings of "The Fall of the House of Usher" on Amazon, but there is only one recording of Poe's "Eureka."

So, I repeat, Aruffo does a great service in seriously digging in to the Poe canon to give us more than just the highlight reel. But he also manages that. At least three big name stories turn up in this collection that have been anthologized elsewhere nearly to death. "Hop-Frog," a bitter tale of revenge, "Berenice," one of Poe's premature burial stories with a couple depraved wrinkles all his own, and one of his greatest stories, "The Tell-Tale Heart." But then there are rare gems like "Man of the Crowd," almost more character study than fiction and "The Assignation," a story of romantic love and sacrifice which almost doesn't feel like a typical Poe, and "Metzengerstein," an unusual piece about family curses and damned horses. One of these rarities, the pseudo-comic "The Sphinx" even allows Aruffo to bring out that most dangerous of guns, the accented narrator.

There are three total discs in this set, much like in many of Aruffo's other collected packages. Typically there are three single disc releases, followed up by one of these package deals that scoop up the three in one decidedly horrifically enjoyable package. Previously we'd seen "Message Found in a Bottle," "Eleonora," "The Premature Burial," and "The Cask of Amontillado" all in one package, as well as "The Black Cat," "The Pit and the Pendulum," and "The Masque of the Red Death" all in one collection. There is almost always a tasteful blend of the obscure and the famous.

The above-mentioned "The Sphinx" is one of the total joys of the collection. Here much like in a previous recording, "Cabs," Aruffo gets to dally in comic accents and his palpable enjoyment rubs off on the listener. In this instance, a visitor from New York, retiring with his country-mouse friend as they hide and take stock of the cholera deaths raging in the city, has an encounter with a monster. Poe is slow in the reveal of this story, but there's something about Aruffo's joyful New Yawk inflections that partly gives the game away early. Oh, that's no spoiler, either. When Poe goes in for his kill, he does it clean and entertainingly, and nothing about Aruffo's crisply satisfying portrayal of a Brooklynite needing a better perspective hands you any answers early.

Another sick treat given to the listener comes with "Berenice," a story any reader of Poe can predict the shapes of long before they're relevant. Here, Poe returns to his familiar stomping grounds of a monomaniacal narrator engaged in a doom-crossed marriage to his cousin and a premature burial, but it is just so the quality of his idee fixe that tosses this story up a bit higher than the usual Gothic fare of the day. Aruffo is in his element here, his narrator erudite, trembling, and unprepared for his own monstrousness. There is a lingering here on the dentrifical concerns, but Aruffo doesn't overplay the hand that Poe clearly does, and the reveal still courses through with dramatic fervor.

The real revelation here is in Aruffo's rendition of "The Tell-Tale Heart." Sure, "Hop-Frog" is a black little bit of pleasure with its many voices and its incredibly ghastly ending, but Aruffo does something so unexpected, so original in his culmination of (arguably) Poe's most famous short story that it goes beyond previous readings. I've had the great pleasure of listening to two preceding versions of the recording as Aruffo sought to get it just right, and with each new recording it closer approached success. This last version, the one available to purchase, finally captures a revelatory element to the structure of Poe's story in a way that to speak more of would be to give away a quickening and exciting conclusion. Something old made new again, and you will find yourself wanting to go back and listen again with a copy of the story in front of you to fully enjoy it the second time around. Poe was a master at thinking about language, its rhythms and its uses, as demonstrated in the essay he wrote about the composition of "The Raven," and here Aruffo has stumbled on to something overlooked by generations of readers. It's quite a treat to get something new, something hidden and unexpected like this.

While the trio pack tends to be your best bet, the individuals are offered for those of you seeking specific stories and not wanting to pay for the other material. Part of me understands that, but for the most part, I see the fantastic bounty of riches in Aruffo's work that there seems little value in letting any of it get away from you.

Is This Jar Half-Full or Half-Empty?

2011-01-10T22:22:00.002-05:00

Mr. Peanut, by Adam Ross, Knopf, 2010

This book started off for me scorching hot:

When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn't kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God. At a picnic on the beach, a storm front moved in. David and Alice collected their chairs, blankets, and booze, and when the lightning flashed, David imagined his wife lit up, skeleton distinctly visible as in a children's cartoon, Alice the collapsing into a smoking pile of ash...Anything could happen between here and there. On the edge of the platform, two boys were roughhousing. The train came barreling into the station. An accidental push. Alice, spun round, did a crazy backstroke before she fell. And it was over.... The things that went through his mind! From their window, he watched Alice walk up the street. A helicopter passed overhead. On Lexington, at the building under construction, a single girder was winched into the sky. And David imagined this was the last time he would ever see his wife -- that this was the last image he'd have of her -- and he felt the sadness well up and had the smallest taste of his loss, like the wish when you're young that your parents would die.

Now, if you tell me that you've been married and you haven't, in times of great frustration thought of your spouse's brakes going out while s/he's on the way to the store or falling down a flight of stairs while you're not home, then I'm going to say, You're a goddamned saint or liar.

And it was that blistering honest fantasizing that was coursing through the book's opening that riveted me to the page. Could he really be writing this? I thought. It felt almost chillingly like a hushed confession.

And then somewhere throughout the course of the book, it lost me. I don't mean to say that I failed to follow the plot or that the book becomes incomprehensible gibberish. I mean that where it felt like the book was going in the beginning was somewhere else from where the book ended up going, and not necessarily in that excitement of discovery way, but rather in a meandering sort of lost-the-thread way. Oh for an editorial Ariadne to give Mr. Ross's Mr. Peanut the key to the labyrinth.

And it's not as if the book didn't have big big ambitions. It couldn't have gotten so spectacularly off-track if it didn't have big ambitions. The plot in a, ahem, nutshell:

We learn that David Pepin, who dreams so vividly of killing his wife, is a vastly successful video game designer who has had great success with worlds crafted after M.C. Escher paintings, worlds that fold back within and out of themselves, and that he is writing a novel. What is his novel about? It is about a man named David Pepin who dreams of killing his wife. After Alice Pepin dies for real, choked to death on a peanut that set off her allergies, detectives arrive to begin the investigation asking, "Did he try to get the peanuts out of her seizing throat or did he force them down her himself?"

There the book sets off into discovering who and what to make of the Pepin marriage. We see their meeting, their courtship, their attempts and failures at having children, and this stuff is utterly fantastic. It is moving, it is vivid and yet still hallucinatory at times. It has the frustrations and the closed offedness of a real relationship, that space that is unknowable to anyone not in the relationship, yet Ross peels it back skillfully for us and shows us how universal it is, if singularly alien.

But then we get on to the detectives and the book veers into something not quite so compelling. We learn of one detective, whose wife goes to bed one day, refusing to get out for months, and this is interesting by itself, a decent short story, though clearly related thematically to the rest of the novel. And the other detective, the partner, is Dr. Sam Sheppard, who has, after being released from prison, moved far away from Ohio to become a police detective. And, yes, that is ambitious, to take a real life historical figure and to run with it, to put that person in some new situations that never happened. And along the way we get the story of the Sheppard marriage, its dissolution, and the eventual murder of Marilyn Reese Sheppard. And the stuff with Sheppard is itself interesting and well written, and I can see what Ross is trying to accomplish here, but these threads don't ever seem to bundle themselves together in any purposeful way. They are there, they want to be related, and despite characters and themes that should make this all sing, it just doesn't quite get there.

It isn't as if I can't draw the lines that Ross wants the readers to draw here, the parallels, the fascination with a case that remains somewhat "unsolved" in the public mind, the curious behaviors of everyone involved in the Sheppard case, and how it in many ways parallels the Pepin story. It's just that it feels like Ross had a short story and two novels that he wanted to mush together into something larger than itself, and for me that gelling just never happens.

When we return to Pepin's story -- the book tends to hop around considerably in time, in focus, and in between fiction and reality -- the detectives have captured a man they believe to be the assassin hired by Pepin to actually murder his wife, a man with the unfortunate character name of Mobius. This is the point where in reading the book I groaned. Mobius? Seriously? Such overt winking at the reader is the province of too-clever by half sophomore creative writing workshop pieces. And it was so jarring that it was hard to get back into the book with the same level of enthusiasm or interest. Whatever are we to do as readers in such a moment? How can we regain our footing in this fictional world and how can we trust the author to guide us?

I'm not saying such reaching out through the page to nudge a reader can't be pulled off successfully, but it works best in the hands of a skilled ironist, and Ross is no ironist. In fact, at the moment of making that observation in my reading, the seriousness of Ross's prose and story-telling began to weigh heavily on me. The prose that had danced in the book's opening pages, now felt like a chore to read. Sure, some of the Sheppard stuff is interesting, but get back to Pepin's case, get back to your novel's heart.

As I see it, the author wants a book that is a puzzle, he wants it to be flexible and friable, mix and matchable. He wants to chop up his narrative and serve us first this piece then that, the entire meal a welter of tastes, one after the other, confounding our expectations. Yet the book marches directly toward its conclusion and the infinite loop that should appear to us as readers is instead merely a moment where we read Pepin's novel then we read Pepin's reality, then we read Pepin's novel again. It isn't confusing or bewildering or unsettling the way it should be, it merely comes off as authorial exhaustion and trickery in place of magic.

Which is, frankly, a damn shame as this book had magic in its opening that I certainly wanted to believe in.

Christmas/Winter Beverages, Part 1

2010-12-02T23:32:00.005-05:00

Hark the herald brewery angels sing, and the message they are blaring from their trumpets is that the crop of festive holiday themed brews is hitting the market. Some of these are delicious, some of these are disappointments, and some of these are frankly legendary from the first sip. Let's not waste any more time on this intro-folderol, let's get to the beer.

Harpoon Winter Warmer, 5.9% ABV, 22 IBUs

Massachusetts seems like a beer lover's paradise. There are so many high-quality micro and quasi-micro (Sam Adams) breweries there, that I quiver at the idea of ever moving there. It excites me from its selection of good beer, and it terrifies me in how much larger pants I'd have to buy after just one year there. Harpoon is just another one of the wonderful smaller breweries that make the kinds of beers you'd love if you actually drank for flavor rather than to get hammered.

Regarding the Winter Warmer, I wanted to like this beer more than I did. If there's one thing I look forward to at the end of the year, it's the flowering of spiced ales. This beer, billed as the brewery's very first seasonal, delivers a nicely dark coppery colored ale that hits your tastebuds with cinammon, nutmeg, and a hint of caramel. It's a wonderful flavor combination that quickly washes away as you swallow. That's a shame in one regard, but if you wish to truly enjoy this beer, you must slow down.

Were you to slow down your usual quaffing and let this beer rest on your palate, the various spices will occur to you one by one, warming and satisfying your tongue.

There's a minimal amount of fuss made with cabonation or lace to interfere with your enjoyment of the drink, but it feels like it's lacking just a tiny touch of something. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but there was a thinness to the flavor that seemed to disappate rapidly. You drank, you smacked your lips, and that was all. There was no linger, no aftertaste, no residual warmth in the mouth. All it took for Harpoon to disappear from your consciousness, it seemed, was to swallow.

But while you had it in your mouth, the beer was just a shy glimpse of heaven.

Breckenridge Brewery Christmas Ale, 7.4% ABV, 22 IBUs

Colorado is another state that shines in the microbrewery market with New Belgium being on my all-time long-standing wish lists of out-of-state beers I wish we could get in Ohio. (The moment seems right to pimp for my brother-in-law's city of Chicago, where one can get New Belgium and Great Lakes in one lucky go.) How I have ached for their Fat Tire to make its appearance in the more easterly parts of the midwest.

Nevertheless, a rather less charming entry into the Christmas/Holiday Ale market is Breckenridge's American Style Strong Ale which they dub as their Christmas. Don't mistake me, though. A far-better than average beer, this just doesn't cut it in the holiday category. There's an obvious lack in the joie de vivre range from this beer's first sip that doesn't mark it out as something to be branded as part of what's only the biggest holiday in the Western World.

A rather spiceless affair, Breckenridge's entry is a decent enough brew in its own right and would be fine any other time of the year. There is little about the beer, strong as it is, as winter seasonals should and tend to be, that gives it away as a Christmas Ale, lacking as it does sweetness or warmth. An initally dry taste on the tongue with a laciness that lingeres only around the rim, Breckenridge resolves itself into a faintly (nearly imaginary) raisinish aftertaste, that feels more like an after effect than after taste. The feel in your mouth (I'm going to resist the charmless portmanteau term, mouthfeel) is a bit oily, though not in a bad way. You want that vague cling of ingredients to stick with you. But only if the're lovely and memorable.

Again, don't think from my critiques that this is an unsatisfying beer. With its fantastic ABV and nicely done caramels and hint of chocolate in the aftertaste, Breckenridge has a charming beer for the year's end. I just wouldn't go about calling it a Christmas Ale as its warming qualities are a bit spartan. Rebrand this as a Winter Warmer, the way Harpoon has, and you have no complaints. In fact, between Colorado's offering here and Massachusetts there, they should swap names, and with it, expectations. A tough beer to get you through a hard winter? Yes. A joyful beer to celebrate Christmas? Not quite.

Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale, 6.8% ABV, 65 IBUs

Note that second number. Take a good hard look at it. It is three times the rest of our beers' bitterness units, but that's typical actually. At the first drink, I thought I'd been slugged in the mouth. The bitterness hits you hard, fast, right out of the gate, -- and then sadly crushed any reaction to this beer outside of obvious ones.

With such an aggressive approach as the brewery has taken, Sierra Nevada is uninterested in subtle flavors or interesting ways to use hops as a point or a counterpoint. This, as said above, is unsurprising. Like modern GOP legislators who see tax cuts as the solution to every single problem, even if originating from tax cuts, Sierra Nevada's brew wizards seem only capable of envisioning hops or a slightly different breed or mix of hops to bring new flavors to their beer. Search the term on their beer page alone. There's not a brew where they don't accentuate hops, it seems.

And quite frankly, this beer only counts as a celebration if you've shown up a couple hours after the bar opened and then were promptly treated to a brisk black jack to the face. If there is one tiresome trick they know in Chico, California, it is how to make a punchy, hop-laden beer. Frankly, this bottle has killed the brewery for me, and I'd always sort of regarded their product as in the category of acceptably craft. Now, I'd cross the street to a different bar to avoid contact with any Sierra Nevada product after this one.

A reddish amber, an obscenely high level of bitterness, and misplaced priorities turn a professional brewery product into an object lesson on obsession and hackery, especially the kind where everything looks, smells, and tastes the same.

Dead Stuff, Dying Things

2010-11-12T00:10:00.003-05:00

And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie, Collins Crime Club, 1939

Confession (I may have said this before): When I was younger, I labored under the delusion that Agatha Christie was some boring shit old people read. I pictured this gray haired ancient lady, like a wispy version of Jessica Fletcher, sitting with multiple cats on her lap as she picked away at her typewriter writing foolish little mysteries.

Then on a whim, back when I worked my night shift job and listened to far more audiobooks, had far more time to "read," and was far more willing to take chances on picking up titles at random (freedom can make you brave), I picked up a Christie novel. Murder on the Orient Express. Not a bad choice.

The plotting was tight, the narration was excellent, and I was hooked. I have since listened to scads more Agatha Christie books, but the funny thing is, I never really sat down with one in my hand and read the thing. My wife and I may go extra rounds after the bell over whether or not listening to an audiobook can be considered reading, and I may swear up and down that it is, but my actions have spoken pretty loudly in the past. Things I'd idly put on while painting a fence, cleaning the house, processing criminal background checks, these are, a lot of them, not things I would sit for hours uninterrupted doing. They were diversions, not the great literature that demanded my attention

So, to be quite honest, I haven't read or listened to an Agatha Christie novel in quite some time. With her earlier work moving slowly into the public domain and my shiny new iPad gizmo at hand, I decided I'd begin hunting down various Christie novels. I tend to find some lighter reading to fill the latter two months of the year, a sort of collapse of my habits of typically reading dense Germanic philologists, Olde English texts in the original, and runes, and so comic books and the kinds of things still published in pocket paperbacks fill the wintery time of the year.

Luckily, this novel fell to hand. The provenance of the epub version is of little interest save that in the beginning, I wasn't sure it was legit. The paragraphs seemed so short, the use of exclamation marks seemed a bit promiscuous, the sudden introduction of ten characters in one go confused and alarmed me. Was this the careful and well-plotted novelist I'd come to love

I settled down to reading, though, and eventually made sense of things, going back and forth to reassure myself who all these people were. Oh, for the buttery tenor of David Suchet with his gift for accent and characterization! He'd have sorted out these island vacationers and given me something to grasp. What we have are eight guests, very quickly sketched as they arrive for a vacation on an island purchased by their host, a mysterious Mr. Owen -- eight guests and husband and wife staff for a total of ten.

And through the course of the novel, Ms. Christie will bump off every last one of these blighters through various means, roughly following the course laid out in the classic (and hideously racist) nursery rhyme. Rather quickly on arriving, after their first meal, the ten hear a phonograph played which accuses each of the island visitors of being a participant in more or less murder. I say more or less because in each case the circumstances would have proved difficult to prosecute: a weak child heir is encouraged to swim out too far, medicine isn't retrieved in time, scornful righteousness leads to suicide, and so on

It seems our guests have been invited to the isolated island under false pretenses, their host having justice in mind, not law but justice. Almost immediately after the record, the first victim falls. We progress from there. What becomes the challenge in such a novel is how to keep the murderer off screen, how to misdirect the reader. As a reader you can choose one of two tacks, it seems.

You can puzzle your puzzler until it grows sore trying to match wits with Dame Christie, and most certainly lose (the tack I take despite my awareness of how I fail as a detective). Or you can simply relax and let the ingenious plot unwind (the tack of a friend of mine). The trick of the first tack to take in this case is that suspects are rather decisively eliminated as the book progresses and you are forced to re-evaluate what you've read previously. At first all the islanders believe that they are hunted by someone external to their party; in time, they come to see the murderer is one of them.

No one seems likely to be the murderer, all of the guests seem likely to be the murderer, and by the book's end I still found myself certain that there had to be a hidden hidey hole for the murderer who would turn up in the book as our fifth-act malefactor. Christie makes good use of her motley characters to keep the plot lively and moving briskly along. Power blocs form and collapse, partnerships are riddled with suspicion, and no one can be relied on, either through confronting their own demons or their sudden death.

It seems when you read a mystery that you do not look to see the author tackle character development, great themes touching on the difficulty of human existence, or social injustices to be addressed. You seek a book that is as distracting an entertainment as any action thriller, but you also seek a puzzle constructed in such a fashion as to tax your mental capabilities.

In this way, it turns out, that mysteries are exactly the kind of escapist fiction I should have been reading all along during my youth when vampires, accursed houses, and other things that go bump in the night claimed my attention. While a ripping good werewolf story might have kept me up all night, first reading, then listening to every creak of an old house settling, a murdered banker with nine decent suspects in his killing would have itched a very specific part of my brain long earlier.

Turns out Agatha Christie isn't for the old fogeys after all. If only I hadn't waited until I was almost an old fogey to find out.

Old Scary, Humanized

2010-10-27T22:24:00.008-05:00

Dracula HD Original Papers, by Bram Stoker, Created by Intelligenti Publishing, 2009-2010

With the advent of e-books now really and truly upon us, it would be helpful to make some categorical distinctions. There are e-books which merely ape print books, but in electronic formats (PDF or EPUB or Amazon's less well-known but market dominating proprietary AZW). These titles may allow you to magnify the page or alter the font or make a few other minor formatting tweaks, but they are, for all the excitement, words on a page, rendered digitally.

Then there are enhanced books which bring a level of interactivity to the experience. A good example that made quite a bit of headlines after Apple's iPad was released is Alice for the iPad. Here, by changing the way you held your iPad, you could make things happen within the book -- make Alice grow or shrink. This is a new kind of book and one I suspect we'll see more of in the future especially in the children's market especially in the children's market, but for now many enhanced books tend to be failures of the imagination, texts that include sound effects or music or an audio version of the tittle read along. These are great for children, but offer little to adults who are lingually proficient and not blind.

Intelligenti Ltd's Dracula HD - Original Papers Edition is neither fish nor fowl as per the above two categories, though it does have elements of both. (It's also, of course, one heck of a title.) Taking the original Bram Stoker classic, they've gone and done something rather interesting, something a printer could have done long ago if he'd thought of it (and maybe someone did).

For those who are unfamiliar with the novel save as an adaptation to film or by name alone, Stoker's novel is written in a style greatly popular in his day, that is, epistolary. While typical novels of this style tend to be between two people with one or two additional minor voices chiming in, Stoker's novel boasts four major voices. We begin with young solicitor Jonathan Harker's account of meeting the infamous Count in Transylvania where our English hero has come to assist the vampire in emigrating to England. He leaves behind his fiancée, Wilhelmina "Mina" Murray, who writes frequently to her dear friend Lucy Westrena, who regales her with tales of her suitors. Jonathan escapes from Count Dracula's clutches, but does not beat the vampire to England's shores.

After Lucy is taken ill, one of her former suitors, the sanitarium owner Doctor John Seward, calls in his old mentor, Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Despite Van Helsing's work, they are too late, and Lucy dies from Count Dracula's nocturnal attentions. Seward, Van Helsing, and two other of Lucy's suitors, are joined by Harker as they band together to hunt down the Count and rid the world of the fiend.

With a clever layout conceit that offers up two pages in landscape mode and one large page in profile, Dracula HD presents the story as though we had found a collection of original documents (hence the long name). Jonathan Harker's diary is then handwritten appearing with blotches on the page and stains and marks where a wet cup of tea or coffee has perhaps sat.

Lucy and Mina Loy's letters alternate on their respective stationary and handwritings. Newspaper clippings in the story are presented in typeset style, and so on.

It's a simple idea, but immensely effective. Stoker's sometimes lurid sometimes prim Victorian style can often read flatly on the page when neatly printed, but here it seems to come alive with personality. Let us be quite clear, Stoker isn't really a masterful writer in any sense of the word, though he did manage to tap into something very nearly universal with this novel. The fake handwriting font humanizes the text's characters, gives them a kind of real world analogue that adds a layer of interest to them beyond the novel. That it is a font is clear the moment you spend any great time staring at the individual letters, but you can easily forget that despite a lack of any irregularity that handwriting might present. Never does Harker's penmanship betray his fear or terror at his fate, nor does Seward's typewritten transcription ever show signs of a faded typewriter ribbon. Instead, we are given stains, foldings, and ink drips. What I wouldn't give for a very small erasure still visible behind the text.

To be sure, these are very small nits to pick, the kind most readers might not even consider. Overall, the developers did a lovely job transferring the material to its present incarnation and the novel moves briskly along. Too much fiddling with the font to suggest a nervous condition and perhaps it'd not be legible.

If there were improvements or enhancements to be made I could only think of two. First, let readers turn off the sound effects of the page turning. That technological little tweak to the work is cute at first, but rapidly becomes annoying over the course of 400 pages. Certainly we can mute our iPads if we wish, but this seems like something we should have as an option.

Shhh, I don't need to hear this part.

The second feature takes Dracula HD out of the realm of the first category and brings it closer to the second. In the novel, Dr. Seward records his diary then has it transcribed to paper. Obviously this is not something that could be presented in a printed book, but here's an ample opportunity to embed small recordings that the reader could choose to employ if they so wished. A scratchy sounding recording of the doctor relating the horrors of their encounter with the vampire could be a lovely addition to the terror of the story.

Even without my suggestions, Dracula HD etc. is a lively experience and well worth the $1.99 price tag. It's a Halloween treat you shouldn't pass up.

Peekaboo

2010-04-22T15:53:00.003-05:00

I know I've said it before, that I will post more content some day, but with library science as a full-time pursuit coming to an end, I can confidently say that book reviewing will recommence at some point, and I will be trying to keep the mix of audio, print, and comics at about the same level.

That said, the move to digital comics lately by Marvel (and soon DC) means that that's going to be totally fascinating me more than you can imagine. Plus, I've got this backlog of really great Fantagraphics titles to get to soon as well. Does that company ever publish a dud?

So, look for something coming to this space sooner or later, and I'll announce it with fanfare and alarums, as always.

(And let's hope after one review comes out, I don't lapse again...)

A Novel of Excess

2010-01-08T00:07:00.001-05:00

Drood, by Dan Simmons, Little, Brown and Company, 2009

I sincerely wanted to like this novel more than I did. The Wife and I were at a bookstore perusing the new releases when I picked up this thick volume with its delightfully evocative cover and read the jacket copy. Get a gander at the kind of teasing this copy gave me:

Drood . . ..

. . . is the name and nightmare that obsesses Charles Dickens for the last five years of his life.

On June 9, 1865, Dickens and his mistress are secretly returning to London when their express train hurtles over a gap in a trestle. All of the first-class carriages except for the one carrying Dickens are smashed to bits in the valley below. When Dickens descends into that valley to confront the dead and dying, his life will be changed forever. And at the core of that ensuing five-year nightmare is . . .

Drood . . . the name that Dickens whispers to his friend Wilkie Collins. A laudanum addict and lesser novelist, Wilkie flouts Victorian sensibilities by living with one mistress while having a child with another, but he may be the only man on Earth with whom Dickens can share the secret of . . .

Drood. Increasingly obsessed with crypts, cemeteries, and the precise length of time it would take for a corpse to dissolve in a lime pit, Dickens ceases writing for four years and wanders the worst slums and catacombs of London at night while staging public readings during the day, gruesome readings that leave his audiences horrified. Finally he begins writing what would have been the world's first great mystery masterpiece, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, only to be interrupted forever by . . .

Drood.

Starting with a nugget of real life tragedy, Dickens' near-death in the Staplehurst train accident, Dan Simmons weaves through this semi-historical thriller the spectral form of London's most notorious serial murderer, Edwin Drood. There at the day of the accident, Drood moves among the bodies of unlucky passengers, doing something to them. He disappears from the scene, only to haunt Dickens for the remainder of his life.

I didn't buy the book that day, though I did get Simmon's previous semi-historical thriller, The Terror, on sale that day. And I devoured that book which tells the story of the doomed Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage and what horrors they experienced out there on the ice.

And it must have been in the researching of that book that Simmons discovered that Charles Dickens and his friend, the novelist Wilkie Collins, wrote a play based on the doomed expedition. Simmons' various researches into Victorian England and America at the time must have led him to Dickens and Collins on more than one occasion, and in this novel, Simmons found a second outlet for the remainder of all his Victoriana trivia.

And that's part of why The Terror is so successful. Simmons is one of those writers who has a tendency toward over-explaining obscure things. In The Terror, while discussing the British Royal Navy and sailors and their vessels of the time, this sort of detail occasionally comes in handy as most of us are unfamiliar with the layout of such a craft. Knowing the size of the captain's quarters relative to the general crew's, understanding the various differing kinds of ice one is likely to run into in Arctic conditions, understanding how ships in those days were heated, these sorts of things help us get a grasp on the world we are visiting.

It is somewhat of a different case in this novel. The habitations of London and the general time period are well trod literary streets to many readers and much of Simmons' research material tugs downward on the novel's flow. Narrated by the ridiculously unreliable Collins, a laudanum addict who in the novel's course becomes further addicted to opium and morphine, a serial liar to his mistress and his other mistress, and a man incredibly riven with envy for the successes of his friend and rival, Charles Dickens, we have to weigh carefully the things he says. Thus when he goes on at great length about his novel's successes, we ask ourselves is this Simmons' trivia or Collins' insecurity coming out.

Insecurity is one thing. Instability, however, another entirely. This is brought home to us rather early in the novel when we discover that on top of all the above addictions, Collins also regularly hallucinates a green-skinned, tusked woman who haunts his house attempting to chuck him down a staircase. He is also visited regularly, as he has since he was a child, by his doppelganger, "the Other Wilkie," who occasionally writes when our narrator is unable -- and writes better. (Simmons had a fine chance to give us more of the sting of that, but he apparently hadn't the time.)

Such ingredients make for a fine novel. And there's one hidden somewhere inside this convoluted tour through opium dens and underground criminal headquarters and mock-Egyptian temples and various 19th century British cities, but Simmons overstocks the book with period detail that is more know-it-all travelogue than setting-the-scene and red herrings that lack the savor of diverting blind alleys. Instead they come off as fanciful ornamenture that don't really do much for the book in terms of plot or atmosphere or necessity. They are, it seems, blind alleys without narrative point.

Also, when I first started the book, I worried. The style of the prose in the opening pages seemed a bit too flip, a bit too modern for a novel of the Dickens era. I let that slide, as accurate mimicry of an earlier style can sometimes become an overly precious (and intrusive) affectation. (And I discovered after finishing the book and reading a novella by Collins that that's his style to a T. For that, Simmons can be applauded, and Collins' more modern style and themes should be revisited by contemporary readers.) And here Collins' narration is puckish and he comes across as a satirical wag in the beginning. But his temper and his sanity soon fray from his exposure to Drood-related horrors and his own rocky domestic scene. By the book's later chapters, his constant, and too obviously sour grapes, griping about Dickens' work has palled. The rivalry between the two men must have been real, but in Simmons' hand, Collins becomes achingly tiresome when he gets on his Dickens bashing hobby horse.

But that's not the novel's greatest crime. No, as a story, there are wonderful moments, truly creepy scenes of real horror, and there is much to admire in its pages. Drood is a shadowy figure, only taking to the stage in rare appearances, most of his treachery and skullduggery behind the scenes, invisible. We get much of it in third- and fourth-hand accounts from those who've dealt with him before. And Collins' hallucinatory scenes (both aided by opium and not) are effective and chilling. At moments like this, reading the book flew in effortless suspension of time and place.

Only...only...only...at 800 pages, it's an overly long book. I say this as someone with an affection for voluminous doorstop-sized novels crammed with whole worlds. And it's clear that Simmons has made great efforts to do just that. Only instead of rich and deep atmosphere and local color, Simmons shoehorns in the facts, driving this reader to distraction, dolloping out little bits of trivia and putting into character's mouths stage-setting bits of leaden dialogue. Imagine a novel with frequent scenes like those that start many a badly written TV show: We open in a room. Mr. A says to Mr. B, "Okay, let's go over the plan again." And then the two characters begin hashing out all the information we, the viewers, need to get up to speed on the plot.

Only, we're getting up to speed on the 19th century. Ostensibly written with a plan "to delay the publication of this document for at least a century and a quarter beyond the date of my demise," Collins' narration feels the need to address we 21st century readers with little asides about London back in the day. We are nudged with trivia like learning that the so-called "ash heaps" you may have frequently read about in books of the time were really just euphemistically named mounds of horse dung. In this same vein, we are treated to an overview of the London sewage system and just how much effluvia gets dumped into the Thames. It's given to us in "just in case such things are different in your day, Dear Reader" asides, but these never come off as Collins' asides. Rather they felt all too much like Simmons addressing those of us who haven't, like him, spent months and months poring over all the historical books that are listed in the acknowledgments at the novel's end. You take copious notes on all this material you read, then you have to work it into the book, only it seems where in The Terror Simmons handled this gracefully, here it all just sits on the page, bagging down the better writing.

Consider when one character confronts Collins with his belief that Dickens will support a new social order not based on class or race. Here is Collins' rebuttal to this:

Again, I was forced to laugh and again my laughter was sincere. Four years earlier, in autumn of 1865, a mob of Jamaican blacks had attacked the Court House in Morant Bay. Our governor there, Eyre, had overseen 439 of those blacks being shot or hanged and another 600 flogged. Some of our more deluded liberals had opposed Governor Eyre’s behaviour, but Dickens had told me that he’d wished the retaliation and punishment could have gone further. “I am totally opposed,” he’d said at the time, “with that platform-sympathy with the black—or the Native or the Devil—and believe it is morally and totally wrong to deal with Hottentots as if they were identical with men in clean shirts at Camberwell.…

During the Mutiny in India long before I had met him, Dickens had cheered on the British general whose answer to the rebellion had been to tie captured mutinous Indians across the muzzles of cannon and to blast them “homeward” in pieces. Dickens’s wrath and contempt, in Bleak House and a dozen other of his novels, had long been aimed more at the idiotic missionaries who were more concerned with the plight of native brown and black people abroad than with the problems of good Englishmen and Englishwomen and white children here at home.

This comes across less a character dishing the goods on someone than as an author who found a salacious tidbit about Dickens' racist attitudes and felt the need to work it into the novel somewhere. It's over the topness isn't necessarily Collins-esque but feels rather more nudge-in-the-ribs-like from an author overstuffed with Victoriana.

Perhaps though that is something of an homage to Collins. A trip through Collins' fiction will find the reader faced with one story of a double after another, and as Collins' drug use grows ever greater throughout the novel and his hallucinations worse and worse, perhaps Simmons meant for the writer's narrative to be a battle between his good writing and his bad. Perhaps the theme of doubles is carried out even unto the very sentences on the page, the wonderful rubbing right next to the plain awful.

Just as no one ever says such sentences as: "I am deeply honoured to have such a famous writer visit me! I so greatly enjoyed your The Woman in White that was serialised in All the Year Round immediately after Mr. Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities ended," you also can not beat such passages as those that make up the novel's first chapter where the train accident's aftermath is described. Dickens helps the wounded here, such as a man with half his head ripped off, "the grey-and-pink pulp glistening within the concave bowl of splintered skull," the woman who smothers her baby under her rather than let Drood get him, and the lady whose arm dangles from a crushed carriage while Dickens comforts her until help arrives. All of these scenes and more shine out so wonderfully in the book that it's a shame the more turgid passages are so distracting.

A novel of great ambition, Drood not only finds a wonderful conceit in Dickens' last years and in his relationship with such a flake as Collins, but also manages to seduce us a long ways under the direction of a narrator who is clearly quite raving mad. This is all fine and good. Now find me an editor who can trim 20% of the novel's excesses and your end result would be an ambitiously great novel.

The Voice of Terror

2009-12-03T23:28:00.003-05:00

The Edgar Allan Poe Audiobook Collection #10: Deus et Machina, by Edgar Allan Poe, Read by Christopher Aruffo, Acoustic Learning Inc., 2009

I'm of two minds on audiobook readers doing character voices. Actually, I'm really only of one mind. If you can do it and do it well, then go ahead and do it. But you really have to be good at it; good in that way that other people praise you, not just good in your head. If you can't do it, don't bother even trying, not even a little bit. It will just come off ridiculous, especially if you attempt an accent.

Having reviewed other Poe audiobooks by Christopher Aruffo, I knew to expect stirring renditions and wonderful vocal characterizations, but even knowing all that I was unprepared for two specific recordings in his latest offering which I shall get to in a little bit.

Tasking himself with the Sisyphean labor of recording all Poe's extent works, Aruffo finds himself in little alleys and byways of the writer's more obscure corners, and sometimes there are truly astonishing gems to be found there. This recent collection, a play on the common phrase deus ex machina informs us that the collection is both about gods and machines. In "The Colloquy of Monos and Una," "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion," and "The Power of Words," Poe uses the Socratic debate formula to speculate on god, reincarnation, and the end of the world. With such conversational pieces, Aruffo is well up to the task of differentiating the voices of the two characters, never leaving you at a loss for what is being said. Readers familiar with Poe's philosophical magnum opus, "Eureka" will find some of the same themes touched on here. Aruffo tackled that piece some time ago and here recreates the quite difficult task of taking Poe's often baroquely phrased vaporous philosophical musings and making them engagingly listenable.

And as the title of this collection alludes to, it was not only the numinous and otherworldly that captured Poe's attention, but the miniscule and the quotidian as well. Thus, Aruffo brings in a few of Poe's essays including "Try a Mineralized Pavement" which reads as a well-informed letter to the editor about a new kind of road surface; "Street Paving" in which the author discusses the latest variations in technologies to succesfully pave city streets; and the delightfully punchy "A Chapter on Science and Art," a series of short blurbs from the recent scientific news and announcements. This last piece, in Aruffo's tones of brio takes on a "News on the March" kind of newsreel quality. There's something about this kind of news item of the past that just kills me:

A gentleman of Liverpool announces that he has invented a new engine, immensely superior in every respect to the old steam engine. The power is created by air and steam. It will consume only one-half the quantity of fuel of the old one; and the rapidity by which a vessel propelled by it will sail, will enable it to cross the Atlantic in six days. Owing to a particular way in which the power acts upon the vessel, twenty miles per hour can be realized by the old steam-engine, and instead of straining and weakening the ship, will brace and strengthen it. By this method the steam power is more than doubled. Doubtful.

That last "Doubtful" is delivered with an almost sneering shortness and you can hear Aruffo channeling a skeptical writer's put down in the finality of his tones. It's the quick touch of the knife that Poe could bring to his criticism that makes it well worth the reading.

"Von Kempelen and his Discovery" is mixed in among these essays, a touch I'm sure Poe would have appreciated, as it is one of his classic put-up-jobs. With all seriousness and straightfacedness, Poe's "essay" tells of the uncovering of a man who has managed to at last discover the secret of transmuting base metals into gold. It is only in the story's final conclusions that the absurdity becomes obvious, and perhaps back in the 1800s such a conclusion might still not have been seen as ridiculous as it appears to us today.

A nice little piece, Poe sort of cutting to the chase of blogging all those years ago, comes in "Anastatic Printing" in which the author celebrates a kind of primitive photocopying that would have printed up duplicates of handwritten documents. Poe champions this new technology declaring "authors will perceive the immense advantage of giving their own manuscripts directly to the public without the expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous intervention of the publisher" while predicting that "the humblest will speak as often and as freely as the most exalted, and will be sure of receiving just that amount of attention which the intrinsic merit of their speeches may deserve." That's fairly a perceptive account of how things should work more or less blogospherically, and in the theoretical this is still possible and does actually happen. And it only took over a hundred years from Poe's prediction until it came true.

The brief "Cabs" is a wonderful treatise on the newest fad sweeping the nation, that of the horse drawn taxi. This is one of the collection's shortest triumphs, though. Aruffo delivers this in a wonderful old-fashioned New York cabby accent and he pulls the trick off brilliantly. It was so well-done that a listener less familiar with Aruffo's work might hazard a guess that a friend sat in to read this piece. Once again, Aruffo's vocalizations shine with his talent.

Which brings us to where I've saved the best for last, Aruffo's treatment of two Poe tales on hypnotism, the latest medical marvel of the day. "Mesmeric Revelation" treads upon the earlier dialogues with some of its format and the general bent of the story. Aruffo pulls off a subtle accent for the sickly, elderly Mr. Vankirk, the hypnotic subject, put under just as he nears death. Then Poe allows his narrator to question the older man in this state right upon the cusp of the afterlift. Vankirk expounds -- at length -- upon the nature of god from a scientific viewpoint. It too is of a piece with Poe's "Eureka," being regarding the Platonic ideals of perfect forms and a deistic take on the deity.

That's all fine and good, but where you really get your money's worth in this collection comes in the sheer chills of "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." Like "Mesmeric Revelation," this story is about a man on the point of death being hypnotized. Unlike that earlier story, Poe takes the macabre route with this tale, the hypnotic state maintaining M. Valdemar's consciousness in his flesh as it decomposes around him. The story itself is a grotesque with "yellowish ichor" leaking from Valdemar's eyes at one point and his body crumbling in on itself in a mass of putrescence. When Aruffo gets to the dead man's voice though, that's when things really get unsettling.

I'm not prone to being creeped out all that much, but the curdling, gurgling rumble of Valdemar's voice after death is just about the finest chill I've ever gotten from a book. Part whisper, part moan, part growl, Valdemar's voice here is the epitome of terrifyingly good. It is horrible, absolutely and perfectly and wonderfully horrible, the kind of thing of which nightmares are made. Listen to it in the dark some time and see if you don't agree.

And you can't ask for better than that from a collection of Poe audio-works, now can you?

Stale Fount

2009-11-20T09:51:00.005-05:00

The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, Read by Christopher Hurt, Blackstone Audio, Inc., 2007

I've read a lot of books in my life. Big books, small books, important books, difficult books, trashy books. And I've listened to a lot of audiobooks, often things I wouldn't take the time to sit down and read, things I could listen to as I went about cleaning the house, working, driving someplace, and so on.

With the possible exception of the first book in the Twilight series, I have never listened to an audiobook that was more sheer excruciating torment than Ayn Rand's massive 700+ page The Fountainhead.

Now, some might think that I disliked the book on sheer political grounds. That I did not enjoy the experience because I disagree with Rand's right wing world view. While I'm sure there's some truth in that, because I was revolted by the sheer loathing for mankind dressed up in some pseudo-garble folderol, I have read and listened to (and enjoyed) books whose authors I disagreed with wholeheartedly. Louis-Ferdinand Celine was a Nazi sympathizer but I have seven of his novels on my shelf and they're great fun. They're not great fun because they're filled with Nazi propaganda and vicious anti-Semitism; they're great fun because they're not religious tracts; they're models of style and pacing; they're a fevered delirium tremens, howls of despair loaded down with poisonous black humor. Because Celine was a great writer, whatever his moral failings and however loathsome his political views.

No. What made The Fountainhead so fist-clenchingly, head-shakingly exasperating to get through is that Rand, whatever her moral failings and however loathsome her political views, is a piss poor writer. Scenes repeat themselves over and over with a tiresomeness. The hero, if you can call him that, architect Howard Roark, does things his own way, screw everybody's else's methods. This, of course, brings him into conflict with people. Over and over we are treated to scenes in which Roark stares down some adversary, cold and hard, while his enemy squirms like a bug on a pin and expounds, at length and in dialogue so wrenching to the ear that an audiobook version is almost a crime, the kind of high-falutin paragraph upon paragraph that no one speaks outside of extremely stoned philosophy undergraduates. And time and again, Roark comes out on top, while everyone else is played for fools.

Scene after scene we are given of these strawmen nobodies in the book, like Peter Keating, the "successful" architect who can't design for shit on his own, as he crawls to Roark for free lessons in architecture and free building plans, as he cravenly stabs people in the back in his rise up the social ladder, in his inner emptiness and hollowness. Time after time, heroine Dominique Francon exasperates men by her stubborn willfulness, her unique mind, her contrarian spirit. Time after time, villain Ellsworth Toohey plots to take over the world with his socialist plots, his mustachio twirling, and his own disgust for mankind disguised poorly as love, monologing the kind of speeches that would put Fidel Castro to sleep.

We get it, we get it. These are not characters; these are cartoons, Roark the comic book Superman bristling all over with muscles corresponding to no real anatomy, Toohey the Lex Luthor, physically weak but brilliantly evil, Dominique the luscious babe in corset splitting style.

Howard Roark, about to do some architectin'

In their entirety, from the biggest to the smallest characters, no one thinks, acts, speaks or exists that even remotely feels like a thought-out human being. And the reason for that is, they're not. At all. Every character from the big to the small exists to serve the agenda, to forward a specific socio-ethical position. The weakness to this is that in Rand's work there are only two positions to take. You are either with Howard Roark and believe that humanity consists of a handful of Creators who make everything of any value whatsoever, or you are against Roark and on the side of the vast bulk of humanity who are leeches and sponges, parasites living off of the Creators, who contribute nothing of value to the world and would be better off dead.

Well, what can you do with such starkly and diametrically opposed views?

There are writers who can invest their characters with various political or philosophical dogma and let them hash it out. The result is a novel of ideas. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don't. A good example of one that works is Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Mann makes characters embody certain philosophical concepts and traditions prevalent at the time of the writing, but in his strength as a writer, he doesn't forget that he's writing about people, about human beings, and he invests his characters with that spark that allows the reader to feel these people as rich and as varied as actual humans. You find yourself caring not just about the fate of the heroes, but invested in the actions of everyone, even the villains.

That barely ever happens in Rand's novel. Instead, Roark is this force, this implacable, driving idealist, an artist who doesn't give a damn if anyone else likes his buildings, an architect who doesn't even take into account the people who will live in and use his buildings. No, all he cares about are the structures. When we first meet Roark, he is described much in the way many victims describe psychopaths. We are repeatedly told that people felt as if he didn't see them, as if he looked at them and saw nothing. He is himself as human as a block of granite, and for this reason immensely boring when he's on the stage. That's not just poor writing; that's the fundamental worst sin of writing.

While Rand positions wunderkind Peter Keating as the narcissist in the book, there is a distinct feeling that it is Roark who is constantly being set up against a noble backdrop, Roark who is being dandied up with spotlights and soaring theme music, Roark who has an almost sociopathic indifference to anyone around him who sports the unnecessarily swollen ego.

Coupled with him are Dominique Francon (whose name gives away the game) and Gail Wynand, publisher of a trashy tabloid. These three character make up the heroic factions of the novel (though Wynand is the flawed superman of the bunch, leading to his almost downfall). They are rugged individualists no one quite seems to "get." Those not "getting" these three paragons are the failures of mankind, the "second-handers," those who live off the successes of the great. Into these two slots, Rand has shoved every character, and the effect is as dispiriting as when George Lucas takes control of a project. The end result is very similar as well: a poorly crafted, blisteringly obvious bit of stage management where the underdogs come out on top because they're right and everyone else is wrong.

Wynand is a perfect example of this. A former childhood gangster in Hell's Kitchen, he rises to Hearst-like prominence as newspaper publisher because he's a rugged individualist, because he's 90% like Roark. The underdog with nothing, Wynand rises to be one of the richest and most powerful men in New York City (in America or the world, for that matter). Even though Wynand caters to the "second-handers," giving them the trashy yellow journalism they love in their hearts, all the while professing a desire for uplifting stories of morals and redemption, he too is one of the elite, a self-made man who acts and talks like no former slum child in existence before or since. Sure, there are stories of rising from the lowest rung on the ladder to heights of media prominence undreamed of (Oprah anyone?), but to have him spouting these endless didactic philosophical ruminations is too much on top of everything else we're expected to swallow.

Rounding out the bunch we have Dominque Francon, the hellcat virgin daughter of Guy Francon, the creative fraud architect who hires his doppelganger in Peter Keating. Dominique was once described by Rand as herself with a bad attitude. She's another wild heart that can't be broken, with the possible exception of the time shortly after they first meet when Roark rapes her and she falls in love. Yes, the frigid iceberg for other men warms up when a strong powerful He-Man puts her in her place -- and once that's done, they're equals. Oh, she mopes around a bit about it, and in the immediate aftermath Rand's writing shows signs of maybe, possibly, almost going for human feeling, but then the camera shifts elsewhere.

Dominique's trajectory through the book is also one of the strangest. On the eve of intellectually bankrupt Peter Keating's greatest triumph, she proposes to him as a way of -- get this -- suffering for her man, Howard Roark, actual almost financial bankrupt. Yes, as her way of proving her dedication to her rapist lover, Dominique will marry a well-off up and coming architectural star rather than slum it with the near penniless love of her life. Now that's dedication. Dominique makes some speech about how this all makes sense and I listened to it three times to make sure I wasn't missing something, but it really doesn't quite gel on any level whatsoever. Then, as Peter begins to struggle as the country moves into Depression territory, Dominique decides to double down on her proof of love for Howard Roark by divorcing Peter to marry uber-rich Gail Wynand.

No, you're right, her stated motives don't make any sense. Dominique appears to trade up the moment the offer is made her, yet somehow we're supposed to see this as the kind of tragic love story that accompanies being one of the Greats of the world.

And, of course, when the time is ripe, Dominique makes her leap to her man, her true and only love. She does this on the eve of his trial for blowing up a housing project. But why, you ask, why would someone blow up a housing project?

Because it did not stay true to his vision.

Here's the layout. Peter Keating manages to snivel his way into scoring a huge housing project gig as government spending begins to pull the country out of the Great Depression. Only, he can't deliver. So, wormlike he crawls to Roark once again, who draws up the plans. Why does this capital-I Individualist agree to make something for the socialist gub'mint and the masses of sponge leeches of these United States? Because he knows how to make affordable housing and no one else does (part of his secret is this loo loo of an apartment you'd just die to live in:

The ceilings were pre-cast; the inner walls were of plastic tile that required no painting or plastering; all pipes and wires were laid out in metal ducts at the edge of the floors, to be opened and replaced, when necessary, without costly demolition; the kitchens and bathrooms were prefabricated as complete units; the inner partitions were of light metal that could be folded into the walls to provide one large room or pulled out to divide it;

tasty, no? I myself have always wanted to live in a plastic-walled apartment with metal fold out temporary walls and sizable metal ducts across the floor). But there's a caveat. The apartment complexes have to be built exactly to Roark's specifications without alteration. Keating promises this will be so; gub'mint bureaucrats object to elements of the design; Keating is overruled; the design is altered...flawed...desecrated!

And so, Roark has no other option but to blow up the building.

It's a statement, you have to understand.

Well, of course the hero is arrested in due time and makes no defense of himself at the trial. That is, he doesn't bother cross-examining any of the witnesses for the prosecution, acts as his own lawyer, and rests his entire case on his closing statement (which doubles as his testimony, yet testimony that doesn't appear to be allowed to be cross-examined; how strange, almost as if written by someone with no clue as how courts actually work).

And even though this closing statement includes an admission of guilt in the crime, it consists mostly of reiterating the Rand philosophy that we've already been beaten over the head with for the last 600+ pages. The jury must have been brain damaged from the verbal beating because without even winking at a possible explication, the verdict comes down "Not Guilty."

There are many ways in which Rand's book is a pile of shit, but this last bit takes the cake for hypocritical fraud.

At the beginning of the book, quite a to-do is made about why architecture needs to be modern, why we shouldn't rely on outmoded styles from the past. No building of the 20thC needs Renaissance stylings or Louis Quinze interiors, Roark avers, just as no car needs horse-drawn carriage trimmings. Fine enough as a point. But in the 25th Anniversary Edition introduction, Rand defends writing her novel as a Romantic style of fiction as made popular in the nineteenth century. She even defends the earlier style of writing for its frequent portrayal of characters as allegories of ideals. The final reel deus ex machina court decision is of a piece with earlier styles of stage writing in which miraculous resolutions came in during the fifth act and needed no logical or even realistic explanation. Roark is simply found not guilty of blowing up the housing project even though admitting under oath that he blew up the housing project.

What we can take from this is that it is perfectly acceptable for a bad writer to steal ideas and forms from the past when crafting her idealized novel, yet that very novel makes the argument that such thievery in architecture is parasitism, the treacherous dealings of the unoriginal second-hander. It is a brazen piece of hypocrisy, the kind such a serious writer as Rand couldn't even pass off as irony. The novel's lessons seem (not too surprisingly) to boil down her philosophy to those eternal conservative chestnuts "do as I say, not as I do" and "fuck you, I got mine."

And you only have to slug through 700ish pages of turgid, lifeless prose to get to it. And if you do that, the joke's on you.

Reader Christopher Hurt manages the task set before him with sufficient aplomb and brio, with enough vocal distinctions to give us a good sense of character, all without ever falling over into caricatured voices. His regular narration is a pleasant mid-range toned butter that glides effortlessly into your ears. Perhaps far too seductive for overt propaganda such as Rand's deranged Benzedrine fueled rampage.

This is Where I Type the Title

2009-11-17T19:21:00.002-05:00

And this is where I post something for class. The buttons above will let me indent paragraphs; bold, underline, italicize, resize, hyperlink, and change the color and alignment of text; post videos or pictures; and preview the results prior to publishing.

Real Teeth

2009-11-05T09:24:00.003-05:00

Let the Right One In, by John Ajvide Lindqvist, Translated by Ebba Sergerberg, Thomas Dunne Books, 2007

I first came across Let the Right One In the movie and committed one of my cardinal sins of films and fiction, I watched the movie first. (Let's make things even worse, I watched it on a teeny tiny iPod screen while commuting to work.)

There is often a disconnect between what a book is and what a movie is, and I used to be among the camp who complained when a cinematic adaptation didn't live up to my literary dream, but I've since wised up to the different demands of the different arts. What you can accomplish inside one character's head on the page just doesn't always work well in a kinetic medium like film, and even the shortest novel often finds lots of scenes cut from the final theatrical release. To do justice to a large work or even a medium sized one often requires a miniseries -- which is why the BBC's Pride and Prejudice is considered the best adaptation to come along. Yet, the final products will always cater to different aesthetics.

Be that as it may, I was quite surprised at how different John Ajvide Lindqvist's novel Let the Right One In was from the film of the same name. The novel has received a fresh round of interest as a result of the 2008 Swedish film directed by Tomas Alfredson (so much interest that an American version of the film is shooting, scheduled for a 2010 release). It's a commonplace to say that a horror novel is much scarier, much creepier, than its celluloid counterpart, but it is quite true in this case.

What's interesting about that, in a book about vampires, is that it isn't really the supernatural elements that are creepier but the human ones. Oh, certainly, there are small bits of horror in the book that don't turn up in the film (for example, in the novel, our vampire sleeps in a bathtub filled with blood; in the film, she just sleeps in a bathtub covered with blankets). That's kind of small potatoes, though later scenes involving a turned-vampire that just won't quite die, are rather wonderfully dreadful.

The film adaptation presents a more streamlined version of the central story but manages to lightly touch on almost everything in the book in allusive ways. The pedophilia at the heart of the relationship of the vampire and her human companion is only suggested in the film, while in the novel it is the human's animating drive. That the film manages to contain most of the novel, if only in gesture, is the happy result of the screenplay being written by Lindqvist himself. This is effective garlic to keep away fiction-bound purists who view other people's takes on "their" beloved art as fundamentally wrong-headed.

The story concerns twelve year old Oskar, a dreamy, shoplifting loner who is bullied by other children at school in 1980s Blackeberg, outside of Stockholm, Sweden. He lives with his mother in an apartment complex and he collects newspaper and magazine clippings of murders and criminals, dreaming of violent revenge on his school tormentors. One night two people move into an apartment in his building, a young girl and an older man. Eli, the younger appearing, turns out to be a centuries old vampire, and Hakan is an ex-school teacher and pedophile who kills to feed Eli's need for blood, a slave to his passions for her underaged body.

It is a creepy conceit of Lindqvist's, pairing a pedophile with a vampire several hundred years older than him but encased in a youthful body. It's an effective, tense technique, unnerving the reader and slightly tweaking our mores. This, Lindqvist is almost saying, you find this so much more horrific than vampires killing people and drinking their blood? Here the author also slightly alters basic vampire mythology, keeping Eli sort of a child despite her true age, her being trapped in the physical form of a twelve year old preventing her from ever quite gaining the wisdom that comes with adulthood, yet still old enough to hold the upper hand in the relationship with Hakan.

Much of the relationship between Hakan and Eli is unspoken in the film version and here it makes up a sizable amount of the squirms induced in the book's early chapters. It also adds a layer of creepiness to Hakan's practical decision to prey on younger victims. He needs someone he can overpower as he grabs them and knocks them out with halothane gas, before tying them up by their feet and slitting their throats to drain their blood for Eli. What else he may do with these young bodies Lindqvist wisely leaves off the page for your mind to stumble on to only later. Eli and Hakan together have come up with this slaughterhouse inspired scheme as the direct bite of the vampire infects others and often requires Eli to kill her victims in a very thoroughgoing fashion (twisting their heads off).

The friendship between the loners Oskar and Eli deepens, the two of them tapping Morse code messages through the wall, meeting at nights out on the apartment complex playground, and learning more about each other. She encourages him to fight back against the school bullies, a path of action that escalates the situation to horrific consequences. Meanwhile Hakan, seeing a relationship forming, experiences jealousy and fear, then botches a murder and is caught in the act before he can finish. He douses himself in acid to kill himself and disfigure himself so thoroughly that he won't be traced back to Eli, his outer form now taking on the monstrous implications of his inner self. A visit by Eli to his hospital in the night and Hakan's fall from out the hospital window gives us a shuffling zombie like vampire, a kind of mindless unstoppable force, and one of the novel's most horrific scenes in a basement.

This last scene brings together the Eli plot and the minor subplot of a teenage hoodlum whose mother is about to marry a local police officer, and it's one of the livelier and more amusing subplots at times. Other strands of the narration focus on Virginia, a woman Eli attacks but fails to kill, whose illness and eventual death almost destroys her group of friends, a bunch of older, out of work alcoholics. Lindqvist's story sags the most when we visit this group, Lacke the slacker, some time lover of victim, Gosta a housebound cat fanatic, and a few other wastrels, though Virginia and her illness is at least of some interest. Her sufferings as she undergoes the transformation, her desperate cutting of her arms and drinking her own blood for temporary satiation are awful to behold. But perhaps the worst, least effective moment in the novel comes during one of the scenes of Virginia's transformation.

There are essentially two routes you can take with a vampire novel: either you can go the all-out ooga booga route and vampires are undead creatures repelled by holy water, crosses, garlic, etc. (or some variant on that), the Dracula model; or they are scientifically explainable freaks of nature infected with a virus or a parasite or something seen under a microscope, the I Am Legend style. You may even blend both types, but this is much trickier to pull off. Lindqvist tries hard, but fails at this third way, explaining in one scene that even though modern science would scoff, Virginia had a small tumor growing in her heart, a tumor made of brain tissue. It's not really a fleshed out theory, but in Lindqvist's vampire model, the vampiric virus is itself alive, somewhat sentient, and controls you through a small brain growing in your heart.

Seriously, that's just laughable and worse than that, unnecessary. It's like Lindqvist had to find some explanation for why the vampire's victims had to be "turned off" lest the geometric trajectory of vampiric infection overtake population growth. And since stakes through the heart is a reliable stand-by, why not do something there? The conceit is nothing short of dumb, and luckily the author touches on it once then moves on with his story (mercifully absenting it entirely from the film). No real plot elements hinge on this point and if I'd been editing his novel that would be the one place I'd really have issues.

The rest of the story, though, is a crisply written, unsettling little shocker of a novel. The end is one of the better hanging endings I've read in some time. Your mind can trace the later, post-novel events with a rather sure certainty and that's sort of what's so horrible about it. The futility and the repetition.

In a sense, though, Lindqvist's novel is really about love, about how we fight for it, we fight against it, we put up barricades against it, we are turned inside out and made monstrous by it, and how it can dominate and alter the very contours of our lives. The novel also turns out to be about desire and how we can confuse that with love and, worse yet, how we can be made monstrous by our desires. If you happen to see the film version first, that heart of the story is more in focus, clearer, stronger. If you pick up the print version, you may wish to turn on a few more lights in the house, because this is a love story with teeth.

He's Bringing Funny Back

2009-10-15T23:42:00.009-05:00

Tales Designed to Thrizzle, by Michael Kupperman, Fantagraphics, 2009
(*click on all these pix to see them bigger)
(**yeah, Cleland, the shit was free. suck it!)

Somewhere between the publication of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns and the retirement of Bill Waterson, the funny pages died. A few sheets of corporate wasteland occupy your Sunday comics section with barely a chuckle to be heard, while the closest thing you can find that could charitably be described as a funny book are Archie Comics, running on wheezes that were tired in 1960. What's mostly left is derivation in four color and grim-faced anti-superheroes angsting up the scenery.

Hallelujah then for Michael Kupperman! He returns with his second collection, Tales Designed to Thrizzle Vol. 1, which brings under one cover the first four issues of the same-named comic. And comic it sure as hell is. I'm not entirely certain when I've read anything that made me laugh out loud as often as this volume, with the possible exception of Kupperman's debut Snake 'n' Bacon's Cartoon Caberet. Women who've given birth to multiple children and older readers are advised to secure some kind of adult diaper.

While the earlier book was entirely black and white, much like the individual issues of Thrizzle, for this collection Kupperman has done gone and colorized his classics. Where Snake 'n' Bacon had a looseness to it, gags showing up on one page not returning til twenty pages later, and its cast of regular characters, Thrizzle has a much more cohesive feel. There's a structure -- of sorts -- to the whole enterprise, stories are longer and each reprinted issue is broken up into an adult section, a children's section, and an old people's section, though I've yet to determine any meaningful distinction for all that.

The resulting product reads more like boys' magazines from decades past with their mix of comics, prose stories, and advertisements woven in between articles, running down one whole column, or tucked away wherever a spare bit of space presented it. Scroll through Kupperman's TwitPic archives and you'll find that it was just these 1950s mens' and boys' magazines with their eclectic mix of self-improvement, thrilling adventure, sexual titillation, and anti-commie paranoias that inspire the author.

Such material gives Kupperman free reign to try out whichever style of illustration or story suits his fancy. There are charcoal style illustrated stories like the absurdist "Tommy Learns About Harbors" then there's the pistol packing police thriller featuring Albert Einstein and Mark Twain in Silver Age comics style. We're also treated to cameos from Snake 'n' Bacon (for those not in the know, a duo that is literally a piece of bacon and a snake), Sex Blimps, Cousin Grandpa, Dick Crazy, the Manister (a superhero who turns into a banister) and more from Kupperman's first book.

And every so often, Pagus, Jesus' half brother shows up to laugh and teach us about colored eggs.

Sandwiched in between all this glorious, hilarious nonsense, Kupperman finds room for more bizarre fun, lampooning old style magazine ads. Issues are replete with full page ads for things like 4-Playo 3000, the robot that performs foreplay on your wife, leaving you time to do important things like work on your Lyndon Johnson biography.

Or how about Baby Poop'n'Tell's ad which features such telling testimonials like "We've had to move out of our house because of Baby Poop'n'Tell" and "Aside from the constant stream of poop, her shrill, high-pitched voice announcing every fresh poop is making it impossible for me to sleep." Kupperman gets off a few lovely gags here for these products, a little dig at the ridiculous coupons that used to run in comic books where you were instructed to fill it out and answer "Yes" if you wanted the product and "No" if you did not. What was the point of filling out no? Kupperman wonders too, in increasingly alarmed and amused fashion.

Kuppmerman takes culture, high, low, and in between, and he runs it through a shredder, dropping comedy that pivots instantaneously from Shakespeare to a copywriter who can't stop swearing in his advertisements to a Virtual Sitz Bath video game ("all the excitement of an actual sitz bath"). It's an absurdist romp through Western cultural references with Kupperman as your guide.

And every page is full of one laugh more bizarrely induced then the last. What can you do with the completely serious illustration for "Modern Chimp Barbering Romance"? Or Mickey Rourke pitching pubic hair stencils? Or Henry Winkler as The Fonz making a guest appearance in a classic porno coloring book? It's these lovely juxtapositions of the unexpected and the unpredictable that makes Thrizzle such a gut-wrenching exercise in belly laughs. The jokes are absurd, but even better than that, they're funny. Really and truly, "hey-I-gotta-show-you-this" funny.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta show you this:

Yeah, yeah, I know

2009-10-14T08:28:00.003-05:00

A couple housekeeping bits.

Yes. I know. I've been like that guy or girl who says s/he's going to call and then never calls. I understand this. I'm in school full time and it's a monster full of duties. Blah.

But I do have a review kicking up soon. So there will be something relatively soon.

That said, the Federal Trade Commission is a box full of stupid assholes. Read this and get back to me. What I say below will make tons more sense if you do.

Apparently, if I get any advance reader copies of books, I have to disclose it by law, and since I don't have the dough Kos has for defense attorneys (or any kind of readership sufficient to warrant any attention), I am going to do so, as bitchily as possible obviously.

It's a stupid as fuck rule because the operating assumption in any review industry is that the manufacturer/publisher/whoever is GOING TO PROVIDE FREE COPIES TO REVIEWERS. That is no guarantee of a good review and it's certainly not the way to make a living, reselling advance reader copies.

That's the fucking industry, you idiotic shitfucks. If you don't even know what the fuck you're talking about when you make rules, either learn about it, or don't bother making the fucking rules.

Morons.

That there is the inherent suspicion that bloggers are doing something in some fashion different than any other publishing venture and must abide by special rules is clearly a law that is in violation of equal protection clauses.

So, for now I'm going to add a blanket disclaimer here and to the template until idiotic rules created by mouthbreathing fucktards are dispensed with. I suspect the first time this ethics rule is prosecuted will be the last time, so I'm prepared to be patient even if I'm seething.

And for the record, I'm not even sure how many books I've reviewed I didn't get for free. As in from the library. And I'm sure if you looked, you'd find plenty of negative reviews.

Lastly, when I was a professional reviewer at the Plain Dealer, there was an editorial policy that essentially stood as "if you can't say something nice, say something helpful" and negative book reviews often got shunted to off-days and tucked away in some section where they wouldn't attract much attention. They weren't usually put on the Books page in the Sunday section, so as not to upset advertisers. So the expectation of a positive review is actually far more prevalent in the professional industry than in the amateur one.

I'll take my own personal ethics over that brand any day of the week.

2009-09-10T00:18:00.003-05:00

An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town, by David Farley, Gotham, 2009.

I think someone said it on the back of the book in a blurb, but it really is true: if you're going to only read one single book about the foreskin of Jesus Christ, then you really want to read this one.

Yes.

You read that right.

Join me, will you, in this particularly weird history of the Catholic Church as we discover the silliness that is the world of relics. For the uninitiated, relics were bits from the lives of various saints and others deemed holy by Rome. These bits had a hierarchy and differing statuses. For instance, there were bits of saints bodies -- St. Valentine's head, for instance -- and these were primo relics. Then there were, just a little bit lower on the totem pole, bits touched by the saints, such as the ax that beheaded St. Valentine. Finally, at the lowest level were relics that were relics by their proximity to actual relics, such as the bag that held the ax that beheaded St. Valentine.

Of course, though, there were hierarchies within those hierarchies, bigger named saints having better relics. St. Paul being better than St. Valentine; Mary Magdalene better than St. Paul; Mary, mother of Jesus, better than Mary Magdalene; and, of course, the big magilla, Jesus. Anything that could be claimed to be something connected with the life of a saint, the bigger the saint the better, was venerated and placed in an honored spot in churches throughout Europe.

Of course, with the relics market being a hot property through the Middle Ages -- and during and post-Crusades -- it wasn't long before tons of folks were jumping on the bandwagon. Relics like splinters of the "True Cross" on which Jesus was crucified were quite the thing, so revered and accepted without reservation that John Calvin once quipped that if all the pieces of the so-called "True Cross" were collected in one place, they would form a whole ship's cargo.

These big ticket items were obvious draws, as were pieces of the table from the Last Supper, the spear that pierced Jesus' side, and so on. But, with the bodily ascension of Jesus, as the story goes, there was no tomb and no chance of nailing a sweet chunk of his body to tout around as a sign of how special you were. Nothing like some random skull could be toted around and claimed as Jesus' head. To be sure, there were relics of Jesus' hair and fingernails, but those were pale substitutes. Besides, even though one could logically extrapolate divine haircuts and nail clippings, there was nothing specifically Biblical to back that up.

Well, cue up your Luke 2:21, because we have straight from the horse's mouth confirmation that Jesus was circumcised which means --yes! -- Holy Foreskin left behind. We can never be sure exactly who figured out this crackerjack scheme, but times being what they were, it went over big. All that was needed was the story of Charlemagne being vouchsafed this particular bit of flesh from an angel and him handing it over to Pope Leo III (though there is a competing story that Charlemagne actually received it as a wedding present from the Byzantine Empress Irene).

Pope Leo III did what anyone else would do when handed what was reputedly an 800 year old piece of baby cock: he put it in the Vatican's most inner sanctum. And there it reputedly remained for seven hundred more years until Rome was sacked by the Germans in 1527. Apparently a soldier found the prepuce, which was little more than a couple chickpeas in size, thought it worth keeping, and took it with him. He was later apprehended in the nearby town of Calcata, where he was locked in a cave jail cell. He hid the foreskin there, was released, and thirty years later, miracle of miracles, the foreskin was discovered and became a centerpiece of the small town's church.

Celebrated by official church dogma, pilgrims who made the journey to the town to view the Holy Foreskin were granted ten years off their stay in Purgatory. And there the foreskin stayed for the next few hundred years.

This bit of dainty old flesh was deified practically, though it wasn't without competition. In the 12th century, an abbey in Charoux, France, decided to horn in on the action, claiming they had the real Holy Foreskin. They claimed to also have received it from Charlemagne, though they apparently lost it for an odd century or two. Theirs disappeared again, after Pope Innocent III declined to rule on its authenticity, only to be "rediscovered" in 1856. Ultimately, there were something like seventeen other competing foreskin claims. Yes, once one town had themselves a claim to some mystical Jesus dick, other towns wanted in on the action.

With a little prepucial sword fighting going on following the Charoux "rediscovery," Rome had to step in, and it did so, deciding in 1900 that anyone who even mentioned the Holy Foreskin would be excommunicated. They modified their approach in 1954, by deciding that plain old excommunication was too soft a decree and pronounced mentioning it would be punished with a harsher degree of excommunication that included shunning by all Catholics. This for even mentioning a relic they'd spent the last several hundred years talking up as grand and great.

The small town of Calcata was allowed to keep their relic. They were even allowed to conduct an annual parade through the town featuring the relic, but only once a year and never discussed any of the remaining 364 calendar days. The going consensus was that relic veneration had pretty much died out, Calcata was a fairly small town, what was the harm in leaving it as it was after setting up their penalties?

Then, in 1983, the priest of Calcata made a shocking announcement to his parishioners. The foreskin had apparently been stolen. It was gone once again, this tiny little bit of flesh supposedly from the end of Jesus' penis, which the priest, Dario Magnoni, had kept, of all places, in a shoebox in the closet of his home

Well, as you can see, this is quite a story. And this history is entertainingly told by travel writer, David Farley in his very amusing, highly enlightening An Irreverent Curiosity: In Search of the Church's Strangest Relic in Italy's Oddest Town. The title takes its first three words from a papal condemnation of the relic and interest in it. It's hard not to see the church's point. What else could provoke a twenty-first century person to want to learn about what was clearly a faked bit of church lore, especially one so preposterous as this one?

To learn more about it, to study the Vatican records and try to piece together the lore and the current whereabouts of the relic, Farley moved his wife and his dog and himself to Calcata, Italy, where he lived for several months, digging into the history as well as plenty of Italian food. The book, when not discussing ancient bits of revered dong, comes off as a kind of slightly whacked love letter to the strange town of Calcata, a refuge for outcasts from the country itself, but also from other places.

Farley describes the village as commonly referred to as a "paese di fricchettoni" which is to say village of freaks. With two actual Calcatas on the map, the old medieval town and the newer Calcata Nuova, the history doesn't make it difficult for a reader to understand those who call the residents freaks. New Agers, old hippies from across the continent, and wanderers from all around flocked to the old town. This sets Calcata apart, as something like 70% of Italians live within 1 mile of their childhood homes.

The older part of town had once been condemned by the Italian government after earthquakes earlier in the century destroyed a village elsewhere in Italy. All the old residents moved to the new government built Calcata Nuova, selling off their homes in the sixties to a bunch of hippies and artist types. In a place filled with Belgians, Americans, Italians from all over, Dutch, Spaniards, etc., Farley can only find freaks to befriend, including an old actor who appeared in Italian soft-core porn and who gives the author a book of nude photography of himself, sometimes in a state of arousal; fascists still dedicated to Il Duce; an old Contessa with bad gas who has been writing a history of the Holy Foreskin for ten years; and other assorted quirky characters.

The book generally trades back and forth being about the historical accounts of the foreskin and Farley's day to day life trying to research it and get answers while living in Calcata, traveling to Rome and Turin, and finding himself stymied at nearly every turn. He acts as a beard for the local foreskin expert, Patrizia, who claims the Vatican is blocking her research, asking for reference works they've denied her, while being fed the basic lore by her in return for his services. The lore itself proves almost as bizarrely entertaining as Farley's misadventures in Italy, a kind of slapstick antidote to the tendentious sturm und drang of Dan Brown.

For example, what will seem beyond absurd into a kind of grotesquerie was how much debate centered around this particular relic. Theologians through the ages spent much candlepower and brain juice formulating statements such as this head scratcher from Saint Anastasius Sinaita in the seventh century: "And as Christ's immaculate blood, mixed with water, trickled on and purified the earth during the Passion, the cut and lost foreskin bestowed holiness on the same earth. In any case He, who let it be cut off freely, saved the foreskin, so that He could assume it again at his resurrection, and He, uncorrupted and whole, could possess every sin of every body. Because our bodies will be complete at the resurrection, and stand by his side."

So, did you get all that? Jesus, at the age of eight days, saved his own foreskin, which he kept with him all his life, so he could have it after his body ascended into heaven and was resurrected millennia later. Let us further note that the author of this particular piece of nonsense ran an abbey

Further, in the sixteenth century, at least one Spanish theologian, Francesco de Suarez argued that Jesus' body could easily, after his resurrection, have regrown his foreskin. Unfortunately, neither Farley or de Suarez fail to go into any detail as to how specifically this is supposed to have taken place. One imagines that Jesus could have likewise as easily have healed the holes in his hands and side, rendering the story of Thomas and his doubt a moot one, but, alas, the record does not touch on this bit of supernatural healing.

So, ideas and hypotheses about Jesus' foreskin percolated throughout the centuries, and were hashed over at later points including by the seventeenth century Greek theologian Leo Allatius. This learned scholar's fantastical contribution to the argument about this Holy Foreskin was not only did it ascend into heaven with Jesus, but that it also traveled through space to become the rings of Saturn. Keeping that in mind, how much will it surprise you when I tell you that Allatius also wrote the first medical treatise on vampires?

Farley is, of course, by no means exhaustive in his accounts. We are spared the dull parts of the history and given just what the papacy feared, irreverence. And, honestly, what should a sensible person's reaction be when learning that certain bishops argue for the foreskin's authenticity by citing the message delivered by Saint Catherine in the fourteenth century that the Popes should move back to Rome from Avignon, France, and that Jesus himself put his foreskin on her finger as a wedding band? Or how can you react with anything but irreverence when you read the story of Saint Agnes of Vienna who claimed that every time she took communion, the wafer was transformed in her mouth into the "sweet" meat of Jesus' foreskin?

Let me remind you. I'm not making any of this up.

Farley's book is too good for you not to read. Irreverent? Absolutely. Entertaining? Just as much so. Fascinating? Your mileage may very, but such hidden nooks and crannies of the past can't help but draw me in. Farley paces everything wonderfully and delivers a gently funny travelogue and history that is both laugh out loud hysterical and stranger than just about any book of fiction you could find.

(And if you want more, for instance, photos of the various cast that make up Farley's researches, you have nothing more to do than visit An Irreverent Curiosity's Facebook page, where you can put faces to names. See Omar, Farley's translator, or Athon, the woman who lives in a cave with crows. Yes, there are faces to go with the whacked-out stories.)

Summer Audiobook Sensation

2009-08-30T22:22:00.005-05:00

The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 6-8 and The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 9: The Pioneers, By Edgar Allan Poe, Read by Christopher Aruffo, Acoustic Learning Inc., 2009

Some time back when I did my month of Poe for one year's October, I managed to somehow stumble into a dedicated audiobook reader who told me he was devoted to making audio versions of all of Poe's work. I was hopeful he'd really do it, but a little doubtful. There's just so much to do and unless there's a publishing company bankrolling you, it seemed a Herculean task for one man with a microphone.

Well, that one man with a microphone, Christopher Aruffo, is back with armloads of new Poe recordings and they're topnotch stuff, demonstrating a growth in his narrative abilities and sensitivities. I recently finished listening to volumes 6 through 9 of his latest recordings and I'm telling you: if you enjoy Poe and you enjoy audiobooks, consider this a little slice of heaven on earth.

Aruffo has made it easy for you to purchase single discs of his versions if you're after a very specific favorite Poe and I review them in this fashion, though it is possible for you to purchase a three pack that bundles volumes six through eight. The ninth volume turns out to feature such long recordings that it is itself a multidisc edition.

The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 6

The sixth disc in this series features some a couple classic Poe pieces as well as an obscurity or two not usually recorded. Both "The Oblong Box" and "MS Found in a Bottle" are from Poe's sea story phase though the two couldn't be more dissimilar. The former is a kind of mystery (for which Poe is given the credit as inventor in his Dupin tales) in which an attentive ship passenger stakes out another passenger to determine what makes up the contents of a strange box the observed party keeps with him. The narration keeps our interest piqued in the curious doings in the stateroom in question, then gratifies it in a moment of excitement and revelation at story's end.

The second tale, "MS. Found in a Bottle" is the story which launched Poe's career, a first-hand account of a ship blown off course by the terrible Simoon (part typhoon, part hurricane and part sandstorm). When the ship capsizes, our narrator ends up aboard another passing ship which is headed toward the South Pole. Poe creepily adds to this black galleon the fact that each of the crew members are blind and do not take account of the narrator, the sole survivor of the previous ship.

In many ways, "MS. Found in a Bottle" presaged a number of other writer's Pole stories while also sharing with it elements of the nameless shapeless dreaded horrors populating many a tale by H.P. Lovecraft. Like many Poe tales, usually featuring a singular narrator, a solitary type who more reports the action than participates it, there aren't many opportunities for dialogue. Aruffo makes the most of the drama of the story, his powerful voice filling my headphones with his rich tones as the ship is beset by currents and lost. While it is a piece of absurdity to imagine that one might write a diary entry as you were in the middle of being sucked down a whirlpool, Poe's story is effective nonetheless, his early sureness of touch when it came to handling dread evident even here.

These two more well-known pieces are joined by "The Oval Portrait" and the last story Poe wrote, the unfinished "The Light-House," also in the form of journal or diary. Readers of Oscar Wilde's "Portrait of Dorian Gray" will recognize the main supernatural device of the fourth story rounding out this disc, "The Oval Portrait," that of the ability of art to so mimic reality that it absorbs the actual life or soul of the real world. Poe's narrator at least makes it abundantly clear why pedants are so rarely invited to parties.

The highlight of these lesser recorder stories, though, has to be "The Light-House." Here Aruffo camps it up for our entertainment, delivering the narrative in the fussy, elitist voice of a man not knowing what he's in for, but certain in his dreams. As the story was unfinished, it's almost never, if ever, committed to recording, and we have our reader here to thank for giving us not only a rarity, but one delivered with such panache. As the recording ended so abruptly, I was certain I was missing some tracks, but no. A check at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore's fantastic and thorough website confirmed what I dreaded. Just as I was settling into a fun tale, it ended. Alas!

The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 7

The seventh volume features only two stories, and with such a short title list, you'd guess they'd have to be good ones, and Aruffo does not disappoint. Here, he chooses to focus on two tales of premature burial, the obviously eponymous one and the all-time classic "The Cask of Amontillado."

Frequently anthologized, "The Premature Burial" allows Aruffo to demonstrate one of his especially wonderful strengths as a reader. Where the opening material dithers for quite some time with a number of anecdotes and treads near dry essay (and, surprisingly, you can approach dry after a number of nearly identical "buried alive" stories), Aruffo's pacing and emphasis keeps the material lively until we reach the narrator's sheer terror in the later pages.

A cataleptic with a long-running fear of premature burial narrates a few incidents of such happenings (apparently not too uncommon somewhere in the area of 150 years ago) and in a manner that presaged Freud's investigations into the unconsciousness, brings about his own almost coma-like condition through fear of such burials. Here Aruffo delivers a nicely chilling vocalization of the demon haunting our narrator's trances, as well as grippingly dramatizes the mounting panic of the narrator as the story closes.

The more famous of the two tales, "The Cask of Amontillado," the familiar revenge story narrated by Montresor, tells how he goes about plotting then carrying out his revenge against the ironically named Fortunato for a grave insult. We're never given the specifics about the insult, only that it was sufficient for Montresor to plot Fortunato's murder and premature internment.

Aruffo brings to this reading his wonderful gift for dialects and different voices to the back and forth conversation between Fortunato and Montresor, delivering the victim in a gruff, accented characterization you'd be hard-pressed not to believe is another person. The reader also ups the ante on the recording by adding just enough sound effect manipulation to give us a catacomb-y echo as villain and victim climb lower beneath the earth. This adds a nice touch, some chilling atmospherics, while avoiding the overkill of overproduction some recorded books have gone in for, turning a reading into a staged performance.

I remarked to a friend of mine who had delivered an amateur recording of this same story that I thought in his version the coughing fit of Fortunato was overdone, but it's a delight to hear Aruffo take the very same tack. At one stage while he and Montresor are down in the catacombs, a coughing fit overtakes the intended victim. The scene includes, in the printed version, a moment of black humor that most readers overlook:

He turned towards me, and looked into my eyes with two filmy orbs that distilled the rheum of intoxication.

"Nitre?" he asked, at length.

"Nitre," I replied. "How long have you had that cough?"

"Ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh! --ugh! ugh! ugh!"

My poor friend found it impossible to reply for many minutes.

"It is nothing," he said, at last.

Both my friend and Aruffo read it arightly and provide this dark little story with the twinkling of humor often overlooked in many of Poe's works. The long, drawn out coughing spell followed up by the clearly ironic dismissal.

It is always a pleasure when someone of great skill tackles something you are intimately familiar and brings a little something new and exciting to the work, and Aruffo succeeds beautifully in this case.

The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 8

The eighth volume finds Aruffo concentrating on two popular Poe stories of doomed romances, Poe following his self-prescribed path to ultimate aesthetic beauty: the death of a lovely young woman. In the first of these, "Ligeia," we meet the notion of "the double" that Poe used so effectively in William Wilson. A young couple marry, our unnamed narrator and his ethereal bride who proves too fragile for this world, and thereupon after the wife begins schooling the husband in the divine and the occult. This education is cut short abruptly by the death of the title character, but it an obvious and telling signifier of what's to come.

Some time after his widowhood begins, our narrator moves away and finds himself married to another woman, his second marriage as passionless as his first one was crammed full of it. But tragedy once more strikes, because this is an Edgar Allan Poe story after all. The narrator's second wife, "the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremaine," falls sick and dies. On a night's vigil, he finds she rises and as her bandages fall away, she is revealed to be none other than Ligeia.

This itself is rather similar to the stories "Morella" and "Eleonora." In all three we are treated to doomed romances that you know are never going to be successful. Poe manages to fill the second romance or the sequel to the wife's death with dread and foreboding, only in one instance giving us the hint of a happy ending.

That happy ending makes up the second story on this disc, "Eleonora," though Poe himself later criticized this wish fulfillment style neat closure. A much shorter piece than the first, "Eleonora" feels decidedly the lesser work. That aspect is quite likely what lies behind the number of revisions Poe put the piece through over the course of his life.

Nevertheless, Aruffo is wonderful in the delivery of his characters. It's a shame that Poe should tend so regularly toward monomaniacal loner narrators who tend to monologue. With such a facility for differing voices, some of Aruffo's talents are wasted with Poe. Still, as a reader he does manage to inflect long, ornate passages with the right amount of breathing room, giving us thinking, breathing characters instead of essayists who happen to discuss dead brides. He is appreciative of the differences in male to female characters and doesn't simper his way through the small amounts of text Ligeia is given to speak in her story, nor does he simply pitch his voice a little higher, but offers up something far subtler and ultimately more feminine than either easy way out.

As a collection, volumes six through eight offer a nice round helping of Edgar Allan Poe stories from the obscure to the overly well-known, and Aruffo's reading is so pleasurable, so well-done as to put them up there among the legendary ones of Basil Rathbone and Vincent Price.

The Edgar Allan Poe Collection 9

If you're seeking hard to find obscurities, stories that almost never make it into recordings of Poe's work, then this is the one for you. A gem of a collection wherein reader Christopher Aruffo tackles pieces you simply can't find anywhere else. It's simply a treasure trove of riches in which we are treated to several of Poe's more hoax like stories. Included are "The Balloon Hoax" as well as "Hans Pfaal" and "The Journal of Julius Rodman," Poe's unfinished serial novel that was so convincing it fooled a member of Congress.

Aruffo also adds to his repertoire of Poe's essays from which he provided a wonderful selection in his Edgar Allan Poe Collection Volume 4 and Volume 5. Filling out the bill with these hoax tales and adventure stories are a few of Poe's more travel related essays including "Harper's Ferry," "Morning on the Wissahiccon" and "The Capitol at Washington." We also are given "Some Account of Stonehenge," which might be considered travel related, though it almost seems Poe's attempt at an encyclopedic account of the place.

Aruffo dispatches these with his customary style, turning what might read dryly on the page into fascinating accounts. The essays demonstrate Poe's less lurid side, though he's just as prone to his ornate, baroque style of composition. Aruffo delivers Poe as he is, bombastic, hyperbolic, critical and judgmental and all of it is a treat to listen to, in no small part because Aruffo's made such an in-depth study of the material. He understands Poe better than any other reader I've listened to, finding subtleties and nuances in the work most narrators miss.

While "Hans Pfaal" keeps a place in my heart just for the sheer audacity of its absurdity (the description of both the visitor who arrives by balloon to deliver the message that makes up the story and the account of the balloon's construction are simply laughable), the crown jewel in this case is what would have been Poe's second novel had he not come to contract disputes with his publisher (an all too common occurrence with the author).

I'm speaking of course of "The Journal of Julius Rodman," a detailed meta-fiction wherein an editor delivers excerpts from a supposedly fleshed out account of a trip over the Rockies preceding that of Lewis and Clark's. While there are entertaining passages throughout, filled with adventure and comic moments, some of the best of these passages of great enjoyment are given to us by the editor who seems at times rather impatient with Rodman's account, interrupting at any given moment to hurry us along in the action.

The style in which Poe writes, the depths he went to to add a veneer of verisimilitude to his work contributed to the fact that Robert Greenhow, one time translator for the State Department, included passages from the work in a document commissioned by the United States Senate.

As the two voices compete for narrative space, Aruffo deftly shifts back and forth, giving both men's accounts and creating wholly credible individual personalities for the rough and tumble gentleman of Julius Rodman, as well as a persnickety editor not too dissimilar in attitude at time from the unnamed diarist of "The Light-House." At times the piece seemed like it was not only Rodman against the elements and the various native tribes, but also Rodman against his later editor.

Alas, again, for this piece likewise ends abruptly, unfinished by Poe after being fired as editor of the magazine in which it had been appearing serially. The loss to literature -- as well as how its loss allows the morbid, brooding Poe to so dominate without challenge -- is, of course, incalculable.

What's remarkable, though, over the breadth of Poe's work, amply demonstrated with this collection, is the visionary aspect of Poe the writer. We are treated to absurdist works, science fiction, fantasy, horror, metafiction, detective fiction -- half of which are invented with Poe's experimentation. While to this day Poe's style of lurid melodrama for which is he best known still keeps him out of consideration at many a college literature course, his contributions can hardly be looked over.

Kudos to Christopher Aruffo for doing his part to bring to light some of these more rare gems of Edgar Allan Poe. It is through each small chip in the edifice of the legend of Poe that the walled in genius of Poe more and more escapes. Recordings of this quality and of this depth and of this thoroughness only hasten that day.

Someone Will Spit Reading This

2009-08-19T21:57:00.002-05:00

I Spit on Your Graves, by Boris Vian, Translated from the French by Boris Vian and Milton Rosenthal, Canongate Crime, 2001

The first thing you need to know is that this novel, originally published in France in 1946, has absolutely nothing to do with the controversial 1978 film, I Spit on Your Grave. While the film was originally titled Day of the Woman, it subsequently changed to the more familiar title, and there the similarity ends.

Originally written on a bet (whether or not the author, Boris Vian, could write a bestseller in a couple weeks), the novel was the the first published for Vian who was an active member of the French literary and intellectual circles, having published poetry and had other novels accepted for publication.

This novel, a loose and nasty little pulp, was cooked up as a bet and passed off as a translation of an American novel by Vernon Sullivan, translated into French by Vian. It tells the story of Lee Anderson, an black man passing for white who moves to Buckton, a small town in America without any further specificity as to place, though we are led to believe that its location is somewhere in the south.

The notion of a white author purporting to be translating a black author -- i.e., passing for black -- while writing about a black man passing for white is one of the novel's little twisted charms. It'd sound almost sick to say that all the unpleasantries of the novel are cruel charms, but from time to time I'm in the mood for something rather sick and sadistic. To say that I Spit on Your Graves fills that bill would be an understatement.

Lee Anderson is in Buckton on a mission. To avenge his younger brother who was lynched for dating a white girl. His plan: to seduce a couple of white, rich sisters, humiliate them, then kill them. Single-minded of purpose, he finds himself a nice position as manager of Buckton's one bookstore, then goes about learning the ways and fashions of the town. This leads him, a twenty six year old, into hanging out, drinking, and having sex with a number of fifteenish year olds.

The first sign that this book was not written by an American comes right there.

While it may be perfectly plausible for men ten years their junior to hang out with French teens in the post-war years back around Paris, I think we can safely assume that small town, southern America was probably a whole different story. I'm not prude or naive enough to believe that no adult ever had sex with a minor in 1947 Alabama, just not so openly or so frequently.

With his in-town sex partners under his belt, Anderson begins casting about for the perfect prey. The semi-anonymous Judy's of Buckton aren't nearly as much of a challenge, nor as much as a prize. And so Anderson lingers, until a sickly upper-middle-class boy named Dexter introduces him to the Asquiths, a well-to-do family from Prixville. There he finds the two sisters, Jean and Lou, roughly twenty and fifteen respectively, who are sufficient for his revenge.

Taking his time, Anderson insinuates himself into their lives, at times pitting the two against each other, though sisterly bonds and Dexter's suspicions complicate matters entirely.

If there is a particular fly in the ointment to Anderson's quest, it comes on the reader's side, not the character's. Much like a certain lack of awareness of southern mores in the 40s, Vian's hep lingo or Negro approximations are weak and never very convincing. For French readers of the same era they were, by sales accounts, sufficiently authentic seeming, but from a later, Stateside perspective there are elements of the voice ("my good Negro blood" and the narrator's belief that his fluency in jive is genetically innate) that don't ring true.

All of this actually seems beside the point. Vian paints Anderson's anger and obsessions pretty thoroughly. While in some respects one could just as easily subtract the entirety of the racial element and merely make Anderson seeking revenge for the death of his younger brother at a party, this is one of the novel's strengths. While Vian is seeking a book that sensationalizes "the Other" to some degree, what comes out through all the pulp conventions is that human nature is universal.

That's a rather kumbaya ending for a review of a novel that features tons of underage sex, a couple of brutal murders, and rape, I know, but there is actually more going on than just a down and dirty shocker. It's too short and too harsh to see it at first, but upon later reflection, Vian, like most good artists, couldn't help slipping in a little deeper meaning. The only drawback is that he gets you right inside it all to make you see it -- and for some, that may be too much

Jeeves Every Day

2009-07-29T10:24:00.003-05:00

Jeeves in the Offing, by P.G. Wodehouse, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1960, Reprinted 2002 by Overlook Hardcover

You may ask yourself, is there any point in reviewing a Wodehouse novel? Or rather, you may ask this of me. I am, as has been established previously, completely and totally smitten with every word that drops from the pen of P.G. Wodehouse. And no novels or short stories so delight me of his as the classic Jeeves and Wooster brand.

I may as well review sunshine, cool, clean water, the smiles of beautiful children, fuzzy puppies, and all other manner of things that are perfection themselves. When the dark clouds have gathered on many a friend's brow, my advice has been steadfast and true: get yourself some Wodehouse and escape into sheer bliss.

How many of these friends take my advice I can't say for certain, but it remains solid. In the years prior to my discovery of these delightful books, I used Tom Robbins in a similar fashion. The problem is that Robbins writes so rarely that depending on your bad days mileage, you're very quickly through the entirety of the canon and back to rereading his novels. With Wodehouse, you have plenty to choose from -- there only being one drawback that may irk some. Wodehouse recycled his plots with a vengeance.

Were you to describe to someone the novel as such, you might describe any number of them: "Bertie Wooster is summoned to his Aunt Dahlia's home Brinkely Court to assist her in some project. In the course of this adventure, he inadvertently finds himself engaged to a girl, breaking up the engagement of someone else, being considered a crackpot by the locals, making an ass out of himself, botching events up completely, then finally resorting to the ingenious advice of his valet, Jeeves, who saves the day for all parties."

Because that is more or less the outline. Maybe it doesn't take place at Brinkley Court, maybe Bertie is assisting his other aunt, maybe a few other variations on a theme, but one way or another Bertie Wooster will make a hash of things and Jeeves will provide the solutions.

In this particular volume, Jeeves in the Offing, Jeeves is away on a vacation, which only provides Bertie more scope and license, though there is actually little even Bertie can do to upend this particular story. Events are already well out of hand before he even comes on the scene to apply his brand of brainpower. After breakfasting with an old school chum, Reginald Herring (nicknamed, obviously, Kipper) he opens the paper to find an announcement that Roberta Wickham is engaged to one Bertram Wooster.

News to him, he legs it to Brinkley Court where he discovers that Roberta, or Bobbie, is actually secretly engaged to Kipper, but has announced her engagement to Bertie in order to soften up her mother. The idea being that after envisioning the horrors of Bertie Wooster for a son, Lady Wickham will welcome Kipper with open arms. Meanwhile, Bertie is also set upon the task of preventing guest Willie Cream from making his advances to another guest Phyllis, locating a missing eighteenth century silver cow creamer dish, and preventing Kipper and his newspaper employer from being sued for libel by Bertie and Kipper's old school headmaster. Naturally, it all goes to pot, Jeeves is summoned from his vacation, and everything ends pleasantly. Yet again.

The lovely thing about these books is the madcap plotting is actually astonishingly complex. There are never any less than three separate plots going simultaneously and each attempt prior to the wise ministrations of Jeeves only complicates matters all the more.

But the true joy isn't so much the plotting and the incidents, which it must be said, are beyond choice. No, the true joy these books brings comes in how all of that delirious cloak and dagger, mistaken identity, love lost and regained stuff is all wrapped up in prose that just cooks.

As a sampling of this first rate stuff, I reproduce below, random Wodehouse quotes from stories and novels not merely from the book in question. It's all good, and you're missing out if you continue to let another day, another hour, go by without plunking yourself down with a tidy little volume such as these choice Overlook reissues.

Boko Bagshott we called him. Took a girl to supper once at the Gardenia. Supper scarcely concluded when an angry old gentleman plunges into the room and starts shaking his fist in Boko's face. Boko rises with chivalrous gesture. ``Have no fear, sir. I am a man of honour. I will marry your daughter.'' ``Daughter?'' says the old gentleman, foaming a little at the mouth. ``Damn it, that's my wife.'' Took all Boko's tact to pass it off, I believe.
Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.
Jeeves coughed one soft, low, gentle cough like a sheep with a blade of grass stuck in its throat.
"If I've tried once to remember that tobacconist girl's name, I've tried a hundred times. I have an idea it began with an `L'. Muriel or Hilda or something.''
He had the look of a frustrated tiger whose personal physician had recommended a strict vegetarian diet....
The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.
Her voice trailed away in a sigh that was like the wind blowing through the cracks in a broken heart.
The Duke of Dunstable had one-way pockets. He would walk ten miles in the snow to chisel an orphan out of tuppence.
The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin.
She was feeling like a mother who, in addition to notifying him that there is no candy, has been compelled to strike a loved child on the base of the skull with a stocking full of sand.

And so on. Every book is crammed with gems along the way. Take my advice, friends, if the world gets you down. The solution is any one of nearly one hundred novels, or perhaps the greatest short story of all time "Uncle Fred Flits By." You won't regret it.

10 Years and Counting

2009-07-17T00:50:00.000-05:00

Ten years ago on this very day, my wife and I got married.

I know, I know, I still wonder what she was thinking too. Why would a beautiful, charming, intelligent, driven woman marry down in such a hellacious fashion?

But she did, dear readers, she did.

And for ten whole years, she's been keeping me honest, on my toes, entertained, well-fed (sometimes a little too well-fed), enthralled, ravished, agg

ravated, and everything everything everything everything -- you know? The whole gamut of everything that is being alive and being human and growing and changing, all of that, has been such a joy just by having her at my side, living it with me, guiding me through it, being there for me in the rough patches, celebrating all the wonder in the world.

In that time, we've been to the Bahamas, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wyoming, Utah, Montana and the Great Serpent Mound. We bought a house that was an even bigger fixer upper than we'd ever imagined (and we've made it beautiful using her brains and my brawn). We've both finally received our master's degrees (well, she's about 2 weeks away). And biggest of bigs, we've managed to have a daughter who really is the complete and total center

of our lives. She is a wonderful distallation of both of her parents and half the time I can't say if I love the way she's like me best or the way she's like her mother.

All of that has been miraculous and more fun than I can even begin to express. I can truly say that without my wife, any other life for me is unthinkable. It staggers my imagination to look back at my past to try to even recognize the person I was when we were first dating. It's like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, night and day difference. My wife has grown too, but I don't think as much as me. I think women often have less growing up to do in a marriage than their husbands, and whether or not that is true in general, it is definitely true for us.

For the last ten years, the world has been incredibly kind to me. My marriage to my wife has given me that. Ten years and counting and if the next ten years have as much goodness packed into them as the first ten, I'll take 'em. And the ten after that. And the ten after that. And all the tens after that too.

I love you, Boosties. And I always will.

Half a Quartet is Enough

2009-07-10T11:10:00.003-05:00

The Holiday, Starring Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, and Jack Black, Written and Directed by Nancy Meyers, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 2006

For many men there is nothing so terrifying as your significant other returning from a trip to the video store without you, stack of movies in hand. All too often you can expect the usual bevy of chick flicks -- Sandra Bullock romantic comedies, sisterhood bonding family dramas, ill family members teaching us the true value of life, higher budget Lifetime movies and that sort of thing.

Handing me a stack of six DVDs she'd just picked out of the library, my wife had made her selections. They were divided into three for our daughter and three for ourselves. She started our strong with an appeal to me: Batman Begins. I'd actually fallen out of watching the Batman franchise after Tim Burton stopped making them, only reeled in by Heath Ledger's brilliant portrayal of the Joker in last year's Dark Knight. So despite being a big fan of Christopher Nolan's other films, I'd passed on this one before.

The second film began to move a little more in the girly direction, Juno, but I'd wanted to see this when it was at the theaters, to see if it deserved all the hype and to watch the ongoing, triumphant return of Jason Bateman who seemed so underused in the eighties.

Third and final big person film: The Holiday. Right away, I think I'm in trouble. Cameron Diaz who hasn't done anything worth watching since her What About Mary career high, and who is, to put it bluntly, a much more obnoxious and annoying Sandra Bullock. Same career trajectory, same oversized star recognition, same later career pushing out schlocky, badly written chick flicks.

Which is a weird way of telling you, that this was the movie I picked for us to watch that evening.

Go with my logic here. The other two movies I really did want to watch. But, it was late when we started (pushing past 11pm) and my wife has a tendency to fall asleep during any late starting film. I figured, I could watch the first twenty minutes of this film, then go do something else once slumber carried off my spouse. The other two films looked promising and I really have a hard time watching a film broken up into blocks. Late as it was, I had no anticipation of making it all the way through a whole movie.

In goes the DVD and we start watching. The opening scenes, an office holiday party at The Daily Telegraph in London were very promising actually. Kate Winslet plays Iris Simpkins, writer for the paper who is in love with Jasper Bloom, a caddish columnist played by Rufus Sewell. They've had an off-again-on-again strange relationship over the past three years, in no small part by the fact that Jasper is also dating another woman. The announcement at the party of Jasper's engagement to said other woman and Iris' assignment from the publisher to be the person covering this news event sends Iris home in tears.

Wonderful stuff. If there's an actress of Winslet's caliber working anywhere, please let me know, because she truly is amazing in every possible connotation of the word. Subtle, charming, elegant, real, engaging. I have yet to be disappointed in a single performance by Winslet.

And ... scene.

We next open on Ed Burns, as Ethan, waking on a couch in t-shirt and boxers. He walks through the house he's in to knock on the bedroom door of Amanda Woods, played by Cameron Diaz, and for a time the entire film goes straight into the toilet. This scene was almost enough for me to suggest we pull the DVD and look for something on PBS or Telemundo to better occupy our time. Isn't there a weeknight version of Sabado Gigante on? Anything? Please?

Because this is probably as good a piece of evidence for the utter lack of talent of Diaz as an actress as you're likely to get. She's ditzy, she is clearly "acting" and doing it badly, her lines are delivered as if memorized only minutes before, and her own actual personality as a major flake comes shining right on through. And one hit wonder Ed Burns does little to redeem himself here, his voice a persistent whine, his characterization limp. The whole scene goes on far too long, leans too heavily on cliches, and is filled with two horrible actors vying to outdo each other in awfulness.

At that moment, I sincerely hoped my wife would fall asleep. I had to escape this travesty. The whole scene had one bright shining moment and that was a cut-away shot to the gardener's face as he contemplates whether or not Ethan should own up to his infidelity. In a ten minute long scene, there was approximately one second that was not sheer hell.

But then we were back to Kate Winslet, and things improved immeasurably.

The movie conceit that gets the ball rolling here, you have to overlook. You simply have to. These two women end up meeting online through a house swapping service, and again, suspending disbelief permanently, you have to get past the sheer ludicrousness that without any kind of screening in place, without any kind of preparation, two strangers, one from Los Angeles and one from London would exchange homes with each other. Iris even abandons her dog to the care of this West Coast stranger.

But leave Iris does, ditching her charming little cottage and flying to Tinseltown where she finds herself astonished and agog at Amanda's palatial estate. Amanda, you see, works in Hollywood as a cutter of film trailers and she's been very, very successful at it. This sets up one of the film's nicest conceits in that Amanda finds her life being narrated by famed trailer voice Hal Douglas, her various avoidance stratagems picked apart as so much predictable movie fodder. "For Amanda Woods," we often hear in voice over, then some almost mocking summary of the story so far.

And in time-honored Hollywood tradition, Amanda finds British ways strange and foreign, the house cold at night from no central heating, driving on the opposite side of the road terrifying, etc. etc., while Iris opens like the flower she is in the California sun, her rainy British cloud lifting as long as Jasper keeps his distance.

Enter our male romantic leads.

Because, of course, you know what's going to happen, I know what's going to happen, my couch knew what was going to happen. What's at least a nice touch to the film is that while the broad strokes are as obvious and as expected as you may imagine, Nancy Meyers' screenplay at least throws in a few minor, very minor, curveballs.

Most prominently, we have Jude Law as Graham Simpkins in one of his warmest performances. He has always come off to me as rather like a female version of Tilda Swinton. Strange looking while still being attractive, a bit of a cold fish emotionally but intellectually you can see something very definitely going on behind his eyes. Here, he's a bit less guarded, a bit more interesting, and a bit friendlier. He shows up drunkenly on the doorstep of Iris' house, waking Amanda from sleep, and the two hit it off like gangbusters, ending up in bed by scene's end.

A bit overwrought and a bit hard to believe, as is much of this script, but Law manages to make it work mostly, and somehow his presence seems to have a calming effect on Diaz who settles down into an at least not horrifyingly annoying performance. When the two are together, his groundedness as an actor tethers Diaz's more air-headed performance tendencies and forces her to at least try to act if only out of competition.

Back stateside, Iris meets Miles, Jack Black, in a performance so restrained one can only imagine the director must have horse tranq'd him every morning prior to that day's shooting. A Hollywood score composer, Black gets to display his musical chops while off-handedly charming Iris. He's none too shabby at being the schlubby nice guy sort, though occasionally his eyes bug out a bit when the medication starts to wear off. When his own girlfriend situation goes south, Miles and Iris and nature almost takes its course. These two wounded parties are far more hesitant than the whirlwind of passion back in snowy England.

One of the more unexpected plot developments in the film is Iris befriending Arthur Abbot (Eli Wallach), a retired Hollywood screenwriter from the Golden Age of film. The two form a charming couple, Arthur teaching Iris about classic cinema and she giving him the confidence to finally attend a celebratory dinner in his honor and ditch his walker. There is much of the classic cinema in this that you can't help but be a bit charmed by it. The Iris plotline includes bits of old Hollywood scores in its music (pastiched together by Hans Zimmer), allusions to films (such as the Brief Encounter inspired grit in eye when Iris and Miles meet), among a host of others. Arthur even refers to he and Iris' initial introduction as a "meet cute," industry term for a wacky meeting of romantic leads.

Halfway through the film, late as it was, I was the one suggesting bed and a continuation of the film later. It's a slight piece of fluff, a pleasant enough wiling away of two hours, but nothing I couldn't live without seeing straight through. My wife urged me to stay for just one more scene and we finished the whole film.

And all in all, it wasn't bad.

Oh sure, it was stunningly predictable, whole swaths of complication in the Amanda and Graham storyline were just plastered over and left to the viewer's discretion, but all in all, The Holiday is a cheerful little effort. No one will win any awards for it, but no one will suffer too terribly in the watching of it either.

I'm not the kind of critic who insists that each piece of art actually be Art, but I at least expect talented craftsmanship and better than average technical proficiency. The Holiday manages this more often than not. I'm as surprised as anyone to say that I find myself rather actually liking the film, no doubt ably assisted by grand performances by the two British leads. As usual, they leave the Americans in the dust when it comes to quality acting, even in a thin entertainment such as this one.

All Ages

2009-07-01T08:00:00.000-05:00

Owly, Written and Illustrated by Andy Runton, Top Shelf Productions, 2003-2009

This stuff is just too ridiculously cute and sweet. I can hardly take it. It's freaking adorable, and you'd have to be a stone-hearted cynical bastard to think otherwise.

Okay, yes, Andy Runton's Owly series of books are almost diabetic coma-inducing and there are tears and tears and tears throughout the series after every setback. But the man is working almost entirely without words and those great big dollops of eyedew just about to crest the bottom of the title character's moon eyes are unsubtle enough for younger readers.

I discovered Owly prowling through the graphic novel section at the library. As soon as I saw the first book, I knew that my daughter, The Littlest Critic, would adore these books. The oh so cute cover of volume four, A Time to Be Brave, not only caught my eye, it also acts as a pretty good indicator of what you can expect from the series. Note the tears in the eyes of that worm (who Owly is not going to eat). Note the sad little animal in the left hand middle, rather frightened-looking itself despite casting a fearsome shadow.

Runton seems to work within the realm of childhood fears, especially rejection by others, and he works them pretty effectively. There are no major frights in these books, just the run of the mill emotional trauma many a child will recognize all too well. That the books are almost devoid of words is actually helpful for addressing these fears because children don't generally have a way to speak to their fears and feelings. Runton's books not only show, not tell, the story, they also effectively demonstrate solutions to these troubles without the heavy, preachy hand of narration.

The first book, a two story volume that includes "The Way Home," wherein we are introduced to Owly's new friend and roommate, Wormy, sets up the typical Runton story arc. Owly, who we are informed somewhere in the promotional materials is a bird of play, not of prey, is an all around good guy, if a little lonely. He feeds local birds with seeds despite their terror at his approach, he frees bugs from jars abandoned by thoughtless children, and he rescues a worm from a puddle during a storm.

The cold, shivering worm is taken back to Owly's home where he is nursed back to health, and then the two set out on a quest to find Wormy's parents who he was washed away from during the storm. Runton's drawings are exquisitely simple without feeling as though he were sacrificing a great deal of detail. He uses nice bold, thick black lines to great effect, giving us almost woodcut quality drawings. The frequent use of closeups makes the books particularly engaging for the littlest of readers (as does the general lack of language). You'd be hard pressed to find a more adorable image in the first story than Wormy with a bindle thrown over his fat part (known as the clitellum among the scientific in the know types).

Of course, Wormy's parents are terrified of Owly, as most worms would be, though Wormy wins them over. After a brief reunion, Wormy then returns to live with Owly in his treehouse.

Thus a pattern. "The Bittersweet Summer," the second story in the first volume finds Wormy and Owly trying to make friends with two hummingbirds. They are at first mystified by the creatures, then try to feed them seed and are saddened by the birds' refusal. A trip to the bird encyclopedia sets our heroic pair straight, which is promptly followed by a trip to the nursery run by a raccoon to purchase nectar flowers. Eventually though, heartbreak: the two hummingbirds can not stay in the treehouse and must head south for the winter. Tears yet again, but happiness at the later discovery that the pair of hummingbirds will return in the spring.

This volume is followed by Just a Little Blue in which Owly and Wormy sacrifice Owly's wooden wheelbarrow for the lumber to make a birdhouse for a bluebird, only to have the bird reject it. Anyone who's been to a children's birthday party and watched the brave faces when a present doesn't quite take will recognize this particular sorrow. How will Owly and Wormy resolve this? with kindness and persistence and patience, of course.

Volume three Flying Lessons has Owly and Wormy meeting a flying squirrel, who, true to form, is terrified of Owly. Wormy is determined to make the squirrel see his friend and roommate in a good light and ventures out at night, alone, to make peace. He stays out all night atop a tree and the next morning when Owly in a panic comes to find him, the squirrel flees yet again. This leaves Wormy stranded up a tall tree. The subsequent flashback, when we learn that Owly can't actually fly, is a touching little bit of school-time cruelty that hardly anyone will fail to recall.

The fourth volume A Time to Be Brave, has Wormy being the frightened one for a change as a new creature, an opossum, comes into the forest. Once again, yet without seeming at all repetitive or dull, Runton tells a sweet little story that likely addresses children's all-too real fears and worries about others and about new friendships.

The best part of the books, other than their absolutely touching sweetness, is the amount of story Runton can convey with merely a few symbols. A few familiar things like exclamation and question marks, the void sign of circle with line through it, arrows and the like, are as much as a child needs to grasp to fully follow along. There are occasional lapses in this, as when Owly or some other character consults a reference work and gets information on various animals or when we see a bag labeled "Seeds" toted about. But other than that, the simple stories told with grace and clarity truly are, as the books' covers suggest, all ages.

And, for the record, TLC loved them.

The Coolness

2009-06-25T10:50:00.000-05:00

Record Club: Velvet Underground & Nico 'Sunday Morning' from Beck Hansen on Vimeo.

Stillborn

2009-06-24T23:37:00.003-05:00

Baby Mama, Starring Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Greg Kinnear, Written and Directed by Michael McCullers, Broadway Video, 2008

(*Note: If you go to the poll that I recently conducted, you will see that Owly won the voting with five votes for Baby Mama's four. Unfortunately, when I started writing the review on Wednesday morning, Baby Mama was tied with Owly at four votes a piece, only I myself voted once for Owly to test the system. Thus, at the time I considered it, Baby Mama actually had one more vote. You are a strange lot of people.)

Writer/director Michael McCullers has done better work. His 2002 screenplay (with idea originator John Ridley) for Undercover Brother is a solid send-up/romp of blaxploitation films of the seventies. Eddie Griffin was smoothly, archly hilarious in the title role and Dave Chappelle brought an unmatched comic insanity to his part as Conspiracy Brother.

Writer/director Michael McCullers has also done worse. His two sequels to the original Austin Powers were proof that a decent refractory period is necessary for older males to keep from delivering something limp.

The problem, I suspect, lies in being a writer for Saturday Night Live. If there is one show with a longer history of erratic delivery I have yet to hear of it. Tuning in, more often than not of late, is an excruciating experience, but every so often they pull something completely out of the hat prompting the inevitable internet buzz that "Saturday Night Live's funny again!"

Lather, rinse, repeat.

The 2008 offering from this poster child for NBC's bipolar comedy empire, Baby Mama, was much less than I'd been expecting. The years Tina Fey helmed SNL's "Weekend Update," I frequently stopped what I was doing at around 12:15 just to watch, then went back to ignoring the show. Fey's ensemble series, 30 Rock, has been a constant, always laugh-out-loud treat with absurdist riffs, razor sharp satire, and a stellar cast (including Alec Baldwin who continues to be amazingly, surprisingly funny and Tracy Morgan whose schtick can get predictable, but when he's given solid lines is untouchable).

That's what I came into the movie expecting.

Instead, what we are given is a by-the-numbers comedy. As was often the case on SNL skits, the routinely unfunny Amy Poehler is the comic foil to Fey. Brought in as the crass, white trash surrogate mom for Fey's overachieving but functionally sterile career woman (a comic pairing mirrored with 30 Rock's Jenna Maroney, Fey's starfucking former star), the two get some mileage out of their clash of personalities. But not much.

Most of the bits prior to Fey's Kate Holbrook committing to having her baby with Poehler's Angie Ostrowiski don't emphasize enough Kate's desperation to have a baby. We find ourselves wondering why such a go-getting business exec would choose such an unpromising person for such a pricey operation as in vitro fertilization. Nor is it clear how such a top dollar organization as the one she applies through would ever greenlight Poehler's clearly idiotic character.

It's said that if you analyze comedy, try to find out why it's funny, you kill it. And a great deal of comedy hinges on unexpectedness or the unlikely scenario. But would it have hurt the writer to hide some of Ostrowiski's idiocy (including her uber-PWT boyfriend, Carl) until later? Then we'd have the shock of the reveal instead of the wondering of why.

So, mismatched-pair/buddy comedy. You can see exactly where everything in this movie is going by the time you've gotten through the first few opening scenes. Fey's Kate works for Jamba Juice, a smoothie company headed by Steve Martin in a ponytail. The easy jokes about sixties era consciousness-raising ex-hippies fall like rain whenever he's on the set. When Kate prowls an urban neighborhood seeking out a location for a new franchise, she happens into a locally owned and operated independent smoothie joint run by Rob Ackerman (Greg Kinnear, who will, for me, always be the Talk Soup guy).

Can you guess what will happen in a comedy when two attractive, similarly aged characters are thrown together as opposites-attract rivals?

Yes, yes, you can. From the moment I recognized Kinnear I knew that no matter what problems Kate had in conceiving, no matter what troubles she has with her surrogate Angie, by film's end not only would Ackerman bed this high-strung corporate filly but he'd knock her up as well.

While Baby Mama has its funny moments and its straining to be touching moments, a few scenes from the film remain lodged nicely in my memory. Most effecting is the scene when Kate and Angie finally have their blow up in Kate's car. "You think you're better than me," Poehler huffs. With a nicely delivered, "I. Know. I'm better than you," Fey makes her character's barely concealed rage all too evident. A film made of such moments would be entertainment in the best possible sense of the world.

Until that comes along, I'm sure you can catch Baby Mama on cable some night soon or at least rent it for free from the library. There's no earthly reason I could give you to actually spend money to see this film, but seen at no cost to you save the time, it offends not, but, alas, it does not illuminate the screen.

Some Old School Jim Henson

2009-06-19T15:31:00.001-05:00

And this shit brings the mayhem. I love it.

Crikey

2009-06-19T12:48:00.003-05:00

Two weeks without even an update? Why does anyone even bother to come here anymore? I really need to get on the stick with this whole "blogging" thing if I expect anyone to read this site anymore.

Readers vote:

Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey.

Or the Owly comic books.

I'm throwing this out on Twitter too.

American Master

2009-06-04T22:18:00.002-05:00

The Stories of John Cheever, by John Cheever, Vintage International, 2000

This is not a collection for sitting down and reading straight through. For starters, The Stories of John Cheever is nearly 700 pages long, spanning over 30 years of writing. Then there's Cheever's idiosyncratic style which is at the same time endearingly crystalline and lovely while also having a seriously dated quality to it, as though you were reading an old Hollywood script or a time capsule document. There is only so much of that in one go that a person can take -- and only so much you should allow yourself to drink in.

Which sounds like more of a slam than I intend it to. Because this really is a wonderful collection, and at the risk of sounding like a glib Reader's Digest style review, something that every American home should own. Nowhere else will you find a better encapsulated view of a certain time in American life or a better portrait of the lingering desperation behind all those post-war men in gray flannel suits. Cheever has the endemic weakness, of course, to male writers in general and most acutely in the American male writers of the era such as Mailer and Jones, of being completely and totally incapable of writing female characters that even approximate human beings with depths and passions.

Which again, sounds more like a slam than I intend it to (though certainly not an enticement to my female readers to rush out and buy a copy). But of course, again it speaks to the reading in doses method I've already endorsed.

This is rather funny in one regard because the most commonly anthologized story most readers will come across is Cheever's "The Enormous Radio" which tends to find itself in high school literature books. The story follows a woman and might be one of his more nuanced portraits. Cheever sets up the story with this nice bit of casting: "Jim and Irene Westcott were the kind of people who seem to strike that satisfactory average of income, endeavor, and respectability that is reached by the statistical reports in college alumni bulletins. They were the parents of two young children, they had been married nine years, they lived on the twelfth floor of an apartment house near Sutton Place, they went to the theatre on an average of 10.3 times a year, and they hoped someday to live in Westchester."

Then the story rather brutally dissects the relationship of this young couple with spare efficiency when the large cabinet style radio Jim purchases for Irene begins broadcasting scenes from the neighboring apartments. The initial delight they take in eavesdropping on their neighbors turns to a kind of disgust at first at the various affairs and petty crimes, then to moral outrage, and finally to sordid desperation that almost leads to violence.

There is, in Cheever's world, always that threat, always the hint, subtle or not quite so, of a brooding rage under the surface waiting only for the right moment to strike. Consider one of my favorite stories in the collection "The Five-Forty-Eight." After being dumped so casually by the caddish businessman Blake, his ex-secretary, Miss Dent, accosts him at gunpoint on a train. The story's climactic scene outside the train station -- his stop, by the way -- is a harrowing portrait of mental illness with only trace of romanticism.

The collection gets right to that very point of violence amidst tranquil settings and what passes for normality with the very first story, "Goodbye, My Brother." When Lawrence, the black sheep of the family returns during a family vacation, he is insulting, demanding, judgmental. By the last couple pages, his older brother and the story's narrator, is braining Lawrence on the beach with a broken chunk of root, splitting his scalp open and driving him to the ground.

It is family, husbands and wives more often than not, that brings out this sudden spasmodic violent urge, and in that respect Cheever, though prone to sudden bursts of obvious fantasy, could be one of the more realistic writers of thrillers. It is statistically significant, the difference between those who experience violence from a family member and those who experience it from a stranger. Cheever's world is our own world, with a halting elegiac tone and its sudden bursts of physical threats.

"An Educated American Woman" is one of the book's cruelest stories, a barely concealed cry of misogyny from a deeply, deeply closeted gay writer, yet the bitterest twist of the story comes in the final paragraphs where our unnamed, omnisicent Dostoyevskyan narrator lets loose with a salvo of judgment of his own. The story was heartbreaking and painful and the last page gave me a sincere dose of the chills, for when taken as a story, divorced from sexual politics, the characters' actions call out for a response not so entirely inappropriate. The kick of a conclusion (and I'm being deliberately vague) gives the story an almost awesome and bewildering power.

Quite possibly the author's most famous story was the one turned into a film starring Burt Lancaster, "The Swimmer." In this allegorical fable, this surrealistic prose poem, this uncategorizable bit of brilliance, Neddy Merrill, sitting poolside one midsummer Sunday, decides that he could, through a looping path, swim from the house he's visiting through every back yard pool, along a path leading back to his own home. As he does so, time speeds up, seasons pass quickly, Neddy ages, glimpses of his own life's ruins become discernible, the story ends in tragedy. It is short and beautiful, utterly unlike anything else at that time in American literature, with an existential absurdity more akin to Kafka than anyone else writing at the time. The story's popularity at the time of its printing, its broad appeal speaks to a sense of fracturing in the facade of Cheever's bread and butter era, the 1950s. Like the sudden onslaught of Beatlemeania that same year, Cheever's "The Swimmer" heralds something new and revolutionary cooking just under the staid best seller lists.

While the early stories hint at a refusal to conform, their broad underlying thrust is toward a very conventional story structure and pattern. In the collection's last hundred and fifty pages or so, Cheever's talents seem to crack out of pattern and begin wandering off on funky new directions all his own. When he writes of sex, he becomes more explicit, but there is always a kind of forced quality to these scenes, an older generation prudery, his depictions of women's bodies more a stage direction than anything else, all "fronts" for breasts and "backs" for butts. The new directions he was discovering for himself in these last few stories hinted at some fresh outlay of genius or some incipient personality crisis, but they left me wondering what his output would have been had he managed to live another decade at least, writing such tales, instead of dying of cancer.

Let me say again, this is not a collection for sitting down and polishing off in one straight go. And you know what? That's a good thing. That's a very, very good thing. Cheever is someone to savor like an almost idyllic vacation. His prose is so curiously perched so as to seem inartful, a deliberate hiding of craft, that it takes a slow meander through his stories to note the almost perfect shine on the best of them. You should take your time with the stories of John Cheever. The novels too. You should relax, dip into this collection, you should read at a sedate pace, maybe in the bath from time to time, perhaps with a highball glass not too far out of reach, but mostly you should savor the pleasures of John Cheever just because.

Love His Robes

2009-05-29T05:36:00.003-05:00

via This is Photobomb.

Time to Buy Some Dawn

2009-05-28T11:37:00.001-05:00

Gotta Get Me One of These

2009-05-26T16:24:00.002-05:00

Watch The Kindle 3 and more funny videos on CollegeHumor

One of These Days

2009-05-19T12:21:00.001-05:00

I'm going to put up a review of a totally fake book, just to see if anyone's paying attention. But first, I'm gonna read me some Borges.

Gadzooks

2009-05-15T14:21:00.000-05:00

Two book posts back to back and one of them an audio book at that. The madness, will it ever end?

No Great Mystery

2009-05-15T14:13:00.002-05:00

The Mystery of Edwin Drood, by Charles Dickens, Read by Alan Chant for Librivox, Text provided by Stanza for iPhone, Chapman & Hall London, 1870/2008

Unfinished works of art are often sources of great mystery. Mozart's Requiem, Fitzgerald's The Love of the Last Tycoon, a whole raft of Hemingway novels foisted upon the public post-Papa, Herge's Tintin and Alph-Art, several projects of Orson Welles, the list goes on and on. The common question is, of course, how would this have been completed, which masks the more pertinent question -- have we been cheated out of what would have been a masterpiece?

There is no mystery to that question in the case of Charles Dickens' unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Dickens was working on the novel up to the day of his death and the book has the distinct feel of only being a goodly quarter of a novel, though based on his plans it appears to be closer to half. Chapters seem slighter than other Dickens' novels, his attempt to keep the novel a lean thriller.

Things move relatively quickly for a Dickens and the subject matter -- opium addiction, madness, murder, jealousy -- seem not exactly foreign to Dickens but a bit more hardcore than readers of Nicholas Nickelby might expect. Nevertheless the novel is clearly not one of Dickens great books and the portions that were published give no great expectation to the reader that a triumph was in the making.

Which is not to say that The Mystery of Edwin Drood is at all a bad novel, nor that it can be judged on merits other than its incompleteness. What we do have is interesting, intriguing and entertaining, just incomplete.

Dickens introduces two couples in the course of the book, Neville Landless and his sister Helena and Edwin Drood and his betrothed, the orphaned Rosa Bud. As alluded to in their name, the Landlesses are not well off, having come to the town of Cloisterham for their education. Neville has a fiery temper -- which is only asking for trouble in a mystery novel -- though we are given to understand that Neville, despite this, is a decent sort. He becomes interested in Rosa, believing that Edwin's appraisal of his betrothed is seriously lacking. Confronting Edwin about this leads to an altercation. Shortly after the altercation, Edwin disappears, never to be seen again in the novel. This spat sets up Neville as the prime suspect in the eyes of the town even if no further evidence can be suppliled.

From this the rest of the novel flows.

As per most Dickens' novels, we are also introduced to a near baker's dozen of oddball characters, highly individuated through speech patterns and personality quirks. There is Rosa's guardian Mr. Grewgious, an "Angular man" not given much to emotion, more of a calculating machine, though with hidden romantic depths; John Jasper, Edwin's highly unstable opium smoking uncle, who is himself desperately in love with Rosa; the noble Reverend Crisparkle under whom Neville studies; Durdles, the cemetery keeper who prizes his work and takes great pride in his tombstone engravings and his drink; Deputy, a young town boy tasked with the curious job of trying to hit Durdles with stones if he sees him out of doors after dark; and more.

While Dickens was not a natural mystery writer, he did have some appreciation for the genre as well as some experience with the form in a small number of short stories featuring detectives and other mysterious elements. However, unless Dickens is delivering an enormous head-fake, the evidence throughout the book most obviously points toward Drood's uncle John Jasper as the murderer. It is always possible that such blatant clues are red herrings, though Dickens is known for somewhat magical predictability so it feels hard to credit such a belief.

Almost since the writer's death "solutions" have appeared. Thomas James published the first only three years after Dickens' death, claiming that the author had dictated the completion of the novel from beyond the grave. No less a personage than Arthur Conan Doyle was sadly duped in this arrangement. Leon Garfield published a "solution" as well to much acclaim. Having seen the damage Robert Parker performed on Raymond Chandler's Poodle Springs, I can only say, no thanks. I'll leave it where it lies.

Though I did have an actual dead tree version of the novel about me, I primarily experienced this novel through two digital mediums. The Stanza app for iPhone is almost in all ways the superior to the Kindle iPhone app in its various setting adjustments. Text is clear and legible; a night reading black-background-white-text option keeps the brightness down; your place is saved in the chapter when you return to the text; and a fairly large and growing catalog of both free and pay books are available. I worried, after reading choppy text documents on my iPod, that the iPhone readers would make for an unpleasant chore, but such was not the case.

The other fashion in which I enjoyed Dickens' final novel was in the masterful audio version provided by Librivox. I've reviewed Librivox audio books before and have to say that it makes an amazing difference when you select a novel with a single narrator over the group effort offerings. Alan Chant, apparently on staff at a British prep school, has an incredibly pleasant voice for reading and, as T.S. Eliot would have it, he do the different voices. Librivox.org's search features aren't the simplest, but an advanced Google search shows that there are a few more titles under his belt including more Dickens for those interested. Chant's warm, even timbre almost made me give up actuallly even reading the book just to sit back and listen to a master at his work. Make that two masters.

Terror Two Times

2009-05-07T10:43:00.004-05:00

The Terror, by Dan Simmons, Little, Brown and Company, 2007

I have the distinct impression that I may have read Dan Simmons before, years and years and years ago in my high school days when all I read were horror novels. Looking through his novels on the shelf, I came upon a few early pocket paperbacks whose covers seemed to strike faint chords in ye olde memory. Nothing specific. In those days, I chewed through pulpy, schlocky horror novels about one every two days.

It was in fact a cover that led me to this novel, though circuitously. At a chain book store for the first time in months without a child in tow, The Wife and I perused the latest releases. Though it is said one shouldn't judge a book by its cover, one often enough makes a purchase based on such a slender reed. In this case it was Simmons' follow up to The Terror, a Dickensian sized tome entitled Drood whose moody, vaguely threat sodden cover that made me pause. The book's description, that slick marketing material known as the jacket copy, fascinated me.

At any rate, and this is all rather digressive, the name stuck with me and when I saw the trade paperback cover for The Terror with its likewise ethereal, menacing cover, I picked it up immediately. The jacket copy describing the novel as an historical horror novel made me pause and recall the great pleasure I had in reading The Historian. The epigraphical quoting of Melville's Moby Dick on the first page also helped the book sink its hooks into me. Doomed Royal Navy expedition to find the Northwest Passage? How could I not thrill to the obvious futility of such a story? An historical novel that promised rich, period details while at the same time delivering on the pulse racing plotting of a thriller?

How could I not buy such a novel?

I'm not much given to buying novels full price anymore, especially on authors I'm not already in love with, preferring the library or the acquisition of armloads of cut-rate classics from used bookshops. However, I am immensely pleased to have taken the plunge on Simmons' historical shocker.

The novel follows the somewhat true story of the two British ships the HMS Erebus and The Terror captained as they were by Sir John Franklin (the fleet commander) and Captain Francis Crozier respectively, as they chugged their way in pursuit of the elusive Northwest Passage. The marvel of the British Navy at the time, the two ships had double hulls and metal plated exteriors, yet we learn soon enough that the best of man's contrivances is still no match for the extremes nature can dish up. After leaving their last outpost, the two ships and their crew were never heard from again. Into that gap comes this novel.

We begin, as it were, in the middle of things (fitting enough for a book that makes occasional and pointed references to the Greeks): two ships locked solid in polar ice, some mile or so distance between them. We begin, as it were in the middle of things: a formless beast of some kind has been stalking the 126 men of this expedition, carrying them off into the all-encompassing near endless nights. It is savage, it is huge, it is quick and it is, most frightening of all, intelligent.

Simmons keeps his novel shifting, hopping from one man to another on the crew, giving us excerpts from a junior surgeon Dr. Goodsir's diary then in the next chapter giving us insights into the mind of Captain Crozier, the novel's remarkable "hero" (for want of a better term), as well as Captain Franklin, Captain James Fitzjames and others. Perhaps the most exciting chapter finds Ice Master Blanky fleeing from the monster across the rigging and masts of the ships, leaping "like a monkey" and otherwise eluding the beast. Repeatedly throughout that chapter I found myself alternately grinning and cheering on Blanky while holding my breath in fearful expectation.

Simmons does little to differentiate the styles of the narration for each of these characters, yet they nevertheless are so well drawn that each man becomes indelible. The melancholic, practical while still romantic alcoholism of Crozier. The clever efforts to save the men of Lieutenant Irving. The general cultural arrogance and blinkered haughty mien of Sir John in his officer's prerogatives is perhaps the most significant factor in the men's fate. Yet even in the chapter where he meets his death, Simmons writes with such feeling for his characters that we sympathize with Sir John and mourn his loss.

What's wonderful about the book is that while the issue of the monster looms large within the novel, it is only periodically brought into the story. The rest of the time Simmons delivers a wonderful historical novel about the nature of the British Navy of the time and the ships. Dr. Goodsir, during a late chapter man-hauling across the ice, is given an enlightening disquisition on the various kinds of smaller boats attached to the expedition ships. The chapter is folksier than Melville's educational asides, but it still evokes him greatly and explains why the men must haul so many different and redundant seeming boats along with them.

If there were worries I had while reading the novel, the two biggest would have been a cheesily used monster -- which Simmons handled expertly, never allowing the creature any time in the bright lights of the stage -- and that the shadow of Melville would fall too heavily over a modern novel aboard ship. Again, Simmons effectively portrays life on Her Majesty's Ships in all their brutal squalor while managing to evoke Melville without being overshadowed. Every sailor's curse, every grimy blanket, the deprivations of the ships quarters, the specific strains of Arctic expeditions, each wart and wrinkle is there along with the kind of heroic nobleness of character the Navy's history seemed to breed as well as the authoritarianism and institutionalized arrogance.

Clocking in at some 784 pages, The Terror reads like a much smaller novel. The author very effectively moves between flashbacks that get us to the point of their third winter trapped in the ice and the misery of their current predicament. Chapters filled with excitement and horrors break up stretches of the men's biographies and their duties on board. I read with a growing sense of despair as each new difficulty resolved itself in a worse fashion than before, as each month brought some new conflict and struggle to the men. It is a grinding down of the men both in numbers and in spirit, and Simmons is as unflinching in abusing his characters as the Arctic winds.

Not bad enough that they are trapped and hunted? Simmons allows for poor soldering of their tinned food giving way to putrefied meats and vegetables. The appearance of scurvy among the men? The lemon juice's anti-scorbutic effectiveness diminishes. Winter conditions worse than expected? Wasted coal used in trying to force an ice passage leads to shortages which leads to only the minimum of heating below decks. A monster hunts the men, ripping their limbs and their heads and their entrails from their bodies? Why not add a mutinous Caulker's Mate to the crew backed by his simple, gigantic lover.

Perhaps the only portion of the novel where the action sagged considerably was near the end when we are treated to a couple chapters on native mythology for Arctic tribes. We are given a background on the monster which takes some of the mystery and fright out of the thing, reducing it in my mind. At the same time, we bog down in creation mythos that disturbingly jar the reader out of the desperation of the preceding tale. While this is necessary to get Simmons to the ending of the novel -- satisfying in its own rights -- it had the distinct feel of a documentation dump, the missing pieces you needed to make sense of parts of the story. It had been better done had it been spaced throughout the novel in the form of notes on the Arctic tribes from the ship's library or a grizzled old salt explaining the native peoples to a younger crewmen.

Still, in a nearly 800 page novel, ten or so pages that don't work feels like I'm reaching for something to complain about. Simmons book is a taut, fearful reading experience, a horror novel for adults and not just the child inside you. It'd been quite some time since I'd read a novel so engrossingly that I found myself surprised that nearly a hundred pages had been covered in one sitting. This book delivered that experience repeatedly. Simmons' The Terror has delivered so profoundly that I have cleared my reading list's top spots to cover Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood just so I can get on to Simmons' latest, Drood, that much quicker.

Carrie?

2009-04-30T15:16:00.002-05:00

One of the links to your left has gone dead. Carrie's Nation seems to have been deleted at Blogger. Now whether this was just from exhaustion on her part or something else remains to be seen. However, the email I had for here also came back as no good.

So, if you're out there, drop me a line so I know you're okay.

Who's Watching, or Moments of Greatness

2009-04-24T13:16:00.007-05:00

Watchmen, Starring Malin Akerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Patrick Wilson, Written by David Hayter and Alex Tse, Directed by Zach Snyder, Warner Brothers Pictures, 2009

There's no winning this argument.

Twenty plus years ago Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons completely took comic book superheroes apart and put them back together again. It was an obsession Moore would revisit in his truly exceptional Miracleman (Marvelman in Britain). His take was, whatever else, the kind of person who would dress up in a funny costume as a means of fighting crime had to be deeply and irrevocably damaged inside. There had to be something wrong with you if you thought that was a good idea. (In Miracleman, the question instead is, what would it really do to you, in all honesty, if you had the kind of power Superman has; you would, in effect, become like a god.)

The thing about Watchmen is that it is dense. It is a complex storyline that takes place over several decades and features no less than twenty characters. There are two different sets of superheroes and unresolved issues from the first, Golden era set (the Minutemen) spill over into the second spin-off era (the Watchmen). Over the course of the decades, Moore and Gibbons retell an American history in which the US won Vietnam, Nixon managed to get re-elected three times, and technological breakthroughs caused by a real, honest to goodness superman have led to advanced flying machines and electrical automobiles. On top of that, Moore ladled stories within stories, and so we are treated at the end of eleven of the twelve issues of Watchmen to chapters from one hero's autobiography, essays, magazine articles, psychiatric evaluations and more, not to mention excerpts from an allegorical horror comic that turns out to play a larger role in the main plot that at first glance it appears.

All of which to say, adapting this kind of material would prove a challenge. The film has its own storied history of film adaptation rights legal wranglings, not the least of which the tussle between Fox and Warner Brothers that potentially threatened to derail this year's release.

And all of this before we even get to the demands of the fanboy legions who would settle for nothing less than absolute 100% loyalty to the source material -- no matter what the cost. Stung by repeated bad adaptations of his comics to film. writer Alan Moore had pre-emptively removed his name from any page to screen adaptations leaving a vital voice out of the writing process. His own insistence on 100% loyalty creating unrealizable goals for any film maker anywhere.

Despite insisting that nothing less than a miniseries would do the book justice, we have had to settle. Settle for the adaptation directed and partly written by Zack Snyder, director of the remake of the zombie classic Dawn of the Dead* which was followed up by the homoerotic Spartan exercise 300. Apparently, such things were enough to get him the nod for this ambitious undertaking. My own wishes after seeing Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight was that someone like him had been given the task.

To be sure, Snyder doesn't slack in the ambition, delivering a movie just fifteen minutes shy of three hours (and I'm betting the DVD director's cut version will easily go for three and a half), as well as providing additional straight-to-DVD material comprising the Nite Owl autobiography as well as the comic inside the comic, Tales of the Black Freighter, that was so integral to the print run's storyline.

And to be further sure, Snyder and his cinematographers have worked to lift specific angles straight from Gibbons art, to include precise reproductions of typography and background images like posters and bean can labels. The attention to detail has been unsparing.

And unfortunate. With some ideal compression, the opening credits made me believe that we might really be finally getting the Watchmen comic nerds have wanted all these years. Throwaway lines about the fates of very minor characters are treated in a short history of the two superhero teams. History is reframed in this new world of costumed heroes. The stage is well set for the background, though I felt that it might seem a bit perfunctory for those who've not read the material going in. And after a while I began to get the distinct feeling that in all the visual accuracy (no character looks anything unlike their comic book counterpart; in some cases this is even frighteningly well done) the underlying feeling was being short-shrifted. Almostthe characters were well-done-ish with some standout moments.

Jeffery Dean Morgan's depiction of The Comedian was gritty and bitter and had just the right curdled notes. He is the first superhero we meet and quite quickly we come to the conclusion that he's not particularly heroic. Oh, he's tough and good in a fight, but scenes of him laughing as he applies a flame thrower to the Viet Cong quite quickly demonstrate that Man of Steel material he ain't. Morgan's Comedian is a pitch perfect translation from page to screen and unfortunately he is perhaps the least interesting of our main characters.

In the category of real superheroes, Billy Cruddup, holographically displayed as the neon blue Dr. Manhattan brings a completely medicated tone to his delivery. Disintegrated in an atomic experiment in the fifties, Jon Osterman has managed to put himself back together as some form of pure energy. Beyond human in almost every respect, he has become a weapon of the Nixon administration and is subsequently, threateningly redubbed as Dr. Manhattan, an atomic nod to keep those Commies in awe. We learn throughout the film that there are emotions churning within Cruddup's Blue Man Group reject, but Snyder's direction never really lets us get under the impervious blue hood to the personality underneath.

And that's probably Watchmen's greatest flaw: its director. Snyder is an able craftsman of action sequences, but wretched when it comes to coaxing real human interaction out of his actors. He'd be ideally suited for First Assistant Director duties, handling minor scenes like when characters order coffee or helping out with the fight scenes.

Because scenes where you'd want the pace to slow down, emotional pivots of the story where some humanity would be warranted, Snyder sprints through to his next action spectacle. Worst of all is that it's not necessary. Snyder blatantly overuses slow-mo effects throughout his movie for gee-whiz coolness and in some instances this works. Ditch all but the best moments of that trick and maybe you'd shake free another five minutes for your film where you could focus on pacing and delivery.

By far and away the best full-fledged portrayal in the film is Jackie Earle Haley's Rorschach. At times, Snyder, in slavish fidelity to the source, dollops on too much voice over narration from Rorschach's journal (the needs of a audiovisual medium are not the same as a printed text's), but the hardened angry shell is pitch perfect. Rorschach's turn in prison after he's caught by police includes a brilliantly done scene where he turns to assorted convicts and snarls, "None of you understand. I'm not locked up in here with you. You're locked up in here with me." Haley's delivery in this moment gives you just the right kind of cinematic goosebumps. But Snyder goes and ruins things in his race to the finish line. Where in the comic book (and in any depiction of life resembling reality), Rorschach would take some time to psychoanalyze, in the film, since we have so little time, he confesses to everything in his first meeting with his shrink.

This also leads to one of the first places where Snyder deviates significantly from the script to his detriment. In the print version of the story, Walter Kovacs is just "playing at" being the masked vigilante Rorschach until the kidnapping and dismemberment of a little girl sends him over the edge. Once he finds the killer, he handcuffs him to a steel bar, leaves him a saw to cut off his own hand should the villain wish to escape, then he sets the place on fire. Simple, brutal, effective storytelling, and more importantly, psychologically complex. Kovacs/Rorschach in his own mind almost gives the guy a chance with this method, and it's part of his inner transformation. It is the last time he will go that far toward mercy. In the film, his disgust rises up all of a sudden and after handcuffing the man to a wood burning stove, he splits his skull in two with a meat cleaver. Repeatedly. Simple, brutal, and psychologically bereft of depth and interest. Ho hum, Kovacs has become Rorschach.

Elsewhere, Snyder hustles the emotional development and epiphanies of his characters just as ham-handedly. Osterman's telling of how he became Dr. Manhattan is probably the best character study of emotions done here just because there are so few of them -- or at least, they are expressed in such subdued fashion.

The movie's "villain" is supposed to be charm itself and instead Snyder directs him with creepy near asexual coolness. We are supposed to believe he is beloved of the people and brilliant and capable of charting the course of a vast business/criminal enterprise. If you've never read the book, you'd be hard-pressed not to guess who the "bad guy" is supposed to be. If you've read the book, you'd be hard-pressed to believe that this cinematic character is supposed to at all resemble the comic book character in anything but hair color and name.

The character we are most likely supposed to identify with, Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson), not only most resembles a hero we've seen before (Batman) in his costume as , but in his uncertainties, in his moral dilemmas, in his paralyzing feelings of helplessness he acts as the cast's Common Man. Where Snyder should use him most effectively, he is just a foil to other action, where his decency is supposed to give us emotional intimacy he's played instead as a hapless milquetoast. At the film's conclusion it is the duty of this poor thespian to fall to his knees and scream, yes, scream for humanity. Oh, the humanity.

With other characters, Snyder also bigfoots the emotion, such as the parental revelation for Laurie Jupiter (Malin Akerman). As Silk Spectre II, daughter of the original who got into the costumed hero game really as a showbiz bid and who pushed her daughter into it as a kind of vigilante stage mommy, she's used more as an emotional toy. Where we're supposed to put pieces together ourselves, walking along the same path with Laurie, Snyder adds to the script a completely unnecessary flat statement by Dr. Manhattan regarding her real father that jolts the scene with a side-nudging obviousness. Didja get it? Don't you see the irony? Huh? Huh?

Snyder's worst transgression of all against the story, however, comes at its conclusion. The climactic resolution to the Cold War is hijacked in probably the only way there was time to fit into this near three hour piece, but it feels like a horrible rip off and cheat. It's probably the best possible way they could get to an end of the film that most resembled the book without padding in another hour's worth of material. Still, the betrayal here, by adaptor and inside the story by the characters, feels wrong enough to be an abomination.

If it sounds like I'm trying to have it both ways, I probably am. Where Snyder is faithful, I find him a servile transcriptionist. Where he deviates out of necessity or desire, I find him the lesser craftsman. It is, of course, just possible that I am right on both counts, that Snyder, a bad choice of director for this film, can't win because of who he is and not for what he tried to accomplish. Like I say in the review title, the film certainly has moments of true greatness, but it is Snyder's insistence on coolness for effect, for surface rather than depth, that prevents the picture from really soaring.

But some blame, again, must be laid at the door of the original writer. Yes, novelists, screenwriters, and other assorted scribblers get such short shrift in the film making business that their complaints are legendary. What the Hughes Brothers did with From Hell is on par with what happened to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose: all the original attempts to demolish a cliche were swept aside and the cliches reinflated only now as absurdities. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was so bad I could only stand short snippets. V for Vendetta came the closest to success but even it fell by the wayside of cool instead of collected. One could hope and dream that had Moore involved himself in the process a much better picture could have been created. The demands of fanboy fidelity might have given his criticisms more weight than in the other projects and a finer piece of film might have been the result.

That is the world as it might have been. Instead, aloof from the process, hidden away as much as to be in another galaxy, Moore came to this film as Dr. Manhattan eventually came to the world. Remote, disinterested, abandoning us and leaving the film to its own failings.

* Updated film reference due to alert reader Joe Smith.

Surely

2009-04-20T11:43:00.002-05:00

I could post a book review some time soon. This is the final week of me finishing off my stacks and stacks of old New Yorkers. (Did I really skip reading so many issues in 2004? I'd have thought I'd be all about the election and current events then. Wonder what was going on in my life...)

But my next actual print book up on deck is Dan Simmons, The Terror. Looks good, has great reviews, and it kicks off with a quote from Moby Dick, which is quite frankly as good as writing gets. So. Eventually.

At any rate, any reviews of non-book related material ya'll are interested in reading about other than semi-action films and action films? I was thinking of doing a review of the amazing and awesome Swedish horror film Let the Right One In, so that's probably what'll happen in the short term.

Or perhaps a snippet of a new story I'm working on?

You tell me.

2009-04-17T10:56:00.002-05:00

In Bruges, Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes Written and Directed by Martin McDonagh, Blueprint Pictures, 2008

Who knew Colin Farrell could act when he really wanted to? Cursed with good looks, he oftentimes falls prey to what I call the Brad Pitt Syndrome. Agents, producers, casting, everyone wants to put the pretty boy in their serious drama, but the pretty boy isn't really at home with such starched material. Thus you get wooden, dull performances in flicks that might have flourished with someone else or might never even have gotten made without the marquee name.

Or you get roped into things like 2006's remake of Miami Vice, a waste of time for everyone involved, a paycheck picture the sole saving grace of which is that it allowed Farrell the room to make meatier, more interesting fare such as this. Billed with what must have been some market tested drivel as "Shoot first. Sightsee later," the poster for this film with everyone packing heat makes it look like any other action-spy-thriller melange. This is a complete shame and put me off seeing an otherwise grand movie.

Rescued by an acquaintance loaning us the picture, The Wife and I settled down to watch it. The box misled us in other ways, giving us to believe that the film would be a hysterical romp, a wacky thriller perhaps. Again, while one scene made me laugh for a good solid minute ("Back off, shorty!" "You don't know karate!" for those in the know), it's less of a comedy too.

In fact, I'd be hard pressed to know precisely which category to drop In Bruges, and that may be my favorite genre of all, the unclassifiable something. As British director Peter Brooks observed “The theatre has no categories, it is about life." The same could and should be said for film, but that's an argument I'm unlikely to win against Hollywood and the great gaping maw of consumers of film.

The voice over opening sets us up:

After I killed him, I dropped the gun in the Thames, washed the residue off me hands in the bathroom of a Burger King, and walked home to await instructions. Shortly thereafter the instructions came through - "Get the fuck out of London, you dumb fucks. Get to Bruges." I didn't even know where Bruges fucking was.

We follow two hit men of sorts, as they lie low in Bruges, Belgium, one of the few remaining cities in Europe to retain so much medieval architecture, thus we are given the treat of long canal rides to show off the city's beauty. We also learn from this opening monologue that we are dealing with a foul mouthed Irishman who has apparently botched a job, and that is the film's rub. Ray (Farrell) is haunted by what happened in London while watched over by the older man Ken (Brendan Gleeson, veteran of apparently most Irish/Scottish themed films Americans might have seen in recent years including the writer/director Martin McDonagh's previous film, Six Shooter). Ken, his conscience seemingly unsullied finds the town charming and indulges himself in the life of a tourist.

Ray finds the city a waste of time, and otherwise behaves like a spoiled, bored child being taken to a museum. He loudly shuffles his feet in a church, asking Ken petulantly if he "has to" go and touch a vial supposedly containing drops of Jesus' blood brought back during the Crusades. To this Ken irritatedly replies with much outraged brio: "Do you have to? Of course you don't have to. It's Jesus' fucking blood, isn't it? Of course you don't fucking have to! Of course you don't fucking have to!"

We learn throughout the picture just what it is that Ray did in London, just how badly he messed up his assassination, and what it is Ken and Ray are doing in Bruges. Along the way Ray insults some American tourists and assaults a Canadian couple, hooks up with a Belgian drug dealer on the set of a film, parties with an American midget actor and some prostitutes, shoots a skinhead with a blank, gets arrested on a train, and attempts suicide. All in all your normal tourist activities in Belgium, I would assume.

There is actually some action in the film when Ray and Ken are pitted against their boss, Harry Waters, played with obvious relish by Ralph Fiennes, but it is normal human action, not the superhuman cartoon examples audiences have grown accustomed to in films like the Bourne trilogy. Shot in the leg, a character will bleed and limp and eventually crawl, because that's what a person would do in real life. Writer/director McDonagh has a knack for filming the action close up but without making it helter-skelter and while keeping within the bounds of reality.

Life-sized characters dealing in life-sized way with admittedly larger problems than most of us face. Such a novel concept for a film. I'd say Farrell carried the picture if he wasn't so ably assisted by Gleeson and Fiennes, but in his scenes without either character he is charm itself. His repeated invocation of Vietnam when arguing with Americans (or those he thinks are Americans) is a funny tic, and his logorrheic nervousness when talking to Chloe (Clémence Poésy), the drug dealer lend his rakish character a weird kind of solidity. Neither a dolt, nor a genius, Ray is smarter than he thinks he is, but still not quite smart enough. The film wisely leaves his future in doubt while resolving other plot points.

Both hilariously funny and grippingly dramatic, In Bruges ably and regularly performs the nice trick of shifting gears in a split second. You are laughing one minute, then stunned by what follows, then back to laughing moments later. The first few laughs are uncomfortable ones, the first real moment of drama horrifying even down to a little handwritten note that brought me to the edge of crying, and the film's emotional climax is shocking, original, touching, and a great piece of visual action.

In Bruges might not look like your cup of tea or in fact it might look exactly like it. Either way, you'll be pleasantly surprised at what you find.

Creepy

2009-04-13T22:00:00.001-05:00

This is like something out of a crazy ass nightmare, via my friend, Minneapolis RAWK star, Janey Winterbauer:

Full of Fail

2009-04-08T11:06:00.007-05:00

Okay, let's get one thing straight.

I never win contests. It is axiomatic.

Maybe once in a while when there's like forty people's names being drawn out of a hat, I'll be like number 35 and I'll win a pair of women's pink slippers or some other essentially worthless garbage. I'm pretty much resigned to this.

Pretty much.

But okay, let's get real for one second here.

The magazine MacLife has a back page contest every month where you send them some kind of funny picture or caption a picture or some other bit of visual entertainment and you can win a prize. February's contest went like so:

Is your current cell phone on its last legs? Do you crave 3G speeds, or are you just tired of that generations-old flip phone--the one with the cracked screen and the 7 that only works when you press real hard? If so, now’s your chance to grab a brand new 3G iPhone (and an awesome headset to go with it)! Send us an amusing photo of you talking on your old cell phone--plus a close-up of the phone itself. Be creative! Whoever can catch our eye--or garner our deepest telephonic sympathies--will score the hot new Vibe II headset and a brand-new iPhone. Paying the bill, however, is your problem.

...

The judges will be Mac|Life editors and will base their decision on 33 percent originality, 33 percent creativity, and 33 percent execution.

So, I actually thought, wow, I really have a chance here. Reproduced below is the entry I submitted replete with photos to back up my claims:

********************

Hello MacLife Contest,

Well, the story goes like this. My phone was ailing already. The keypad when pressed would bring up a different number on the screen. When I flipped it open, the hinge would stop about halfway. Occasionally the screen would refuse to light up until I turned off the phone, removed the battery, placed the battery back inside, then turned the phone on again.

I was considering a new phone, to be sure.

Then one day I pulled out my phone (Motorola Razr) to answer a call while I was coming down the stairs in an RTA station and I dropped it. Like in a Hollywood movie, if anything or anyone falls at the top of the stairs, it has to make the trip all the way to the bottom. My phone did just that, bouncing, skipping, skittering all the way down a double flight of concrete steps. Where it landed. In a slushy puddle of half-melted snow. (I wonder what that sounded like on the other end of that call.)

Well, I was nowhere near home, nowhere near tools to dry off the phone inside with any kind of speed, so I picked up the super scarred, cracked phone, and tried the buttons. No dice, all was black. So I popped out the battery and rushed to my house with the idea of at least saving my photos, my address book, my texts, if not the actual working phone itself.

With some handy Torx screwdriver action I was able to open up my phone and dry it off whereever the slushy, salty mix had made it in. But, in my haste and with my clumsy hands, I severed a few contact connections inside. Four hours of phone surgery later with electrical tape and plenty of good luck, I managed to get the phone up and running again minus a few features. For example, the screen, the camera, the text function, the address book. Basically, I had a cell phone circa the late 80s. Answer and call capacity only.

With some third party software, I managed to save about 70% of my pictures, the rest had weird data errors so either they wouldn't open or they'd open with heavy distortion. Address book was lost. Texts, lost.

But the phone worked. It still worked. Now, I'm kind of a cheap-ass anyway, and to be honest, I was kinda proud of my mad surgical skills, so I kept using the phone, putting off ordering a new one. Also, my contract was near expiration and the idea of buying a new phone when I might get a free one with a new contract seemed a good reason to put off making a new purchase.

So, since the view screen was totally dead and the phone had all kinds of broken elements going on, I made sure to add some new features to make it workable. For instance, an electrical tape lock to keep the completely unhinged clamshell closed as it now flipped open at odd times, all loosey goosey.

And post-it notes and a pen on my person at all times for "text" messages. The photo of my camera workaround is just for fun, but the "text" feature I sincerely used because otherwise I'd forget things I wanted to tell people.

I didn't remember half of my phone numbers because I'd gotten so used to just using the address book on the screen. So I got their numbers directly from the people I called most, and then I printed up an address book to tape into my new phone.

Now, when someone calls, I let the call go directly to voice mail with the hope that the person will either leave their number or the person will be one of my regular contacts in my paper address book. Since my wife has a phone of the same model, I've also memorized a few cheats in case the caller doesn't leave a VM. (Left arrow, down arrow, select button, then down arrow as many calls back as the person you're trying to get a hold of. It doesn't work much if you don't keep a good recall of how many people have called you and how many people have left messages. Hell, it doesn't work at all. Who am I kidding? But I tried! I tried!)

Of course, there's only so long I can go with such a ridiculous excuse for a phone. I don't dare turn the ringer off because I can't see the screen to change the settings to turn it back on. But when you pull out a scratched, cracked, taped phone with post-its crammed inside it, people tend to stare. Then laugh. Then try to take pictures of your phone to post to failblog. It's not pretty.

So, hook me up MacLife. Give me something to show off in our next office meeting. Give me bragging rights. But most of all, pretty pretty pretty please, give me a phone that actually works.

*************************

Not bad, if I do say so myself. I thought, I've got the hardest luck story of anyone I've ever heard and I have a superbeat phone with pictures to prove it. This is awesome, I will win this iPhone for sure.

Well.

The May issue of MacLife arrives and I haven't heard anything from them yet, so I know it doesn't look good for my chances. That's okay with me actually. While I was already looking at the sweet apps I'd download like the iPhone Kindle and all the games and widescreen rendering of TV shows and all the rest of the sweet techy goodness that comes with it, I still didn't truly believe in my heart of hearts that I'd actually win.

However, I was not prepared for what awaited me when I went to the back page.

Are you fucking kidding me? Seriously? This is the win they came up with? Look at this entry. It's not even in the ballpark of funny, though it's trying to be. The rusty tin can execution? That's like grade school level funny, something a first grader might come up with.

And get this, the image doesn't even make sense. He's got a Bluetooth earpiece (which comes with a microphone) and he's talking into a can. Is that supposed to be how broke his "can-phone" is? That he has to use it and the Bluetooth? When you have you seen someone using their phone headset and at the same time talking into their actual phone?

Never. Because it doesn't make sense.

This garners MacLife's sympathies? This had the perfect 33/33/33 originality/creativity/execution break down? Seriously?

So I can understand people reading this and thinking I'm just being a sore loser here, and let's face it, I am being a sore loser here, but to lose is one thing. To lose to such a demonstrably weak delivery is insulting.

Now here's the icing on the cake. Yesterday, after I found out about this retardulous loss, I posted this on Twitter:

The editors of MacLife can suck it, suck it, suck it. What the hell are they putting in their bongs over there? GAHHHHHH!!!!!!!

And what did I get for this outburst?

The following two emails:

Hi, The Critic (The_Critic).

Roberto Baldwin (strngwys) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Roberto Baldwin's profile here:

http://twitter.com/strngwys

and:

Hi, The Critic (The_Critic).

Ray Aguilera (raguilera) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Ray Aguilera's profile here:

http://twitter.com/raguilera

Now who do you think these two are?

Editors at MacLife. To make matters worse, Ray Aguilera goes and reposts what I wrote about them. It's almost like they're either taunting me or they really are as ridiculous as I took them for after I saw this mega FAIL on the back page.

I swear this is the most ridiculous loss of my life. After this, I can take any beating in any contest ever again because, kids, I have seen the bottom. I have seen the bottom and it looks like a rusted fucking can.

Reality and Its Discontents

2009-04-07T10:54:00.002-05:00

Master of Reality, by John Darnielle, Continuum, 2008

Part of the ongoing series of pocket-sized album appreciations known collectively as 33 1/3, John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats does something completely different with music criticism when he turns his pen to Black Sabbath's 1971 record, Master of Reality. The series features single album considerations often by names in the music business, record critiques by those who make records themselves instead of drooling fanboy loveletters or too cool for school sneerfests by the likes of the Pitchfork roster. To be sure there are non-musicians among the writers, but there is a heavy lean in the direction of art appreciations by artists.

Thus readers could learn what Colin Meloy of The Decemberists thinks of The Replacements' legendary Let It Be. Franklin Bruno of Nothing Painted Blue (as well as The Mountain Goats) provides his disssertation on Armed Forces, Elvis Costello's third album. Care to read a detailed appreciation of The Beastie Boys Paul's Boutique? Dan LeRoy, the Director of Literary Arts at Lincoln Park Performing Arts Charter School, has got it covered.

While some authors cast their criticism as semi-autobiographical how-I-fell-in-love-with-this-record reminisces and some give the history of the album's creation, what Darnielle has done is what he does best. Providing slice-of-life vignettes of troubled characters and various people on the edge of cracking throughout his musical catalog as The Mountain Goats, here Darnielle has framed the analysis of Master of Reality in the voice of a teenager locked inside an adolescent psychiatric center. Roger Painter, our narrator, is writing in a journal as an exercise for one of his counselors, Gary, and his goal in the first half of the book is clear: convince Gary to let him have access to his Walkman and his heavy metal tapes.

Like all good authors, Darnielle does little to satisfy our hero's desires which allows Roger to get into ever more involved explanations of what each track on this album means to him. Consider this passage from Roger's description of the song "Sweet Leaf"

Imagine that you are a man from space! And you don't speak English and you never heard of weed, and you landed in California and the first person you met up with took you to his house and said, "Hey check out this band." And then he played you "Sweet Leaf." In my opinion, the man from space would hear that song, just the crunchy guitar sound and those bass notes, Geezer Butler is the best bassist it sounds like his strings are made from lime jello salad, and he would start banging his head! Because the riff on "Sweet Leaf," that is something anybody could understand. ANYBODY.

While this is by no means sophisticated lyrical parsing or chord progression analysis, what Roger gets at in his troubled way is the deeper meaning of the music, the meaning underneath what you hear when you put on the record, the meaning of what you feel when you hear music. Darnielle is trying out a tricky device in this way, attempting to put complicated thoughts into the words of a mixed up kid, trying to draw out the emotion of music without letting the mask of his character drop.

In another place Roger writes:

But this is the thing about you guys and music here. You think that all we are doing when we listen to our music is either looking at the words like they were the bible for us, or looking at pictures of the singer like they were Jesus. It is not like that at all. When you guys talk like that, that's how we know you are stupid and growing old has made you crazy. Because: music is like a whole world, and there are words and pictures and sounds and textures and smells probably, OK I didn't actually mean that I just got carried away.

And there's that lovely moment at the end when his self-image of cool stops Roger and he has to pull back, to keep up the veil of who he is. But then, feeling that something about what he's saying is True in a real fundamental sense, he plunges on:

Albums do have a special smell though. Old ones smell different from new ones. Anyway you gotta know what I mean about this! It's like when you sing "Row row row your boat," do you really only focus on the boat and rowing it? And think "Wow, this is a song about some guys rowing a boat, fucken awesome!" No of course not. Only if you are totally weird do you think like that. When you are singing, you hear the song, the part that is more than words, and is also the feeling of just the notes in the air, especially if you are singing it in a round with a bunch of other people. We used to do that in my kindergarten. You hear a mood which is way higher (not "high" like that, come on) than the words, it is always sort of floating above the words. And that is why bands like the Beatles can be popular everywhere, even where people do not speak English, where to them the Beatles probably sound like trained monkeys trying to talk.

You begin to see as the story progresses, not only that putting down on paper what he thinks about the music is therapeutic for Roger, but that the deprivation of music or art of any kind is a considerable mistake in such a setting. To be sure, Darnielle is on the kid's side in this argument despite his own time on the other side as a nurse in a rehabilitative hospital of the kind he writes about here. He understands inside and out the power of music to soothe our souls and his sympathies lie with the artists and the fans.

In a sense, Darnielle's choice for album isn't inherently as important as the story he's telling, which is likewise not inherently important that it's about Roger Painter specifically. It is about generations of kids misunderstood by their elders, condemned for their tastes which ultimately prove to be less threatening than suspected.

To go back and listen to the metal of my youth is a memorable trip accompanied by a feeling of "what were they thinking?" The "they" in this case being those who believed Poison or Metallica was going to turn their kids into bloodthirsty Satanists who would stab parents in their sleep. It is these kind of parents who are responsible for Roger's incarceration, and Darnielle has told this story before in the song "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton" from All Hail West Texas, the last of his lo-fi offerings. This second take allows a much more thorough exploration of what music means to the teenage years which I'm sure most readers will remember all too well. The passionate absorption, the avidity for any tidbit about the band, the hours and hours spent burning up batteries and wearing out record needles.

The book shifts halfway through, ending the first half with Roger being shipped out of the psychiatric hospital to the State hospital for the infraction of sneaking into the nurses' station to retrieve his Walkman and Master of Reality. The second half finds Roger working as a fast food manager. We pick up his life ten years later and learn about him from where his story left off. Having recently moved out of the house he shared with his now ex-girlfriend, Roger finds his old hospital journal and decides to complete it. Decides to finish telling his old counselor Gary just what the album meant to him, and more importantly to describe how his life has turned out since last they met.

Master of Reality bristles with a barely restrained rage, the first two pages reading in repetition "FUCK YOU ALL GO TO HELL." When this exact anger returns in the second half there is something almost triumphal about it but still enraged. The rage in the second half is makes the first half's anger look small in comparison for now it has something tangible to point to to mark loss. Rage for the loss of his childhood based on other's fear and misunderstanding, rage for how limited his life now seems as a result of all the "counseling" he received and, almost as importantly, rage for just how little those who were tasked with helping him listened and actually helped.

As an unconventional approach to musical appreciation as this is, Master of Reality is a love letter to not just one album but to music as a whole. One can find that release from self, that absolutely necessary escapism in metal or jazz or folk or symphony records. What is important, Darnielle is saying, is the moment when transcendence takes over and you almost cease to be earthbound. High art or low makes no difference whatsoever.

Through Roger Painter, Darnielle has told a story that for the first time in my reading experience, despite many marketing claims to the contrary, can actually stand alongside The Catcher in the Rye for a moving portrait of vulnerable, funny, disturbed and misunderstood adolescence. It's a powerful and disturbing piece of work, instantly recognizable in its characters to those of us who lived through the eighties when such hysteria seemed to run at a fever pitch.

You could almost consider what's been done here as an entirely new form of criticism, a Newer New Criticism in which fiction is used to get at larger truths about a piece of art, much in the way New Journalism set reporting inside a more narrative based framework. Despite never having been an Ozzy fan in my life, I felt an almost urgent need to hear Master of Reality as a result of one (fictional) person's love. That's the power of art, that connection of person to person, soul to soul.

Sometimes...

2009-04-03T15:39:00.002-05:00

I really wish I could work for a European ad agency....

The ad, by the by, is for an...ahem...adult store of some kind....

The Bourne Trilogy

2009-03-27T12:59:00.004-05:00

I’m not the world’s biggest fan of action films. I’m not saying I mind them per se, but the majority consists of Jerry Bruckheimer and his clones blowing shit up. Blowing shit up is just about the epitome of boring unless you are there, on site, in the flesh, feeling the driving thud as it happens. In a film, if there’s no good emotional or adrenaline rush building up to the explosion, it’s just a ton of noise.

Another beef I have with the modern action film comes with their other main ingredient: the fight scene. Most fight scenes these days seem to be filmed by strapping cameras to the participants and fast cutting the heltery-skeltery mess together in some kind of epilepsy inducing chaos. Honestly, I don’t want to sound like some curmudgeonly old man, but Clint Eastwood’s fight sequences in Every Which Way But Loose were more exciting because you could tell what was going on. If I had any complaints at all about The Dark Knight, it was that all the fight films seemed to take place inside a very dark closet with a slow strobe going on.

The Matt Damon vehicle of the three (possibly a fourth in the makings) Bourne films tread sometimes dangerously close to a couple of these pet peeves of mine, but they manage to be rather fun little slices of violence that didn’t make me feel like a cretin for enjoying them.

The Bourne Identity, Written by Tony Gilroy and William Blake Herron, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum, Starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Chris Cooper, Clive Owen, and Julia Stiles, Directed by Doug Liman, Universal Pictures, 2002

The first of the three films that make up the Bourne Trilogy, based on the novels by Robert Ludlum , The Bourne Identity follows the plight of an amnesiac (Matt Damon) fished out of the Mediterranean by an Italian fishing boat. At first, they assume he’s dead, then the boat’s “surgeon” determines otherwise. The bullets lodged in his back are removed as is a strange laser device which beams out the numbers of a Swiss deposit box.

Fully recuperated, Bourne sets off for Zurich. He is rousted for sleeping in the park by two police, who he quickly attacks and incapacitates when they try to arrest him for vagrancy and no identity papers. This turns out to be just one of the many skills Bourne finds himself surprised to possess including proficiency in several languages. Here he ditches his red coat as being too distinctive – and this is the very last time this character will ever, ever try to disguise himself despite being wanted by the CIA, Russian assassins, Interpol and many others.

At the bank in Zurich, our protagonist opens his deposit box, whereupon he finds a gun, several different passports under different names from different countries but all with his photograph, and a ton of assorted dough. He opts to go with Jason Bourne, the American passport’s name, and flees with the cash but not the gun.

And from there things quickly become a game of chase. A contact at the Swiss Bank calls CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and repeated attempts are made to capture Bourne. All of these attempts fail, as Bourne proves to be an incredibly lethal and effective killing machine. Along the way, Bourne picks up a young woman, Marie (Franka Potente), offering her twenty thousand dollars to drive him from Zurich to Paris. It isn’t long before the CIA are on the scent and hunting both parties.

Essentially, the film trades off back and forth between the hunted, the various killers hunting them, and the bloodless bureaucrats back at Langley who manipulate everything. Chris Cooper plays his usual hard ass self, though you wish sometimes he’d take a light role just to see the man stretch himself. I had suspected romance between Bourne and the rather minor character of Nicolette merely because she is played by Julia Stiles and when big names meet in a film, often there is romance. That that didn’t happen flouted my expectations enough to earn my respect. Clive Owens, poor lad, is entirely and hugely wasted in the film as an assassin brought in for the middle of the film and dispatched by Bourne all too quickly for my tastes.

The film is relatively fast-paced and the action sequences and the plotting are clever enough to keep you entertained with their ingenuity. Matt Damon is effective playing an emotionally locked person struggling with something he rather despises about himself, a role not unfamiliar from his turns as Will Hunter in Good Will Hunting or Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley. It is a film that, even as it is self-contained and could end where it does, clearly tips its hand toward the sequels coming down the pike.

The Bourne Supremacy, Written by Tony Gilroy, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum, Starring Matt Damon, Franka Potente, Joan Allen, Brian Cox, and Julia Stiles, Directed by Paul Greengrass, Universal Pictures, 2004

With a change of director in the second film The Bourne Supremacy from Dough Liman (who helmed the party films Swingers and Go in the 90s), to Paul Greengrass, the action became bigger, the fight sequences more involved. The style of filming seemed to shift also to one that featured far more hand-held camera action, a trend I absolutely loathe. Yes, if it’s a street scene or somewhere you want to give the audience a really personal you-are-in-the-moment feeling then fine, that works in small doses. But there is no justification for filming closed door CIA briefings with shaky jittery camera work. Aesthetically, it serves no function and everyone does it and the whole thing gives me a bit of dizziness induced nausea.

One of the treats at least in these scenarios is that Bourne proves effective at using what he finds around him to disable or kill those who are sent to kill him. In one amusing scene, he ably defends himself with a rolled up magazine – which should give you some idea as to how deadly we’re supposed to consider him. It probably reflects badly on me that I find inventive killing situations rather amusing, a holdover from my teenage years watching Friday the 13th films, I suppose.

Living in a small coastal village in India with Marie from the first film, Bourne thinks only of a quiet life living off his remaining funds, trying to piece together his past and who he is and how he came to be what he is. Over the years, he and Marie have put together a scrap book of news clippings, jottings, illustrations, maps, supposedly about his various assassination activities.

Anyone who’s seen enough action pictures knows that it isn’t long before Bourne is back to being pursued or that his girlfriend won’t ultimately make it. Hunted by a Russian version of himself, Bourne and Marie try to flee their Indian village, but Marie is shot and their Jeep plummets into the river. The scenes of her death and his tormented escape underwater reminded me of nothing so much than comparable scenes from the Lethal Weapon franchise which is unfortunate and unfair.

And again the chase is on. Not only have the Russians assassinated Bourne’s girlfriend, they also set him up as the fall guy for a robbery committed by the same assassin, leaving evidence implicating Bourne at the scene. This brings the CIA back into the matter and what shifts things slightly here and in the follow-up film is that Bourne is now the hunter and the hunted. Not only does he believe that it was the CIA who set up the hit on him, but he is again hot on the trail of the special training program, Operation Treadstone, that produced him and other killers like him. We hop all around the globe, back to Italy, to Germany, to Langley again, where we meet a new CIA character, Pamela Landy (played excellently well by Joan Allen in a mix of tough and feminine where neither tips the girlie/bitchy balance that strong females must manage), and ultimately in Russia where the climactic car chase takes place.

I say climactic car chase, which is not to make you think that this is quite like any other car chase you’ve ever seen. Greengrass turns the warrens of streets and intersections of highways, public transit, and other various byways into an enormous chess board as both killers alternately hunt and flee from each other. This ties neatly together, a bit too neatly, with another thread the film has been weaving that of one of Bourne’s first assassinations, a Russian politician named Vladimir Neski, who had information about a thief among the CIA, and Bourne’s desire to apologize to Neski’s daughter for the killing.

The film concludes, as did the first one, though far more overtly, with near insistence that we’ll be back for a third helping. And we will.

The Bourne Ultimatum, Written by Tony Gilroy and Scott Z. Burns, based on the novel by Robert Ludlum, Starring Matt Damon, Joan Allen, David Strathairn, and Julia Stiles, Directed by Paul Greengrass, Universal Pictures, 2007

It turns out that the closing scene of the second film actually takes place almost near the end of the third film, The Bourne Ultimatum. This is initially a bit of a comfort, because when the second film’s climax in a Russian highway tunnel ends, Bourne merely staggers away from a massive amount of property damage and from his police pursuers. That the very next scene should take place months later in New York City without ever explaining how Bourne eluded his pursuers and got out of Russia seems a bit of a cheat.

It’s all very well and good having a superman CIA assassin who can kill you with a magazine or a bath towel, but we should at least hew a bit close to reality at some stage. Alas, there is an opening sequence chase for this third film, reuniting most of the cast and crew of the second and first films, and picking up from that Russian tunnel. However, Bourne’s ultimate escape is again glossed over in favor of yet another flashback sequence to another mystery shrouded event in Bourne’s past.

And scene.

Wait, what?

Oh, never mind.

Next we pick up with a reporter for The Guardian who has apparently got wind of Operation Treadmill, the super secret CIA program to create Jason Bourne and countless other super-assassins. Bourne contacts him to get information out of him about his own past, which quickly leads to more action. And of course, Bourne is still traveling about, apparently without any regard for the fact that international police and intelligence services all over the world know what he looks like. Does he grow his hair out? He does not. Grow a moustache? Nope. How about a hat or a change of clothes? Surely he must consider at the very least a slight disguise. Not a bit of it. It must be something in Damon’s contract that he will not wear funny latex noses or prosthetic limbs, that he will just march automaton like through the film as recognizable as George Washington or Paris Hilton.

Joan Allen is back on the case of hunting Bourne despite not getting him the last time around, assisting CIA section chief Noah Vosen (the always excellent David Strathairn) who has come on to the case because of the Guardian reporter’s sniffing about. Using broad anti-terrorism justifications to excuse his methods (where have we heard that before?), Vosen is hot on rooting out the CIA leak providing The Guardian with their scoops. To this end, Vosen unleashes more of the Treadstone program assassins (now renamed Blackbriar after being “officially” shut down).

Somewhere along the way, Bourne meets up again with Julia Stiles’ character of Nicolette (now given the full name of Nicky Parsons) and takes her with him, leading Vosen to believe she and Bourne are in league with the leak. More assassins follow, more action, by now you know what to expect. My suspicions returned that Stiles and Damon would ultimately hook up, but at least Greengrass and the series writer Tony Gilroy are determined to thwart that coupling.

Bourne ultimately goes back to New York where we again see the scene from the end of the second film, which sets up the final show down between Bourne, Vosen, and the sinister Dr. Albert Hirsch (the titanic Albert Finney), head of Treadstone/Blackbriar’s psychological program, the piece that made the assassin’s into who they were. This final confrontation reveals all the secrets including the one that breaks Bourne’s amnesia completely. It’s probably not unfair to say like Vosen’s national security justifications for his behavior, this final reveal, stands as something of a rebuke to the American populace in the age of the Global War on Terror.

A bit silly, a bit over-the-top, but always fast and at least inventive, the Bourne films are really well done mindless entertainment. You are expected to greatly suspend your disbelief, but no more than you would in any other number of action films, and the main reward at least is that you and your own intelligence aren’t insulted to get to that end. It may sound contradictory to say that the film is both mindless and one that doesn’t insult your intelligence, but the plotting is just that tight, just that unpredictable in places. With writing this good, no wonder the cast is stellar.

Tomorrow for Sure

2009-03-26T14:08:00.004-05:00

I know I promised that there'd be a review coming up this week of the Bourne Trilogy (and there still will be), but ya'll are just gonna have to wait until tomorrow.

Today, of course, is The Littlest Critic's sixth birthday, so there has been much to do and much to get done so I can belt on out early today for our little tiny Actual Day Party.

The official lots of kids and screaming and presents party to follow at a later undetermined time, perhaps when it's a tiny bit warmer.

Meanwhile, enjoy this FAIL I made for the good folks at FAILblog where you will piss yourself laughing.

Review?

2009-03-20T08:58:00.003-05:00

I might get up a review of the Bourne trilogy of films today, but since I've been slugging it out with Proust for about two months now, I haven't actually read much that I could talk about.

Plus, I've read everything but the last page of this 4500 page behemoth, Remembrance of Things Past. So here's where things stand:

And the reason I'm stopping here is because when I started, I needed some kind of goal, a target, something to strive against. Since The Littlest Critic's birthday was coming up (six years old! with wobbly teeth! crazy...), I told her I'd finish the book before she turned six.

And so it became a race against the clock. Now, according to The Wife, this is bad form. A.) I'm teaching our daughter that to rush through things and to hurry is a good way to read and B.) I've been taunting TLC that it's "a race." Only TLC can't do anything to win. She can't turn six any faster. I can read faster, I can read slower, sixty seconds is still only one minute, sixty minutes is still only one hour, etc. etc.

Granted, I have taunted. I've been childish. I've teased. In my defense, TLC has fought back admirably, hiding my book in a number of clever places as a way of slowing me down. The kid's got spirit.

And I've budgeted my time, knowing that if I was going to make my deadline, I'd have to read fifty pages a day for so many days and so on and so on. I've been like Rocky in that scene when he's in Russia running through the snow with a log strapped to his back or something. I've been training to complete this book all my life. That time I slogged through Schopenhauer's boring as hell World and Will as Representation? Yeah, that was me high stepping it in Siberia.

So now, here I am, at the pinnacle, at the peak of this mountain of Proust, and I pause. I pause with maybe 500 words to go out of hundred and hundreds of thousands.

Why?

Because I'm waiting for TLC to turn six. And then I will read the last page or so of the seventh novel Time Regained.

I can't say I've enjoyed Proust much. Oh yes, sometimes he's amazingly beautiful in his prose, sometimes his philosophical insights are remarkable, and sometimes the events he depicts are interesting, engaging, and dramatic. (I am especially fond of all the novels of The Captive which is all about Marcel's paranoia and obsessiveness with his girlfriend/fiancee's supposed lesbianism to the point where he convinces her to move in with him and then he essentially denies her requests to go out anywhere at all. Ever. That sounds a lot, lot sexier than it is, actually.)

But to get to these points...oh, to get to the goods you have to suffer through so much digression and so much over-explication and so much fine-hair splitting of this social strata versus that social strata and how this particular salon hostess daren't even think of not inviting this one particular obscure baron because it might upset the delicate balance of her social circle with this and that obscure minor aristocracy. An enormous amount of high-hat nonsense that I didn't even find remotely enjoyable or entertaining or pleasurable to read.

The Wife loves to read novels and watch films about people who are different from her. If there's some documentary about Mormon cults or the unknown practices of the Amish, she could watch for hours. I to a great degree also like stories about things foreign to my experience, like shivving a guy in the prison workout yard. So, a little of this salon hothouse atmosphere is interesting, but then we go off on an extended four page single paragraph tear about why Mme. Verdurin didn't care for one particular seaside resort town because of what the fuck ever and really, Marcel, wrap it up. Get back to your point because now I've lost the thread.

Years ago, fresh out of college, I read Swann's Way, the first novel and having made it through one, I began the second novel, frequently translated as Within a Budding Grove (though more recently translated into the far sexier and far more accurate In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower). Despite this topical sexiness, I never made it more than a quarter of the way through that second novel.

I rarely give up on a book. But I just could not stay awake while reading that and if I did manage to stay awake, my mind would drift horribly and I'd have no idea what I had just read. So I gave up. Fine and dandy.

It's always rankled me somewhat, though. The not having finished. The idea that this is a classic of world literature without which your reading life is incomplete. Go to Goodreads.com or any book nerd site and just sample the accolades people routinely toss upon this pile of pages. "Best book ever written," "the only book you will ever need," and similar tripe of this sort. I read some jackass claim that you could throw away all literature before and all literature after which is Certified Prime, Grade A asshole chatter.

But I like a challenge, so I had to go back and try again. And this time I succeeded. Almost. I'm done for now. In one more week, I will finish this monster, as long as I don't get hit by a bus.

Was it worth it? If only for the bragging rights. Could I have gotten more pleasure out of selected quotations and the Cliff Notes version. Probably. Maybe I'm just bitter because two months have gone by and all I have is this accomplishment on my plate. An accomplishment that doesn't have a lot of associated joys. Oh well. Cross one off my Great Books list. Now on to War and Peace.

Your mileage, as always, will very but you know what? Meh.

Wow

2009-03-18T12:05:00.001-05:00

This is just an amazing remix project. Friggin amazing. Kutiman scours YouTube, finds videos of amateur musicians, remixes them into professional sounding songs. Again, amazing.

More here.

Authoritarian

2009-03-17T22:06:00.001-05:00

That word doesn't mean what you think it means, jackass.

"I'm going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there's an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened," Bush said.

Or maybe he's just being honest for once.

Beauty at Every Point

2009-03-12T22:43:00.005-05:00

The Fall, Written by Dan Gilroy, Nico Soultanakis, and Tarsem Singh, Directed by Tarsem Singh, Starring Cantica Untaru and Lee Pace, Absolute Entertainment, 2006

Shelved for two years for whatever reason, Tarsem Singh’s second film, The Fall, is one of the most amazing visual treats you will see any time soon. Most remarkably, in this age of digital image manipulation, the film is nearly one hundred percent CGI free. (There is one scene near the end involving birds that was definitely digitized, but that’s the only one.)

Instead, relying on beautiful sets, lavish costumes, simply gorgeous outdoor cinematography, and pure art, the filmmakers have managed to produce something amazing. All I had seen prior to this film was the rather obscure trailer, which doesn’t quite manage to make the film comprehensible (nothing really quite does until you see it), but that teaspoon of beauty was enough to make me hunt this picture down once it was out on DVD.

Now with your typical CGI laden films that tend to get big promotion and summer box office hype, that no amount of hours and dollars are spared prettifying, there’s still this artificiality. Yes, computer graphics have advanced to the point where a character like Gollum was fascinating, sympathetic, almost Oscar-worthy in its animated format, but there still remains a kind of hokiness about them. While there are no more zippers in special effects (unless you’re talking a Troma picture), the image-flatness that they haven’t yet managed to do away with still prods you out of the film if you’re the observant type.

If anything jars you out of yourself in watching The Fall it’s a kind of painterly beauty you all too rarely get in a film anymore. Take any still out of Citizen Kane with its deep focus, its unconventional camera work, and it’s like looking at a black and white realist painter’s vision of the world. Every once in a while, a film comes along like this that is simply such a treat to the eyes that words reach their limits then fall short. The list of stunningly beautiful films, despite the medium's visual nature, is not nearly as long as it should be.

But it would only be a pretty picture, or a series of pretty pictures, were it not for the riveting stories that the film tells. Cowboy film stuntman Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is in the hospital in 1920s Los Angeles after an accident on the set has left him quite likely paralyzed from the waist down. He is found in his bed by a bored, imaginative five year old Alexandria (Catinca Untaru). Her family having fled strife in India, she and her mother and her siblings have settled in Los Angeles where they work picking oranges. It is a fall, likewise, that has landed her in the hospital, breaking her arm.

After a brief conversation, these two lonely souls come together as Roy begins to tell Alexandria a wild, rambling adventure story about five heroes who have come together for one common purpose: to kill the Spanish Governor Odious. Roy populates his story with a variety of melodramatic film and fiction types: the ex-slave named Otta Benga, an Italian explosives expert named Luigi, Charles Darwin (accompanied by the slyly named monkey sidekick Wallace), a mystic who carries every bird in the world in his stomach, an Indian (in Roy’s version, the Native American type, while in Alexandria’s reimagining a sub-Continental with beard and Punjabi dress), and their leader, the masked Blue Bandit.

At first, it is hard to determine Roy’s motivation in telling this story. He is transparently plotting something, but his story seems to both mislead and reveal at the same time. I’d give away more of the plot were I to summarize much beyond this initial set up, and I’d hate to give away some of the film’s more important revelations. Part of the wonderful aspect of the film comes from how various elements of the hospital including staff and assorted other visitors and associated persons find their way into Alexandria’s visualizations of Roy’s story. The tall, black ice-delivery man becomes the vengeful Otta Benga while Alexandria’s absent father moves in and out of character.

The film manages to catch at its characters’ psychologies in very poignant and telling fashion. In one scene where Roy asks Alexandria about her life back in India, she tells him that her home was burnt down. When he asks her who did it, her reply “Angry people,” contains within it the maximum of a child’s understanding, yet her delivery suggests that there is more to the story that she’s unprepared to relive. And in the early stagesof Roy’s telling of the adventure tale, we get a hint of the downward spiral that will consume him as time progresses. While the story also develops, Alexandria’s powers of observation and her psychological acumen are shown to be far more advanced than one would give credit to a five year old. Her casting of Governor Odious cuts right to the heart of Roy’s story with scary precision.

I’d say it’s a rare film that can make me cry, but that’s not entirely true. Hell, I can be made to cry at Hallmark card commercials around the holidays. But it’s a rare film that can make me cry with real feeling, to ache for the characters, to share their inner turmoil, their conflicts, their agonizing pains. The film’s horribly excruciating climax, a tear filled battle between five year old and self-pitying drunken adult is probably one of the most moving arguments I’ve seen on film in literally years. I was sobbing when it was through.

It’s a marriage you don’t often see in a film, when a piece of transcendent visual beauty is married to a couple of psychological portraits that really plumb human depths. Too often the one is sacrificed to the other. Here, in The Fall, you have your cake and you eat it too.

Really, You Yahoos?

2009-03-12T05:39:00.003-05:00

Seriously, wtf? Are you completely tone deaf assholes? Do you think this is the featured story that all of America, hell, all of the world is clamoring to hear right this second? Why not rub it in our faces a little more? Why not show us photos of these billionaires lavish mansions where even their dogs drink out of finer porcelain china than most Americans have ever even heard of, seen, or touched? Why not show us the 37th spare bathroom, the one with the platinum bidet?

You suck, Yahoo, you really suck ass.

Commercial Break

2009-03-08T12:00:00.000-05:00

I don't normally post commercials, but this is for a book publisher, and it's pretty bad ass, so enjoy this lovely little stop motion jobber.

This Is Where We Live from 4th Estate on Vimeo.

Miniseries Heresy

2009-03-06T13:32:00.002-05:00

Cranford, Written by Sue Birtwistle, Susie Conklin, and Heidi Thomas, based on the novels by Elizabeth Gaskell, Directed by Simon Curtis and Steve Hudson, Starring Judi Dench, Imelda Staunton, Simon Woods, Eileen Atkins, Lisa Dillon, and Jim Carter , BBC, WGBH, Chestermead, 2008

My wife, like many women I know, is completely gaga for A&E’s Pride and Prejudice. One searches in vain for a period miniseries that can quite equal that one for its pacing, its flawless writing and acting, and its sheer timeless delightfulness. Without considering the length of the show (around six hours), it is something she can put on at almost any time and be quite content. It is a rare on-screen man who doesn’t get stacked up against Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy – and be found lacking.

We have sampled other Masterpiece Theatre pieces, BBC offerings, and A&E attempts, but nothing quite delivered on the must-have status. Until now. The five episode adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford novels might just about be one of the most enjoyable television experiences I have had in years.

Alerted to it through Dame Judi Dench’s Golden Globe nomination (and I wonder how long it’d have taken us to discover Cranford were it not for the service sometimes provided by these award shows), I sat down immediately after seeing one scene during the awards and requested Cranford from the library. And within two weeks, we were watching.

And we were riveted. To begin with, the BBC is just about one of the best companies for producing this type of work, so no expense seems to have been spared. From costumes to settings, the poor are realistically begrimed and ill-housed, the moderately well-off skimp on candles but go into raptures over new bolts of cloth at the milliners, and the aristocracy is icily filmed through blue filter in their palatial estates to emphasize their remoteness. One of the true rewarding elements of Cranford is that the writers haven’t glossed over the actual day-to-day workings of life in those ages. Indeed, you could even say it’s one of the most rewarding elements of the show.

For example, when a carpenter falls and breaks his arm in a compound fracture, the art of setting such a wound was cutting-edge for the time. The newly arrived Dr. Frank Harrison (Simon Woods, amusingly enough from the most recent cinematic Pride and Prejudice) can fix it with a technique he learned in London, but he is thwarted by a lack of candles at his home and at the village’s single store. Cranford’s established physician, Dr. Morgan (John Bowe), insists that amputation is the only way, indeed the preferred way for the times, to save the man’s life, though as a carpenter he’ll be thrown upon the poorhouse afterwards. As Dr. Harrison rides at full length to nearby Manchester for the required hooked needles, ice is procured from the town ice house to keep the man’s arm in an operable state. Within the first of five episodes, we are treated to contemporary medicine, the limitations of trade in pre-industrial Britain, and the sense of community as the ladies of Cranford come together to donate their candles for the operation.

And the entirety of the series is like that. We are educated as to the effects of the Enclosure Act of Parliament, to the penalties for poaching, to how the coming of the railroad affected small town England, to the appropriate manners in Cranford for visiting hours and just what color coat a gentleman doctor should wear (black).

I have yet to watch such a series that had the texture of the times so accomplished and so thorough. Most adaptations of Austen or Dickens era novels feel like merely modern times in period costume, an elaborate game of dress up and pretend that convinces no one. This is not to say that I expect authentically rotten teeth and toilet habits to make up the dominant thread of a program, but it is nice to watch how an old piece of lace is bleached for a garden party by being laid out in a bowl of buttermilk (with hilarious and additionally enlightening developments when said buttermilk and lace are scarfed up by a cat).

And as is fitting, the casting is stellar. Usually one turns into a Judi Dench program to see the spitfire personality she’s been typecast as. Here instead, as Matilda Jenkyns, she is the more retiring sister, afraid at all to give the wrong impression, hesitant and nervous, especially while her elder sister, Deborah (Eileen Atkins), lives and imperiously pronounces upon the correctness of behavior and attitudes. These two spinsters are joined by Miss Mary Smith (Lisa Dillon), their niece who is in flight from her marriage-minded stepmother and the voice of steady English reason throughout. Among other ladies of the town are the gossipy Miss Pole (the always entertaining Imelda Staunton), Mrs. Forrester (Julia McKenzie), a widow who loves her cow like a daughter, and Mrs. Jamieson (Barbara Flynn), a widowed snob who is frequently seen being carried through town in a sedan chair.

Cranford also excels at being a primer on the politics of the time through the story of the local aristocrat Lady Ludlow (Francesa Annis) an imperious widow who finds a serving girl’s ability to read and write sufficient cause not to hire her. The land agent of Hanbury Court, her estate, is the progressive reformer Edmund Carter (Philip Glenister), one of Cranford’s true unsung heroes, who is constantly imploring Lady Ludlow to exercise her mercy as well as her better judgment regarding her wastrel son. Carter takes under his wing young Harry Gregson (Aex Etel) the son of an indigent poacher, with at first successful, then disastrous, the ultimately uplifting and tear-inducing results.

Also, much as we’ve come to expect through such novels and such stories, there is romance. The dashing young Doctor Harrison is the object of crushes ranging from his landlady to a somewhat unattractive young woman determined not to remain a spinster, as well as his true love Sophy Hutton (the luminously beautiful Kimberley Nixon), daughter of the town’s minister. This three way race for Dr. Harrison’s hand leads to quite a bit of comedy as well as life-threatening drama.

Which is one of the other great pleasures of Cranford. For though it amuses and delights, it is also not at all afraid of completely sucker punching you with the deaths of characters seemingly out of the blue. It almost seems axiomatic for quite some time throughout that spinsters will remain so and true love will be thwarted, that the more vicious human nature will prevail and that miscommunications will forever stand not to be corrected.

I’d reveal more of the plot, but the intricacies, how one event unfolds and sets off a cascade of other events, are part of the absolute delight and charm of this miniseries. It may not be Pride and Prejudice exactly, but in many ways, I find it actually even better.

I Get Emails

2009-03-05T18:29:00.002-05:00

Hi, The Critic (The_Critic).

Zappos.com CEO -Tony (zappos) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Zappos.com CEO -Tony's profile here:
http://twitter.com/zappos

You may follow Zappos.com CEO -Tony as well by clicking on the "follow" button.
Best,
Twitter

Ummm....what? Why would a big name person like the Zappos CEO want to follow widdle ol' me?

Review Tomorrow

2009-03-05T10:38:00.002-05:00

Ah, the joy of the reused headline. Thursday is usually my intended target day for new reviews, although clearly Monday would make the most sense. Don't know how I settled on Thursday, but there you have it, kids.

Anyway. Despite chawing through plenty of aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, and naproxen, I seem to be unable to shake this bloody headache that makes me want to scoop my eyeball out with a spoon and ladle ice cream directly into the gaping hole.

Soooo, maybe tomorrow with the review. And maybe I'll go see Watchmen this weekend and review that too.

We'll see, my pretties, we'll see.

Meanwhile, someone turn out the lights and let me get some peace.

Haw Haw

2009-03-04T11:18:00.001-05:00

Apologize and grovel, Republican dorks.

The Horror. The Horror.

2009-03-03T13:21:00.001-05:00

Crime Times One Thousand

2009-02-27T13:07:00.003-05:00

The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, Edited by Paul Gravett, Running Press Book Publishers, 2008

Regular readers here will not find it surprising that I had to have this the moment I saw it.

If I have a genre weakness these days, it’s for gritty crime novels and mysteries. I love me a good puzzle of a story and if you mix in shady dames, two-fisted action, sick villains, existential angst, and a poetry of the streets, I’m in hog heaven. Currently mired in the second (soon to be third) volume of the long-winded sociological French salon society of Marcel Proust, I aim to give the palate the down-these-mean-streets high pressure rinse once I’ve finished remembering the lost past.

Meanwhile, though, a man still needs something to read whilst taking care of other business. Thus, graphic novels and comic books, especially anthologies like The Mammoth Book of Best Crime Comics, are ideal bathroom books. Seeing that the publisher has also printed The Mammoth Book of Zombie Comics and The Mammoth Book of Horror Comics, I will be set for quite some time in that respect. (In the sense of disclosure engendered in this paragraph, I will also add that I’m reading a Proust graphic novel adaptation upstairs in our second bathroom. It is delightfully distilled.)

Selecting from the long history of crime comics seems like a gargantuan task. Originally the genre of comics (along with horror comics) that most spurred the creation of the infamous Comics Code, hard-boiled detectives have been a staple of comics since their beginning almost. Their gritty violence and unflinching look at the cruelty of criminals are what attracted readers and the unwanted attention of so-called psychologists who found terrible links to juvenile delinquency. And the attention quickly shifted further afield to superhero comics as well. What is Batman, in the final analysis, but a straight-up tough guy gumshoe, albeit one who wears a costume and has the wealth to churn out Batarang style tools?

In that same violent vein, editor Paul Gravett has included the notorious “Murder, Morphine and Me” by Jack Cole, the comic whose second page eye-stabbing imagery is now iconic due to Congressional attention. Despite the comic’s anti-drug imagery, its no-holds barred depiction of drug abuse and the gangsters who ran the rackets elevated this piece to classic status. And a great number of the pieces in this book are American classics such Dashiell Hammett’s foray into the field with Secret Agent X-9 and a somewhat cheesy story from Will Eisner’s The Spirit, while others such as Commissario Spada and Carlos Sampayo’s and Jose Muñoz’s Alack Sinner are European imports (the former, go figure, comes from a Catholic children’s weekly newspaper put out by the Vatican).

The comics from the vaults are occasionally chock full of cinematic slam-bang action that was the hallmark of the genre back in the day. Gravett’s managed to avoid the worst offenders in this vein, focusing on visionary radicals like Charles Burns and Bernie Krigstein, the latter contributing two solid pieces. The first, “Blind Man’s Bluff,” the bizarre and funky tale of a blind but psychotic painter who can paint perfectly to life comes from a series based on Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct books. Krigstein’s work is more fluid in this, his last comic, than in the earlier almost woodcut thick lines of “Lily White Joe,” which tells what happens when you mix with, then cross the mob. A whole book has been devoted to the development of Krigstein’s art and it’s really worth the time checking out, his early squarish work evolving into something still heavily inked but more sinuous, his experimentation with panel size and the passage of time, his use of painterly elements and his overall different look and feel from what everyone else was putting on the page.

I’m not particularly a fan of Terry Beaty’s art style in his pairing with Max Allan Collins for Ms. Tree though Collins’ female detective is a nice groundbreaker in a field dominated by macho men. Her no-prisoners style delivered the goods long before V.I. Warshawski or Stephanie Plum came on the scene, though you can clearly trace a decent familial lineage. How one manages the trick of being hard as nails while nine months pregnant is handled with an amusing grace. We’re treated to a lengthy plotline from about midpoint to the end and includes the great line “I just killed two morons and my water broke.”

The crown jewel though from this collection is the Hammett newspaper strip Secret Agent X-9. Aided and abetted by Alex Raymond’s chiseled jaw pencil style and the occasionally brilliant sight gag, Hammett tells a fast-paced hunt with gusto and sophistication in a piece of nearly one hundred pages. Hampered by the newspaper comic strip format, events must move with a quickness and with frequent cliffhangers as well as the occasional summary panel for newer readers, which makes the greatness of this strip even better. The history behind Secret Agent X-9 sounds like one of those perfect instances in which bureaucratic meddling interfered with the development of something really awe inspiring. Originally planned as a detective competitor with Dick Tracy, the publishers decided that secret agents were much cooler and shoehorned in conflicting storylines of who exactly X-9 was and whom he worked for. In the beginning, there is a great similarity with Hammett’s other creation, The Continental Op, a nameless detective working for The Agency, but the ever increasing baroqueness of the publisher’s demands crippled the story and turned it into a mess. Hammett didn’t last long on the strip, though he originally believed it would be his ticket to a steady paycheck forever.

By way of contrast, the biggest dud is Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer offering, “Dark City.” I’ve given Spillane his chance before, and while it’s clear the author’s having a blast, Hammer’s world is so hokey and hammy and over-the-top it’s almost a caricature of detective fiction, an ultraviolent version of the campy Batman of the 1960s. Leggy dames who aren’t to be trusted fall miraculously in love with Hammer within seconds of meeting him every single time then go on to tell him how much they love him, shortly before trying to ventilate his guts. Hammer spends hours in the books walloping people and this newspaper version is tiresomely no different. Amusingly, Hammer’s piece is preceded by “Mike Lancer and the Syndicate of Death,” which acts as a parody of a parody almost. With far less time to build up a story, Lancer almost shoots his client on the second page the moment she walks in the door. Sailing out to a boat, the moment he arrives on board he’s knocking people overboard and plugging them left and right.

Let’s be fair. The crime genre is full of sock-o stuff like this, but there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way. Spillane is just about the epitome of wrong while Hammett is golden every single time. Now the great bulk of Gravett’s collection falls on the right side of the fence, but it is impossible to please everyone. Where I find Hammer appallingly low-brow (and this in a genre not known stateside for its great intellectual rewards), someone else might find him just the ticket. Considering what I’ve been reading lately, where the Baron de Guermantes’ habits of riding a train are described for no less than four solid single paragraph pages, I might just be in the mood for something two-fisted and cornball as the worst of Spillane when all’s said
and done.

But when you consider the price that Running Press has tacked on to this anthology ($17.95) it’s hard to see how your money would be poorly spent. All in all, it’s probably impossible to get more bang for your buck, even if you bought a Mike Hammer omnibus.

My Response to the Tomato

2009-02-27T10:53:00.002-05:00

No one was ever as cool as Cab Calloway. From the 1933 film, International House, with W.C. Fields, George Burns and Gracie Allen and, oddly enough, Bela Lugosi. Obviously this is pre-Code.

Baby Steps, Baby Shoes

2009-02-20T23:41:00.003-05:00

Eyes leftward again to the latest development from down on high at Critical HQ.

My recent twitterings have given me the inspiration to begin writing micro-fictions. The form has been around for a while, very, very short stories, and it only recently occurred to me that I could actually use Twitter to do this. I am not the first to have this brainwave, as you will see if you ever google twitter and microfiction or anything along those lines. I don't know how frequently I will update this, nor if I will get bored with this fairly quickly, nor further still if I will find it fun for a while, then kinda forget about it and let it just wither and die.

What I do know is that I'm interested in the experiment, so if you are at all interested, then check it out under the Micro-Fiction link over to your left (your other left...sigh...I'll wait while you figure it out...).

Thanks.

No, really.

Shorties for Shorties

2009-02-19T01:00:00.001-05:00

Mr. Men Little Miss, Series 2, Written & Illustrated by Roger Hargreaves, Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2008

The Mr. Men and Little Miss series of tiny books that came out throughout the seventies and eighties declare their childlike qualities from their utter, sometimes insane, simplicity. Started by Roger Hargreaves back in 1971 in answer to his son Adam’s question “what does a tickle look like?” there were forty five books featuring the male characters and 39 featuring the female characters. A better, simpler example of the philosophical concept of the idée fixe would be hard to find than this series. We are treated to such characters as Little Miss Naughty, Little Miss Sunshine, Little Miss Curious, Little Miss Greedy, and around our house a particularly apt one, Little Miss Chatterbox. (Were The Wife to select books that might be apt around our house, she’d likely choose Mr. Messy, Mr. Silly, Mr. Lazy, Mr. Grumpy, Mr. Mischief, and Mr. Impossible.)

Needless to say, though, with bright colors, bold lines, and rather absurd if simple stories, The Mr. Men and Little Miss books are a treat for younger readers. The Littlest Critic finds them rather hilarious. Although we intend to own more, we currently only have the four books which make up the second series of 2008 reissues of the books.

Herein, we are introduced to Little Miss Chatterbox who finds herself bouncing around from occupation to occupation after she talks for hours and hours when she should be working. This, of course, leads to great customer dissatisfaction and subsequently termination.

For example, when Mr. Greedy, a pink blobulous character with prominent belly, arrives at The Eatalot, a restaurant LMC has begun to work at, she describes the menu in such detail and at such length, she only finishes up around midnight, leaving poor Mr. Greedy absolutely starving. Likewise, Mr. Funny is so charming only he can cheer up the animals in the zoo, which he does through silly faces and so forth. Little Miss Sunshine is equally focused on the titular character’s relentless cheerfulness which turns out to be the saving grace on her visit to Miseryland.

Where the fourth book falls down is in its suggestion, in the title, that the book will be about Mr. Messy. Instead we are treated to the obsessive, almost freakish insistence on cleanliness and order of the humanoids Mr. Neat and Mr. Tidy. (I should point out here that none of the title characters even remotely resemble persons, being instead blobs, ovoids, and other variegated shapes with legs.) While the cheerful characters blithely go along in their lives wreaking havoc or otherwise being the life of the party, characters associated with negative traits such as messiness are given their comeuppance. One suspects that the heavy handedness of the book’s fixer uppers (as well as their overt dissimilarity to the titular characters) comes from them being representatives of the parental world.

While these books are fun and quick reads, the very productive publication of the author and the ten dollar price for four books puts you in the hole to the tune of two hundred dollars and up for a complete set. Find a library with a more or less complete set and pick and choose for the books you think your kids will get the biggest kick out of.

Rotten Island, Written & Illustrated by William Steig, Simon & Schuster, 1969

There’s something of a mystery about this book, as the original publication was entitled The Bad Island and was apparently rather different in some respects. Out of print, we have no means at our disposal to determine the differences or what prompted them.

Nevertheless, Steig, creator of Shrek and Doctor DeSoto among many other children’s books has a distinctive style and what might be considered a bit of a warped sensibility.

Naturally, children love it. I was turned on to Rotten Island by frequent commenter The _______ Tomato who just recently got hip to the book from his squeeze Auntie Sarah, Esquire. After my initial reading of the book, I wasn’t entirely certain that The Littlest Critic would go for it, but she did sincerely, requesting the book the next five nights running.

The story of an island filled with mean, rotten monsters who live for nothing so much as to hurt one another and who laughed at nothing so much “as to see another one suffering pain” are described variously as being “huge or miserably stunted, fat or scraggly, dry or slimy, with scales, warts, pimples, tentacles, talons, fangs, extra arms, eyes legs, tails and even heads, all in ridiculous arrangements. Some had armour-plating full of tacks and rusty nails, and some had wheels for legs.”

At the descriptive pages of the vicious monsters, the nasty sea creatures, and the horrid insects, TLC goes to great pains to point out to me that her favorite monsters are “this one, this one, this one, this one,” etc. until she has pointed out every single monster on the page.

As mean and as vicious and as cruel as they are described, she loves them all. Odd then that she should not find their cruelty or revulsion at pretty things like flowers repellent, and further odd that the monster’s wholly expected bad ends should not elicit sympathy either. What Steig has managed to create in this queer little volume is something quite surprising. He has created horrible monsters who don’t elicit any sympathy, yet who are somehow weirdly lovable. Whether that is a function of his artwork (which frankly tends toward the juvenilely sloppy) or his storytelling is hard to say. When a peculiar yellow monster goes mad from the recent appearance on the island of flowers, his plunge off a cliff side and resultant coma make us feel sad for him to some degree.

But then, he’s all upset about a flower or two.

These monsters, vicious, mean, and truly rotten, are pieces of work, no doubt, yet there’s something both wistfully hopeful and regretful in the story’s ending. It is almost as if Steig were as Blake characterized Milton, of the devil’s party, so engaging does he make these irredeemable villains.

Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, Written & Illustrated by Mo Willems, Hyperion Books for Children, 2009

I’ve gotten used to such amazing things from Willems, that I hate to admit I was disappointed at first in this book. What a promising title!

I have to admit I’ve had a thing for naked mole rats since seeing them at the Columbus zoo what feels like a hundred years ago. Then Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control came out and reignited my love which lay dormant for many a year. When I heard this title some time back, I had high high hopes. Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus high hopes.

Without nearly as much drama and with very little explanation of what naked mole rats are (“1. They are a little bit rat. 2. They are a little bit mole. 3. They are all naked.”), Willems gets right to the story of Wilbur, a naked mole rat who finds clothes fun and interesting and the kind of thing that lends itself to shifting personal identities. Thus he can be a cowboy, a spy, a superhero, a French beatnik, a well-helled smoothy.

Attacked and ostracized by the community, Wilbur tries to run a clothing store to little success until his persecutors take their cause to the naked mole rat colony founder Grand-Pah.

Now, when I first read this story, I’ll admit I was underwhelmed. This wasn’t at all like Willems' great books, the Pigeon series or the Knuffle Bunny books. It felt a little thin on idea, kind of like Edwina the Dinosaur. Yet The Littlest Critic loves it.

I don’t know if it’s the all time comedy fun of “naked” that she enjoys so much, just as any kid will enjoy a book that includes butts in it, or if the story really means something to her, but not a night has gone by that she hasn’t requested that book specifically. To me this says, of course, that even though I felt like the target market with the Pigeon books, I wasn’t really. Here, the disconnect between parental enjoyment and kid enjoyment feels much starker.

Don’t get me wrong. Willems books are ever so much more entertaining and cute and fun and memorable than pretty much any children’s author working the field today. He manages an amazing amount of depth and feeling in rather dashed off looking lines of facial expression, and his stories are always unlike anything else out there. Plenty of books hit the market every week, hell, every day, that fall into either the “sweet pablum” category or the “rude funny” category. Willems manages to do a complex hula dance that falls somewhere right in between those two groups (much closer to sweet pablum, as I’ve not yet seen a Willems character fart) without being of either camp. It’s a nice trick and it makes for refreshing reading.

All of these books are refreshing reading, a far cry from the bulk of what's out there, the print version commercials for toys and so forth that passes for kids' lit.

Because You Need to Know

2009-02-13T16:37:00.002-05:00

Childhood Darkness

2009-02-13T08:47:00.003-05:00

Coraline, Written by Henry Selick , Directed by Henry Selick, From the Novel by Neil Gaiman, Starring Dakota Fanning, Terri Hatcher, John Hodgins, Laika Entertainment, 2009

Believe me, between The Littlest Critic and myself, I don’t know which one of us was more excited to go see this movie, though I suspect I might have edged past her by a nose. After all, when you’re a kid there are so many things to be excited about, like finding a stuffed animal you thought was lost or getting a cookie with sprinkles, things that adults are distracted from fully enjoying, leaving you free to obsess over adaptations of younger readers’ novels.

And thus it was the day after it opened (chosen strategically in case the movie was as frightening as the fabled “cellar” chapter) that we hastened to the first showing and got ourselves settled in. Contraband snacks? Check. Contraband water bottle? Check. Stuffed animal brought along for comfort? Check. And then the previews started.

(I won’t waste much time on that, because I’m sick to damn death of the previews for Dreamworks Monsters v. Robots. Dreamworks cartoons are hit or miss affairs with a pretty limited shelf-life and a sock-o sense of gag material. This film looks like it’s so chock full of these gags to degree that the film itself serves as a vehicle for the gags, rather than the jokes coming about through the plot or characters. Dreamworks films tend to rely on up-to-the-minute cultural references that are dated by the time the films hit video, in my opinion. Go back and watch the first Shrek and tell me if it doesn’t already feel an artifact. Can you say the same forFinding Nemo? Of course not.)

Anyway, Henry Selick, director of the instant classic The Nightmare Before Christmas was hoping for some of that same magic and for the most part, he succeeded. If you haven’t read the novel and you go see the film, you’re in for a real treat. You’ll be awed and wowed at every turn. If you’re a fan of the book, you might bristle a little.

I tried valiantly, oh how I tried, to subordinate my faithful-to-the-novel partisanship, but found where Selick changed things, he did so in a way that weakened the overall story. This is no more egregiously done than in the film’s climax. Where the novel had our heroine solving her own problems with her smarts and cunning, Selick instead goes for teamwork and brute strength.

Neil Gaiman, author of the brilliant novel the film is based on, is apparently a good egg, because he’s been a real trooper in being involved in the film’s marketing, doing little interview vids and championing Selick’s film and his choices. One could take the cynical view that a successful film means more book sales, or one could take the charitable view and say Gaiman understands that adaptations pick and choose and sometimes invent because the screen has different demands.

Where Selick’s film excels is just in those cinematic and filmic moments. Coraline is gorgeous. Absolutely amazing and wonderful to behold. The stop motion style of his previous film has progressed to fantastic levels. Between he and Nick Park there are no big name practitioners of the art who so consistently hit the mark with something that is lifelike yet completely and utterly cartoonishly enjoyable and bizarre. Coraline is simply a treat to behold. Moments such as the transformation of the villainous Other Mother from soft and round cutesy June Cleaver (with button eyes) to skeletal spider woman are eye candy at its cartoon finest, beautifully creepy in that fun way where you’re scared but excited too.

Selick seems to spend much more time in the Other Mother’s world than the real world – or maybe it only felt that way. I’m sure the temptations of creating a visually dynamic, colorful world with pianos with great mechanical arms, preying mantis tractors, flower gardens in the form of pictures, and acrobats made entirely of rats, far and away beats the quotidian fun of a shower filled with cockroaches or a gloppety recipe of veggies.

Selick mixes up his media in the scene where Coraline meets the souls of the three children caught and feasted upon by the Other Mother in earlier years, giving us pale blue transparencies of children, gliding around the frame. It is one of the film’s more unsettling scenes, Coraline shoved behind a mirror into a small room behind it where the previous victims remain. Seeing this scene online prior to the rest of the film was one of the things that reassured me the movie was in good hands, despite the cutesier elements of the Other Mother’s seductions.

Who? you’re probably asking, as in my nerd enthusiasms I haven’t even properly set up the story. Coraline Jones and her two writer parents move into the ground floor apartment of a house split into three. Above them in the attic apartment, lives Mr. Bobinsky, the “Amazing” Bobinsky, acrobat and trainer of a mouse circus. Below them in the basement apartment live two ex-vaudevillians from the more burlesque side of things, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (ably and cattily delivered by Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French). An only child, Coraline is a lonely child, as her parents are busy putting the final touches on a gardening catalog they’ve been writing for what seems an eternity.

On a sort of scavenger hunt through the house, Coraline finds a small door, wall-papered over. To satisfy her daughter’s curiosity, Coraline’s mother unlocks the door only to show her daughter the bricked over wall behind it. Later that night, the door opens to reveal a long gauzy tunnel, leading to another world. At first it looks the same as Coraline’s real world, but then our heroine meets the Other Mother, a seemingly pleasant, nurturing woman with buttons for eyes. The entire world is here recreated by the Other Mother, but made better, more fun, a seductive spider’s web woven with sinister intent. The garden is picked out in flowers that make up an image of Coraline’s face, her Other Father plays the piano and sings songs, both parents actually pay attention to their daughter, food is delivered by trains and spinning chandeliers, and all the toys talk to Coraline. After a few nights visiting this fun world, Coraline is given the choice of living there forever, if only she’ll let the Other Mother sew buttons over her eyes.

Her rebellion on this point angers the Other Mother and we see the world begin to turn, become darker, in some cases to dissolve and warp. Here, Selick’s darker imagination comes to life and the film goes from unsettling to downright scary. The Littlest Critic beside me was enraptured, though she asked too about the changes to the story and the new character of Wybie, a neighbor and grandson of Coraline’s landlady. Most importantly, she worried that her nightmare chapter, what takes place in the cellar, would be too frightening – not for her, mind you, but her stuffed animal, a ginger cat named Milo. Alas, the cellar chapter did not make it in original form into the film and cats and children everywhere were relieved.

Despite the changes Selick made to the book, Coraline is incredible. It’s a thing of rare beauty, a kid’s movie that lacks saccharine and easy moralizing or lame fart jokes in a cheap attempt to get laughs (and I say this as something of a fart joke aficionado). It’s one of those films that can be equally enjoyed by parents or adults without the resort to two tiers of jokes, half of the material going over half of the audience’s heads. Much like Selick’s previous efforts, I’m quite certain thatCoraline will enter into the pantheon of classics, a tale of childhood that is as much about finding the strength (and the kindness) inside yourself as it is about finding satisfaction in your family, your friends, their foibles and all.

Plus

2009-02-12T14:41:00.001-05:00

Review of Coraline the film tomorrow, I suspect.

Darwin Day

2009-02-12T12:28:00.002-05:00

Evolve, assholes! Evolve!

Start here.

Word

2009-02-06T17:08:00.001-05:00

The Real Deal

2009-02-04T23:58:00.006-05:00

Coraline, by Neil Gaiman and Illustrated by Dave McKean, HarperCollins, 2002

When the previews and movie posters started turning up for the adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 2002 novel, Coraline, I let the wife know that she would not be allowed to accompany The Littlest Critic and I to see the movie unless she read the book herself. We had read the book maybe two or three months prior to the advertisements’ appearance and we were kind of excited. The few previews I’d seen worried me a little as they seemed sillier than the book which has a chilling quality to it*. To be quite frank, I’d read the novel once through by myself, then thought, Well, it’s pretty damn scary, but I think TLC will like it anyway.

And she did.

We read the first eighty pages of the novel in about three or four nights. We read the novel’s second eighty pages in one.

TLC has this tendency, when we’re reading stories to her, The Wife and I, to squirm. Actually, she squirms all the time. When she goes on the computer to play her games, when she watches cartoons, when she’s in her car seat. Hell, when she creeps into our bed in the middle of the night, all she does for the remainder of the night is roll about, kicking me in the stomach, flopping her arms onto my face, and generally trying to sleep perpendicular to her parents.

But she was almost rock still through parts of this novel. She listened with the keenest of attention. Were I to have photographed the moment and sent the picture off to the author, I’d have made his year just letting him see how involved in the world he’d created she had become. There was only one real chapter where she became active, moving around the bed and interrupting me and tugging on my arm, and that was a rather disturbing chapter that takes place in a cellar in the novel. In fact, being a part of the second half eighty pages, it was right after this chapter that I broke off reading and got a drink. TLC encouraged/pleaded me to “come back to bed and read some more, that chapter made me all shivery.”

What is remarkable, then, about Coraline is how engaging it is across ages. I myself found the cellar chapter the creepiest part of the book, but in the past few days while listening to The Wife read the novel, I keep on returning to the book's coda, a quote from writer G.K. Chesterson: "Fairy tales are more than true -- not because they tell us dragons exist, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten."

(Internet sources now tell me that that is a paraphrase of a conversation or something along those lines and the precise wording may, in fact, originate with Gaiman. And despite my best googling efforts, I can't, in fact, disprove those sources.)

Nevertheless, Coraline is indeed about the dispelling of dragons. There is a part near the novel's beginning when Coraline tells a story to a cat about how once, when she and her father were out hiking, they stumbled across a yellow wasps’ nest. Her father told her to run, and he stood there getting stung while she ran to safety and once she was far enough away he ran after her. Later that day, her father has to go back and retrieve his glasses which had fallen as he ran. For Coraline, the two actions of her father are different. The first, as brave as it sounds, isn’t really, because it’s a situation where you have little choice. It’s what a parent should do, and as dull as Coraline finds her parents, they are good parents at any rate. It is her father’s second act, the going back when he knows there’s a strong chance of being hurt, but going back anyway, that defines real bravery.

It is the going back part of the story that really gets the plot moving. An elementary aged girl, maybe ten or so, bored in her flat over school break, goes exploring. She does so, on the advice of her father, one of two work-from-home parents who don’t have the time to spend entertaining their daughter. One of her father’s suggestions, count various items in the flat, leads Coraline to discover a locked door in the apartment that only leads to a brick wall.

Not that anything should ever be so easy. Later, when the door ends up ajar, what was once a brick wall has become a long, dark path. On the other end? A mirror of Coraline and her parent’s home, replete with someone calling herself Coraline’s “Other Mother.” All the various persons living in Coraline’s real apartment building – two spinster actresses living together, Miss Spink and Miss Forcible, and the crazy old man living upstairs who trains mice for a circus – all find their slightly more interesting and slightly more sinister counterparts in this new mirror world. And each one of them, each down to the last, has buttons for eyes.

At first, though, things seem preferable to her own home, where she’s regularly ignored, but the kind of attentiveness, the creepiness of this new world rapidly becomes apparent to our heroine, most dramatically portrayed in the scene where the “Other Mother” tells Coraline she can stay with her and the “Other Father” and the rest, have all the fun she wants, as long as she lets the “Other Mother” replace her eyes with buttons.

It is, obviously, a trap, and Coraline is wise enough to escape the first time, but the "Other Mother" manages to somehow ensnare both Coraline's real mother and father into her mirror world. This is the going back. Coraline knows that she must be brave and go back through the door if she is to save her parents. And, in going back, she finds the ghostly souls of other children the "Other Mother" has trapped once before.

Gaiman’s prose is deceptively simple throughout the novel. The Wife has been reading it out loud as TLC’s chapter book of the night and she’s found that slight British phrasing differences, and Gaiman’s choice of language, has made the book slightly jarring for her to read. Yet within this limited palette choice, Gaiman manages to wring quite a bit of horror from his story. Better yet, nowhere does the author feel he has to explain things or give away all of the secrets. The “Other Mother” exists. Where she comes from, where she goes, what she is, all of this is left to the reader’s imagination.

It’s kind of the author’s gift to the readers; he never once denies us our part in enjoying and engaging with the story. We are never just a faceless audience to which Gaiman is pitching some fanciful novel, but are more like kids around a campfire, eagerly taking in every twist and turn of the plot, almost, but not quite, active participants in the storytelling process.

I have wracked my brains through the three (more or less) readings of this novel to find a flaw somewhere, a bit to glom onto as a critic and not just as a lover of the novel, but I’ve been stumped at every turn. Coraline runs like a finely tuned machine, without a hitch, leaving just as much as you can take unresolved, putting the responsibility on you to fill in the blanks where totally necessary. Gaiman clearly knows the single most important lesson of horror fiction: the reader’s imagination will always make the monster worse than you could. Thus, he leaves enough up to us to make this book truly a shivery experience.

*Later sneak peaks have allayed those fears somewhat.

It Just Might Be

2009-02-04T17:24:00.001-05:00

Review planned for tomorrow or Friday at the very latest, my pets.

Perfection

2009-02-02T13:56:00.001-05:00

People, take note. This is how it's done.

New Ways to Waste Time

2009-01-31T21:29:00.002-05:00

With serious amounts of layoffs and cutbacks at my work, I've had to take on new jobs and responsibilities (Creative Director work part of it). Oddly, for a rather anti-social person like myself, one of my new duties is investigating the varieties of social networking sites and media out there.

This means I've spent far more time on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites of this nature than I would ever have done so on my own. One such site is Twitter.

Twitter, which most of you should have heard of by now, is a "microblogging" site. This means that much like texting, you get 140 characters per message to make your pitch. For most people, this just ends up with lame crap that ain't worth reading because it's nonsensical crap. It's like hanging out with people you don't really know and hearing all their shorthand comments for in-jokes. Tiresome, mysterious without allure, and impenetrable.

However, one of the things I've been doing with Twitter is trying to find a way to set it up for The Wife so her kids can subscribe to her Twitter feed (Twitter posts are called, embarrasingly and annoyingly, "tweets," which is a term I will fucking roll over and die seventeen times before I use non-ironically, thankyouverymuch), and get their homework notifications -- BAM!-- right there in their cellphones.

Now, of course, back when I walked to school in seven feet of snow with shoes full of broken glass, we didn't have none of this dang fool technology folderol, but ya gotta roll with the times and do whatchagottado to keep the naifs' eyes on the ball. Next The Wife will come up with some fashion to incorporate the Wii in discussions of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

So that's how I come to have both a professional Twitter feed (for rather neutered posts about recruitment advertising related articles and zzzzzzzzz...wha- shit I fell asleep talking about it myself) and now a personal Twitter feed (and a doppelganger that I set up to try to get messages sent to my cellphone). Having used the site for all my work related laziness-disguised-as-seeming-productivity, I am now prepared to pass the same kind of half-ass effort on to you, my faithful readers.

Want to know what I think about Proust right this very second? Well, maybe I'll say something about it in my Twitter feeds. Who can tell? That's just the kind of wild and crazy hoss-shit I plan on getting up to with all this stuff at my finger tips.

So, eyes leftward again and behold yon link for my actual true and real Twitter page. Embrace its other inutility. Glory in the hyped banality. Revel in magic that Virginia Woolf only thought about with a double-headed jelly dong. Or something.

Something for the Ladies

2009-01-30T10:22:00.001-05:00

And what I think of that.

Fur Alina

2009-01-30T00:12:00.003-05:00

Been digging hard on the Arvo Pärt lately. Enjoy this little bit of beautiful music, never mind the graphics.

Testing Again

2009-01-29T07:03:00.001-05:00

Apparently the last testing post didn't get sent to my cell. Still testing. Will keep on testing to make sure this works. Test a-zilla.

Testing

2009-01-29T06:19:00.000-05:00

Testing out a text service RSS feed thingie.

Oversight Now Seen To

2009-01-28T16:10:00.003-05:00

It occurred to me when I was engaged in the Twilight-inspired gender debate over at Vox Pop that though I thought I had long-ago added my other in-law's blog to my links, I actually hadn't.

Let me now remedy that and point you in her direction.

Take some time and go look at the craftiness of Kelly Keirn, my sister-in-law, my sister-in-advertising, and all around Wyoming nutball. She makes some purty stuff and some fancy designs and if you like something, you can even buy it. Now who doesn't want some custom designed shoes?

Oh, It's On....Elsewhere

2009-01-27T22:50:00.002-05:00

Seems like the Twilight comment thread done up and migrated over to this here site, and completely stopped being about the book. Go have a look if you're at all interested in sexism and gender.

On the bright side, at least one of my book reviews got some comments. Ya'll are stingy with book comments. Maybe this blog needs some baby panda videos or something to get your attention.