A Little Dose of the Anti-Hipster

Courage is how commerical radio you're willing to go on your pseudo-snobby arty blog. See Jukebox for guilty pleasure circa 1997.

Infinite Jest? Ah, no. After a month of getting but halfway I'm crying not laughing thank you very much.

I'm reading David Foster Wallace's magnum opus  "Infinite Jest" and I'm not having fun. 524 pages in with still 457 pages to go, not including footnotes. There are 96 pages of footnotes.

I'm not kidding.

I'm in hell.

Not a fast reader at the Murakami/Salinger best of times this is gonna take me forever. Also, as with most overlong tomes I've read, the publishers, to keep the thing very large instead of gynormous, use the smallest possible print so that one page of "Infinite Jest" equals about twelve pages of "Twilight."

Probably it's that I just don't get it. Actually it's that I just don't give a crap. The footnotes should tell all. Too many characters, way too many unnecessary details and a whole boat load too much clever. I don't care if you're David Foster Wallace this book is a few hundred pages too long. In the foreword to the paperback edition I have Dave Eggers ("A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," "Zeitoun," and publisher of McSweeney's) goes on about how brilliant the book is, that there isn't an unnecessary line.

I beg to differ, Dave.

So why the hell am I plodding on with it? Some (many) readers feel the need to finish whatever they start. I'm not like that. Eleven pages of "Ulysses" was enough for me. (This time round anyway.)

So why finish this? Cause I'm an elitist. Cause I don't drive a better car than you (I don't own a car), my clothes are usually from the Gap and worse, but shit, at least I could finish "Infinite Jest."

Wait. What? Just for the dumb notch on the belt?
Yup. Just for the dumb-ass notch.

If you want your children to be bright, read them fairytales. If you want them to be brilliant, read them even more fairytales.

-Albert Einstein

Desert Island Novel to Read and Read and Read Again # 6: Ernest Hemingway's "Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises"

In honour of Hemingway Week at ye old PBIHT.. 

[Originally published here on August 13, 2010]

For Desert Island book to read and read and read again #5 click Steinbeck's "East of Eden"



Fiesta or The Sun Also Rises is perhaps more heart breaker than soul healer; it's a dark world Hemingway paints, but it's also enormously exciting, adventurous, honest and so beautifully written. Sometimes the most heart breaking of art works heal our soul by the beauty of their construction. The content may be dark, but the architecture is the part that uplifts. When it comes to his fellow man Hemingway was rather the cynic. But in nature or when it came to women, he was a romantic in the extreme. 

No Old Man, Barely any Sea
I was so intimidated by Hemingway's very name, as I think we all are by the big classic names in literature that, as I wrote about in my last Novel to Break Your Heart Even As It Heals Your Soul piece on For Whom the Bell Tolls, that first encounter with the author on my friend's toilet was a genuine relief. That - on my friend's toilet - is where I discovered Fiesta or The Sun Also Rises. It was my first Hemingway and for that I think I'm lucky. Too many were forced, or at least misled to choose, to read The Old Man and the Sea. This is a tragedy cause it would have you believe that Hemingway is always boring, long-winded, portentous and pretentious. He's not. The Old Man and the Sea, as the name so aptly describes, has nothing in it but an old man and a great big sea. There are no women folk. There is no love story, and as I've said here before, that's the big secret about Hemingway. The big lug was a full-blown romantic at heart.

This was Brett that I had felt like crying about. Then I thought of her walking up the street and stepping into the car, as I had last seen her, and of course in a little while I felt like hell again. It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night is another thing. 

His earlier novels are far more interesting for this - they aren't just about man and nature. In fact, in the beginning it was far more human drama, far less about nature. I'd argue it was actually Hemingway's ability to break up his long passages of human drama with scenes of people-less nature that created a kind of perfect balance in the work (a kind of balance sorely lacking in the The Old Man book, where I'd have killed for a little human-on-human drama).

Rather the Book Than the Man
There are so many things about Hemingway I don't like, but most have more to do with the man than the writing, though of course the man is in the writing all over the place. What's not to like? Oh I don't know, the antisemitism, the utter male chauvinism and worst of all the self-aggrandizing macho bullshit. And Hemingway can, at times, be totally full of it, like a bad Marlboro commercial's version of the caricature of what a man "should be." For guys that buy into beer commercial definitions of gender. 
 
Fiesta is great cause it has far less of the macho. There is no old man, there is no fishing, there is little to no sea. It's not a book about war either. Now, yes, there is a whole slew of information about bull fighting, but it's quite interesting and it's not overlong, not a tenth of the hundreds of pages of French history you get in, say, Hugo's Les Miserables. Also, it's set amongst a fiesta, a truly Spanish celebration of seven days and nights of madness and drinking and unhappiness and elation and the way people are when there are no consequences. 

Plotless Wonder
My all time-favourite books, of which I count Fiesta or The Sun Also Rises one (the former was Hemingway's original title, used in Britain; in North America, however, the book was renamed The Sun Also Rises) manage to not feel like they have any plot. This is the most dangerous kind of story writing because usually it is bound to fail on its ass. Though you've probably never before heard Fiesta compared with Murakami's Norwegian Wood or with The Catcher in the Rye, I think they share something structurally. None of these books follows the kind of obvious plot line that is common to more traditional modes of novel writing.

These are my favourite kinds of books. They aren't epic in scope. They don't involve casts of thousands. And no codes need be broken, no vampires spoken. The mystery - and genius - of them is that they read like life and yet of course are so much bigger than that. This is the danger with Hemingway, I'll acknowledge. Without a wee bit of patience, The Sun Also Rises can read almost mundane at times, the way a simple day is described. To me though, the utter beauty of a "simple" Hemingway description ... let's just say he might be the most evocative writer of a scene I've ever read. Certainly in terms of capturing the beauty of nature; few writers I've ever read better put a picture in my mind (and teach me how few adjectives and big words are necessary to get the job done right).

In the morning it was raining. A fog had come over the mountains from the sea. You could not see the tops of the mountains. The plateau was dull and gloomy, and the shapes of the trees and the houses were changed. I walked out beyond the town to look at the weather. The bad weather was coming over the mountains from the sea. 

The flags in the square hung wet from the white poles and the banners were wet and hung damp against the front of the houses, and in between the steady drizzle the rain came down and drove every one under arcades and made pools of water in the square, and the streets wet and dark and deserted ...

The utter simplicity of the language, the near child-like simplicity of it (the repetition of the words, for example) all the more beguiles the reader when considering how much misdirection there is in this book. You are already some thirty pages in before you've even been given a hint of what the story is truly concerned with. (It's not bull fighting).

The Spanish fiesta itself, of the binge drinking and bull running, does not begin until halfway through the novel, and much of the book's contents, be they in Spain or France, are about the underbelly of human relationships. So much of this story is of people eating good food and drinking copious amounts of wine (no writer makes me hungrier or thirstier), and in the midst of all this it is about how people can be so jealous and cruel, of love and hate, of friendship and misery.

Roger Ebert, the film critic, said the following of film, but it of course goes doubly for literature as well: The greatest works are always something of a mystery - that's what keeps us coming back.

Is Sushi a Moveable Feast? A Weak Imitation of Master Hemingway

In honour of Hemingway Week at ye old PBIHT.. 
[Originally published here on March 19, 2010]

There was a warm, friendly atmosphere in the sushi shop. I sat at the bar of the restaurant, sipped the green tea and pulled my new hard-covered book from my bag. I ordered my usual for a Japanese restaurant so far from Japan, where unless you have the money to blow, you won't get fish good enough for straight sushi. I ordered the rolls that have the shrimp tempura and green vegetables inside and that are topped, each one, with a big generous slab of salmon, an orange not quite the lovely bright you find in Kansai, but still with those white V-shaped stripes that go down the length of the fish. The salmon slithered smooth and sweet down the throat when you ate it. The crunch of the tempura and wedge of cucumber balanced the softness of the fish and the ripe avocado, and then to wash it down with the cold of the Japanese beer I had ordered to go with it. The fresh crispness of the lager complimenting the sweetness of the fish.

It was good to be alone in the restaurant like that, sitting, the only one, at the counter, but comfortable there, absorbed as I was in the flavours, and the slow chopstick way I'd learned from a friend to eat sushi, putting wooden utensils down after eating each piece, making the meal last, allowing the belly to fill. And all the while reading sensous pages far better written than this and so strongly styled, so uniquely written. I felt inspired to rush home (I didn't rush - that's a lie; the weather too spring gorgeous to rush, the night too clear, a sliver of moon high in the clean air) and write about my experience in the style of the book I was reading. Or at least, a lazy approximation of that style, of Hemingway's style, in particular from his great collection of memoirs called, "A Moveable Feast." Cause what I'm really trying to do is recommend this remarkable literary remembrance to you.

Hemingway Week at ye old PBIHT

In lieu of the recent publication of Paula McLain's "The Paris Wife," a fictional account of Hem and his first wife Hadley (the book's shtick is that it's from her perspective - word on the street is that it's worth a look) back in their (his) heyday, the Paris years, "The Sun Also Rises" years, the "Moveable Feast" years, I thought I'd dedicate this week to one of my all-time favourite writers.

Coulda Been the Willie Nelson, Coulda Been the Wine

Sad, soulful Canadians.
Them's what's new on the jukebox [look left, scroll down].

A Good (Not so) Old Summer Blockbuster: Christopher Nolan's "The Dark Knight"

Could there be anything more exciting? Big screen, big sound, the Paramount or Warner or MGM lion roaring it out, full concert, ear bleeding sound and then all goes dark and the hundreds of millions put into the flick and its promotion all of it, all that promise, you'll know, those first minutes.

Achey for spring I guess I'm suddenly nostalgic for a good old summer blockbuster.

The Dark Knight's opening is up there for me with the best of the blockbuster openings, up there with The Matrix and the two Terminators (we'll ignore all that came after). OK maybe not quite up there with The Matrix, cause man the chills I got when Carrie-Anne Moss jumped in the air and time stopped, sort of, and you knew, you just knew - and here's where those spine tingles came in - that time had stopped for a reason; that the effect had a purpose, that in fact the whole movie might just have to do with the effect. This was gonna be awesome. Still The Dark Knight's opening is a pretty ass-whooping, popcorn-hurtling, edge-of-your-seat making killer wicked ass fun start to a pretty damn awesome summer movie.

In the second of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies (and muchos kudos to Batman Begins, which has some killer training sequences - and don't training sequences always trump  a given flick's final fight?) it's a high-pitched sound, a disturbing bit of score - the high whine of a violin perhaps? - that starts things off as we circle round to get aerial views of the big city, of Gotham, of the skyscrapers. There's a ticking sound, like a bomb that might go off any second. Focusing in now. A glass building, a window, high up. The glass shatters as the window is smashed out. Thugs in clown masks who've just shot it to shit.   Rope shot out across the skyline, thugs ziplining from one building to another. A man on a street corner seen from behind, just standing there, with his greasy hair and a clown mask hung limp from the arm at his side. A bank is about to get robbed but already we know, cause we are not so much smiling as worrying, that this won't be your typical bank heist. That the masked thugs robbing the place keep killing each other off for a bigger stake is a tip off. Their discussions about some character named the Joker, even more troublesome ...

In my favourite blockbusters where good battles evil and good will ultimately prevail, I need my evil to be pretty effin evil. Thus a childhood reverence of the first Termintator. I was considered a pretty good child, overall, give or take, yet I was a Darth Vader lover all the way. Skywalker was a pussy. Hans was cool, but Darth was cooler.

The Dark Knight is premised, the whole thing, on the sinister notion of an enemy so crazy as to have no motive - how are you to fight, to defeat, to even approach an enemy that because he has no motive, has no clear vulnerability? The terminator had no fear of death, but it had purpose. The Joker only celebrates chaos and kills at will.

But much much much more important than all that psycho-babble-stuff is that the opening has you knowing: this film is gonna be coo-ool. The gun play, the bank robbery, the ziplining robbers, the way it all goes down - the whole thing is just so slick and smooth. It is, at least for me, the pleasure of watching something you could never make. Something several head spaces above and beyond what I understand and know. The sheer technical feat, the utter crafty cleverness of being able to stage a gun fight, never mind one that will involve moving vehicles (ie. sixteen wheelers and fat-ass batmobiles) and a rocket launcher. Repeat viewing of a movie like this is to repeat the thrills of those action sequences (the Batmobile turns into a motorcycle - do you even remember how cool that was?) and as much to continue to marvel at not being able to answer the question: how the hell did he do that?

Of course, what separates the A-list action flick from its Van Damme equivalents is the level of acting.

Enough has been written and said about Heath Ledger. I can only begin to allow myself to enjoy the level of his performance knowing that he actually made another movie before ending his life. Still, such a disturbing character performed by a clearly disturbed young man. It gets in the way. It also intensifies. Undoubtedly it confuses. But fact is, the performance is assured, it's powerful and most of all it's haunting. From the tongue licking tics to the humourous bits, there's not a false start in Ledger's transformation into the Joker. It's total commitment. It's fascinating and it's terrifying and wholly unpredictable. You keep asking yourself: what is this guy gonna do next? And he'll surely wrong-foot you at every turn.

What a standout performance can problematically do, though, is overshadow the ensemble behind it that props it up as high as this one did. At the forefront of this band of mere players sits Gary Oldman. Remember Gary? Remember in the 1990s when he was the crown prince, the king of cool, the ultimate bad guy. Whether Dracula or the dread-head thug that thought he was black in True Romance, he just always and consistently rocked the house. So intense, so spontaneous, smart, scary, interesting, complex. And then like that, boom! he disappeared or at least seemed to. (Another phenomenal British actor getting lost in the mediocre shuffle of the Harry Potter series just doesn't cut it for me.) I sort of see The Dark Knight as Oldman's return, but now he is older, now he is wiser and now he no longer is trying to play for drooping cigarette from the mouth cool. No, now he's gonna play it character actor beautiful, which is to say subtle. He is the character of most integrity. The family man. The quiet man. And while The Dark Knight really is one of the darkest big blockbusters in ages, it's easy to forget that there is a whole hell of a lot of heart and humanity in Oldman's portrayal of Commisioner Gordon.

Even the littlest roles, like the bank manager - William Fichtner (small but alway memorable roles in movies like Heat): it's his face . The power of this guy's reactions intensifies the entire robbery. That and that he has some ass-whooping rifle reloading gun-power of his own. Considering that every robber in the scene is masked, it kind of makes sense that the one guy who speaks, that has a face you can see can express as much as he does with it. The fear. The anger. The outrage. And then, ultimately, the shock.

Even the love story between Rachel (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) comes across as passionate and intense and strong thanks to the level of these actors' performances. Nolan's decision to replace Katie Holmes with Maggie Gyllenhaal was, let's be honest, at first a disappointment. But once you get over that Gyllenhall isn't quite the looker that Homes is, you realize the lady makes up for looks in spades with her acting chops.

Even the briefest of conversations between Bruce Wayne and Alfred can feel so weighted, thanks to the gravitas of Sir Michael Caine.

Put this all together, the craft, the opening, the choice of actors, making it all work - this is a director's movie extraordinare and while I was not floored by Inception like so many others, I think his work on these Batman movies is nothing short of brilliant. Cause I don't care if you eat popcorn with your movies or if you need subtitles to call them art - whatever you're eating, whatever you're calling them The Dark Knight series of movies rocks and it's thanks to the sure hand, pretty perfect pacing (other than its being about twenty minutes too long) and the never-ending intensity that this is a movie worth owning. Love it. Love it.

Over and out.

Never judge a book by its movie.  

~J.W. Eagan 

Next Up: Sophie, I mean, Mia Wasikowska in "Jane Eyre"

The reviews from the NY Times on down are all solid red tomatoes. And while "Jane Eyre" is usually more my mother's (and my wife's) territory than mine, the very fact of them casting

Mia Wasikowska ("The Kids Are Alright" and "Alice in Wonderland") in the lead inspires real hope. Hope stemming not from her movie career but from her breakout performance as a teenage girl in HBO's "In Treatment." (If you still haven't seen the first season, do.) Wasikowska, to be honest, let me down in her portrayal of Alice, but then Burton's Disneyfied, formula-tied take on the great Lewis Carroll story left me nauseous so I can't totally blame the poor girl. I only hope she can really dazzle again as she did in "In Treatment" for I fear otherwise like the Barenaked Ladies with "Gordon" or the young Claire Daines in the short-lived "My So-Called Life" I'm not sure Wasikoska will ever top the performance that made her famous: her remarkably emotionally open portrayal of a tremendously complex and compelling sixteen year-old girl named Sophie.

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend.  Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.  

~Groucho Marx

The Five Books I Most Often Recommend at the Book Shop Are:

1.

--For its epic scope, its great story and its literary quality (probably the safest bet to satisfy the book club goer, the Oprah lover and the snob), Middlesex is a beaut. 

2.

 
--Click East of Eden for the reasons why

3.

--Click Dance, Dance, Dance for the reasons why;
--The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle - because it is widely considered Murakami's first masterpiece and is good for anyone looking for something meatier, denser, more all-encompassing; also that bit of (Japanese) history seems to ease more readers into the belief that what they are reading is "real" literature;
--Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World - for sheer wonder and sparkling imagination

 4.

--Click All the Pretty Horses for the reasons why; and

5.

 

--For being my favourite collection of short stories published since Salinger's Nine Stories and winning the Pulitzer on what was Jhumpa Lahiri's first book, The Interpreter of Maladies is a stunning debut.