CCLaP's first original book, the story cycle Repetition Patterns by Ben Tanzer, is now available. Click here for a lot more about it, and to start the purchasing/downloading process.
CCLaP's third "white paper" is also now out, a series of minor publications that simply reprint longer material originally published here at the site; in this case, it's a compilation of the four essays that originally chronicled the best of the books reviewed here in 2008. Click here to download a copy for free.
Podcast
Episode 42, a special beat-mixed all-electronica music special, is now online. Click above to listen to it right now.
All material Copyright 2009, Chicago Center for Literature and Photography. All rights revert to original authors after publication. Published under a Creative Commons license; some rights reserved.
CCLaP is always happy to accept publications for possible review, especially self-published ones, although makes no guarantee that any such review will definitely be published. Click here to learn how to submit such a project for review.
Programmed in HTML 4.1 and CSS2, powered through Movable Type, maintained through a Mac Mini and Palm Treo 650. The space for this website is graciously supplied for free by Jimi Sweet; I thank him immensely for doing so.
July 2, 2009
Justify My Netflix: Revolutionary Road
(Like many Netflix customers, I too can get quite lax with the timely watching and returning of my movies, which of course defeats the entire purpose of having a flat-rate rental plan in the first place. To combat that, I am now writing standardized mini-reviews of each and every movie I end up watching through Netflix, both instantly and on DVD. Don't forget, all previous 'Justify My Netflix' reviews can be found on CCLaP's main movie page.)
Why I added it to my queue: Because it's the latest Oscar-nominated prestige pic from "Big Bad Suburbs" (or BBS) filmmaker Sam Mendes (American Beauty), adapted from one of the first BBS-themed novels ever written, the semi-forgotten 1961 postmodernism harbinger by the academically-admired but now-obscure Richard Yates. Because as regular readers know, I read and reviewed the original novel earlier this year and was surprisingly blown away by it, finding it a much more complex and morally murky story than I was expecting, and getting me more interested for the first time in exploring other authors from the beginning of the postmodernist movement, people like Philip Roth and John Updike and all the rest. Because it's the first movie since Titanic to co-star the power duo Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, two of the most well-regarded actors of their generation, who specifically agreed after that juggernaut not to do a movie together again until finding a script they both intensely loved; and for those who don't already know, because Winslet just happens to be married to Mendes in real life, and insisted to the money people behind this production that she wouldn't do it unless her husband was allowed to direct.
The reality: WOW. It's no secret that I'm not much of a fan of Mendes, and frankly there wasn't much of a reason to believe that he'd do well with this newest assignment that landed rather randomly in his lap either; after all, a whole series of better directors have tried and failed to take on this project themselves over the last half-century, from John Frankenheimer in the mid-'60s (who eventually abandoned it to make The Manchurian Candidate) to Todd Field just a few years ago (who eventually abandoned it to make the similarly BBS-themed Little Children, also starring Winslet), with Mendes essentially being the lucky beneficiary of a series of random studio mergers and bankruptcies in the early 2000s. So how astounding, then, to watch this and see that he has retained nearly all the subversive surprises that made the original novel such an unexpected treat; because for those who don't know, this story is not really an indictment of middle-class-yearning simpletons like how American Beauty and so many other contemporary BBS tales are, but rather a powerful slam against the hipster-douchebag intelligentsia who end up in the bland suburbs despite knowing better, the bohemians who choose to hypocritically accept all the comfortable perks of suburban life while still railing against suburban life behind the safety of their shaded ranch-home windows.
In fact, I thought it was very telling that during a magazine interview last fall, DiCaprio mentioned how he saw his character Frank Wheeler as "unheroic" and "slightly cowardly," almost the same exact terms I used in my review of the original novel; because this is ultimately what makes this film a dark masterpiece instead of the usual Mendes treacle, that all three of the principles involved were ready to delve into all the horrible little spaces where Yates himself went in the book, not an insult against those who simply wish for comfortable lives but rather against those who try to have it all, the Americans since World War Two who have attempted to have all the materialistic perks of the corporate middle class but all the gut-wrenching passion of full-time artists too, resulting in a badly-clashing disaster that here ends in legitimate tragedy. And as a result, I have to confess how shocked and pleased I was to see Mendes sneak in so many of the subtle details from the book that make the final message as powerful as it is, and why it is that so many intellectuals consider this one of the first true postmodernist novels ever written; just to cite one excellent example, how it's Frank who ends up getting both his wife and their best-friend next-door-neighbors hanging out at the cheesy, kitschy roadhouse in their neighborhood, originally for ironic enjoyment (which let's not forget, eventually became one of the biggest calling cards of postmodernism, the ironic enjoyment of cheesy pop culture), but how it's also Frank who becomes the first one to eventually enjoy the roadhouse non-ironically, a quiet but incredibly important moment in the original novel that I was surprised and pleased to see Mendes squeeze into the film version as well.
Or to mention another example, think about how in my original book review, I said that this can almost be seen ultimately as a complex character study of those weirdo, overly serious fifty-something tech executives in the 1970s who were the first major investors in such computer companies as Apple; it's no coincidence, after all, that the "Knox Business Machines" (or KBM) that Frank works for in this story is so similar to the real-world IBM as it existed in the late '50s, and I think it's pretty safe to compare the speciality group of mavericks that Frank's boss pulls off from the main company at the end as a fictional stand-in for the real Xerox PARC, a commercial thinktank started in the late '60s for the exact same reasons mentioned in Yates' made-up story (to figure out how to sell million-dollar cutting-edge tech systems to billion-dollar conservative companies), and which contained many of the first people to become billionaires in the real world because of investing in the personal-computing industry in the late '70s. As I said in my original review of the book, if nothing else you can see Revolutionary Road as the story of how one of these rich, weird, always-sad tech executives got to the place in the '70s where they did, of all the bizarre and heartbreaking things they had to go through in the '60s to reach that point; so how satisfying to see Mendes agree with me, and see him end the movie version of RR exactly with this thought in mind.
Can you tell that I liked this movie? That I liked it a whole lot? And that I think you should rent it out too as soon as you can? And that it's unfortunate that it got sucked into the usual Oscar-Prestige-Christmas circle-jerk whirlpool that so many of these titles get pulled into right around the same time each year, so that everybody ended up hearing about it but hardly anyone actually saw it? Yes, there's that too. Definitely check out this movie when you have a chance, especially right now when there's a billion temporary copies down at your local Blockbuster; despite all the stereotypes going against it, it really is a remarkable film, something that elevates itself against all the brick walls that come with the production's circumstances.
Strangest piece of trivia: Not only was this the first film since Titanic to co-star Winslet and DiCaprio, but also the first since then to counter-star celebrated character actress Kathy Bates, who plays the couple's nosy real-estate agent in a more nuanced way than even in the original novel itself.
Worth your time? Oh Lord yes
(POSTSCRIPT SPOILER ALERT! POSTSCRIPT SPOILER ALERT! This very last thought has nothing to do with the above main review, but was just an interesting remark I wanted to share with those who have already seen the movie or read the book. If you've done neither, absolutely do not read the paragraph below this one.)
And by the way, how subtly smart that what seems at first to be a random image used for the film's poster turns out to be a shot from seconds before the Wheelers make passionate love in their suburban kitchen, after finally deciding that yes, they really can chuck it all and move to Paris in three months if they want, ironically the same exact moment that Alice ends up getting pregnant and triggering all the events that lead to the film's eventual tragic ending. This is why people originally went so nuts over the book, because of every seemingly banal moment actually being packed with symbolic importance; the fact that this even boils over into what image was used for the movie poster I think says a lot about how surprisingly great this film turned out to be.
Filed by Jason Pettus at 10:45 AM, July 2, 2009. Filed under: Movies | Reviews | Comments: 0.
(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)
Even less than a year after it's ended, it seems that there are more and more Americans (even former supporters...er, especially former supporters) now openly acknowledging what an utter disaster the eight years of the Bush Junior administration was, and especially as more and more of the details from that shameful decade become public facts that not even the perpetrators bother denying anymore -- how it's pretty much a given now, for example, that the American public was lied to regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, simply to justify a pointless war cooked up by a handful of violent sociopaths for petty personal gain; or how even the people responsible for it now happily admit that they authorized the use of torture among soldiers for the first time in American history, hiding the victims in other countries so to sidestep the jurisdiction of the US Constitution, then hiring a series of weasely lawyers to concoct elaborate justifications for the actions after the fact. This first year of the Obamian Age is essentially like Germany in 1946, both societies slowly starting to wake up from the collective nightmare their nations had become; and as such, there are suddenly millions of Americans starting to ask themselves the same tricky questions that millions of Germans did as well after the close of World War Two, questions like...
How did things get so out of hand in the first place? How is it that there could've been such a colossal, systemic breakdown of such basic philosophical understandings as the difference between right and wrong, among millions and millions of people all at the same exact time? Does this make all Americans "evil?" Does this make me evil, for sort of understanding all this while it was going on, but not doing more to stop it? How do you define evil in the first place? How do you collectively punish 400 million people, anyway? Is that what the economic collapse was? Divine retribution against an entire society for collectively turning into such monsters? How do you pick up the pieces after an event that nearly tore of the fabric of your society apart? And most importantly, how do you ensure that such a situation never occurs again, and ensure it in such a deep and lasting way that the very idea will never again even enter people's souls and lodge there to begin with?
These are all questions pondered by philosophy professor and thinktank head Susan Neiman in her smart and sober new book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, a manuscript bound to be highly welcomed by a huge portion of Americans because of doing something that so few others do; namely, it clearly divorces the actions of the Bushists in particular from the entire ideological debate over Republicans versus Democrats, using basic lessons of philosophy to show how ashamed all of us should be over the things perpetrated in our name in the last decade, liberals and conservatives alike, then gently guiding us (mostly through the precepts of the Enlightenment) to a place where we can all be a little prouder of our life decisions, no matter who we'll be voting for in the next election. In fact, if anything you could call this book a "hybrid" in the best sense of the word: partly an informative history book, partly a heady primer to philosophy and the world of ethics, partly a Malcolm-Gladwellesque contemporary guide to politics and other practical issues, using a plethora of fascinating examples to make points that are always strong but never insulting. It can be a tough read sometimes but a highly worthwhile one, a book guaranteed to have you thinking differently about the Bush years no matter what you thought of them before, and that very well might change you into an entirely different person by the time you're done.
And in fact that's one of the most important things to understand about Moral Clarity, that despite her bipartisan approach, Neiman very clearly has an axe to grind; as she herself admits in the acknowledgments, for example, the entire book itself was inspired by the 2004 re-election of George Bush, which like millions of others Neiman reacted to with an almost overwhelming sense of alarm and depression, especially given that her day job is to sit around thinking very deeply about the slippery subject of morality. (After all, she's the previous author of the sleeper hit Evil in Modern Thought, and it's no coincidence that I earlier compared this "real-world philosopher" to Malcolm Gladwell.) Although she uses the very foundations of Western thought to get her points across, Neiman definitely has a very contemporary and very pointed issue that she wants to address: of how the Bush years could've happened in the first place, and by extension how it is that any formerly rational society can manage to get to the point where evil deeds are suddenly being perpetrated in their name.
And indeed, as she explored in more detail in her last book, one of Neiman's first big contentions is that the process of defining "evil deed" is a much more complicated thing than it might seem at first, using it as a gateway in her book to delve into the age-old question of moral absolutism versus moral relativism, an issue that's been debated among humans all the way bak to ancient Greece and beyond. And in fact this is one of many places in Moral Clarity where Neiman displays a refreshingly balanced look at the underlying causes of Bushism, given that this book is quite obviously designed to appeal mostly to Bush-hating liberals, because one of the other big early conclusions she makes concerns why so many tens of millions of Americans would end up supporting such mustache-twirling cartoon villains as made up the Bush administration, asserting that for many of these people, no matter how flawed the 2000s GOP was, it at least offered a clearly defined sense of right and wrong, and a clear sense that the world can be a great place again through the belief in "idealism" (that is, believing that ideal situations actually can be practically brought about in the real world, no matter what your particular vision of an "ideal situation" might be).
As Neiman methodically shows us through history and example, as little as a hundred years ago this situation was reversed: it was progressive, Marxist-friendly liberals who were the big optimistic idealists, who sincerely believed that a society without poverty, without untreated illness, could actually be brought about in the real world; and it was the conservatives who were resigned to the crappy pre-civil-rights reality of the world as it currently was, and not believing that the world was bound to ever get much better than that, the situation that brought about the popular rise of fascism in so many countries in those years in the first place. It's a surprising conclusion, one that makes sense but that I had never thought about; that after the collapse of Marxism as a viable long-term political structure, that after the counterculture and murky postmodernism of the 1960s and '70s, most liberals have given up on the very idea of there being absolute rights and absolute wrongs that exist in the world, have given up on the very idea that the world can eventually be brought to a more ideal state than it currently is. For example, later in the book she poses an interesting challenge to us, to quickly name a couple of contemporary people in our head we consider heroes. Did you just laugh at the very idea of there being heroes anymore in the early 2000s? Did you just mentally put quotation marks around the very word "hero" when thinking about it? Then you're probably a liberal, Neiman astutely guesses, and your snotty brushoff of the entire question was the exact reason that millions of otherwise sane middle-class suburbanites voted for Sarah Palin in the 2008 election, because at least she and her fellow Republicans think the question worth pondering in the first place, think not only that it can be answered but should be.
And so it is throughout Moral Clarity, with Neiman devoting each chapter to one big subject from metaphysical life (happiness, reason, hope, etc), using both classical philosophers and current-day examples to examine that issue from all sides, hesitant to tell you what conclusion to draw but insistent that you draw some kind of conclusion by the end. And that's why this book is so great for a bipartisan audience, because it essentially argues that all of us need in our lives at least a little of the attitude from both the traditionally liberal and conservative standpoints -- that liberals as a whole need to add a little more idealism to their lives, that conservatives in general need to add a little more common sense, and that all of us need to stop mistaking the loudly-shouted piety of fundamentalists for a legitimate commitment to "moral values." After all, she concludes, this is one of the biggest places where things went so wrong during the Bush years -- that since most on the left believe the entire idea of "being good" to be a childishly simplistic concept not worth even addressing, it allowed immoral hypocrites on the right to easily take advantage of the millions of Americans who precisely do think that "being good" should be a daily habit among both themselves and the people they elect, splashily declaring their beliefs in absolute morality through pandering surface-level gestures that make for great soundbites in the media (fighting gay marriage, covering the breasts of Justice statues in government buildings), while in actuality getting away with some of the most horrifically vile acts humans can commit behind closed doors when no one was looking (and of course lots of vice that's not so horrific -- it's no coincidence that more Bush-era politicians have been caught in sex scandals than the entire rest of American history added together).
Neiman wears her biases on her sleeve, make no mistake, and like millions of other Americans continues to have an almost all-consuming hatred for the "Christian Taliban" Bushists and the way they nearly destroyed our country; but such sleeve-wearing is just how it should be in cases like these, and I never mind a nonfiction writer having biases as long as they honestly admit these biases upfront. If you're able to get past this yourself, you'll find an infinitely informative and thought-provoking book, one bound to challenge your political beliefs no matter what they are, and help you understand how to more embrace both realism and idealism without the usual platitudes of the paleocon right or nihilism of the intellectual left. It's a heavy read, too heavy for some, but if you're comfortable diving into discussions regarding 18th-century philosophers and life-quality issues of pure thought, Moral Clarity is a title you'll surely not want to miss.
Personal essay: The CCLaP music library reaches 500 songs.
(Every day, I like to post at least a thousand words of original content to the CCLaP website; on the days I don't have a review of a book or movie ready, I thought I would try other material, such as this series of personal essays, looking at a topic in the arts from my life that I think you might find relevant or entertaining too. You can click here for a master list of all personal essays now written, if you're interested.)
Regular readers will of course remember "The Great iPod Indie Rock Challenge of 2008," a long-form artistic dare last year that I documented through a series of essays here at the site (now collected and available as a free electronic book through CCLaP Publishing), in which I challenged myself to get off my lazy REM-listening slacker ass and get all my sad old '80s and '90s indie-rock off my 1-gig iPod Shuffle as quickly as possible, and replaced with contemporary music I was rapidly starting to find more and more online. After all, I had already been starting to pay more and more attention to contemporary college-radio music since opening CCLaP the previous summer, originally to find interesting royalty-free songs to feature in the intros and outros of the center's podcast; but what I was quickly discovering was just what a plethora of amazing free music there actually is out there these days, not a trickle like I was expecting but a giant flood, being handed out legally by the bands and labels themselves as a way of promoting full CDs and live tours, and that this plus iPods plus home broadband connections have been slowly but thoroughly replacing the sad corporate-overwhelmed remains of what used to be the all-dominant commercial radio industry, as far as being the primary way that most young people now discover new bands.
And so I subscribed to the feeds of half a dozen of these indie-rock "gentle gatekeepers" like Pitchfork and Discobelle and Orange Alert, who much like CCLaP no longer try to insist that the stuff they're recommending is the only stuff out there worth checking out (as traditional gatekeepers used to do it), but merely acknowledge that there's a whole bursting world of intriguing creativity out there and that they're merely presenting some of it; and then I also subscribed to half a dozen iTunes channels from these more traditional gatekeepers who have smartly jumped on the new-media bandwagon, radio stations like KEXP and cultural networks like NPR. And thus is it that since January 2008, I've been sampling a hundred or so random new songs every Saturday or Sunday afternoon, and end up on average keeping around 10 or 15 of them, kind of like buying a new CD every week except in this case with no filler, only radio-worthy singles; it's music I keep separately labeled and away from my commercial purchases here at home, what I jokingly refer to as the "CCLaP music library," in that the creators of these songs have all given permission for them to be used royalty-free for non-revenue purposes. And in fact just last week I passed a major milestone with this library, collecting my official 500th song for it, which for those who are curious equals roughly 40 to 50 CDs of music, or put another way an entire week at a 9-to-5 job without repeating a single song.
Astounding! Because believe me, if you had sat me down during college and told me that by the time I was forty, I'd be able to find and download each year roughly 25 CDs' worth of great music I love legally for free, that it'd take only one afternoon each week to do so, and that such a thing would largely supplant commercial radio and make it seem as quaintly obsolete as chimney sweeps, I would've asked you to introduce me to your dealer, because obviously they were getting you much better drugs than my dealer was getting me. How amazing that technology can change our lives so profoundly so quickly, I many times think these days; no wonder this goes hand-in-hand with so much fear these days as well over the abuse of technology (just how many movies about rebellious killer robots have we seen in the last twenty years, anyway?), and no wonder that the beneficiaries of the old gatekeeper system being replaced are so threatened by this technology that they have devolved into literally calling bloggers "witches" and "angry mobs."
Because as I've said here before, what this technology is really doing is no less than profoundly redefining many of the terms from sociology that haven't changed for a century or more: it's literally turning all human beings into part-time artists, literally turning creativity itself into a leisure-time activity, instead of a special event practiced only by an educated elite who are financially rewarded for their efforts. And also as I've said before, there's a direct correlation between this and the last time our societal definition of these terms changed, back during the Industrial Age/Victorian Age of the late 1800s; how back then, quickly-changing technology brought about to millions for the first time the entire concept of "leisure time" to begin with (which let's not forget, used to be an opportunity only for the very rich, before the establishment of the middle class that the Industrial Age inspired), brought about for the first time the idea of an entire population being literate (which again used to be an expensive privilege just for the rich). It was the combination of these eventualities that brought about our first definition of "leisure time," the definition that stayed with us for over a century -- namely, the enjoyment of passive cultural activities, things like the reading of novels and the watching of plays (and later movies, and later television), of simply relaxing after your ten hours a day as a factory foreman or whatever other crappy 1800s middle-class thing you were doing back then, which still seemed like heaven compared to your father's old job, 14 hours every day at the bottom of a coal mine or in the middle of a farmer's field, with no health insurance and not even Sundays off.
And so is the exact same thing happening again in the early 2000s, as a sort of magic combination of small new realities come causally gliding together: the rise of easy-to-use creative services like iTunes, Flickr and YouTube; the growing proliferation of ubiquitous internet access (at home, at work, at the cafe, in the car, on your phone); the dramatic drop in price for all the physical equipment to make this stuff work; the profoundly growing media literacy among the population in general; the slow disintegration of the 40-hour work week and the line between "office time" and "personal time;" the tendency for most middle-class jobs to require less and less physical effort with each passing year, leaving people more refreshed and energetic during their leisure time to begin with, leaving people wanting to do something productive with that time instead of needing to relax using passive activities. All of these things have been changing the very way that we think about the arts, so much so that even the word itself has started getting replaced more and more in everyday conversation by the term "creativity;" for example, think how embarrassed most artists are anymore by the idea of referring to themselves as "artists," or think how in the advertising industry, people like writers and illustrators are literally now called "creatives" as an entire job class.
This in turn has created some mind-boggling statistics in our contemporary times, new facts about the creative world that would seem like science-fiction just a generation ago: two billion unique photos at Flickr, ten thousand new novels published in the US just last year, five thousand new songs I sampled in 2008 because of following just a dozen sources. But of course this comes with drawbacks as well, and it's not just traditional gatekeepers who are finding their lifestyles severely disrupted; after all, if there are 60 million bloggers out there writing short stories and op/ed journalism every single day, a lot of it able to inform and move me just as much as anything I've ever read in a magazine or newspaper, why should I bother buying that magazine or newspaper in the first place? If a million middle-aged housewives can provide me 22 minutes a day of easy chuckles over at I Can Has Cheezburger?, why should I pay a sitcom producer to do so instead? And again, if you'd like to look back at a historical example to better understand what I mean, think of what a lucrative activity it used to be in the Victorian Age for authors to do speaking tours, simply reading their stories on a stage to a largely illiterate audience like how Mark Twain made millions doing; but how as more and more of the population learned how to read themselves, the act of consuming a story became simply a hobby to do during one's free time, not a special occasion that required a trip out and a significant amount of money to be spent, despite live public entertainment in general remaining just as popular as it ever was. (And to be extra-clear, I'm not talking here about either traditional theatre or contemporary book readings; think instead of such contemporary monologuists as Spalding Gray and Henry Rollins, the tiny remains of a formerly huge industry that used to generate billions of dollars among hundreds and hundreds of public speakers, the contemporary exceptions that prove the rule of just how profoundly that industry has shrunk since the nationwide push for 100-percent literacy among the general population.)
This is the very definition of history, when a big shift in a society produces results that both better and worsen that society, hopefully resulting by the end in a slight rise for civilization in general; we're merely going through yet another one of these big shifts right now, a fact I was reminded of all over again after my 500th song download last week, which is why I thought I'd take a moment today and write about it all again. And meanwhile, this landmark reminded me of yet something else I hadn't thought of in awhile: that I now had a large enough collection of danceclub-style electronic music to be able to try my hand at a "beat-mix" collection of them if I wanted, which for those who don't know is exactly what the term sounds like, when a club DJ will mix two songs together so that their beats match, hopefully inspiring their customers to stay on the dancefloor just a little bit longer. I was a beat-mix club DJ myself for a little while in college, in fact, almost twenty years ago now, although of course back then mixed songs the old-fashioned analog way, via two record players and my freaking fingers; it was an activity I really used to enjoy (I was a pretty serious clubkid for a bit in my youth), and here at middle age thought it'd be something fun to occasionally do again as a weekend hobby, my version I suppose of model trains on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
So anyway, that's exactly what I ended up doing this weekend, and I've released the results as episode 42 of the podcast, 19 songs mixed into a 45-minute MP3 and being posted to the site today at the same time as this essay. Now, please bear in mind that it's been literally two decades since I've done my last beat mix, that this was the first time ever that I've attempted doing one through visual means on a computer screen, and that I would really appreciate you cutting me a little slack for a few clunky segues you'll hear; but that said, I have to confess that I'm joyously happy with how well it came out in general, with the whole process this weekend really pleasantly drawing me back to nostalgic remembrances of college, of spinning in the corner of a private apartment at an after-bars party in the middle of the night, back when the hottest things you could throw on at three in the morning were 808 State and the Thrill Kill Kult. That's the whole reason for a middle-ager to take on creativity as a leisure-time hobby in the first place; not to compete with the much better professionals who do it full-time, but simply to have some fun and to feel like the effort was worth it, to have something at the end that others might enjoy in a simple way as well. In that spirit, I hope that you too will have as much fun listening to it as I had making it.
It's Monday, which means it's time for another episode of the CCLaP Podcast. Today: It's a very special experiment, a beat-mixed all-electronica music special, done as a companion piece to an essay I also posted at the website today, on the occasion of downloading my 500th free legal song online since starting the center, my first attempt at club-style beat-mixing since all the way back at college two decades ago. It features 19 bands over the course of 45 minutes; and don't forget, if you download the enhanced MP4 version linked to below and listen on an iPod (or simply subscribe to CCLaP's iTunes channel), chapters and links and images will be at your disposal too!
(Like many Netflix customers, I too can get quite lax with the timely watching and returning of my movies, which of course defeats the entire purpose of having a flat-rate rental plan in the first place. To combat that, I am now writing standardized mini-reviews of each and every movie I end up watching through Netflix, both instantly and on DVD. Don't forget, all previous 'Justify My Netflix' reviews can be found on CCLaP's main movie page.)
Today's movie:The Duchess of Duke Street, 1976 (Amazon | IMDB | Netflix)
Why I added it to my queue: Because this is an older, well-regarded TV series from the BBC that I've never watched before; and as regular readers know, this year I've been using Netflix as an excuse to finally get caught up with more and more of these old BBC shows I've never seen, if for nothing else than to feed my insatiable Anglophilia.
The reality: Very...'70s. Yet another Edwardian-period drama from John Hawkesworth, creator of the much more well-known and highly regarded Upstairs, Downstairs from the same years, The Duchess of Duke Street was loosely based on the real story of Rosa Lewis, and her rise in the early 20th century from Cockney maid to the owner of one of the most posh hotels in London; and so that results in something interesting in this case, a situation an artist could get away with in the '70s but probably not now, where the first four episodes are in actuality more like a mini-series (full of one-time events and one-time sets that get our main character from maid to hotel owner); but then the other 25 episodes of the show are much more like a weekly serial drama, where the action takes place almost exclusively within the hotel itself, and the storylines based mostly around whatever guests are staying there that particular week. But there are other '70s aspects as well that might be more troublesome to viewers, such as the highly noticeable slowness to the storylines' pacing; in one episode, for example, an entire ten minutes is spent doing nothing but watching the hotel's staff wordlessly cook a grand meal, in an almost comically languid way that one could certainly never get away with in a television show now. That's a reason to be charmed by a show like this, but also a reason to be annoyed, depending on who you are; for sure, though, this show is very much a reflection of the times in which it was made, despite the entire thing being set in the first two decades of the 1900s.
If I had watched it when it first came out: I probably would've been a casual fan, like I'm a casual fan now of Law & Order, for example.
Worth your time? Depends on what kind of person you are
Filed by Jason Pettus at 9:21 PM, June 25, 2009. Filed under: Movies | Reviews | Comments: 0.
(Like many Netflix customers, I too can get quite lax with the timely watching and returning of my movies, which of course defeats the entire purpose of having a flat-rate rental plan in the first place. To combat that, I am now writing standardized mini-reviews of each and every movie I end up watching through Netflix, both instantly and on DVD. Don't forget, all previous 'Justify My Netflix' reviews can be found on CCLaP's main movie page.)
Why I added it to my queue: Because here on its 25th anniversary, I thought it was high time to revisit this notorious science-fiction trainwreck from celebrated Surrealist filmmaker David Lynch, which upon its original release was not only the most expensive movie ever made, but one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history, responsible for putting an entire major studio out of business.
The reality: Still as wonderfully head-scratching as the day it first came out. See, for those who don't know, Lynch actually handed over to the studio a five-hour final cut of the movie, sincerely not understanding why they couldn't just release it into the theatres that way (freaking Surrealists, I swear), forcing the arbitrary cutting of over half of what was already an ultra-complex far-future saga about spacefaring royal families, a genetically-engineered messiah, and the consciousness-altering spice that brought all these developments about in the first place; so imagine if you will cutting down Donnie Darko to just 45 minutes of random moments, randomly spliced together with not even an attempt made at story continuance, and it's no wonder that not a single audience member was able to follow along with the two-hour version of Lynch's Dune that finally hobbled into theatres that summer. But man, I gotta tell you, this movie still looks gorgeous, one of the best-filmed and best-costumed science-fiction movies of all time; and it's obvious that a big chunk of that massive studio-breaking budget went into the same kind of secretive biological special effects that Lynch so masterfully displayed in earlier films like Eraserhead and The Elephant Man (and was in fact a big reason why he got the Dune assignment in the first place). Confusion still remains over how much of this cut material still even exists, and who now legally owns it (with Lynch mentioning in recent interviews that he has almost no interest in revisiting this original footage); but what a treat it would be to finally have the five-hour version out to public, perhaps as a special DVD box set, which I imagine would elevate this film in many minds to one of the best ever made, if that were to ever actually happen.
Strangest piece of trivia: When they say this was a big production, they're not kidding -- it featured a crew of over 1,700, shooting on 80 sets spread across 16 different soundstages (including what at the time was the biggest indoor desert set ever created), using a million watts of lighting that drew 11,000 amps. Also, for those who still don't know this, in order to make this movie Lynch had to turn down an opportunity to direct Return of the Jedi.
If I had watched it when it first came out: I did, in fact, because at fifteen I was already a huge fan of both Lynch and Dune; and like everyone else, I was hugely disappointed.
Worth your time? Yes, although do yourself a favor and go into it with extremely low expectations. Also, read the novel itself (or at least a synopsis of its plot) before putting this in your queue, if you want even the slightest chance of understanding what's going on.
Filed by Jason Pettus at 9:16 PM, June 25, 2009. Filed under: Movies | Reviews | Comments: 0.
Sorry for the scattered schedule; my internet is out yet again
So yes, as some of you have undoubtedly already guessed, my internet connection here at home is down yet again, a semi-regular occurrence in my life; and since I work from home, that gives me no cushy office internet connection to fall back on, which leaves me pretty much crap out of luck a lot of the time. (Or technically, I get through all my basic chores through a combination of public libraries, pay-per-minute internet cafes, and borrowed time on friends' computers, which does in a pinch much of the time, but is a process that gets interrupted during extreme weather, like the continual rainstorms and 100-plus heat we've been experiencing here in Chicago this month.) Anyway, the connection here at home will be off for at least another month if not maybe more, so the CCLaP site will most likely suffer the kind of scattered posting schedule you've been seeing over the last couple of weeks (you know, only three or four posts a week, with sometimes several days going by without anything new). Rest assured that the reading and writing continues at its normal pace here in Chicago; and that will hopefully result in a nice long string of reviews in a row once I have a stable always-on connection again. As always, I thank you very much for your patience.
Filed by Jason Pettus at 4:18 PM, June 24, 2009. Filed under: CCLaP news | Comments: 0.
It's Monday, which means it's time for another episode of the CCLaP Podcast. Today: It's the June edition of CCLaP's monthly music special, wherein I share some of the best and most interesting bands I myself have been coming across legally for free online in the last four weeks, kind of like a college radio show but without actually needing a college radio station. Today's episode features 13 bands and lasts just under 50 minutes; and don't forget, if you download the enhanced MP4 version linked to below and listen on an iPod (or simply subscribe to CCLaP's iTunes channel), chapters and links and images will be at your disposal too!
(This is part 1 of a special 14-part essay series I'm writing this summer, examining in detail nearly the entire ouevre of controversial Chicago author Nelson Algren, on the occasion of his 100th birthday this year. For an introduction to this series, as well as links to all the other essays, you can click here.)
The shot you're looking at above is of the Chicago street address 4834 North Troy, in the Albany Park neighborhood on the city's northwest side, a crucial location for any serious discussion regarding Nelson Algren; for it was here that Algren was to live full-time from the age of twelve until the start of college, and then part-time on and off after that all the way to nearly thirty. As you can see, as of 2009 the neighborhood has become a "creative class" one, full of web designers and ad-agency execs and all kinds of other shiny happy white-collar Loop workers, but this was not always the case; back when Algren was there in the 1920s and '30s, for example, it was mostly a working-class neighborhood, full of such blue-collar immigrants as Germans and Poles, with income levels that spanned from medium to low instead of medium to high like is the case now. And this is in fact yet another important thing to know about Algren early into any examination of his life and work; that according to Bettina Drew in her 1989 biography Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side, far from picking up the habit as an earnest liberal undergraduate, as is the case with so many writers who end up "championing the downtrodden," Algren just naturally preferred the company of the lowest-end citizens of his neighborhood even as a boy, from what seems to be simply a high natural curiosity about the world almost from birth, and an inherent disdain for the normal and blase.
It's an important thing to remember, because it's a big factor behind Algren's early successes; because as he traversed his early twenties (and history's 1920s) as a college student at the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana, he of course fell in more and more with the growing group of young, radically liberal artists who defined the Early Modernist era, most of them squeaky-clean middle-classers with an intense desire to show off the plight of society's worst-off, but who had never actually hung out with a prostitute or stepped into a gambling hall to save their lives. Algren however was not only a regular at such haunts already, but was an intimate acquaintance of many of those whose lives revolved around such dens of iniquity, the people who Karl Marx called the "lumpen-proletariat" in The Communist Manifesto (a sort of holy bible to this group of young leftists of the 1920s and '30s); not the usual working-class but the lowest of the low, the cripples and addicts and mentally-challenged who lack even the basic faculties to become productive members of society, who in pre-Roosevelt America were essentially left to wither and die on their own, the very people that communism was theoretically designed to most help.
In fact, like it seems with so many Early Modernist artists, Algren ended up having quite an adventurous young life before becoming a full-time writer, one that kept him in close contact with the very people he would end up building his award-winning stories around. A sober and hard-working student of journalism, French and sociology at Champaign, he ended up rushing through his degree so to be able to get a job in the lucrative "Roaring Twenties" that much faster; but then he ended up graduating right at the start of the Great Depression in the early '30s, the holder of a now worthless degree who found himself in the same soup lines as everyone else. It was at this point, Drew says, that Algren spent several years actually living the full-time life of a "hobo," which to modern ears might need a bit of a clarification; because far from being small bunches of panhandling stragglers like we think of the homeless today, in the Great Depression hoboes were an entire economic class, hundreds of thousands of young people who simply roamed the countryside from day to day looking for whatever temporary labor they could find, crisscrossing the US once or twice every single month through the dangerous activity of "train-hopping," not the romantic notion we think of it today but rather a perilous and highly illegal endeavor that always carried the chance of violent injury and death.
It was during these years that Algren saw with his own eyes the kind of human indignities that his peers only read about; of young women having miscarriages in freight cars and then bleeding to death, of young boys trying to hop a rail, missing, and getting their legs cleanly chopped off by the rushing wheels. And when Algren got busted once in 1934 for stealing a typewriter from a half-empty community college in small-town Texas, the month he spent in a county jail awaiting trial was what he considered ever after as one of the most harrowing of his life, and gave him direct knowledge of the pre-civil-rights squalor, 'convict justice,' and complex homoerotic/homophobic sexual politics that were a part of the American prison system even then. So no wonder, then, when he finally got settled for a time again in Chicago, and started getting more and more involved with the local chapter of the John Reed Club (a formal network of communist-sympathizing urban intellectuals in the pre-McCarthy US), it was Algren who was most admired among his new circle of friends (including famed black author Richard Wright) for bringing such a high level of authenticity and attention to detail to his work, in a way that his ivory-towered peers simply couldn't.
It was at this point, in fact, that Algren's career finally started taking off, after almost a decade of on-and-off writing in a more traditional vein; spurred by his Reed friends' insistence that he write more about his true experiences as a 'bo, his melodramatic stories of Man Dispossessed started quickly striking a chord within the exact crowd of leftist intellectuals who were desperately seeking such stories. It was one of these tales, in fact -- "So Help Me," based on the real experience of Algren and two of his drifter pals once trying to re-open an abandoned gas station in the Deep South -- that brought him to the attention of Vanguard Press in New York, who supposedly sent him a simple query letter one day seeing if he just happened to be working on a full-length novel; claiming years later that he simply had nothing better to do, he ended up hopping a freight-train to New York that very week, and by the end of the visit had finagled Vanguard into a book contract, with them agreeing to front the money for him to live cheaply in Texas again for another three months, and with him promising to deliver a full manuscript at the end. In true artistic fashion, he missed that first deadline, although finally did deliver on the book; and that's how it is that we have Algren's 1935 debut novel, Somebody in Boots, which both he and his commie friends were convinced was going to make him known as "the American Gorky," and help usher in a glorious new revolution in Modernist political thought.
But there turned out to be a problem with Boots, succinctly summed up by fellow writer (and secretly-brought-on editor) James Farrell; namely, it was a barely readable mess, and destined in its original form to cause embarrassment to nearly everyone associated with it. And sure, maybe Farrell wasn't exactly the best person to be making such an assessment objectively -- although a fellow communist sympathizer, he couldn't stand what he called the simplified preaching of the "Proletariat Novel," and in fact didn't hold at all with the Stalinist idea of all artistic projects somehow needing to serve the state, a position that Reedites agreed with quite strongly. But then again, maybe this made Farrell exactly the most perfect person to come on as secret editor; because as we all know by now, no matter how noble the intentions, a book simply needs to touch something profound within the general zeitgeist in order to be a big success, and with the majority of American citizens at that time much more like Farrell than Algren himself, left-leaning but not radical and certainly in no mood for a violent revolution.
Now that I've read the book myself, in fact, I can easily see what people complained about when it first came out, and can perfectly understand the mixture of respect and frustration for the novel among those who take their Modernist literature seriously. It's ultimately the story of one Cass McKay, not an autobiographical portrait of Algren himself but rather of one of the typical "lumpens" he spent time with back then -- barely intelligent, quick to anger and with a bad taste for whiskey, he seems almost born to live the hobo lifestyle, the product of an abusive home and with almost no formal education under his belt. The novel itself, then, is a 260-page record of life taking a nearly continuous dump on Cass as he stumbles his way through the Great Depression (known among the 'boes as "the Big Trouble"), which like I said is mostly made up of experiences Algren actually had during his own drifter years; by the time our story is over, not only have all the real events I've already mentioned taken place to the fictional Cass, but also the gang-rape of a young black woman traveling by herself, the unwanted turning of Cass's sister into a prostitute, the forced feeding of rancid meat to hundreds of vagrants by a corrupt do-gooder church receiving New Deal government money, the horrific death of a prisoner from untreated tuberculosis, and all kinds of other wonderful life-affirming experiences like these.
It's when Algren gets lost inside these stories that he really cooks, when he forgets about Making A Grand Point and simply describes in exquisite, poetic detail what the experiences were actually like -- take for example his masterful description of a low-class burlesque house in Chicago's South Loop that Cass ends up working at for awhile, which I swear to God by the end made me feel like I had actually visited it in real life myself -- and in fact Algren himself came to understand more and more that this is where his true strength as a writer laid, honing this aspect to razor sharpness in such later masterpieces as The Man with the Golden Arm. But unfortunately, the highly political 25-year-old Algren did feel the need in his first novel to Make A Grand Point, and it is always at these overwritten, overanalyzed moments that the book most suffers; take for example his bad habit of writing accented regional dialogue phonetically, which threatens to make the novel utterly unreadable during several long stretches. (Confused by what I'm talking about? Take this random example: "Well, y'all see, when ah fight a man ah just go all-to-pieces like, so sometime it happen ah don' rightly know ex-acly what is it ah hev got in mah han'." UGH.)
And of course it doesn't help that each section of the novel starts with a highly intellectual quote from The Communist Manifesto itself, a jarring schism from the plain-spoken social-realist tone of the actual book; and it also doesn't help that the entire last 50 pages essentially becomes one big lefty sermon, with Algren using Chicago's real 1932 World's Fair (unfortunately planned when times were good, but not open until after the Great Depression hit) as a heavy-handed metaphor for class inequality, comparing the glittering lights on one side of the fairground fence with the trash-picking street orphans on the other, in an obvious and pandering way much more reminiscent of his experience-light academic peers, who have mostly now all fallen away into rightful obscurity. And by the way, sheesh, no wonder the Chicago Tribune ended up trashing nearly all of Algren's books when they first came out, because Algren does a real number on them here in his first novel, essentially accusing them of being the FOX News of the 1930s, not only one of the major causes of the Great Depression but also one of the groups helping to perpetuate it, so that the paper's executives can get even more filthy-rich than they were before. No wonder the paper held a grudge against Algren for nearly his entire career, and no wonder that people call it such bitter irony that the Tribune now hands out a prestigious annual literary award in his name.
It's for all these reasons that Somebody in Boots was met with a resounding "meh" when first coming out, and by the end of a year had still sold less than 800 copies nationally; not exactly a shameful showing for a debut novel by a 26-year-old in the middle of the Great Depression, and especially considering the actual good press it ended up racking up (including a fairly glowing review in the New York Times), but certainly a disappointment for this man nearing thirty and still living part-time with his parents, whose friends had been spending months falsely inflating the book's expectations, with all of them convinced that it was destined to be a controversial bestseller that would turn Algren into a household name. And it's for all these reasons that Algren not only put off writing another book for a full half a decade, but that a couple of years after Boots he was quietly hospitalized for a short time, for what seems now to have been a nervous breakdown, all records of which he thoroughly suppressed later in life, because of his general embarrassment over this entire period of his career. (In fact, Algren was to have contentious feelings about Boots for the entire rest of his life, actively refusing to speak about it at all for decades, then finally in his later years coming to see it as a noble but deeply flawed failure.) But I'll be getting a lot more into all this next week, when I tackle his much more successful follow-up, 1942's Never Come Morning, considered by his fans to be the first of his "classics." I hope you'll have a chance to join me again then.
P.S. And a piece of trivia to leave you with today, that I never found a good place for in the actual essay: Turns out that Algren's original title for the novel was Native Son, but was nixed by the publisher, because of a California politician at the time running a campaign with this same theme; it would of course later be taken by Algren's drinking buddy Richard Wright for the most famous book of his own career. Its current title Somebody in Boots comes from a great line from within the novel, where Cass reflects that there's really only two major kinds of people in the world (his words) -- those who own sh-tkicker boots, and those always getting the sh-t kicked out of them.
Tales from the Completist: "The Ghost Writer," by Philip Roth
(Just like anyone else who is a lover of great books, I find myself sometimes with a desire to become a "completist" of certain authors; that is, to have read every book that author has ever written. This series of essays chronicles that attempt. Don't forget, a list of all the other books reviewed as part of this series can be found on CCLaP's main book review page.)
All right, I admit it -- I'm not the biggest fan of postmodernism, for a whole host of reasons that are sometimes related to each other, sometimes not: because of the movement's insistence, for example, that the only "true" artists are ones with advanced college degrees; because of its worship of cold irony and empty pop culture; because of its smug liberal platitudes and warm embrace of moral relativism; because every single famous example of it tends to be some intolerable novel about snot-nosed professors having pointless affairs with their 19-year-old students; because of how frighteningly easy it was for the Bush administration to use the mechanics of postmodernism to sell a form of quasi-fascism to an uneducated, celebrity-obsessed American public; because it was the artistic movement most favored by the generation right before mine (dirty f-cking hippies), so of course part of me is just going to naturally rebel against it; because my own generation (the so-called "Generation X") was especially good at postmodernism during its popular height in the 1990s, and if there's one group of people I hate more than dirty f-cking hippies, it's bitter paleocon-embracing hipster-douchebag Gen-Xers; and on and on and on in this vein ad nauseam.
But the longer I run my arts center, the more I'm coming to realize just how many of these issues are simply personal biases in my life that I should learn to get over; because as an arts critic, it's my job to know as much as possible about every artistic movement in history, and especially one so recent and that still so heavily influences even the brand-new novels coming out to this day. And so that's had me slowly starting to explore postmodernist literature whenever the mood strikes me, and especially looking at the beginning of the movement in the early 1960s (see for example my review earlier this year of Richard Yates' 1963 Revolutionary Road, widely considered one of the first postmodernist novels ever written), back when it was mostly an intellectual response to the Modernist movement right before even it, and not yet so co-opted and twisted by an all-pervasive consumerist-lifestyle advertising industry like what happened near the end of the movement's history. (Oh, and that's something else to know if you don't already, that I consider postmodernism to have officially died on September 11th, although had been going through its death throes for years before that, and that for the last decade the arts have been going through the beginning of a new movement that simply hasn't been named yet. The "Sincerist" movement, perhaps? With Michael Chabon and Radiohead being its first two truly great masters?)
Anyway, so all this has gotten me more and more interested recently in the work of Philip Roth; he's not only considered one of the titans of postmodernist literature (within such company as John Updike, Gore Vidal, Don DeLillo and a lot more), but I've actually read and loved one of his novels already, 2004's "alternative history" thriller and Bush slam The Plot Against America, making it more likely that I'm going to enjoy his earlier work as well. (This is compared to, say, Norman Mailer, whose work I also really need to sit down and comprehensively read one day, but in that case will be a navel-gazing chore I'm actually kind of dreading.) And hey, turns out that Roth has already created an easy framework for following along with his maturation over the years into a pillar of postmodernism; namely, within his overall prodigious ouevre, he has over the decades published a remarkable nine-book series known as the "Zuckerman" tales, named after the Nathan Zuckerman character who appears in them all (sometimes as the protagonist, sometimes as just a bystander), a character that Roth has very clearly identified in the past as an autobiographical stand-in for himself, and whose fate largely follows Roth's own over the years.
And in fact, as my smartass remark earlier about Mailer indicates, this is in general yet another common trait in postmodernism, a certain obsession with self-reflection and self-examination; when such a thing is done right, its fans say, it produces a kind of powerful emotional truth about the world impossible to gain in the arts otherwise, while critics complain that it more often than not leads simply to an unreadable mishmash of mental masturbation. For example, although not actually written until 1979, Roth's first Zuckerman book The Ghost Writer is set twenty years earlier in 1959, at the beginning not only of the postmodernist movement but also Roth's real-life career; and the Zuckerman we find in it is just starting out as well, a kid in his twenties with a series of attention-grabbing short stories now published in various prestigious literary journals, and with a favorable profile of him recently appearing in one of those "Hot New Authors" articles in one of those New Yorker type magazines. And this is yet something else important to understand about postmodernism -- that although we take it for granted now (and in fact is viewed by many now as an antiquated process to be gotten rid of), it was the postmodernist writers who were the very first to come of age within this Modernist-created academically-based strict hierarchal definition of artistic success (stories in respected journals out of college, which lead to full books from respected presses, followed by retrospectives at respected museums, with plenty of grants and fellowships and awards and workshops and honorary degrees thrown in along the way), a path considered the height of sophistication right around the Kennedy years when so many of the most famous postmodernists all got their starts.
All this newfound press, then, has brought Zuckerman to the attention of his literary hero, a writer named E.I. Lonoff who seems to be sort of a combination of Saul Bellows and J.D. Salinger; entering old age in the late 1950s, he is one of the only Jewish-American authors in history so far to gain a national audience for his work, which has driven him to a point of almost no contact with the general public, making it that much more special when one receives an invitation to dine at his rural upstate New York farmhouse, the one he shares with his WASPy New England goyim wife, much to the consternation of all the Manhattan-dwelling Jewish intellectuals who were once his pre-war peers and friends. This is exactly the kind of dining invitation Zuckerman receives at the beginning of The Ghost Writer; and then the novel itself is not much more than a record of his evening there, as Zuckerman has a series of conversations with Lonoff, witnesses a fight between he and his wife, drinks too much to be able to get home safely, and ends up spending the night on Lonoff's sofa while thinking very intensely about a bunch of stuff.
And in fact this is yet again another hallmark of postmodernism, the habit within so many of these novels for almost nothing to actually "happen," which again as I've mentioned here in the past comes with both its defenders and detractors; fans say that within postmodernism it is the "inner lives" of the characters that are most important, and that contemporary literature no longer needs the soap-opera plot machinations of the Victorian Age in order to be a great story, while critics say that this is merely a reflection of postmodernism's tendency for all its most famous authors to be boring ol' do-nothing professors themselves (as opposed to Modernist authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald who went around driving ambulances and fighting bulls and, you know, doing stuff), and that all this merely adds to the navel-gazing masturbation the movement is already so guilty of. Or in other words, the movement's ever-increasing frequency over the years towards confessional novels about whiny authors writing confessional novels about whiny authors writing confessional novels, which is where we get the postmodernist term "metafiction," which critics claim is simply a fancy word for "circle jerk."
And so what are these things that Zuckerman ends up drunkenly pondering on Lonoff's sofa in the middle of the night? Well, that's a very interesting question, really the main point of reading The Ghost Writer to begin with, because it turns out that it's three main things that Zuckerman spends the novel mostly thinking about, all of them having to do with modern Judaism in a post-Nazi world...
--First, he spends a lot of time pondering the "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" style fight between the Lonoffs that he witnessed earlier in the evening, and what it might say about the natural complications that come with any marriage between a Jew and a Gentile in mid-20th-Century America, no matter what the circumstances;
--Then he gets to thinking about his latest short story, a true recollection of a money-based neighborhood fight he once witnessed as a child, which even pre-publication has turned into his most popular story among those who have now read it, but that has inspired horror among all his Jewish relatives, convinced that the story will do nothing but bolster the anti-Semitic view of Jews as greedy, finance-obsessed shysters;
--Which then finally gets him thinking about the beautiful, mysterious eastern-European writing protege of Lonoff's who had also joined them for dinner earlier in the night, and pondering what the world would be like if she turned out to be none other than Anne Frank herself, who somehow miraculously managed to survive the concentration camps at the end of World War Two, but whose identification was lost during the chaos of it all, and of why it might be that a young woman in that position might actually prefer to stay anonymous after the war is over, and after her teenaged diary has become such a lynchpin for modern postwar Jewish/Gentile relations.
And that really gets us to the heart of The Ghost Writer, and why it is that Roth is widely considered one of the most important Jewish-American authors in our country's history; because as Roth himself so indelicately reminds us in this book, before the rise of postmodernism and writers exactly like him, the most famous Jewish author in history had actually been a dead 15-year-old girl, and the most important thing she ever wrote was that despite the Holocaust, she still found herself with a desperate desire to get laid. It's very easy to forget this, but as little as 50 years ago, a term like "Jewish humor" was most likely to conjure up racist images from vaudeville and folktales, big-nosed Shylocks greedily rubbing their hands together in anticipation of yet another bulging bag of precious gold, versus the images now of Woody Allen and Jerry Seinfeld and wry urban wit like so many of us think of these days when hearing the term. And it's no accident that the world changed this way, either, but was instead due to the deliberate efforts of writers exactly like Roth, an entire generation of young post-Holocaust Jews who dared to openly discuss the normal day-to-day conflicts found within the Jewish community, without worrying as their parents did that such a thing would simply contribute to another future round of yellow stars and gas chambers.
It's an incredibly easy thing to forget when reading these seminal books in our contemporary times, ironically because of these writers ending up being so successful at what they were trying to accomplish; so successful, in fact, that much of what is played for serious drama in these early novels has ended up over the decades getting played for laughs by a whole generation of Jewish artists after them. For a good example, look at how with just a little re-wording, what turns out to be the most tension-filled scene in The Ghost Writer can easily start sounding like that Seinfeld episode where Jerry gets caught making out during Schindler's List...
"Oh, I see -- my son the writer now feels the need to write stories that please Herr Joseph Goebbels."
"Ma!"
"Oh, never mind me. What do I know? I'm just the mother of a self-hating anti-Semite, that's all."
"Ma, will you stop it?"
"Oh, I'll stop. I'll stop as soon as God whisks me off to hell for bringing a self-hating anti-Semite into the world. Strike me down now, God! Strike down this unworthy mother of a self-hating anti-Semite right this second!"
"MA!!!"
It's a testament to Roth, really, that what he means to be serious drama in The Ghost Writer now reads so unintentionally funny; it's a testament to how successful he and the other Jewish writers of the postmodernist age all were, that they could create a situation where even most non-Jews now have at least a basic knowledge of and appreciation for the ebb and flow of normal Jewish life, versus such give-and-takes in the past simply reinforcing the pervasive anti-Jewish sentiments so rampant around the planet before the Holocaust. It's essentially a normalization process, which the Jews of Roth's parents' generation were terrified of, because it was impossible for them to picture a world where Jewish life would ever seem "normal" in the eyes of most non-Jews; so what an astounding feat that these postmodernists of Roth's generation actually pulled it off, to the extent that a show like Seinfeld half a century later could end up being as thoroughly embraced by mainstream Christian America as it was.
So when all is said and done, maybe I actually have been a little too tough on postmodernism in general; although I still argue that the movement's excesses in the second half of its history are rightly worthy of scorn and derision, which also like I said may just mostly be my way of naturally rebelling against what was most popular with the generation of artists right before mine. In any case, I'm for sure extremely glad that I've decided to take on Roth's Zuckerman stories in the first place, and am now highly looking forward to the second book in the series, 1981's even more self-referential Zuckerman Unbound. As always, I'll be posting my thoughts about that here as soon as they're ready.
(Because I make my way through so many books and movies for CCLaP, I regularly come across projects that are interesting enough unto themselves but that I simply don't have much to say about, or at least not enough to warrant an entire entry. I thought, then, that on occasional weekends I would gather up such "micro-reviews" and post them all in one large entry; they can also be found on CCLaP's main book and main movie archive pages.)
Standing Still
By Kelly Simmons
Washington Square Press / ISBN: 978-0-74328-973-3
As I've mentioned before, there's actually a host of different reasons why I might do only a mini-review of a book here instead of a full write-up, besides that the book in question might be of subpar quality (which frankly usually is the reason, which is why people make the mistaken assumption to begin with); take for a good example Kelly Simmons' debut novel Standing Still, which when all is said and done is not a bad book whatsoever, well-written and concerning an interesting subject, with not only a decent sense of pace but a compelling personal style too. But it just so happens that I myself am not a particularly big fan of this type of story, which if pressed for an easy explanation I would say is destined to most appeal to the kind of female audience member also into The Bachelorette, Alice Sebold and the Lifetime Channel; not that I mention any of these references specifically to belittle them, but merely to point out that these too are projects and artists of decent quality that I'm not necessarily into but that others are. As you can guess, the novel is centered around a middle-aged suburban housewife named Claire Cooper, and has a dark premise I was instantly intrigued by, which is why I requested a copy in the first place from this highly active Goodreads.com member; namely, after being kidnapped from her sleepy McMansion near the beginning of the book, over the course of a week she comes to slowly realize that her abductor is actually a better man (ethically, emotionally) than her cold, corporate-embracing white-male-dick husband, with Simmons using a semi-surprising plot to reveal a much more nefarious situation with the husband's day job than Claire had ever been told about.
But be warned that what could've been a fast-paced thriller in another's hands is instead a deliberately slow psychological meditation here under Simmons' treatment, with much of the "action" actually the inner-brain thoughts of Claire as she spends the majority of the book tied immovably to a hotel bed; and also be warned that Simmons sometimes wields her metaphors with all the grace of a drunk hillbilly swinging a two-by-four, such as Claire's regular habit of referring to her unnamed abductor as "Him" and "He" with a capital 'H' (and with all the resulting Freudian daddy/Christ issues such a thing implies). This is why I say that the book is perfect for fans of the Lifetime Channel, for example, because the shows and movies produced by that cable network are known precisely for this, for using patriarchal acts of violence as a way to symbolically explore therapist-worthy issues of how middle-aged women are defined in our society, not only as wives and mothers but also sexually and intellectually; and that's why Standing Still gets today just a little bit higher of a score than I would maybe give it otherwise, because I know for a fact that there are all kinds of people out there who will adore such a book, and wanted to give it a general score that more reflected that. If you're one of those people (and you know who you are), it comes much recommended.
I'm as much of a fan as anyone else of informative non-fiction guidebooks and how-to manuals, but while acknowledging a big danger with such books too; that by their very nature, most contain far less than an entire book's worth of useful information, but because of the commercial norms set decades ago by the traditional paper-based publishing industry, most of these authors are forced to pad out their manuscripts to "book length" anyway, resulting many times in fluffy messes that actually do more damage to that author's career than if they had simply published it as a low-profile magazine article instead. Take for example academe Thomas Foster's How to Read Novels Like a Professor, which as far as advice goes is actually quite astute; like I do here at CCLaP when examining a new piece of long-form fiction, Foster shows how the quality of a manuscript is not only determined by the big basic issues you learned in Lit 101 (plot, character, etc), but a whole host of little ones as well (the author's "voice," how good they are at setting a scene, and a lot more), then methodically explains how exactly to take all these complex criteria into consideration simultaneously while reading any novel one wishes to examine critically. But unfortunately the book utterly fails the rule-of-thumb I have about such titles -- that if I can read just the first sentence of each paragraph and not miss a single important thing, it's a book not worth bothering with in the first place -- which makes it a real shame that Foster wasn't simply allowed to release this as the tight novella-length manuscript it most deserves to be. One day, the vast majority of books bought and sold in the US will be done in electronic format, and it will finally no longer matter to either publishers or customers whether a manuscript is "standard book length" or not; but until that day, titles like this one will unfortunately suffer, a helpful guide but that would simply better exist as a series of blog entries than as a full-length paperback. It's worth checking out from the library or borrowing from a friend, but sadly not the full price being charged for it.
Regular readers know that I make my way through graphic novels on a pretty regular basis, usually only ten or twenty pages at a time while in bed at night; and hey, what should just happen to pop up at my neighborhood library the other day than the collected "Palomar" stories from legendary '80s and '90s comic Love And Rockets, only a handful of which I'd ever sat down and read from cover to cover before. (Or, actually I cheated a little -- the book I came across randomly was merely volume one of a brand-new paperback collection by its publisher Fantagraphics, being offered as a cheaper and more mobile version than the all-in-one coffeetable-sized hardback collection they put out in 2003; when I discovered that the Chicago Public Library has not yet acquired volume two of this new paperback series, I simply checked out the larger hardback version, and finished up the stories that way.) For those who don't know, the original Love And Rockets consisted of several different persistent storylines, each of which was run by a different member of the multi-sibling Hernandez family, who as a group originally created and funded this historically ultra-important title from the dawn of alt-comics; the "Palomar" stories (named after the town where they take place, also known as the "Heartbreak Soup" stories after the very first tale in the series) was the one maintained by brother Gilbert, an expansive look at a fictional village somewhere on the west coast of Central America, and all the remarkable things that happen there from roughly the 1950s to 1980s (and sometimes both before and beyond).
And indeed, the entire series as a whole is still a remarkable read, just as sharp and entertaining as when the stories first started appearing nearly thirty years ago; because by concentrating on the long-term fates of dozens of Palomar's citizens, as they mature over a dense 600 pages from childhood to middle-age (or from middle-age to death in the case of the main characters' parents, or from birth to puberty in the case of their kids), combined with a healthy dose of magical realism (inspired by the Latino-American artist's obsession with Gabriel Garcia Marquez), Hernandez turns in a saga much more timeless than his '80s contemporaries, ultimately a story about family that now holds up much better than the instantly dated punk-rock tropes of, say, peer Alan Moore from the same period. (For example, just try reading Moore's early-'80s V For Vendetta anymore without its naive anarchist political posturing making you want to burst into unintended laughter on a regular basis.) It's this original attention to classic detail that makes the Palomar stories still so enjoyable, and what has kept Love And Rockets still so well-known and influential even decades later, when so many of the other roughly-done black-and-white comic-book experiments from the period have by now fallen into near-total obscurity.
Out of 10: 9.4
Teacher Accused
By Alvin Granowsky
iUniverse / ISBN: 978-0-595-49072-1
As we all know by now, sometimes there doesn't have to be anything particularly wrong with a novel at all to make it nearly unreadable anyway; sometimes, for example, it's merely a case of a novel taking on a subject that has already been written about one billion freaking times, and with that one billion and first containing not a single unique new thing to actually say about it. Take for an unfortunate example Alvin Granowsky's Teacher Accused, which to make no mistake certainly gets an 'A' for earnestness; it's the made-up but highly believable tale of teenaged homophobia in a small Texas town, and of the gay high-school teacher (and recent New York transplant) who tries to help and ends up unfairly crucified for it, written by a "straight but not narrow" real-life teacher and national PTA consultant who specializes in hate crimes perpetuated by angry mobs. But you know what they say, that the path to the remainder bin is paved with good intentions, and here Granowsky is even guiltier than normal; although not actively bad, Teacher Accused nonetheless presents not even a single development or plot point that can't be easily guessed in advance by anyone who's ever read a Young Adult novel on the same subject, or watched a single afterschool special. I always dread writing reviews like these, because it's tempting to see it as me "ganging up" on some poor self-publisher who's just trying to bring a little good to the world, but the truth is that this is merely one more legitimate part of the commercial publishing process; that if an author is going to voluntarily ask complete strangers for nineteen dollars (nineteen dollars!) in order to read their book, that book better well contain nineteen dollars' worth of entertainment, regardless of how noble that author's intentions or how much the subject matter "deserves" to be paid attention to. That's a role I chose to take on when I decided to become a book critic in the first place -- to offer advice precisely on whether a given random book is worth your time and money or not -- and unfortunately it sometimes leads to situations like today's, where a perfectly nice person will write a perfectly nice book that is nonetheless barely worth your time, and certainly not worth your money. Teacher Accused unfortunately gets an official pass from me today for that reason.
Tales from the Completist: "The Man Who Melted," by Jack Dann
(Just like anyone else who is a lover of great books, I find myself sometimes with a desire to become a "completist" of certain authors; that is, to have read every book that author has ever written. This series of essays chronicles that attempt. Don't forget, a list of all the other books reviewed as part of this series can be found on CCLaP's main book review page.)
As I've mentioned here before, most fans of science-fiction consider the genre to have now gone through four major periods (or "ages" as the nerds call it) of history: there is the "Golden Age" from when the genre first came into being in the early 1900s; the "Silver Age" of Mid-Century Modernism, when engineers in skinny ties ran around strapping cowboys to the noses of jet-fueled rockets; the "New Age" of the countercultural '60s and '70s, when like everything else in the arts suddenly all the traditional rules of SF were up for grabs; and the "Dark Age" of the '80s and '90s, when postmodernism combined with punk-rock to produce a whole series of heady neo-noirs. (And also as I've mentioned before, I believe that we've been going through a whole new age of SF since around September 11th or so, simply that most people haven't acknowledged it yet, what I suppose you could call the "Accelerated Age" [after the Charles Stross novel] or the "Diamond Age" [after the Neal Stephenson one], a Web 2.0ey wave of ultra-optimistic tales concerning the coming merger between the mechanical and the biological...but that's a whole other Locus guest article for a whole other day.) But just like any artistic medium that a person tries to categorize in an overly general way, these four ages still leave a lot of SF over the years unaccounted for; there are for example all the transitional periods between these ages, the counter trends that happen within any major period of history, not to mention the works so jarringly unique that they exist outside of any traditional classification at all.
Take for example the Nebula-nominated 1984 novel The Man Who Melted by Jack Dann, celebrating its 25th anniversary this year with a slick new reprint by our friends at Pyr, a product of one of these exact transitional periods of history I'm talking about; because much like his contemporaries Philip K. Dick, Tim Powers, Roger Zelazny, Larry Niven and others, this is one of the projects to bridge together the New Age and Dark Age of SF, one of those books that helps create a direct line between, say, Frank Herbert and Alan Moore, when otherwise it might be difficult to see such a connection. Or if it helps to think of it in terms of popular music, think of Dann as maybe the SF equivalent of Iggy Pop or the New York Dolls, artists who embraced many of the hippie-like elements of the old '60s counterculture while paving the way for the anger and nihilism of the '80s punk movement directly after them, who took the sexuality and intelligence of the free-love years and added a raw, meth-tinged intensity to it. It's not exactly a masterpiece like is found smack-dab in the middle of major periods of artistic history, but certainly an important and well-done book that shows you how the genre got from one polar extreme to almost its exact opposite in less than twenty years; and since I'm a particularly big fan of these overlooked transitional times in history, of course I'm going to think this book still well worth your time to this day.
Set 200 years in the future, The Man Who Melted portrays an Earth with the same kind of relationship to us as perhaps our modern times would look when viewed by an early Victorian -- that is, a lot of what was there originally is still with us, but with yet another new layer of human technology slapped on top of everything, in this case resulting sometimes in entire cities that now have a glittering "grid" of new infrastructure hovering 30 or 40 feet above the old one, effectively turning all the old streets of New York and Paris (to cite two examples from the book) now into Klieg-lit subterranean crime-infested underworlds. And there's a good reason for this, too, because of a major global natural catastrophe in their past that no one could've possibly predicted: called the "Great Scream," it occurred when one day suddenly thousands of cramped-in urban dwellers around the world started forming by accident a psychic connection with each other, creating these chaotic city-sized hive minds so overwhelming that they caused psychotic snaps among all those "hooked in," resulting in crazed mass rioting that nearly destroyed the planet. And although the worst of it is now over, no one is quite sure when another outbreak will occur, which now gets all national governments around the world nervous indeed whenever too many people gather in one small place; and in the meanwhile, many of these "Screamers" who made up the destructive hive mind are still alive and roaming the streets, merely schizophrenic by themselves but becoming a killing mob whenever a critical mass gathers, which has necessitated the movement of all the non-mad city people into one urban layer higher in the sky, leaving the street-level layer below to the schizos and criminals.
And so as you can imagine, this has had a profound impact on all kinds of details concerning daily life in the future; for example, the sanctity of human life itself seems to be worth less in this post-Scream society than in our times, with such activities as gambling for your own internal organs now their equivalent of a "high-stakes night out" at the casinos. Also, sexual norms have become quite different 200 years in the future; it's now considered perverted to not be bisexual, for example, and menages-a-trois are now considered another legally-binding form of cohabitation. And in the meanwhile, turns out that this Great Scream has left behind a whole new form of human consciousness that used to not exist before, kind of like if you woke up tomorrow and saw on the news that ESP had finally been scientifically proven; not only can people like lovers now psychically connect voluntarily through concentration and practice, but mechanical devices have been built that make this connection automatic, inspiring not only a whole new field of psychiatry but a whole new form of gambling (not to mention a whole new type of bordello). And so that's brought about a dualistic way of thinking of these psychic connections, as "dark" ones versus "light;" and that's inspired the creation of a whole new religion on top of everything else, people who call the Screamers "Criers" instead and believe them to be a form of angel, here to usher humanity into its next tier of evolution, and who hold elaborate illegal rituals where an entire congregation will hook up to a Screamer/Crier at the moment of their death, where acolytes are plunged into a kind of deep psychotic dive that they must mentally "journey" their way out of in order to reach "enlightenment," and thus gain the ability to communicate psychically with each other whenever they want.
Yeah, not exactly Star Wars, which is why these types of books represent only a minor transitional period of the genre's history, but why fans of this period love these books with such an intense passion; because they are extra-dense, extra-subversive tales designed specifically for a smaller niche audience, stories that pile on layer after layer of stream-of-consciousness and eastern religious thought and uncomfortable sexuality. Take for example just all the circumstances surrounding our main character Raymond Mantle, living his life in the middle of all this mess: his wife was one of the many victims of this Great Scream who was turned into a wandering Screamer herself, but with Mantle no longer having any memories of her because of he himself being a minor victim of the Scream too, who is now seeking out this highly dangerous dead-Screamer psychic-joining process that this religious group base their rituals around, so that he can connect with the hive mind and try against hope to discover information about his missing spouse. Freaky enough for you yet? How about adding the fact that the only way he can do this is by entering a sexually explicit threeway relationship with the wife-lookalike who wants to be his new girlfriend, and his platonic same-sex best friend from college who he has a subliminal love/hate relationship with? Now is it freaky enough? No? Well, how about if the missing wife in question is actually Mantle's sister as well, and that the two of them have had an incestuous relationship for decades? Now is it freaky enough?
There's all kinds of weird, morally murky things like this going on in The Man Who Melted; and Dann certainly does not make any of it easy to comprehend, either, writing in a convoluted, dreamlike personal style that's hard many times to keep up with, providing very few out-and-out clues about this ephemeral, purposely spotty backstory but rather making you piece it together yourself a bit at a time as you make your way through it (and in fact, to give you fair warning, I may be way off with some of my own backstory info today; I'm making an educated guess at it too, just like everyone else). But this is precisely why people end up loving books like these, for the same reason so many love Dann's more well-known peer Philip K. Dick; because these kinds of books present a legitimate challenge to the well-read intellectual, a sort of "anti-airport read" if you will, where the whole point is that you have to both be smart and pay a lot of attention to have even an idea of what's going on, but will be rewarded with untold mental riches for doing so. And the attention-paying reader is indeed rewarded by the end of this book, with the manuscript actually having a lot of thought-provoking things to say about love, about letting go, about friendship, about the special connection that seems to exist between two people in an intimate relationship, but with these insights only coming when one is really getting what Dann is going for in the first place.
It has its problems, and I'm sure its detractors are highly tempted to dismiss it as a trippy mess; but even this book's lovers I bet are bound to agree that that's the entire point, that it's an unabashed trippy mess designed exactly for the types of people who like trippy messes. (Like Donnie Darko? Then you like trippy messes.) In any case, The Man Who Melted for sure deserves more attention and more historical acknowledgment than it currently receives, and I applaud Pyr for reissuing it in a major new way and with a major new PR campaign behind it. For all of those who have ever wondered how the peace-loving flower children of the '70s became the safety-pinned punks of the '80s, this book goes a long way towards explaining.
Chicago sure has a strange way of treating its artists: we love venerating those who have either died or moved to another city, but tend to be openly hostile to such creatives when they actually live here, and are actively creating the works that make them known in the future as "Chicago artists" in the first place. Examples range all the way from Theodore Dreiser to Liz Phair to most of the founders of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company; but perhaps none is more notorious than author Nelson Algren, a man who by the early 2000s has become nearly synonymous now with the Chicago arts, but who was hated by many here when actually alive and writing the books he would become most known for. And indeed, Algren in general had what one can only call a checkered literary career overall, full of poetically ironic ups and downs: he was the recipient of the very first National Book Award (for his 1950 novel The Man with the Golden Arm, later made into an Oscar-winning movie starring Frank Sinatra), yet died in near-obscurity and with every single one of his books out of print; was a ceaseless defender of the city's Polish community (the largest on the planet outside of Poland itself), yet was essentially run out of town by the business and religious leaders of that very community; penned what is now widely considered one of the best books about Chicago ever written (1951's long-form essay City On the Make), yet was almost arrested for it by city officials when it first came out; received hackjob reviews from the Chicago Tribune regarding nearly every book he ever published, yet with this same exact newspaper now handing out an annual high-profile literary award named after him.
And like many Chicagoans, I've been spending years now name-dropping Algren at dinner parties without ever actually having read any of his books from cover to cover -- yeah, I know, shame on me -- so now that we're celebrating in 2009 the centennial of Algren's birth, I thought it'd be the perfect excuse to spend the summer finally reading nearly his entire ouevre, 14 books altogether, one a week all summer long, in the order they were first published...
Week 1: Somebody in Boots (1935)
Week 2: Never Come Morning (1942)
Week 3: The Neon Wilderness (1947)
Week 4: The Man with the Golden Arm (1950)
Week 5: Chicago: City on the Make (1951)
Week 6: A Walk on the Wild Side (1956)
Week 7: Nelson Algren's Own Book of Lonesome Monsters (1962)
Week 8: Who Lost an American? (1963)
Week 9: Conversations with Nelson Algren (1964)
Week 10: Notes From a Sea Diary (1965)
Week 11: The Last Carousel (1973)
Week 12: The Devil's Stocking (1983) *posthumous
Week 13: Nonconformity: Writing on Writing (1994) *posthumous
Week 14: Entrapment and Other Writings (2009) *posthumous
...and then of course writing analytical essays about them all, while stirring in stories as well about what was going on in Algren's life at the time he was writing each of them (mostly gleaned from Bettina Drew's 1989 bio Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wild Side), along with contemporary photos of various Chicago locations that were important to Algren's life and work, which for those who don't know continue to this day to be a source of local controversy just unto themselves. (For example, as recently as ten years ago, Polish business leaders mounted a massive and expensive PR campaign to successfully stop the city from naming the trisection of Division, Ashland and Milwaukee "Algren Plaza," while the continuing efforts to get Algren's last residence in Wicker Park declared a historical landmark has also faced stiff opposition.)
So what will I find when I finally read the books themselves? Well, I'm trying to keep my mind as open as possible about that question going into this, precisely because of the schizophrenic nature of Algren himself: here after all was one of the most ultra-liberal radical-leftist artists in US history, a communist-sympathizing drinking buddy of famed civil-rights author Richard Wright, who even traveled through Latin America in the late '40s fomenting dissent among the working class with French proto-feminist Simone de Beauvoir (who by the way was having a torrid affair with Algren at the same time, behind the back of her husband Jean-Paul Sartre); but someone who was accused on a regular basis of racism, sexism and homophobia, someone still despised by many women and non-Anglo-Saxons to this day. He was thoroughly a product of the tough-guy Modernist Age, yet an unsung early champion of the headier and more complex Postmodernist movement; a college-graduated journalist and semi-pro sociologist who friends claim was better-read than most professors, but who loved nothing more than a night of drinking and illegal gambling among the shady back alleys of the city's northwest side, while carousing with an endless series of petty criminals, prostitutes, cripples and junkies. Frankly, I don't know how a person manages to pick up such a bipolar reputation, and have no idea how this schism might manifest itself in his actual stories; it's one of the many reasons I've been wanting for years to do a project like this, and I have to admit that I'm glad Algren's 100th birthday this year has finally given me an excuse to do so.
Anyway, I hope you'll have a chance to join me every Wednesday this summer, for yet another chapter in this ongoing essay series; and of course don't forget that once all 14 parts are written, I will collect them into a free standalone eBook as well through CCLaP Publishing. And needless to say, I highly encourage anyone with an interest to actually participate in this reading project in real time themselves, and to leave their own extended comments at the end of each essay posted here; for those planning on doing so, don't forget that the first book I'll be discussing was the 25-year-old Algren's very first, 1935's communist apologia Somebody in Boots, a novel that nearly ruined his career before it could even start.
Book review: "The President's Pianist," by George Manos
(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)
As I've mentioned here before, I believe these days to be an ironically golden time for publishing, "ironic" of course because by all traditional means of measurement, the industry seems to be in a real crisis right now; but really, once you get past the shock of a bunch of now-useless middle managers at giant corporate structures losing money hand over fist these days, you'll see that it's actually easier than ever for an author to simply get a book designed, printed, and in people's hands, suddenly opening the floodgates that these old cultural gatekeepers used to keep tightly shut. And so in our particular period of history, this means not only a plethora of new work from the usual young, hungry artists out there, but also a bevy of new memoirs from a whole generation of retiring baby boomers, those "Children of Modernism" who built the US into the economic powerhouse it eventually became precisely by deferring their creative sides until they were older, until this fabled old age of wealth and luxury and arts and travel just like such 20th-century Presidents as Eisenhower and Kennedy promised them in their youth.
Take for example the recently released book The President's Pianist, by George Manos (as "told to" [i.e. cleaned up by] writer and editor Daniel Lindley), a perfect example of what I'm talking about; it's the tale of a career that was fascinating but not necessarily that historically important, although one that definitely crossed the paths of history-makers on a regular basis, a great little read that will be of enormous benefit to future presidential historians but that normally would just not be financially worth a mainstream publisher taking on. So thank God then that Manos lives in an age where he can simply self-publish his tight, 100-page tale (through our old friends at iUniverse), and be able to get the book into the hands of the specific small crowd who would most enjoy it; because if this was another day and age, such a memoir would've likely never gotten published at all, and with the world just a little worse off for it.
Because to be sure, Manos has had a fascinating life; a Greek-American child piano prodigy, who joined the prestigious Marine Band in the late 1940s in order to get out of combat duty during the Korean War, through a series of events he eventually came to the attention of President Harry Truman, who unofficially "commissioned" him to be the official White House pianist for several years, a position Truman essentially made up out of thin air and has never been bestowed again. Because for those who don't know, Truman was a pretty decent piano player himself, and an obsessive fan of the moodier classical composers of the Romantic period; and with this being the late 1940s, of course, and with record players back then being not much more than crude lo-fi experiments, those who could afford it were much better off simply hiring a musician to play songs on demand live, whenever the mood struck the listener for yet another specific tune. And thus was it that Manos ended up playing on a pretty regular basis for Truman all through his administration, both on the Presidential yacht that Truman spent a lot of time on and in the "Blair-Lee House" Truman actually lived in during his Presidency, the White House actually going through a massive restoration during those years.
Yeah, didn't know that the White House was closed during the Truman administration? Or that it was Truman himself who instigated the overhaul, and who used to derisively refer to the restricting mansion as the "Great White Prison?" Well, that's the entire charm of a book like The President's Pianist, a memoir full of interesting anecdotes but not exactly essential to history, the kind of title cited by scholars when examining the "human side" of society's greatest figures. And Manos has all kinds of great little yarns to share about the people who were a part of Washington in those years, sometimes surprising but never disrespectful, not tabloid-worthy but simply quirky and funny -- Truman's secret hatred of "The Missouri Waltz," for example, Eleanor Roosevelt's habit after her own White House years of rearranging knickknacks whenever visiting the building again. This is the whole reason for such a memoir to even exist, after all, is to "fill in the gaps" of famous periods of history, to give us a sense of what a man like Truman was like when he wasn't signing treaties or running wars; and since the pressure was off in this case to turn in some 400-page tome that could be more easily marketed by a major press, Manos instead delivers a slim volume packed with interesting stories, versus the padded, fluffy mess that so many of these "minor memoirs" turn out to be (although make no mistake, Manos covers a lot of ground in his book, going into detail not just about his years with Truman but also his schooling at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, his time with the Marine Band during the war [the only military band that has played at every Presidential inauguration since the 1700s], his stint as music director for the National Gallery of Art, and all his various gigs around Washington as the '50s turned into the '60s, then the '70s and beyond).
Like I said, it all adds up by the end to a great little read, a nice tight book that will take most people only a single day to get through; as mentioned, it's I think one of the great things about this age of self-publishing, that such a book can exist without too much of a herculean effort, for the admittedly small crowd who will love a chance to read such a book. For anyone interested in this period of history, or in getting a bit of an insider's look at Washington in those years, The President's Pianist comes much recommended.
(CCLaP is dedicated to reviewing as many contemporary books as possible, including self-published volumes; click here to learn how to submit your own book for possible review, although be warned that it needs to have been published within the last 18 months to be considered. For the complete list of all books reviewed here, as well as the next books scheduled to be read, click here.)
Perforated Heart
By Eric Bogosian
Simon & Schuster / ISBN: 978-1-41653-409-9
As regular readers know, I'm a particularly big fan of a type of literary trope I call the "anti-villain," which like it sounds means nearly the opposite of the more well-known term "anti-hero;" that is, instead of the main character being someone who seems fairly despicable at first but who we come to root for more and more, an anti-villain is someone who seems pretty decent at first, but who we come to realize more and more is actually an assh-le. But such a thing begs a big question -- where do anti-villains come from, and what makes them be that way in the first place? That's a fascinating question, because it taps into basic philosophical issues that are universal to us all -- of whether humans are born inherently good or inherently bad, of whether it's our environment that most influences our behavior or our conscious choices, or perhaps something uncontrollable like our DNA. Are charming sociopaths destined from a young age to be charming sociopaths, or is it possible for such a person to recognize these tendencies in themselves, and purposely put a stop to them? And perhaps most importantly to readers of this website, is it that anti-villains are just naturally attracted to the arts, which is why it seems that so many artists are such complete d-ckheads? Or is it something about the arts that focuses and enhances the latent assh-lic tendencies of anyone who gets involved, like a bug being slowly burnt to a crisp under a magnifying glass on a sunny day?
These are all subjects addressed by veteran underground artist Eric Bogosian in his brilliant new novel, Perforated Heart; and he does it in a brilliant way too, by examining one of these anti-villains both at middle-age and in his earnest early twenties simultaneously, looking at where it all went right and where it all went wrong in this particular monster's case. And not only this, but Bogosian filters this story through a brilliant timeframe on top of everything else, a timeframe that has recently been begging for a great story; our particular anti-villain happened to have come of age in the proto-punk scene of lower Manhattan in the late 1970s, the New York of CBGB's and Max's Kansas City, a pre-gentrified Soho and an abandoned, squatter-filled Williamsburg. It's not exactly an autobiographical tale, but rather what Bogosian has called in interviews an "alternate universe" one -- a story where he examines how his own life might have turned out, if only a few important events from his past had transpired differently than they did -- which is the key to the book being so great; because a true anti-villain author wouldn't be able to write a novel like this, despite the main character being an anti-villain author, in that an author that clueless himself wouldn't be able to so gently layer in a whole series of hard realizations like Bogosian does, through the behavior not of the main character but rather all the "normals" surrounding him, wouldn't be able to so smartly get across what makes this sociopath tick without the sociopath himself having even a clue. It's a masterful feat of subtle storytelling, one that could never be pulled off by a writer like this one examining their own actual life, but rather by a writer like Bogosian who applies a laser-precise look at the potentials of an edgy life, a future that could've been but ultimately never was.
Because make no mistake, it's impossible to read Perforated Heart and think of anyone else but Bogosian himself; because for those who don't know, Bogosian actually was one of this wave of "performance artists" who were running around lower Manhattan at the same time as all the punk musicians in the late '70s, people like Karen Finley and Lydia Lunch who were creating back then a kind of "theatre that isn't theatre," the forerunner not only of such modern monologuists as Eve Ensler but such tourist-friendly spectacles as Blue Man Group, not to mention the entire phenomenon known as "slam poetry." Bogosian first made a name for himself by creating a series of on-stage character sketches regarding the people surrounding their group at that time in history -- the prostitutes and junkies of pre-'80s lower Manhattan, that is, the losers and criminals who besides the punks were the only ones to inhabit back then the New York south of Houston -- and it was the growing success of such one-man shows that transitioned Bogosian into a more traditional writing career, artistically culminating (one could argue) with his unforgettable Pulitzer-nominated 1987 play Talk Radio, eventually made into a popular movie starring Bogosian himself. And that led Bogosian into more and more of a mainstream career, and more and more traditional acting roles (you may remember him as the cackling heavy in the dreadful action pic Under Siege 2: Dark Territory); and thus it is that Bogosian is now in his mid-fifties, fairly rich and fairly successful, happily married for decades now, not exactly a household name but certainly a writer who has sold untold thousands of books by now, and whose work is regularly studied and staged worldwide.
So like I said, it's no surprise that in Perforated Heart, our main character Richard Morris has led a nearly identical life, only with a few important differences -- for example, instead of ending up with the legitimately good-for-him failed-painter character Katie (clearly a stand-in for Bogosian's real wife), he coldly dumps her for a crazed, dysfunctional marriage with a Sigourney-Weaver-type famous brainy actress from the period, a terrible relationship that sputters along for years and eventually ends in disaster. And it's this plus other factors I'll let remain a surprise that leads Richard to the place in 2006 where we find him at the beginning of the book -- a dumpy-looking has-been whose glory years are long behind him, angrily pissing on the world from the safety of his upper-class converted farmhouse in rural Connecticut, still constantly in and out of a whole series of empty sexual relationships with good-looking girls in their twenties (only now with them thinking of him as a daddy figure to be "tended to" rather than desired), alienated from nearly every single person who used to be part of his life, reduced to curse-filled rants against the "godd-mned litbloggers who just don't get" his latest forgettable navel-gazing crap, a widely derided book called A Gentle Death which weeks after its release has still only sold a few hundred copies nationwide. And thus it is that in the midst of such a milieu, Richard ends up having emergency heart surgery, which keeps him laid up for weeks in his isolated Martha Stewart fortress with no diversions; and thus it is that on a lark, Richard digs out of the attic all his old journals from his artistic start in New York in the late '70s, entries from which make up every other chapter of the novel you and I are reading about it all.
It's a simple yet effective framing device, and Bogosian makes great use of it here; because as we read more and more of the novel, it comes to appear that "Twenties Richard" and "Fifties Richard" are in fact two completely different people, and one of the main pleasures of the book is in examining both the told and untold history that makes these two personas seem so fractured in the first place. That seems to be one of Bogosian's main points, in fact, that the actual behavior of Richard doesn't actually change that much from his twenties to his fifties, but rather the way that the people around him react to this behavior; because let's face it, the young Richard as portrayed in this novel is actually quite a charmer, despite being just as clueless and dicklike as he is later in life, because in his youth these things are balanced by his optimism and naivety about the world, his eagerness to embrace life as fully as he can. As anyone's who's spent time with a dicklike 25-year-old artist (or has actually been a dicklike 25-year-old artist) can tell you, it's these very traits that can many times make these people irresistible, these traits that help such artists become big successes in the first place; because when such traits are tempered by youth and humor and good looks, such arrogance and narcissism can often come across as smart and sexy, and is often what attracts that artist's first big audience to begin with (along with that artist's first set of lovers, first set of patrons, etc).
But as any middle-ager can tell you, this rosy optimism of youth never lasts; as our thirties progress into our forties and then fifties, we experience the kind of truly traumatic pain we can only guess at in our twenties, divorces and deaths and profound betrayals, a growing complexity over our understanding of the world and the evil that exists within it, and what a true miracle it is that we humans have anything even approaching a "civilized society" in the first place. And as Bogosian so wonderfully shows us through the fates of all the other characters in the book (who Richard ends up hunting down one by one as the manuscript continues), most grown-ups learn how to successfully enfold this kind of darkness into their adult day-to-day lives, learn how to balance the failed dreams and crushed optimism of youth with the kinds of deeper, more profound, more satisfying successes that come with age and maturity -- children, love, a better understanding of what makes them truly happy, a better understanding of what they were truly meant to do with their life (just to cite one excellent example, how the aforementioned failed painter Katie ends up by her own fifties becoming not only a happy wife and mom but an award-winning "outdoor lighting sculptor," now hired on a regular basis for such high-profile commissions as corporate headquarters and sports stadiums).
It's not so much that we change our fundamental personality as we get older, Bogosian seems to be arguing, but rather that most of us learn to understand it better, learn to channel its real-world manifestations more and more into activities that are ultimately good for us, learn to drop more and more of the things that we come to understand are bad for us. And this is the ultimate curse that Richard is saddled with, a fatal combination of two very basic problems -- of never coming to these understandings himself, combined with the riches and fame he received as a youth precisely for this infant-terrible behavior. Since he never bothered creating long-lasting friendships or a more meaningful life when younger, he now has nothing to fall back on in his fifties besides his usual misogynistic six-week relationships and abyss-teetering self-absorption; and since it was these precise things that used to net him bestselling novels and Oscar-winning girlfriends, he now has the perfect justification for continuing this behavior ("This is what an artist does; an artist is supposed to be an uncomfortably truthful agent of chaos"), and to easily avoid even the tiniest bit of honest self-reflection over what a trainwreck his life has actually become. And in the meanwhile, as mentioned, no analysis of Perforated Heart is complete without a look at the pitch-perfect, instantly nostalgic setting Bogosian uses for these youthful reminisces; because the fact is that Bogosian utterly transports us here to punk-era New York within these old journal entries (apparently based on his actual journals from this period, again according to interviews he's given), and utterly makes us understand why all these formerly suburban white kids would want to hang out in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of '70s lower Manhattan in the first place, amidst all the pimps and pushers and post-traumatic Vietnam vets that used to populate the area.
Ultimately I can give this novel no higher a compliment than this: that reading it made me understand my own life better, and helped me come to a resolution regarding elements of my own past as a former assh-lic artist who has paid a certain price for that in middle age. This is the entire point of professional storytelling, after all, is to help us as readers understand the world a little better than we did before, to help us navigate the infinitely complex thing we call a human life; and anytime an artist can do this successfully, especially in the nuanced way Bogosian does here, that's another reason to celebrate. It's not what Richard himself says in Perforated Heart that makes the book so revelatory, but rather what all the people around him say, and more importantly what they often don't say, a hard thing for a writer to pull off without making the main character under examination seem either too clueless or too falsely self-aware; it's what makes this novel in my opinion the first true masterpiece of Bogosian's career*, even more noteworthy when you consider that he already has a handful of bestsellers and a Pulitzer nomination under his belt, and is now at an age when most artists start either coasting on their laurels or retiring from new work altogether. It's one of the best strictly character-oriented dramas I've read in years, and it comes today highly recommended to all parts of CCLaP's audience, whether or not you're a middle-aged sociopathic assh-le yourself.
*And to make it clear, I've been a close follower of Bogosian's career since the '80s myself, and have read nearly everything he's ever written (including, yes, his notoriously awful middle-aged-crisis play subUrbia, itself made into a notorious Hollywood flop), which is why I'm comfortable judging this particular title against the rest of his ouevre. In fact, it was such "performance artists" of the '80s that mainly inspired me to get involved with the arts myself, as an undergraduate in Missouri in those same years; and it was the fact that they all used to perform at the infamous "Club Lower Links" in Chicago back then that helped convince me to move here myself in the early '90s, and to get involved with the poetry slam back then too. Ah, Sweet Dumb Youth, how I adore your glorious stench when sniffed from a safe distance!
![[RSS]](http://www.cclapcenter.com/archives/rss.jpg)
Subscribe via RSS feed
