I am not a big one for biography. I'd rather experience the work of the person in question first hand. Picasso? I don't need to see Anthony Hopkins ramble around in a striped shirt. I'll just look at Guernica again, thank you very much.
Occasionally though, I meet up with exceptions. 'Heavier Than Heaven' is a heartbreaking book that doesn't ride on the sad coattails of its subject. It perfectly articulates a certain subset of modern American society, one that had been ignored and excoriated for years before Cobain broke that particular glass ceiling with 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.
The punk.
Now, music and pop culture have exploded with such ferocity and variety that it is hard to remember how limited and limiting categories were in the very recent past. It is as if a sort of Big Bang happened in the '70's and we are now witnessing the impossible velocity of a universe in the throes of expansion. You half blink your eye and you've missed an entire galaxy.
But in the '80's? Thing were still crawling along, or seemed to be. And a little unhappy boy in the Northwest seemed to have known all along that he would provide the spark necessary to speed it all up. If this book is to be believed this goal was present all along. As was the plan to exit stage left immediately upon achieving it.
For anyone who wishes to delve into the mind and psyche behind such a convulsive figure, this book is the place to do it. Cross painstakingly recreates the atmosphere that Cobain encountered and his reaction to it. But he does so in a way that is much like the split second before a car crash. You know the impact is coming and you are powerless to stop it. You know it is going to be bad and you are powerless to stop it. You are afraid but strangely exhilarated and you are powerless to stop it. He saw what was coming for him years before anyone else did and he was powerless to stop it.
Fascinating stuff.
For me it was like stepping through a door into my teen years. In many ways he and I were quite similar. Bought the same bands, traveled in the same small fanatic circles who wore their outsider status like military decoration. We pitied those who had plugged into the status-quo for their music, much like you'd pity some poor fat kid whose dumb-ass mom keeps buying him Cocoa Puffs and Pop Tarts. Yes, you blame the mom too but at some point that kid needs to take control of his own body. We had already done that.
Kurt Cobain had too. By the time he was 11 years old he was fully immersed in counter culture aesthetic. He was an outlaw in his own home. He compensated for this by dreaming grandiose dreams and he knew he had the talent to pull them off. This odd juxtaposition ate at him his whole life...how can you be counterculture when you know your talent is so monstrous as to destroy those boundaries and create a new mainstream? I know this sounds a bit over-dramatic but these are really the questions he wrestled with.
And Cross plunges us right into the middle of it and makes us feel as if it is happening to us. He makes us want to chuck it all and disappear. He makes us see no other way out. He oppresses us with these arcane strident categories connected to the underground music world until we feel as trapped by them as Cobain surely did.
He makes it hard to breathe. What is heavier than heaven? Just about everything.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Book 8: Summerland by Michael Chabon
You are Michael Chabon.
You've just published a Pulitzer Prize winning novel that deals with the Holocaust, the transformation of American culture in response to rapidly shifting entertainment availability, and the personal side of coming to terms with homosexuality in the face of denial and open hostility to that reality.
What next? An examination of immigration and how it is shaping worker's rights? A searing look at the effects of modern warfare on fragile psyches? An inside look at the corrupt trappings of a political campaign?
Well, no. If you are Michael Chabon you will write a 500 page novel for young adults in which the main character must play baseball alongside a race of fairies in order to keep a mythical evil force named Coyote from destroying the Lodgepole, a giant tree that encompasses four different worlds or planes of existence.
Whew. Did you get all that? When it came out it was originally placed on the adult fiction shelves in Barnes & Noble. I know because that is where I bought it from and read it in a fever. Being a baseball fan and father of a young boy I flipped my wig for this book. Shortly thereafter someone in the Chabon marketing department must have said, "Hey, guys, this isn't really a book for adults. We gotta get that thing in the kid section!"
Sure enough it was as if the book had a re-release party. There it was in the kid section. My son read it at a very young age and I'm still sort of blown away that he did so. But it is that kind of story, the kind of story that will inspire a kid (who isn't even a baseball fan when you get right down to it) to stretch his intellectual capability in order to get to the end of the story.
I can't be sure but I would bet a significant portion of my life savings (i.e. close to $200) that this novel started as a bedtime story in the Chabon house. It has that sprawling anything-goes feel of the many stories I invented off the top of my head for Cash. For example, I was dragging a story out to try and get Cash to fall asleep. In the story a kid and his dog were walking through the forest. I knew they were going to have an adventure but I wasn't sure what. All of a sudden they'd shrunk down and were sliding down into a flower.
The book is like that. Giant impossible realities are introduced and accepted without so much as a shrug. After the relentless awesome reality of 'Kavalier & Clay' this book was a pleasant absurdist shock to the system.
Since this book, Chabon has seemed to delight in taking on genres and infusing them with his own sensibility. It is almost commonplace now, a bit of a crutch within his own oeuvre. I know some day he'll drop a collection of words that are as weighty and far-reaching as 'Kavalier & Clay' but in the meantime his experiments are a boatload of fun.
Except for 'Gentlemen of the Road'. Holy shit, if I were in 'Summerland' I'd let Coyote destroy the world of that book in a heartbeat! What a stinker. But that is the joy of a writer like Chabon. He goes as far out on a limb of the Lodgepole as he can.
You've just published a Pulitzer Prize winning novel that deals with the Holocaust, the transformation of American culture in response to rapidly shifting entertainment availability, and the personal side of coming to terms with homosexuality in the face of denial and open hostility to that reality.
What next? An examination of immigration and how it is shaping worker's rights? A searing look at the effects of modern warfare on fragile psyches? An inside look at the corrupt trappings of a political campaign?
Well, no. If you are Michael Chabon you will write a 500 page novel for young adults in which the main character must play baseball alongside a race of fairies in order to keep a mythical evil force named Coyote from destroying the Lodgepole, a giant tree that encompasses four different worlds or planes of existence.
Whew. Did you get all that? When it came out it was originally placed on the adult fiction shelves in Barnes & Noble. I know because that is where I bought it from and read it in a fever. Being a baseball fan and father of a young boy I flipped my wig for this book. Shortly thereafter someone in the Chabon marketing department must have said, "Hey, guys, this isn't really a book for adults. We gotta get that thing in the kid section!"
Sure enough it was as if the book had a re-release party. There it was in the kid section. My son read it at a very young age and I'm still sort of blown away that he did so. But it is that kind of story, the kind of story that will inspire a kid (who isn't even a baseball fan when you get right down to it) to stretch his intellectual capability in order to get to the end of the story.
I can't be sure but I would bet a significant portion of my life savings (i.e. close to $200) that this novel started as a bedtime story in the Chabon house. It has that sprawling anything-goes feel of the many stories I invented off the top of my head for Cash. For example, I was dragging a story out to try and get Cash to fall asleep. In the story a kid and his dog were walking through the forest. I knew they were going to have an adventure but I wasn't sure what. All of a sudden they'd shrunk down and were sliding down into a flower.
The book is like that. Giant impossible realities are introduced and accepted without so much as a shrug. After the relentless awesome reality of 'Kavalier & Clay' this book was a pleasant absurdist shock to the system.
Since this book, Chabon has seemed to delight in taking on genres and infusing them with his own sensibility. It is almost commonplace now, a bit of a crutch within his own oeuvre. I know some day he'll drop a collection of words that are as weighty and far-reaching as 'Kavalier & Clay' but in the meantime his experiments are a boatload of fun.
Except for 'Gentlemen of the Road'. Holy shit, if I were in 'Summerland' I'd let Coyote destroy the world of that book in a heartbeat! What a stinker. But that is the joy of a writer like Chabon. He goes as far out on a limb of the Lodgepole as he can.
Friday, January 15, 2010
Book 9: It by Stephen King
Everyone romanticizes childhood but when you cut through all the bullshit being a kid is terrifying. Imagine having the realities of childhood imposed on you as an adult:
1. You do not control your environment.
2. You do not have any say in where you live.
3. You are surrounded by beings that are much larger and stronger than you.
4. For years you are bombarded with images of a world you CANNOT name.
5. You cannot control your own bodily functions.
6. You spend the first few years of your life having sentient thought without being able to express it in any comprehensible way, as if you were in a living coma.
7. You would be defenseless without your caretakers who can mistreat you and you can do nothing about it.
Need I go on? Even those of us lucky enough to have had a relatively unscathed childhood (and I count myself a member of that small crowd) there is a patina of terror that envelops most of what I remember as a child. You are in a situation that you do not understand. By situation I mean life.
Stephen King is not a great writer. I rarely note the language he uses (i.e. 'What a sentence!' or 'What an image!'). But the cumulative effect of the narratives that he calls into being is stupendous.
'It' is, for me, a treatise on what we go through as children. I cannot pretend to know what it is like to be truly in peril as a child. I had loving parents, great siblings, an extended family that was ever-present and fun on both mother and father sides. And still...
I respond to the situations that Stephen King creates in this book as if I had some deep dark secret never told, ever unfolding. The novel tells two dueling narratives involving the same set of characters as children and years later reconvened as grown-ups. They faced an unspeakable evil as children and have gathered to finish the job.
The irony is that they have all each forgotten much of what happened. In order to triumph they must willingly go back into that trauma and come to terms with it. Put as baldly as that it is an obvious metaphor for dealing with the past and its effects. Woven into the context here it takes on epic proportion as these people face not only their own internal demons but actual external ones as well.
I was brought to tears again and again as he articulated these personal trips his fictional counterparts were on. The double power of the narrative is such that we see these kids bravely facing something that will haunt them for years to come.
When I look at pictures of my son as a little boy I am struck by how open he is, how vulnerable. And how much strength there is in such vulnerability. We shed this openness, through design I think. There just wouldn't be any way to survive if you took the full brunt of input that you could handle as a toddler.
And I ache for him, knowing that some day he will have to look at those pictures and wonder what the hell happened and how it all went wrong.
But King leaves us with the knowledge that doing so can chase dark dreams from our nights, that finding the bravery to confront the scary moments of childhood inevitable leads to a powerful clean present moment.
It.
1. You do not control your environment.
2. You do not have any say in where you live.
3. You are surrounded by beings that are much larger and stronger than you.
4. For years you are bombarded with images of a world you CANNOT name.
5. You cannot control your own bodily functions.
6. You spend the first few years of your life having sentient thought without being able to express it in any comprehensible way, as if you were in a living coma.
7. You would be defenseless without your caretakers who can mistreat you and you can do nothing about it.
Need I go on? Even those of us lucky enough to have had a relatively unscathed childhood (and I count myself a member of that small crowd) there is a patina of terror that envelops most of what I remember as a child. You are in a situation that you do not understand. By situation I mean life.
Stephen King is not a great writer. I rarely note the language he uses (i.e. 'What a sentence!' or 'What an image!'). But the cumulative effect of the narratives that he calls into being is stupendous.
'It' is, for me, a treatise on what we go through as children. I cannot pretend to know what it is like to be truly in peril as a child. I had loving parents, great siblings, an extended family that was ever-present and fun on both mother and father sides. And still...
I respond to the situations that Stephen King creates in this book as if I had some deep dark secret never told, ever unfolding. The novel tells two dueling narratives involving the same set of characters as children and years later reconvened as grown-ups. They faced an unspeakable evil as children and have gathered to finish the job.
The irony is that they have all each forgotten much of what happened. In order to triumph they must willingly go back into that trauma and come to terms with it. Put as baldly as that it is an obvious metaphor for dealing with the past and its effects. Woven into the context here it takes on epic proportion as these people face not only their own internal demons but actual external ones as well.
I was brought to tears again and again as he articulated these personal trips his fictional counterparts were on. The double power of the narrative is such that we see these kids bravely facing something that will haunt them for years to come.
When I look at pictures of my son as a little boy I am struck by how open he is, how vulnerable. And how much strength there is in such vulnerability. We shed this openness, through design I think. There just wouldn't be any way to survive if you took the full brunt of input that you could handle as a toddler.
And I ache for him, knowing that some day he will have to look at those pictures and wonder what the hell happened and how it all went wrong.
But King leaves us with the knowledge that doing so can chase dark dreams from our nights, that finding the bravery to confront the scary moments of childhood inevitable leads to a powerful clean present moment.
It.
Book 10: I Was A Teenage Dwarf by Max Schulman
I am not sure how this book came under the O'Malley family radar, most likely either my mother or father had read it as teenagers. Looking back, the book rests like a banana peel right outside of a swinging door from a busy kitchen in an overstuffed restaurant. Nothing might be happening right now but hilarity is about to ensue.
Both my older sister and I devoured this book on family road trips, roaring with laughter as Dobie Gillis dates one disaster after another, pledging life-long love in spite of incompatibility of the intellectual, spiritual and moral variety. He starts by saying things like, "Okay, so the next girl I date will not lie. I don't care if she has eight moles on her nose she has got to be truthful."
Of course, minutes later he is buying ice cream sodas for some beauty who is most likely lying about her name.
A half mile up a gorgeous tree lined road from our house sits a used bookstore. It used to be a Variety Store. Looking back on it it seems to be rather sketchy, a convenience store run out of an old Colonial house first floor showroom. The floors were scuffed wood and they seemed to be turning to cinder underfoot. They sold what we called 'penny candy' and odd assorted knick knacks.
My grandfather used to pile all thirty seven grand kids into the biggest car brought to the family reunion. He would then drive us up to the Kingston Hill Store to each buy a small bag of 'penny candy'. He was one of those men who is funny by being deliberately un-funny. He would wear goofy hats. He said, 'Kenny-pandy' instead of 'penny candy'. His face in photographs seems to be in a perpetual imp grin. Grampa.
I'm not sure when but the Kingston Hill Store eventually was transformed into a Used Book Store, which considering the tendencies of my family is somewhat akin to putting a poppy field next to a family of opium fiends. The ancient penny candy tradition immediately transformed into long walks down the Indian Summer tunnel of red gold yellow brown tree leaves culminating in orgies of $3 book buys.
On one of these trips I found 'The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis'. I laughed out loud when I saw it. Upon re-reading it, I was surprised at how well the humor has held up in spite of it being published in 1959.
It makes you blush on reading it, thinking of how absurd you've been in your life in the face of attraction. The lengths you'll go to as a teenager to get the attention of a crush and then how quickly your feelings flip to the opposite spectrum.
Through the vagaries of memory and real-estate turnover, this book is now associated with a store that used hold 'Kenny Pandy', a store that sat halfway between my house and the University of Rhode Island library on a street my father walked every day to work. I'd turn down South Road in the car and there he'd be, arms swinging slightly, hands curved, and sometimes he'd accept a ride. Others he wanted to enjoy that tunnel of trees.
Both my older sister and I devoured this book on family road trips, roaring with laughter as Dobie Gillis dates one disaster after another, pledging life-long love in spite of incompatibility of the intellectual, spiritual and moral variety. He starts by saying things like, "Okay, so the next girl I date will not lie. I don't care if she has eight moles on her nose she has got to be truthful."
Of course, minutes later he is buying ice cream sodas for some beauty who is most likely lying about her name.
A half mile up a gorgeous tree lined road from our house sits a used bookstore. It used to be a Variety Store. Looking back on it it seems to be rather sketchy, a convenience store run out of an old Colonial house first floor showroom. The floors were scuffed wood and they seemed to be turning to cinder underfoot. They sold what we called 'penny candy' and odd assorted knick knacks.
My grandfather used to pile all thirty seven grand kids into the biggest car brought to the family reunion. He would then drive us up to the Kingston Hill Store to each buy a small bag of 'penny candy'. He was one of those men who is funny by being deliberately un-funny. He would wear goofy hats. He said, 'Kenny-pandy' instead of 'penny candy'. His face in photographs seems to be in a perpetual imp grin. Grampa.
I'm not sure when but the Kingston Hill Store eventually was transformed into a Used Book Store, which considering the tendencies of my family is somewhat akin to putting a poppy field next to a family of opium fiends. The ancient penny candy tradition immediately transformed into long walks down the Indian Summer tunnel of red gold yellow brown tree leaves culminating in orgies of $3 book buys.
On one of these trips I found 'The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis'. I laughed out loud when I saw it. Upon re-reading it, I was surprised at how well the humor has held up in spite of it being published in 1959.
It makes you blush on reading it, thinking of how absurd you've been in your life in the face of attraction. The lengths you'll go to as a teenager to get the attention of a crush and then how quickly your feelings flip to the opposite spectrum.
Through the vagaries of memory and real-estate turnover, this book is now associated with a store that used hold 'Kenny Pandy', a store that sat halfway between my house and the University of Rhode Island library on a street my father walked every day to work. I'd turn down South Road in the car and there he'd be, arms swinging slightly, hands curved, and sometimes he'd accept a ride. Others he wanted to enjoy that tunnel of trees.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Book 11: Crime And Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
When I read this book every breath I took was suffused with guilt. Nothing could be free from the taint of corruption. And the corruption came from within, not the other way around. The idea that I could exist outside of that stain was as preposterous as time travel.
Raskolnikov. Just the name produces an interior shudder in me, a throb of recognizance, a sob of regret. Now my sin was not on the order of murder in cold blood as the protagonist of this massive treatise of human psychology has committed. No. But just that small slice I visited upon myself was enough to make me wish that I HAD done something irrevocable. If it was going to hurt this bad without it why not go through the crucible and sin all the way?
How easily we court our own undoing. How much more effort it takes to avoid sin. How attractive is the slippery slope of wrongdoing because once you allow for the possibility that you are capable of such things everything starts to feel EASY.
I've dreamed of killing vagrants, of Leopold and Loeb-ing myself into some heightened state of reality, one in which human life is just another grain of sand slipping through the curved glass of time. I've felt the pull of violence both against myself and others.
Dostoevsky must have understood this pull and so sends Raskolnikov through that circle of fire. In some reviews I don't mind giving away plot points because that isn't really what this blog is about but in this case there is no way to discuss the trajectory the character is on without giving away vast areas of story.
Suffice it to say that the book follows his brain as it attempts to deal with the magnitude of taking a life. Of stopping another heart.
My connection to that comes from the romantic version of that act. I sat my first college girlfriend down and stopped her heart. I will never forget her face and I wished immediately that I could take it back, that I could undo what I'd done, that I could start her heart again. Would my whole life have changed had I done that? A different marriage? No son named Cashel? Probably not, I don't take things that far. But perhaps I'd have trusted myself more along the way, felt more in control of my own life.
As it was, the guilt I talked of ate away at me like an acid for the better part of fifteen years. I had my own Siberia to go to.
Raskolnikov. Just the name produces an interior shudder in me, a throb of recognizance, a sob of regret. Now my sin was not on the order of murder in cold blood as the protagonist of this massive treatise of human psychology has committed. No. But just that small slice I visited upon myself was enough to make me wish that I HAD done something irrevocable. If it was going to hurt this bad without it why not go through the crucible and sin all the way?
How easily we court our own undoing. How much more effort it takes to avoid sin. How attractive is the slippery slope of wrongdoing because once you allow for the possibility that you are capable of such things everything starts to feel EASY.
I've dreamed of killing vagrants, of Leopold and Loeb-ing myself into some heightened state of reality, one in which human life is just another grain of sand slipping through the curved glass of time. I've felt the pull of violence both against myself and others.
Dostoevsky must have understood this pull and so sends Raskolnikov through that circle of fire. In some reviews I don't mind giving away plot points because that isn't really what this blog is about but in this case there is no way to discuss the trajectory the character is on without giving away vast areas of story.
Suffice it to say that the book follows his brain as it attempts to deal with the magnitude of taking a life. Of stopping another heart.
My connection to that comes from the romantic version of that act. I sat my first college girlfriend down and stopped her heart. I will never forget her face and I wished immediately that I could take it back, that I could undo what I'd done, that I could start her heart again. Would my whole life have changed had I done that? A different marriage? No son named Cashel? Probably not, I don't take things that far. But perhaps I'd have trusted myself more along the way, felt more in control of my own life.
As it was, the guilt I talked of ate away at me like an acid for the better part of fifteen years. I had my own Siberia to go to.
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Book 12: London Fields by Martin Amis
When paranoia shows up in your morning cup of coffee it might be time to reclassify it as precognition. And if each cigarette that you light delights you because it is a clear cut way to taste death, why shouldn't you wash it down with a pint of something strong?
Nicola Six is planning a murder. Her own. No, not a suicide. A murder. Who will do it? The family man or the darts thug? Our narrator, an American writer dying of some sort of cancer, is trying to find out. Or so he thinks.
Every tiny plot line in Martin Amis' masterpiece 'London Fields' is like some horror film version of those Russian dolls, each smaller doll contained in a slightly larger replica of itself, only these get bigger with each reveal instead of smaller and from the hollow body that seems so beautiful comes a disquieting sound, as if claws scratched, straining for escape, so that what started out as a sweet little plaything is now some monstrous prisoner.
The city of London is a character as well, the poisoned well all the characters must drink from, breathe in, move through.
The nihilism inherent in inciting someone else to murder you might seem like an impossible conceit, something intellectual to hang a plot on. But why should that be so? The scope of human trickery is so vast; why couldn't it contain such a dark conclusion?
It is difficult to admit the extremes of humanity. To truly appreciate a Mother Theresa one must also leave room for Pol Pot, Hitler, Dahmer. And if a Dahmer exists, is it so impossible to believe that some sad soul out there is searching for him, seeking out what they perceive to be their fate, hoping against hope that some day they will find themselves in his clutches?
'London Fields' forces us to a mirror, head twisting, neck straining, desperately wishing that we could UNSEE all we have seen. Can we trust ourselves in love when we have so often hurt each other? I am a member of a race that has systematically slaughtered itself with each ironic technological advance. Electricity? Aren't we geniuses? Let's kill someone with it.
This is who we are. We love. We kill. But who? Who will we love? Who will we kill?
Who will love US? And who will kill? Who?
Like I said at the top, what seems like paranoia is more like prophecy. Now pour me a cup of joe and light my smoke.
Nicola Six is planning a murder. Her own. No, not a suicide. A murder. Who will do it? The family man or the darts thug? Our narrator, an American writer dying of some sort of cancer, is trying to find out. Or so he thinks.
Every tiny plot line in Martin Amis' masterpiece 'London Fields' is like some horror film version of those Russian dolls, each smaller doll contained in a slightly larger replica of itself, only these get bigger with each reveal instead of smaller and from the hollow body that seems so beautiful comes a disquieting sound, as if claws scratched, straining for escape, so that what started out as a sweet little plaything is now some monstrous prisoner.
The city of London is a character as well, the poisoned well all the characters must drink from, breathe in, move through.
The nihilism inherent in inciting someone else to murder you might seem like an impossible conceit, something intellectual to hang a plot on. But why should that be so? The scope of human trickery is so vast; why couldn't it contain such a dark conclusion?
It is difficult to admit the extremes of humanity. To truly appreciate a Mother Theresa one must also leave room for Pol Pot, Hitler, Dahmer. And if a Dahmer exists, is it so impossible to believe that some sad soul out there is searching for him, seeking out what they perceive to be their fate, hoping against hope that some day they will find themselves in his clutches?
'London Fields' forces us to a mirror, head twisting, neck straining, desperately wishing that we could UNSEE all we have seen. Can we trust ourselves in love when we have so often hurt each other? I am a member of a race that has systematically slaughtered itself with each ironic technological advance. Electricity? Aren't we geniuses? Let's kill someone with it.
This is who we are. We love. We kill. But who? Who will we love? Who will we kill?
Who will love US? And who will kill? Who?
Like I said at the top, what seems like paranoia is more like prophecy. Now pour me a cup of joe and light my smoke.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Book 13: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Depression goes on and off inside of me with a thud, as if some giant switch had been inadvertently thrown, as if I'd stepped through a waterfall of crude oil, leaving me coated in foreign harm, appreciably heavier than the moment before.
When this happens beware. You will not measure up to my standards. Your choices will be indefensible. I will have no patience with you. I will make you wrong.
Only later will I be able to see how much of this is projection, how you merely camouflaged the mirror I was trying to grapple with, how you stood in for my reflection. Only later will I be able to judge fairly. Only later will I be sorry.
Once that switch goes off I revert to some animal state, truly dangerous because it actually uses intelligence and cunning, not brute force. Oh, I'll resort to brute force if I have to but I'll first use what seems to be logic against you. You'll wonder what happened. How such a nice guy could shift so totally, so swiftly.
I'll apologize once I've got my wits about me again. But I'm not sure the damage can be undone. Would you trust a rabid dog that had finally taken its medicine?
Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a depressing book. I've read many of her other books and at one point liked her enough to buy new books as she published them. This has fallen by the wayside. This was the first book of hers I'd read.
It had been assigned as part of my course load for a class I was taking within my English major at URI.
My sense of apocalypse hadn't been finely tuned yet, resting in angry teen punk rock anthems raging against corporations, which mostly meant they'd been hassled by the local convenience store owner who didn't want them skateboarding in the parking lot. So when Margaret Atwood walloped me with a United States of America in which women were systematically denied their rights, citizenship and even basic identity outside of their reproductive capability, I was taken completely by surprise.
I remember being keenly unsettled by this book. It scared me. I hadn't read or witnessed much propaganda preaching against the modern political machine so I was really quite taken aback. The world isn't fair? Things don't work out? There is no man behind the curtain? Malevolence is the main force behind our world?
Now these things seem old hat to me. Last night for some reason my internal switch was thrown and I walked through that sheet of oil. I can't breathe. I have no articulation. Nothing is fair.
What is truly disturbing is that there is no opposite process, no psychic facility where I can go to get a good scrub, no mental spa designed to lighten my load and recharge my batteries. Or, maybe there is and I'm just too depressed to find it.
The only slight difference these days is that I can now HEAR the thud of the switch being thrown, I acutely FEEL the scum of the oil that sheaths me. Which may be the headlight of a train but at least it is a light in my tunnel.
When this happens beware. You will not measure up to my standards. Your choices will be indefensible. I will have no patience with you. I will make you wrong.
Only later will I be able to see how much of this is projection, how you merely camouflaged the mirror I was trying to grapple with, how you stood in for my reflection. Only later will I be able to judge fairly. Only later will I be sorry.
Once that switch goes off I revert to some animal state, truly dangerous because it actually uses intelligence and cunning, not brute force. Oh, I'll resort to brute force if I have to but I'll first use what seems to be logic against you. You'll wonder what happened. How such a nice guy could shift so totally, so swiftly.
I'll apologize once I've got my wits about me again. But I'm not sure the damage can be undone. Would you trust a rabid dog that had finally taken its medicine?
Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale' is a depressing book. I've read many of her other books and at one point liked her enough to buy new books as she published them. This has fallen by the wayside. This was the first book of hers I'd read.
It had been assigned as part of my course load for a class I was taking within my English major at URI.
My sense of apocalypse hadn't been finely tuned yet, resting in angry teen punk rock anthems raging against corporations, which mostly meant they'd been hassled by the local convenience store owner who didn't want them skateboarding in the parking lot. So when Margaret Atwood walloped me with a United States of America in which women were systematically denied their rights, citizenship and even basic identity outside of their reproductive capability, I was taken completely by surprise.
I remember being keenly unsettled by this book. It scared me. I hadn't read or witnessed much propaganda preaching against the modern political machine so I was really quite taken aback. The world isn't fair? Things don't work out? There is no man behind the curtain? Malevolence is the main force behind our world?
Now these things seem old hat to me. Last night for some reason my internal switch was thrown and I walked through that sheet of oil. I can't breathe. I have no articulation. Nothing is fair.
What is truly disturbing is that there is no opposite process, no psychic facility where I can go to get a good scrub, no mental spa designed to lighten my load and recharge my batteries. Or, maybe there is and I'm just too depressed to find it.
The only slight difference these days is that I can now HEAR the thud of the switch being thrown, I acutely FEEL the scum of the oil that sheaths me. Which may be the headlight of a train but at least it is a light in my tunnel.
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
Book 14: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
The 920 bus disintegrated into billions of bus-like particles just past Fairfax and then, after a brief passage through unrecorded space and time, reconfigured further west along the Wilshire corridor, say somewhere between the Federal building and the cemetery down by the 405. But my iPod had been churning out a killer stream of random tunes, the book in my lap was the latest by a genius recluse, my coffee was still hot and, contrary to pattern, none of my surrounding bus comrades smelled bad enough to distract me.
Had I been sufficiently bored by 'Inherent Vice', had the iPod played something I was embarrassed by instead of enthralled with, had the lady with the Mickey Mouse brooch and the seven Ralph's bags filled with what look like beef jerky smelled just that much worse, I might have lifted my head from the page and sensed a low buzz, a slight smell of burnt chrome, a shimmer of refracted light...maybe the buildings in Beverly Hills would have blurred just enough to clue me in that my bus, my reliable public transport, was defying all known space/time behavior. Not to mention skipping a couple of stops.
One cannot rue what one does not know one has missed. If Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking had been there they'd have been jumping for joy despite being dead and wheelchair bound respectively but they were not. So their reaction, while fabricated and impossible, was identical to mine, i.e. they had none.
Down there on my lap the pages flipped and turned. Vicarious dope was smoked, legs ogled, punches thrown and taken, sunsets rose, dawns fell, and a general sense of stupefied malaise seemed to emerge from the early 1970's decor. It all seemed so quaint and innocent compared with where we'd wind up, with these keystrokes bringing you chosen few this strange review of this strange book on this strange medium.
In that stretch of time that I did not know I'd lost, perhaps one tiny bus molecule did not make it through the worm hole. And that one bus molecule contained the whole bus, every bit of every passenger, so that somewhere in the ether, somewhere in the world that surely exists between this world and whatever other conjectural entity stands for the adjoining unknown, somewhere over there I am ignoring another fantastic universe while reading 'Inherent Vice' and crying slightly when Eminem cleans out his closet.
Had I been sufficiently bored by 'Inherent Vice', had the iPod played something I was embarrassed by instead of enthralled with, had the lady with the Mickey Mouse brooch and the seven Ralph's bags filled with what look like beef jerky smelled just that much worse, I might have lifted my head from the page and sensed a low buzz, a slight smell of burnt chrome, a shimmer of refracted light...maybe the buildings in Beverly Hills would have blurred just enough to clue me in that my bus, my reliable public transport, was defying all known space/time behavior. Not to mention skipping a couple of stops.
One cannot rue what one does not know one has missed. If Carl Sagan or Stephen Hawking had been there they'd have been jumping for joy despite being dead and wheelchair bound respectively but they were not. So their reaction, while fabricated and impossible, was identical to mine, i.e. they had none.
Down there on my lap the pages flipped and turned. Vicarious dope was smoked, legs ogled, punches thrown and taken, sunsets rose, dawns fell, and a general sense of stupefied malaise seemed to emerge from the early 1970's decor. It all seemed so quaint and innocent compared with where we'd wind up, with these keystrokes bringing you chosen few this strange review of this strange book on this strange medium.
In that stretch of time that I did not know I'd lost, perhaps one tiny bus molecule did not make it through the worm hole. And that one bus molecule contained the whole bus, every bit of every passenger, so that somewhere in the ether, somewhere in the world that surely exists between this world and whatever other conjectural entity stands for the adjoining unknown, somewhere over there I am ignoring another fantastic universe while reading 'Inherent Vice' and crying slightly when Eminem cleans out his closet.
Monday, January 4, 2010
Book 15: The Quiet American by Graham Greene
Up til now I've tended to use these books as lynch-pins upon which I can hang hazy memories, nostalgic wax and poetic licenses. But this book I read over the holidays.
A rough holiday for me in many ways, a great one in many others. Because I am broker than a broke piece of broken brokenness, I was confined to the West Coast this year. This meant that I would not be able to spend the first anniversary of my father's death with my family in Rhode Island. This meant that my lovely girlfriend went to Paris without me and I'm the one who speaks French, merde. (Just to clarify, I was happy she got the opportunity to go, happy she went, I just wanted to go with her.)
The silver lining? Two weeks hanging out with Cashel all by myself. We saw in successive order 'Fantastic Mr. Fox', 'Avatar', and 'Sherlock Holmes', each amazing in specific different ways. We lounged around. He got a Wii for Christmas from his mom so he jumped around the room while I read 'The Quiet American'. Which I then took with us to Vegas.
Yes, I took my 12 year old to Vegas. We rolled into town at about noon and hit GameWorks, the giant arcade. We bought all day passes and then proceeded to drive, ski, bomb, fly, shoot, die, swim, kill, maim and Ms. Pac-man for the next four hours.
We wandered out at dusk bleary eyed and dazed. I was starting to get quite sick by this point. Cash said, "I think I need to go lie down at the hotel for a little while."
So we strolled back over to Luxor the giant pyramid of glass where we had rented a room. We ordered room service so we wouldn't have to walk anywhere or smell the smoke in the restaurants contained in the hotel. And then we watched the new 'Star Trek' movie.
Which, by the way, I loved.
The next morning I doubted I'd be able to make it out of the hotel I was so sick. But the whole purpose of going to Vegas was to make the small drive out to see the Hoover Dam. My ears hurt, my throat burned, I was coughing and sneezing and my head ached. Cash, ever the class act, said it would be okay if we just went home.
But after I'd choked down a Starbucks and a couple of cough drops we set out down I-93 to Boulder, NV. I am very glad we did. Because I have never seen anything quite like the Hoover Dam. The fact that we built that thing in 1930, the fact that the cement is still warm and will still be settling for years to come, the fact that the tunnels are art deco for chrissakes...it all adds up to quite an emotional experience.
I was proud. Proud to be lucky enough to have been born in this country. Proud that that thing was built in 1930 when black people couldn't vote and now we have a black president. Doesn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? Give me a break. History will not be so blind in viewing that award. The sheer fact of his winning that election is a feat worthy of any award there is out there to be awarded.
My father died on January 2, 2009. In November he voted for the last time. By November he'd lost his left arm. The cancer had eaten from his ribs to his shoulder. He could barely stand. But he and Mum went to the poll and he voted for Barack Obama. Now he knew that Rhode Island was in the bag for Obama. One vote would not have made a difference. Death loomed.
But, like the concrete deep in the heart of the Hoover Dam, my father, a loud American, had barely begun to cool.
A rough holiday for me in many ways, a great one in many others. Because I am broker than a broke piece of broken brokenness, I was confined to the West Coast this year. This meant that I would not be able to spend the first anniversary of my father's death with my family in Rhode Island. This meant that my lovely girlfriend went to Paris without me and I'm the one who speaks French, merde. (Just to clarify, I was happy she got the opportunity to go, happy she went, I just wanted to go with her.)
The silver lining? Two weeks hanging out with Cashel all by myself. We saw in successive order 'Fantastic Mr. Fox', 'Avatar', and 'Sherlock Holmes', each amazing in specific different ways. We lounged around. He got a Wii for Christmas from his mom so he jumped around the room while I read 'The Quiet American'. Which I then took with us to Vegas.
Yes, I took my 12 year old to Vegas. We rolled into town at about noon and hit GameWorks, the giant arcade. We bought all day passes and then proceeded to drive, ski, bomb, fly, shoot, die, swim, kill, maim and Ms. Pac-man for the next four hours.
We wandered out at dusk bleary eyed and dazed. I was starting to get quite sick by this point. Cash said, "I think I need to go lie down at the hotel for a little while."
So we strolled back over to Luxor the giant pyramid of glass where we had rented a room. We ordered room service so we wouldn't have to walk anywhere or smell the smoke in the restaurants contained in the hotel. And then we watched the new 'Star Trek' movie.
Which, by the way, I loved.
The next morning I doubted I'd be able to make it out of the hotel I was so sick. But the whole purpose of going to Vegas was to make the small drive out to see the Hoover Dam. My ears hurt, my throat burned, I was coughing and sneezing and my head ached. Cash, ever the class act, said it would be okay if we just went home.
But after I'd choked down a Starbucks and a couple of cough drops we set out down I-93 to Boulder, NV. I am very glad we did. Because I have never seen anything quite like the Hoover Dam. The fact that we built that thing in 1930, the fact that the cement is still warm and will still be settling for years to come, the fact that the tunnels are art deco for chrissakes...it all adds up to quite an emotional experience.
I was proud. Proud to be lucky enough to have been born in this country. Proud that that thing was built in 1930 when black people couldn't vote and now we have a black president. Doesn't deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? Give me a break. History will not be so blind in viewing that award. The sheer fact of his winning that election is a feat worthy of any award there is out there to be awarded.
My father died on January 2, 2009. In November he voted for the last time. By November he'd lost his left arm. The cancer had eaten from his ribs to his shoulder. He could barely stand. But he and Mum went to the poll and he voted for Barack Obama. Now he knew that Rhode Island was in the bag for Obama. One vote would not have made a difference. Death loomed.
But, like the concrete deep in the heart of the Hoover Dam, my father, a loud American, had barely begun to cool.
Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Book 16: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing
I have read this book several times over whenever I needed a boost in spirit. Every amazing second of it is true.
For those who are unfamiliar with the tale it bears retelling. Ernest Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer who set out on an expedition in 1915. The goal of the trip was to cross the South Pole on foot.
Here's how it would work.
Shackleton and his primary crew would sail to the South Pole in the Endurance, a ship outfitted specifically for the voyage. Concurrently a ship would sail to the other side of the pole. They would trek as far inland as they could leaving supplies which Shackleton could then retrieve.
Shackleton would disembark, stop at the South Pole, and then follow the gingerbread crumbs all the way to the other side of the Pole.
The Endurance never made it to the Pole. They lived on the ship trapped in ice pack for just about a year, finally having to abandon it when the pressure from the ice destroyed it completely. By that point they'd taken everything they could or might possibly use off and proceeded to live directly on the ice for several more months. They had salvaged a few small boats which they eventually had to use in a mad dash for tiny Elephant Island. In open lifeboats they sailed for five days to reach the tiny island.
This alone is a miraculous enough escape. None of the men had died. They had survived a year exposed to the elements while living on ice which was moving through the Antarctic.
But this was child's play compared to what came next.
They could not count on being rescued at Elephant Island seeing as it was unlikely that a whaling ship would pass close enough to signal.
Shackleton took five men in one of the lifeboats, a ship they'd christened the James Caird, the name of the man who sponsored the expedition in the first place. They set sail for South Georgia, a mountainous crag of an island that housed a small whaling village.
South Georgia was 800 miles away.
800 miles.
They sailed across the most forbidding stretch of ocean on the planet in what was essentially a big rowboat with a sail. 800 miles in the Antarctic/Weddell Sea, an area sailors shiver upon pondering and not due to the cold.
Two weeks later they reached the island. Landing almost killed them as they were exhausted almost to the point of immobility, fingers frozen, bodies numb. The tiny swath of rock that they were able to cling to was inhospitable almost to the point of cruelty. They had inadvertently landed on the side of the island WITHOUT a whaling village.
Once again, the story implausibly become more and more heroic. After all that, after a journey that defied any and all odds, they faced an even more difficult challenge. South Georgia had never been mapped in the interior, basically because it was a mountain sticking out of the ocean. Whalers found a flat spot on the southern tip and used it. No one had ever thought to explore inland. Mostly because it was a sheer winter ice mountain of almost 10,000 feet.
Shackleton and company knew what direction they had to go in order to get to the whaling village. But they had NO IDEA what they would encounter on the way.
What they encountered was a 22 mile journey up and over one of the most forbidding landscapes known to man. Or unknown to man since no one had ever done it before. They had only what they could carry. They had no climbing gear. The five men struggled up and over a mountain having nothing but a compass to show them the way.
At one point they had struggled mightily to span a ridge. After hours of backbreaking labor they reached a steep slope which disappeared into the mist below them. They had two choices. Head back the way they came for hours and hours only to have to find a new way or to sled down into an abyss which might plummet them off of a cliff.
They slid. By their estimation they flew almost a mile down a steep incline.
Small children playing in Stromness saw five hooded bearded figures coming out of the interior of the island and thought they were monsters. Nothing had ever come from that direction before.
The men rested and recuperated in Stromness. They commandeered a whaling ship and sailed back to Elephant Island four months later and rescued those they'd left behind.
To give you an idea of how amazing all of this is, the interior of South Georgia island was not traversed on foot again until 1955 when a mountaineer followed their tracks using the best equipment available. Antarctica was not crossed until 1958.
So on days like today when I feel as if I'm on an ever-quickening treadmill being tossed chainsaws to juggle blindfolded and on one foot, it eases my worries a bit to think of Ernest Shackleton turning and waving to the 22 men on Elephant Island who, no matter how much they trusted and revered their boss, had to be thinking, "Man are we fucked."
For those who are unfamiliar with the tale it bears retelling. Ernest Shackleton was an Anglo-Irish explorer who set out on an expedition in 1915. The goal of the trip was to cross the South Pole on foot.
Here's how it would work.
Shackleton and his primary crew would sail to the South Pole in the Endurance, a ship outfitted specifically for the voyage. Concurrently a ship would sail to the other side of the pole. They would trek as far inland as they could leaving supplies which Shackleton could then retrieve.
Shackleton would disembark, stop at the South Pole, and then follow the gingerbread crumbs all the way to the other side of the Pole.
The Endurance never made it to the Pole. They lived on the ship trapped in ice pack for just about a year, finally having to abandon it when the pressure from the ice destroyed it completely. By that point they'd taken everything they could or might possibly use off and proceeded to live directly on the ice for several more months. They had salvaged a few small boats which they eventually had to use in a mad dash for tiny Elephant Island. In open lifeboats they sailed for five days to reach the tiny island.
This alone is a miraculous enough escape. None of the men had died. They had survived a year exposed to the elements while living on ice which was moving through the Antarctic.
But this was child's play compared to what came next.
They could not count on being rescued at Elephant Island seeing as it was unlikely that a whaling ship would pass close enough to signal.
Shackleton took five men in one of the lifeboats, a ship they'd christened the James Caird, the name of the man who sponsored the expedition in the first place. They set sail for South Georgia, a mountainous crag of an island that housed a small whaling village.
South Georgia was 800 miles away.
800 miles.
They sailed across the most forbidding stretch of ocean on the planet in what was essentially a big rowboat with a sail. 800 miles in the Antarctic/Weddell Sea, an area sailors shiver upon pondering and not due to the cold.
Two weeks later they reached the island. Landing almost killed them as they were exhausted almost to the point of immobility, fingers frozen, bodies numb. The tiny swath of rock that they were able to cling to was inhospitable almost to the point of cruelty. They had inadvertently landed on the side of the island WITHOUT a whaling village.
Once again, the story implausibly become more and more heroic. After all that, after a journey that defied any and all odds, they faced an even more difficult challenge. South Georgia had never been mapped in the interior, basically because it was a mountain sticking out of the ocean. Whalers found a flat spot on the southern tip and used it. No one had ever thought to explore inland. Mostly because it was a sheer winter ice mountain of almost 10,000 feet.
Shackleton and company knew what direction they had to go in order to get to the whaling village. But they had NO IDEA what they would encounter on the way.
What they encountered was a 22 mile journey up and over one of the most forbidding landscapes known to man. Or unknown to man since no one had ever done it before. They had only what they could carry. They had no climbing gear. The five men struggled up and over a mountain having nothing but a compass to show them the way.
At one point they had struggled mightily to span a ridge. After hours of backbreaking labor they reached a steep slope which disappeared into the mist below them. They had two choices. Head back the way they came for hours and hours only to have to find a new way or to sled down into an abyss which might plummet them off of a cliff.
They slid. By their estimation they flew almost a mile down a steep incline.
Small children playing in Stromness saw five hooded bearded figures coming out of the interior of the island and thought they were monsters. Nothing had ever come from that direction before.
The men rested and recuperated in Stromness. They commandeered a whaling ship and sailed back to Elephant Island four months later and rescued those they'd left behind.
To give you an idea of how amazing all of this is, the interior of South Georgia island was not traversed on foot again until 1955 when a mountaineer followed their tracks using the best equipment available. Antarctica was not crossed until 1958.
So on days like today when I feel as if I'm on an ever-quickening treadmill being tossed chainsaws to juggle blindfolded and on one foot, it eases my worries a bit to think of Ernest Shackleton turning and waving to the 22 men on Elephant Island who, no matter how much they trusted and revered their boss, had to be thinking, "Man are we fucked."
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