From Trish, and way late considering that this was probably supposed to be Halloween-themed. Oh well.
The rules are that you Bold those you’ve seen.
Italicize movies you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have watched more than once.
The Shining* - I read the book and loved it long before I ever saw the movie. As such, the first time I saw the movie I was unhappy. But i got over it. This is a 100% classic.
The Exorcist* - For my me this is one of the scariest movies ever made, and a good lesson in how it's not good effects or gross-out stuff that makes a great scary movie because, while this movie has both, the effects are so comically bad that they don't work for the most part. Also, not the kind of movie you sit and watch and scream during, but the kind of movie that you won't sleep very well after seeing. I was in college when they re-released this in theatres, and I went with some friends who had never seen it. They were so freaked out that I ended up having to stay and sleep on the floor in their room because they didn't want to be left alone (because, what, I'm going to protect them from Satan?), and they left the lights on all night, too. That's a good scary movie right there.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre -This is OK in and of itself but to the extent that it has inspired slasher flicks and, even worse, Rob Zombie, i find it hard to have positive feelings about it. But what a great poster this flick had. "Who will survive and what will be left of them?" That's great.
The Silence of the Lambs* - This is a very good movie, but I've never really seen it as a horror movie.
Jaws - I know, i know, start the outrage. It's not that I started it and couldn't finish it; I've just seen parts, maybe even the whole movie, but not in sequence and/or all at once.
Halloween - I don't much like the original but it's certainly light years better than the remake.
Psycho - Hitchcock has a lot of far better movies, and ones that don't suffer so much for their age.
Seven* - I rented this one night in high school when my parents were out of town and I was (duh) home alone. Bad idea. There was also a huge thunderstorm going on outside while I watched it. Freaky. But one of my favorite movies. I'd say it's one of the best movies made in the past 10 years ... except I'm thinking it might be older than that now. And that makes me feel old.
Rosemary’s Baby - No interest in seeing it, either. One of those where I have pretty much taken in the story via social osmosis anyway,
Poltergeist - Again, I've seen parts of it recently, but if I ever saw the whole thing when I was younger then I don't remember it.
A Nightmare on Elm Street -I think the first and only time I saw it was at a sleep-over back in elementary school. I have never been interested in this series.
Friday the 13th - Pretty much same as above.
The Thing - Never seen it, not interested.
The Evil Dead* - I'm the kind of person that "cult movies" generally appeal to, but this one doesn't. I've seen it twice because they did a midnight showing of it at Gallagher when I was in college and I went, hoping to "get it." I didn't.
Carrie - Probably the only time I saw it was ... junior high, maybe? I know I'm generally anti-this kind of statement but, given how short and good the novel is, there's no reason the movie should be so inferior to the book.
Night of the Living Dead - The first horror movie I ever saw. When I was growing up, there was a high school-aged kid who lived across the street who sometimes played basketball with me. He invited me over one time and I watched this with he and his family. My mom was pissed when she found out, but this movie really isn't good enough to be scared by.
The Omen - never seen the original.
An American Werewolf in London - Never seen it.
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer - Never heard of this movie.
The Hitcher - Never seen the original. Diana watched the remake one evening while I napped because I had a headache. I heard the remake had a DMB song in it, though.
The Blair Witch Project - This movie scared the hell out of me not because it had any aura of "real"-ness around it; that always seemed like pure propaganda to me. But it did a very nice job of creating that effect, so I applaud it for that. The reason it scared me is because I have been lost in the woods before; it's amazing how easy it is to get a few feet off a trail and suddenly feel like you have no idea where you are and have no idea how to get back to where you need to be. That's a horrible feeling and this movie had me full of it the entire time I was watching it. Haven't seen it (all the way through anyway) since that first time in the theater, when it was brand new.
Pet Cemetery - Never seen it, never read the book. I think I may have seen the end of this once on TV, actually.
Saw - A clever idea for a movie ruined by the (now thankfully dying) more gore aesthetic that came over horror movies this decade. Gross things aren't scary, they're just gross. That and Cary Elwes' final scene ruined this one.
The Ring* - I imagine with any horror movie hype can really kill the experience. Diana and I saw this at a sneak preview, without really knowing anything about it. Scared the hell out of both of us. She can tell you all kinds of embarrassing stories about just how much it scared me.
Scream* - I have mixed feelings. I don't like the slasher sub-genre at all, so to the extent that this movie is part of that (and even more so to the extent that it re-invigorated the genre) I disdain it. But, as my dear wife is so fond of pointing out, it's also a very clever movie. It's not quite a spoof, but it winks so often that I found it funny (and this is good because the reason i don't like slasher flicks is that they're almost never scary). So, to the extent that it's a movie-about-movies, I liked it.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Drink to Chuck's health
(I know this is a pretty random way to come back after months away.)
Further proof that Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist ever. "Without doubt the most Christmassy classic author, Dickens is also literature's best source of winter cocktails."
I've always wondered what wassail is; sounds pretty darn good.
Further proof that Charles Dickens was the greatest novelist ever. "Without doubt the most Christmassy classic author, Dickens is also literature's best source of winter cocktails."
I've always wondered what wassail is; sounds pretty darn good.
Wednesday, August 08, 2007
A Review of Ana Castillo's 'The Guardians'
I have an issue with the person who wrote the blurb for Ana Castillo’s The Guardians. Actually, I have issue with blurb-writers in general, but this one particularly annoyed me.
The back cover of The Guardians calls the main character Tia Regina, a “sensuous, smart, and fiercely independent” woman. I’ll give them smart. Maybe even sensuous. But, despite her many qualities,
I suppose this is fine as a marketing tool, but as a literature lover it just irks me. Because in fact
Well, nearly all her job. In fact, the novel contains three other narrators are none of them are as convincing or as enjoyable to read as
It’s telling, too, that I’m into my fifth paragraph and only now mentioning the fact that this could easily have been a very political kind of novel. The action takes place in the far south of
In the end, the book is about family. A lot of great novels do this – they sell you on the idea that they’re about some new, exciting issue, but then turn out to be very sentimental, very traditional at heart. The Guardians isn’t the kind of book I would normally read – it came to me as part of an early reviewer program – but I related to it strongly. It’s the sort of book that starts slowly, lets you get to know its characters, and then comes at you in a rush. I liked it and would recommend it absolutely.
Friday, May 11, 2007
Overly Sentimental: A Song and a Shot In the Dark
Don Henley has a lot of songs that I love – more even from his solo career than from his time with the Eagles. Boys of Summer, Sunset Grill, Dirty laundry, All She Wants To Do Is Dance – this is great stuff, not to mention all but mandatory on any mix tape of L.A. songs. Then there’s The End Of The Innocence, which is one of my all-time favorite songs period. And then there’s some stuff that’s much less well known, from his 2000 solo album, Inside Job. The album has a lot of good tracks, but my favorite is easily the closer, My Thanksgiving.
It begins as a salutation to an old friend:
Well, a lot of things have happened since the last time we spoke
Some of them are funny, some of them ain’t no joke
And I trust you will forgive me, if I lay it on the line
I always thought you were a friend of mine
And sometimes I think about you
I wonder how you’re doing now, what you’re going through
Because the last time I saw you, we were playing with fire
We were loaded with passion and a burning desire
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my Thanksgiving
I think that Henley here is in fact addressing his listener, each loyal fan individually, more than any specific long lost friend. It’s a nice little trope, personal and not as condescendingly “rock star” as Henley can sometimes come off. But I’m not old enough to be a long-time Henley fan, I don’t connect with the song in that way (which is not to say that I don’t admire the maturity of this song and the album as a whole). I connect with it personally, and to that extent this verse, and therefore the song as a whole, has always made me thing about my friend Romi.
Romi was probably my best friend in high school, a person who always seemed to essentially be me in a different body. I don’t like the term “soul mates” because it’s so associated with lovey dovey BS that I don’t believe in, but I do believe in … call it kindred spirits. Romi was a kindred spirit – we went to concerts together, we talked about books, we dreamed similar dreams. I loved her in a completely platonic but powerful way – one of the best ways to love someone, in my experience. She, who had a sister and therefore has somewhat of a right to know about such thing, once wrote to me one of the happiest compliments I’ve ever received: she said I was like a brother to her.
And we were friends in high school, a time that is the very definition of “loaded with passion and a burning desire.” The whole world was in front of us. We were believers in a certain kind of better future and our place in creating it. The world was in front of us and it was ours, and even if we were many miles apart it seemed like maybe we would be conquering the world together. She was the one person I actually believed I would keep in touch with after high school. I haven’t seen her since 2001, and haven’t heard from for nearly as long.
The next verse and the bridge:
The trouble with you and me my friend is the trouble with this nation
Too many blessings, too little appreciation
And I know that kind of notion just ain’t cool
So send me back to Sunday school
Because I’m tired of waiting for reason to arrive
It’s too long we’ve been living these unexamined lives
I’ve got great expectations, I’ve got family and friends
I’ve got satisfying work, I’ve got a back that bends
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my thanksgiving
And have you noticed that an angry man
Can only get so far
Before he reconciles the way he thinks things ought to be
With the way things are
As bad as the third and fourth lines are, I love the first and second lines so much that I forgive him. I don’t mean to diminish anyone’s pain, goodness knows there are any number of awful things that can happen to us in this life, but seriously we’re pretty damn spoiled here in America. I remember reading once someone’s rant about how our country was based on the assertion in Jefferson’s declaration that we all have a right to the “pursuit of happiness” but that we modern Americans seem to have forgotten the first part. We act all too often like life isn’t supposed to be hard. But that’s not what the promise of this country was supposed to be – you’re not guaranteed happiness, but you’re guaranteed a chance at it. A chance that anyone who doesn’t live in a free society by definition does not have. I could really go off on this for a lot longer, but Henley has done a beautiful job of summing it up in two lines, so I’ll drop it.
The other thing I love is that bridge, where Henley realizes that he’s much happier when he isn’t fighting so hard for his happiness. It’s a bit of a resignation, I suppose, and heaven knows we’d be nowhere if it weren’t for the passion of youth. But at the same time, when you spend all your time raging against … well, whatever, that’s time you’re not spending really appreciating your life. It’s a two-way street – it’s a worth while life to try to make the world better. But you have to take a breath sometimes, and appreciate the beautiful day outside.
The song ends with:
Here in this fragmented world, I still believe
In learning how to give love, and how to receive it
And I would not be among those who abuse this privilege
Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge
And I don’t mind saying that I still love it all
I wallowed in the springtime, now I’m welcoming the fall
For every moment of joy, every hour of fear
For every winding road that brought me here
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my thanksgiving
For everyone who helped me start
And for everything that broke my heart
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my thanksgiving
The best part of this section is what he’s thankful for. Look: fear, winding roads, broken hearts. He’s thankful for this? Ah, but that’s the beauty of a life happily lived: coming to terms with the dark times in our past, seeing how they’ve helped to lead us to where we are, and allowing ourselves to appreciate that such pain may have actually in the end made us stronger.
So this song has always made me think of Romi. It came out when I was in college, at a time when I was still sporadically in contact with her. We’d write sometimes, maybe talk on the phone. And then, for whole months at a time, just not. The day after the Dave Matthews Band concert in boulder in 2001, Romi called me. Have you ever actually gotten a phone call from an old friend who is on your mind but you haven’t talked to in a long time? It’s the neatest feeling. A day or two later we had lunch. Afterward, we saw something awful happened, and I haven’t seen her since. There have been a few letters back and forth – yes, actual letters, and the fact that she would write and mail me actual letters is just one more thing that makes her awesome – but even that’s been years.
And so this song came on this morning and made me think of Romi, and I miss her. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll Google herself one day, and this will show up on Page 19, and she’ll click on it and respond. Probably not. But I thought it was worth a try. Romi Pekarek, if you’re out there, thanks. I hope you’re doing well.
It begins as a salutation to an old friend:
Well, a lot of things have happened since the last time we spoke
Some of them are funny, some of them ain’t no joke
And I trust you will forgive me, if I lay it on the line
I always thought you were a friend of mine
And sometimes I think about you
I wonder how you’re doing now, what you’re going through
Because the last time I saw you, we were playing with fire
We were loaded with passion and a burning desire
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my Thanksgiving
I think that Henley here is in fact addressing his listener, each loyal fan individually, more than any specific long lost friend. It’s a nice little trope, personal and not as condescendingly “rock star” as Henley can sometimes come off. But I’m not old enough to be a long-time Henley fan, I don’t connect with the song in that way (which is not to say that I don’t admire the maturity of this song and the album as a whole). I connect with it personally, and to that extent this verse, and therefore the song as a whole, has always made me thing about my friend Romi.
Romi was probably my best friend in high school, a person who always seemed to essentially be me in a different body. I don’t like the term “soul mates” because it’s so associated with lovey dovey BS that I don’t believe in, but I do believe in … call it kindred spirits. Romi was a kindred spirit – we went to concerts together, we talked about books, we dreamed similar dreams. I loved her in a completely platonic but powerful way – one of the best ways to love someone, in my experience. She, who had a sister and therefore has somewhat of a right to know about such thing, once wrote to me one of the happiest compliments I’ve ever received: she said I was like a brother to her.
And we were friends in high school, a time that is the very definition of “loaded with passion and a burning desire.” The whole world was in front of us. We were believers in a certain kind of better future and our place in creating it. The world was in front of us and it was ours, and even if we were many miles apart it seemed like maybe we would be conquering the world together. She was the one person I actually believed I would keep in touch with after high school. I haven’t seen her since 2001, and haven’t heard from for nearly as long.
The next verse and the bridge:
The trouble with you and me my friend is the trouble with this nation
Too many blessings, too little appreciation
And I know that kind of notion just ain’t cool
So send me back to Sunday school
Because I’m tired of waiting for reason to arrive
It’s too long we’ve been living these unexamined lives
I’ve got great expectations, I’ve got family and friends
I’ve got satisfying work, I’ve got a back that bends
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my thanksgiving
And have you noticed that an angry man
Can only get so far
Before he reconciles the way he thinks things ought to be
With the way things are
As bad as the third and fourth lines are, I love the first and second lines so much that I forgive him. I don’t mean to diminish anyone’s pain, goodness knows there are any number of awful things that can happen to us in this life, but seriously we’re pretty damn spoiled here in America. I remember reading once someone’s rant about how our country was based on the assertion in Jefferson’s declaration that we all have a right to the “pursuit of happiness” but that we modern Americans seem to have forgotten the first part. We act all too often like life isn’t supposed to be hard. But that’s not what the promise of this country was supposed to be – you’re not guaranteed happiness, but you’re guaranteed a chance at it. A chance that anyone who doesn’t live in a free society by definition does not have. I could really go off on this for a lot longer, but Henley has done a beautiful job of summing it up in two lines, so I’ll drop it.
The other thing I love is that bridge, where Henley realizes that he’s much happier when he isn’t fighting so hard for his happiness. It’s a bit of a resignation, I suppose, and heaven knows we’d be nowhere if it weren’t for the passion of youth. But at the same time, when you spend all your time raging against … well, whatever, that’s time you’re not spending really appreciating your life. It’s a two-way street – it’s a worth while life to try to make the world better. But you have to take a breath sometimes, and appreciate the beautiful day outside.
The song ends with:
Here in this fragmented world, I still believe
In learning how to give love, and how to receive it
And I would not be among those who abuse this privilege
Sometimes you get the best light from a burning bridge
And I don’t mind saying that I still love it all
I wallowed in the springtime, now I’m welcoming the fall
For every moment of joy, every hour of fear
For every winding road that brought me here
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my thanksgiving
For everyone who helped me start
And for everything that broke my heart
For every breath, for every day of living
This is my thanksgiving
The best part of this section is what he’s thankful for. Look: fear, winding roads, broken hearts. He’s thankful for this? Ah, but that’s the beauty of a life happily lived: coming to terms with the dark times in our past, seeing how they’ve helped to lead us to where we are, and allowing ourselves to appreciate that such pain may have actually in the end made us stronger.
So this song has always made me think of Romi. It came out when I was in college, at a time when I was still sporadically in contact with her. We’d write sometimes, maybe talk on the phone. And then, for whole months at a time, just not. The day after the Dave Matthews Band concert in boulder in 2001, Romi called me. Have you ever actually gotten a phone call from an old friend who is on your mind but you haven’t talked to in a long time? It’s the neatest feeling. A day or two later we had lunch. Afterward, we saw something awful happened, and I haven’t seen her since. There have been a few letters back and forth – yes, actual letters, and the fact that she would write and mail me actual letters is just one more thing that makes her awesome – but even that’s been years.
And so this song came on this morning and made me think of Romi, and I miss her. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll Google herself one day, and this will show up on Page 19, and she’ll click on it and respond. Probably not. But I thought it was worth a try. Romi Pekarek, if you’re out there, thanks. I hope you’re doing well.
Monday, April 23, 2007
I am not making this up
A theme park called Dickens World is opening soon in Kent, England. No, seriously.
See?
I am both horrified, and yet desperate to go.
See?
I am both horrified, and yet desperate to go.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
I've been tagged! Hooray. I think this is as good an excuse as any to finally get back to updating my blog. Now, what was I tagged for?
Oh, yeah: Report on 7 Songs I am Into Right Now: (in no particular order)
1. "My Father's Gun," Elton John. Back when my grandpa died and i went back to nebraska for the funeral the whole experience gave me a very strong Elizabethtown feeling, so I re-watched it one night after I got back. There's a lot of good music in the film (i always enjoy what Cameron Crowe picks out) but this one stood out. Now, it wasn't my father who had died, but the song still really hit me. Even though I've been to a number of funerals and unfortunately have known a number of people who have died, this was the first major family death I've experienced. The whole experience of flying back home and driving back to Nebraska and all of it made me feel adult in a way that was new to me. I had never thought much about what happens to the flowers that get sent, or how much there is for family members to do in the midst of their greif after a loved one dies. as I'm an only child, the only thing I have ever been truly afraid of is my parents' death, because all that shit will be on me - I have no siblings to help shoulder the burden. Also, my grandpa's funeral was the first one I have been to at which all the men in attendance took a shovel full of dirt and dumped it into the grave. I'd seen that in movies, but had never imagined myself doing it. Anyway, all this stuff has been kind of stuck in my mind for the past month and all these thoughts are scored with "My Father's Gun."
2. "Down By The River," Neil Young. Because Dave Matthews Band has started covering it. I'm not sold on their version yet, but hearing it reminded me how much I enjoy the original.
3. "In The Waiting Line," Zero 7. Woke up to it the other day.
4. "Still Fighting It," Ben Folds. Another song about getting older. There is a theme developing, and it's depressing.
5. "Even Better Than The Real Thing," U2. because I have been rereading "Glamorama" and the "we'll slide down the surface of things" quote becomes a very powerful refrain in the club-opening scene. Ellis' books tend to have one line that afterward I always strongly associate with the book. For Less than Zero, of course, it's the opening line "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." For Rules of Attraction it's the quote that gives this blog its name. American Psycho is "this is not an exit," and the U2 quote is the one for Glamorama.
6. "Can We Still Be Friends?" Todd Rundgren. Another one from a Cameron Crowe movie. This is the somehat javial sonding tune that disjointedly plays over the scene of Tom Cruise smothering Cameron Diaz in "Vanilla Sky." Brilliant scene. I love when disturbing action is set to an otherwise pleasant score, makes it so much more upsetting. Back in college, I knew a guy who couldn't even listen to that "Stuck In The Middle With You" song without nearly vomiting thanks to "Reservoir Dogs."
7. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," Elton John. God, more Elton John. But this song is awesome. I learned not too long ago that it's about how Elton almost got married (yes, to a woman) but a friend talked him out of it and encouraged him to continue pursuing music. Turned out OK for him, I guess.
I tag everyone I know who hasn't already done this.
Oh, yeah: Report on 7 Songs I am Into Right Now: (in no particular order)
1. "My Father's Gun," Elton John. Back when my grandpa died and i went back to nebraska for the funeral the whole experience gave me a very strong Elizabethtown feeling, so I re-watched it one night after I got back. There's a lot of good music in the film (i always enjoy what Cameron Crowe picks out) but this one stood out. Now, it wasn't my father who had died, but the song still really hit me. Even though I've been to a number of funerals and unfortunately have known a number of people who have died, this was the first major family death I've experienced. The whole experience of flying back home and driving back to Nebraska and all of it made me feel adult in a way that was new to me. I had never thought much about what happens to the flowers that get sent, or how much there is for family members to do in the midst of their greif after a loved one dies. as I'm an only child, the only thing I have ever been truly afraid of is my parents' death, because all that shit will be on me - I have no siblings to help shoulder the burden. Also, my grandpa's funeral was the first one I have been to at which all the men in attendance took a shovel full of dirt and dumped it into the grave. I'd seen that in movies, but had never imagined myself doing it. Anyway, all this stuff has been kind of stuck in my mind for the past month and all these thoughts are scored with "My Father's Gun."
2. "Down By The River," Neil Young. Because Dave Matthews Band has started covering it. I'm not sold on their version yet, but hearing it reminded me how much I enjoy the original.
3. "In The Waiting Line," Zero 7. Woke up to it the other day.
4. "Still Fighting It," Ben Folds. Another song about getting older. There is a theme developing, and it's depressing.
5. "Even Better Than The Real Thing," U2. because I have been rereading "Glamorama" and the "we'll slide down the surface of things" quote becomes a very powerful refrain in the club-opening scene. Ellis' books tend to have one line that afterward I always strongly associate with the book. For Less than Zero, of course, it's the opening line "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." For Rules of Attraction it's the quote that gives this blog its name. American Psycho is "this is not an exit," and the U2 quote is the one for Glamorama.
6. "Can We Still Be Friends?" Todd Rundgren. Another one from a Cameron Crowe movie. This is the somehat javial sonding tune that disjointedly plays over the scene of Tom Cruise smothering Cameron Diaz in "Vanilla Sky." Brilliant scene. I love when disturbing action is set to an otherwise pleasant score, makes it so much more upsetting. Back in college, I knew a guy who couldn't even listen to that "Stuck In The Middle With You" song without nearly vomiting thanks to "Reservoir Dogs."
7. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight," Elton John. God, more Elton John. But this song is awesome. I learned not too long ago that it's about how Elton almost got married (yes, to a woman) but a friend talked him out of it and encouraged him to continue pursuing music. Turned out OK for him, I guess.
I tag everyone I know who hasn't already done this.
Friday, January 05, 2007
I assure you this is a 'Children of Men' review
I used to be the sort of person who would say, “This is a book everyone should read,” but I am no longer that person. I don’t know when I changed, or what did it exactly, because I didn’t even fully realize I had changed until recently. I was reading the introduction to Nick Hornby’s “Housekeeping Vs. The Dirt,” a collection of the essays he writes for a magazine called The Believer about what he reads each month. He writes about the decline of reading as a part of the culture, but doesn’t blame TV or movies or computers. Instead he blames readers and English teachers and the sort of people who would say, “This is a book everyone should read.”
Literature, Hornsby says – and I find that I agree with him – is all too often presented not as a pleasure activity, but as a responsibility, as something that’s good for you. But we humans don’t generally like things that are good for us; we think of healthy food as being food that doesn’t taste good, and the doctor as someone who sticks us with needles, and literature as incomprehensible and pointless metaphors for who knows what. This is a problem.
No one says you should watch The Sopranos because it’s good for you – we say you should watch The Sopranos because it’s just a damn good TV show. That it happens to be better for us than, well, pretty much any reality TV program is entirely subordinate to the fact that it’s also just better than any reality TV program. The same thing is often true of literature. Look, I’m not trying to argue that reading John Grisham and Danielle Steele is better for you than reading Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon. What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t matter whether it’s better for you or not, because ultimately it’s better for us (book-loving people first, but broader culture, too) as a whole.
In high school I worked at a book store and for the first few weeks when a customer would come to the register with two romance novels and a copy of Us it was all I could do to mask my disgust. Jackie Collins? Steve Baldacci? How could people read that crap when they could be buying Hemingway or David Foster Wallace or, God, even an Oprah book!?! But I got over that, too. After all, for every person buying Steve Martini there were countless others not coming into our store and buying anything at all, who were probably not reading at all.
At the end, it has to be better (for literacy, for the publishing industry, for struggling writers, for everyone) if more people are reading five books a year (even if it’s Dean Koontz) than if those same people are (a) not reading at all or (b) attempting to read whatever won the National Book award because they feel like they should, like it will somehow make them better, but hating it and never finishing.
There aren’t many people who still actually complain that Pirates Of The Caribbean will make billions more than whatever movie ultimately wins Best Picture. In the case of movies (and TV, too) we accept that what is good is not always going to be popular and that what is popular can be good without being especially redeeming. The world of books will be much healthier once more people let reading for pleasure be the norm, not some sort of shameful taboo (eg, this British article about people who are supposedly embarrassed to admit they read Harry Potter and Stephen King).
So I’ve given up the “you should read this book” mantra. Reading takes far too long and can be far too painful if you’re not enjoying it. Besides, whatever qualities the book has to recommend it are going to be wholly lost on any reader who resists the project from the start.
So the question, as it relates to what I intended this blog to be about, is whether I feel the same way about movies. Last year, if I remember correctly, I wrote that you should go see Munich. To a great extent, I still really feel that way. And yet, though I own it, I’ve never made any of my friends (nor even my wife) sit down and watch it. I’ve never even suggested it. Here I think the issue of time goes out the window. While reading a book can take hours upon hours of your life, watching a movie takes two, maybe two and a half. I don’t necessarily thinks that’s too much time to ask someone to sacrifice to an important movie. The issue is still whether or not a person essentially forced into watching a movie will get any benefit from it, no matter how potentially meaningful. Last year, Syriana and Munich both left me speechless – but to anyone who doesn’t want to go along for the ride they’re just going to be two movies where things blow up and the plot’s kind of confusing.
So I’ll just say that if it’s the sort of movie that looks even mildly interesting to you, or if you’re in the mood to visit a dark world, or if you just like Alfonso Cuaron – then you should go see Children Of Men.
It is in many ways a very difficult movie to recommend because it’s a movie almost entirely without joy, with only even a tiny amount of hope. Diana said it was good but good in a Schindler’s List kind of way. She’s right, although I hesitate at the comparison because harsh as it is Children of Men was not, to me, nearly as distressing and arduous as Schindler’s List was. That it could have been and is not is one of the greatest things to recommend it, I think.
The movie could easily have been 140-150 minutes, with long stretches toward the beginning that introduce us more fully to the characters and to the futuristic (2027, I think) world in which the movie is set. Instead, you’re thrown in and you have to figure it out for yourself. The characters talk about the calamity of the world they live in, a fragments of news broadcasts fill in other details, but a lot if left unanswered and everything is a part of the plot. The movie is not two hours long and I wasn’t bored or uninterested for even a single second.
Including Children Of Men, I can only think of three movies Cuaron has made (there may be others I either haven’t seen or have forgotten) but I’m not sure there’s any director currently working who I respect more. He just makes good movies. Two (Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Children Of Men) are stories that might otherwise not particularly interest me and I don’t have a burning desire to watch either of them again, but both are lean, well-made films that don’t get boring. Of course, I think the same goes for his Harrp Potter movie (The Prisoner Of Azkaban), which is still my favorite of the series, as much for what it leaves out as anything that’s in it. The guy is brilliant (and how many directors out there can make three so wildly different kinds of movies and be so good at all of them?).
There are pleasures in Children Of Men, just not any that come from the story itself. (I’m not saying the story is bad, mind you, everything about it is good and well done. It’s just so harsh.) Clive Owen is excellent, as he pretty much always is. This is more of a good guy role than he normally takes on and it’s nice to see his strength and rage (and flaws) used for good for a change.
One of the things I was most struck by is the future world they created. It’s a mixture of modern London (remember the story is only 20 years in the future), concentration camps, the American War On Terrorism, and the gray-blue of Minority Report. It’s sci-fi, I suppose, but the world hasn’t advanced much technologically – why would it, if humanity is dying out? The still-green enclave in central London is an interesting touch, and as a contrast the refugee camp on the coast was like Black Hawk Down meets the Blitz. There’s an abandoned schoolhouse, rather late into the movie, that was to me by far the most moving realization of just how awful that world must be. Then there are almost comic touches, like the relative who has “saved” greats works of art (like the David) and now displays them in his foyer, or an inexplicable balloon pig straight off a Pink Floyd album cover.
So it’s hard to recommend the movie, to muster up any enthusiasm. It’s hard to even want to talk about it, which is about 98% of the reason I ever want people to see any movie I’ve seen. But it’s deserving of any award nomination it gets and any best of the year list it makes, and it’s definitely worth your 10 bucks and two hours.
Literature, Hornsby says – and I find that I agree with him – is all too often presented not as a pleasure activity, but as a responsibility, as something that’s good for you. But we humans don’t generally like things that are good for us; we think of healthy food as being food that doesn’t taste good, and the doctor as someone who sticks us with needles, and literature as incomprehensible and pointless metaphors for who knows what. This is a problem.
No one says you should watch The Sopranos because it’s good for you – we say you should watch The Sopranos because it’s just a damn good TV show. That it happens to be better for us than, well, pretty much any reality TV program is entirely subordinate to the fact that it’s also just better than any reality TV program. The same thing is often true of literature. Look, I’m not trying to argue that reading John Grisham and Danielle Steele is better for you than reading Cormac McCarthy or Thomas Pynchon. What I’m saying is that it shouldn’t matter whether it’s better for you or not, because ultimately it’s better for us (book-loving people first, but broader culture, too) as a whole.
In high school I worked at a book store and for the first few weeks when a customer would come to the register with two romance novels and a copy of Us it was all I could do to mask my disgust. Jackie Collins? Steve Baldacci? How could people read that crap when they could be buying Hemingway or David Foster Wallace or, God, even an Oprah book!?! But I got over that, too. After all, for every person buying Steve Martini there were countless others not coming into our store and buying anything at all, who were probably not reading at all.
At the end, it has to be better (for literacy, for the publishing industry, for struggling writers, for everyone) if more people are reading five books a year (even if it’s Dean Koontz) than if those same people are (a) not reading at all or (b) attempting to read whatever won the National Book award because they feel like they should, like it will somehow make them better, but hating it and never finishing.
There aren’t many people who still actually complain that Pirates Of The Caribbean will make billions more than whatever movie ultimately wins Best Picture. In the case of movies (and TV, too) we accept that what is good is not always going to be popular and that what is popular can be good without being especially redeeming. The world of books will be much healthier once more people let reading for pleasure be the norm, not some sort of shameful taboo (eg, this British article about people who are supposedly embarrassed to admit they read Harry Potter and Stephen King).
So I’ve given up the “you should read this book” mantra. Reading takes far too long and can be far too painful if you’re not enjoying it. Besides, whatever qualities the book has to recommend it are going to be wholly lost on any reader who resists the project from the start.
So the question, as it relates to what I intended this blog to be about, is whether I feel the same way about movies. Last year, if I remember correctly, I wrote that you should go see Munich. To a great extent, I still really feel that way. And yet, though I own it, I’ve never made any of my friends (nor even my wife) sit down and watch it. I’ve never even suggested it. Here I think the issue of time goes out the window. While reading a book can take hours upon hours of your life, watching a movie takes two, maybe two and a half. I don’t necessarily thinks that’s too much time to ask someone to sacrifice to an important movie. The issue is still whether or not a person essentially forced into watching a movie will get any benefit from it, no matter how potentially meaningful. Last year, Syriana and Munich both left me speechless – but to anyone who doesn’t want to go along for the ride they’re just going to be two movies where things blow up and the plot’s kind of confusing.
So I’ll just say that if it’s the sort of movie that looks even mildly interesting to you, or if you’re in the mood to visit a dark world, or if you just like Alfonso Cuaron – then you should go see Children Of Men.
It is in many ways a very difficult movie to recommend because it’s a movie almost entirely without joy, with only even a tiny amount of hope. Diana said it was good but good in a Schindler’s List kind of way. She’s right, although I hesitate at the comparison because harsh as it is Children of Men was not, to me, nearly as distressing and arduous as Schindler’s List was. That it could have been and is not is one of the greatest things to recommend it, I think.
The movie could easily have been 140-150 minutes, with long stretches toward the beginning that introduce us more fully to the characters and to the futuristic (2027, I think) world in which the movie is set. Instead, you’re thrown in and you have to figure it out for yourself. The characters talk about the calamity of the world they live in, a fragments of news broadcasts fill in other details, but a lot if left unanswered and everything is a part of the plot. The movie is not two hours long and I wasn’t bored or uninterested for even a single second.
Including Children Of Men, I can only think of three movies Cuaron has made (there may be others I either haven’t seen or have forgotten) but I’m not sure there’s any director currently working who I respect more. He just makes good movies. Two (Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Children Of Men) are stories that might otherwise not particularly interest me and I don’t have a burning desire to watch either of them again, but both are lean, well-made films that don’t get boring. Of course, I think the same goes for his Harrp Potter movie (The Prisoner Of Azkaban), which is still my favorite of the series, as much for what it leaves out as anything that’s in it. The guy is brilliant (and how many directors out there can make three so wildly different kinds of movies and be so good at all of them?).
There are pleasures in Children Of Men, just not any that come from the story itself. (I’m not saying the story is bad, mind you, everything about it is good and well done. It’s just so harsh.) Clive Owen is excellent, as he pretty much always is. This is more of a good guy role than he normally takes on and it’s nice to see his strength and rage (and flaws) used for good for a change.
One of the things I was most struck by is the future world they created. It’s a mixture of modern London (remember the story is only 20 years in the future), concentration camps, the American War On Terrorism, and the gray-blue of Minority Report. It’s sci-fi, I suppose, but the world hasn’t advanced much technologically – why would it, if humanity is dying out? The still-green enclave in central London is an interesting touch, and as a contrast the refugee camp on the coast was like Black Hawk Down meets the Blitz. There’s an abandoned schoolhouse, rather late into the movie, that was to me by far the most moving realization of just how awful that world must be. Then there are almost comic touches, like the relative who has “saved” greats works of art (like the David) and now displays them in his foyer, or an inexplicable balloon pig straight off a Pink Floyd album cover.
So it’s hard to recommend the movie, to muster up any enthusiasm. It’s hard to even want to talk about it, which is about 98% of the reason I ever want people to see any movie I’ve seen. But it’s deserving of any award nomination it gets and any best of the year list it makes, and it’s definitely worth your 10 bucks and two hours.
Thursday, January 04, 2007
Made-up places
Another thing I wrote a few months ago, also inspired by Daniel Handler, but not about him.
As a writer, one of the things I’m always most interested in is place. As in location. That I currently have various ideas for stories that take place in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Colorado is not simply because these are places that I have been to often enough that I feel comfortable writing about them, though that’s certainly a factor. The real reason is because each story has to be set there. Consider that in my own mind I refer to at least two of them as “the Los Angeles story” and “the Las Vegas story,” despite the fact that both have perfectly good working titles (“Screenwriter’s Blues” and “What Happens Here,” respectively). (The stories set in San Francisco and Colorado have no definitive working titles but I don’t tend to think of them as “the San Francisco story” or “the Colorado story” so much as the one is “Aaron’s story” and the other is just “that Big Thompson thing.” This is because the stories could take place in locations other than where they’re currently set, but the intertwining nature of all four books makes the current locations necessary.)
The Las Vegas story could technically take place anywhere, but the point of the story as it’s framed in my mind would be completely different. (When I become famous and dead and my writings are a part of the great American canon, this essay will no doubt be a boon to all those poor graduate students who want to write their theses about my brilliance.) The same goes for the Los Angeles story – sure, people can go crazy anywhere but there’s a whole tradition of “LA makes you crazy” stories that I’m emulating and, besides, the kind of crazy LA drives you is so different from the kind of crazy you get from living in Phoenix that it really would make for a whole different novel.
But this interest in locations gets sticky because I’m writing fiction. I don’t have any idea if there’s an apartment complex in any of the places I need apartment complexes to be in any of these stories. I could drive around and take lots of pictures and get places and crossroads and times just right, but – dammit, why? It’s fiction. Even if I get the right street corner, I’m still putting a fictional person in an apartment that is in fact lived in by a real person. And if the timing of a story is also important that brings up a host of other problems – like, what if it wasn’t in fact rainy in San Francisco that day?
I used to avoid all this by creating my own worlds. Somewhere (I think) I still have a very thick notebook from high school with more details than you can imagine about a fictional metropolis named Harrison City along the southern coast of Oregon. Here was an urban center not unlike San Francisco, a sprawling suburban canvas reminiscent of the suburb I grew up in, a university, a small liberal arts college, a military base, everything I needed. When I set stories in Harrison City (there was some figure of Oregon history who leant his name to the place) I used to sort of imply that I was inspired mostly by Faulkner and his astonishingly complex (given that it was entirely made up) Yoknoptowhatever(who knows how to actually spell this word?) County. Which, I mean OK, I was probably inspired by Faulker a little bit, but in retrospect I had a lot more experience with the fictional Maine towns created by Stephen King (Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock, and Derry, which are themselves apparently based on the trio of fictional town created by HP Lovecraft).
More and more, though, I realized that sometimes the university where a story was going to be set couldn’t be in Oregon – it needed to be in the desert, or in New England – or that the story was about Las Vegas as much as the characters in the story. My reaction was typically overblown. Suddenly every detail had to be right. There’s some use in this. My LA story character is the sort of obsessive who would know everything about all the possible freeway combinations and who would never once tell you how his morning was without relating which route he took to get to work. But ultimately this is inconvenient when you’re me and most of your experience with LA freeways is knowing how to get from the 91 to Disneyland. Moreover, it’s just not important. Sure, there will always be a reader who knows you got a detail or two wrong, but it’s fiction so the nit picky stuff doesn’t matter.
Or then in the middle ground of those two extremes is a place like the fictional San Francisco of Daniel Handler’s The Basic Eight and Adverbs. It is recognizably San Francisco, would be even without being named as such (though it is), with all the landmarks and weather and topography we expect from that city. But it is not San Francisco. It’s Handler’s own unique world. There are band names and terrorist acts and supernatural wonders that are unique to his world. This is all appealing to me and to some extent I emulate the idea. Of my four novels mentioned above, at least three share characters or reference each other in one way or another, and there are short stories that also branch off from those same characters. These are all the same people living in the same world at the same time. If LA is experiencing extreme wildfires in the fall of 2003, it’s something my characters in San Francisco are aware of. If an earthquake hits San Francisco, LA might feel the shock as well. At the same time, I’ve gone back and forth on just how fictional to make my world. Consider my main character in “the San Francisco novel:” He’s an unabashed music lover, virtually everything in his life (all his memories, most of his relationships) is based around music. If I base him on me (and he’s certainly not in full but I’m allowing him much more of me than any other character I’ve ever written), for example, he’ll be a Pearl Jam fan, and a great many of his memories will be traceable to major moments (and concerts) in Pearl Jam history. This is both useful and a detriment to the narrative, potentially. It’s useful in that it’s identifiable. If he wants to compare a feeling to the sweeping chorus of some hit song, there’s a literal equivalent there that the reader can relate to. It also creates a solid timeline around which the narrative can be built. But these are also the potential detriments to the book – Pearl Jam is a known band, so every reader brings a preconceived notion of what it means to be a Pearl Jam fan with them and this may influence their perception of the character more than the actual characterization as put forth in the book. Moreover, the timeline of the real world is often inconvenient for fiction – Pearl Jam’s huge, free (and then aborted) concert in San Francisco was in July of 1995, they have had tours and albums in many but not all years, and their popularity has declined massively over the past decade (it makes me feel so old to write that) … so what if none of this fits the needs of the book? What if, to work with the character’s age and life, Pearl Jam needs to be on tour in San Francisco in 96 or 97? It didn’t happen, so do I look for another band that was touring in San Francisco, then? It gets complicated.
But on the other hand, while you can mold a fictional band to whatever career path and tour schedule you need, you can’t use them as any kind of reference point with the reader. You might love U2 or hate U2 or be indifferent toward U2, but if I talk about U2’s song “One,” you know what I’m talking about. There’s a key scene in the book right now which takes a cue from Better Than Ezra’s “At The Stars.” I could create a fictional song, a fictional band – even one that is self-consciously Better Than Ezra- and “At The Stars”-like, but I can’t guarantee that, as I describe a song about the joys of driving around in a convertible late at night with no cares in the world that the reader will actually think of “At The Stars.” Maybe they’ll think of “Pink Moon,” a great song, but one with a decidedly more somber feeling. Maybe they’ll think of some other song I’ve never heard.
It all gets very complicated, and so the urge to just distance the entire story from pop culture becomes strong. This works sometimes. The Las Vegas story, to the extent I’ve conceived it so far, has no reason to make reference to much of pop culture (the where is more important than the what). But both the San Francisco and the Los Angeles stories rely heavily on pop culture, and I think this is important because pop culture is such a part of all of our lives. The songs we listen to really do say something about us, they really do influence our moods and our decisions.
(As I write this it has just occurred to me that if the LA story and the SF story take place in the same universe then they need to be governed by the same laws of pop culture. The final scene of the LA story (which is all very cinematic) is set to a Beach Boys song. It has to be. So the decision is either maintaining consistency throughout all the novels or letting them be creations unto themselves. Hm.)
The songs we listen to even influence the way we (as writers) write. One of the novels I wrote in high school was completed on an adrenaline-fueled night when the last hundred or so pages came rolling out of me all at once, as I stayed up late into the morning, with The Refreshments’ “Mekong” on repeat virtually the whole time. When I later went back and read parts of the end of that book, I realized the language actually could be read to the songs, it had the same rhythms. Or, for another example, consider that when I write fiction I always listen to music – usually music that is deliberately reflective of the mood I’m looking for in the work. The playlist on my laptop for the LA story includes a lot of Nine Inch Nails, but also Oingo Boingo, 70s Elton John, and Soul Coughing. The Las Vegas story’s playlist is heavy on early-90s U2, Ryan Adams, and Ben Folds. But if what I’m writing is academic I cannot listen to pop music – really nothing with lyrics is appropriate. Film scores, orchestral “tribute” records to pop bands, and classical are my choices then. But no matter what I’m writing, it’s always much easier with music.
And, to bring us full circle (did you catch that? I didn’t even plan it! I am so awesome!), the other thing that has always encouraged my writing is travel. There’s something about being in a different (not even new necessarily) place that intrigues my mind, encourages writing. Day-to-day life at home is uninspiring. Even when I want to write, with work (and now school), and a house to take care of, it’s all but impossible to find the time. I was writing sporadically in the spring and summer but once my classes picked up heavily in July the fiction/creative writing pretty much stopped (that’s also, you’ll notice, when my blog became a ghost town). All of the reading and analyzing was stimulating a different part of my brain. I was reading a lot, even a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with school, and thinking about it a lot, but the creative part of my mind was dead, which is always dangerous because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that not writing tends to result in depression. (When I was younger I had it backwards: I thought that when I was depressed, I could write to pull myself out of it, but writing’s not the cure so much as it’s the symptom. I don’t have much in my life to be depressed about, but sure enough I was depressed just a few months ago, because I wasn’t writing.)
Then I went to California for two nights and suddenly it was bursting out of me quicker than I could possibly write it all down. Even still, weeks later, all those ideas for scenes and conversations crowd my mind, begging to be put to paper before they are forgotten. But real life is again in full effect. I go to work in the morning, I go home and clean and cook and do homework. I write academic papers because I must, and all the while the ideas in my head are forgotten, they trickle away. I lay in bed at night and the ideas come and I must choose between hoping they’ll still be there in the morning or getting up, writing them down, and getting even less sleep than the too-little I already get.
It’s not that I write about foreign places (LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco) because they are more special or better suited to stories than home is. It’s just that home is home. It’s boring. One day I’ll write stories that take place in Phoenix … but not until I’m inspired to write them because I’m here on vacation.
As a writer, one of the things I’m always most interested in is place. As in location. That I currently have various ideas for stories that take place in San Francisco, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Colorado is not simply because these are places that I have been to often enough that I feel comfortable writing about them, though that’s certainly a factor. The real reason is because each story has to be set there. Consider that in my own mind I refer to at least two of them as “the Los Angeles story” and “the Las Vegas story,” despite the fact that both have perfectly good working titles (“Screenwriter’s Blues” and “What Happens Here,” respectively). (The stories set in San Francisco and Colorado have no definitive working titles but I don’t tend to think of them as “the San Francisco story” or “the Colorado story” so much as the one is “Aaron’s story” and the other is just “that Big Thompson thing.” This is because the stories could take place in locations other than where they’re currently set, but the intertwining nature of all four books makes the current locations necessary.)
The Las Vegas story could technically take place anywhere, but the point of the story as it’s framed in my mind would be completely different. (When I become famous and dead and my writings are a part of the great American canon, this essay will no doubt be a boon to all those poor graduate students who want to write their theses about my brilliance.) The same goes for the Los Angeles story – sure, people can go crazy anywhere but there’s a whole tradition of “LA makes you crazy” stories that I’m emulating and, besides, the kind of crazy LA drives you is so different from the kind of crazy you get from living in Phoenix that it really would make for a whole different novel.
But this interest in locations gets sticky because I’m writing fiction. I don’t have any idea if there’s an apartment complex in any of the places I need apartment complexes to be in any of these stories. I could drive around and take lots of pictures and get places and crossroads and times just right, but – dammit, why? It’s fiction. Even if I get the right street corner, I’m still putting a fictional person in an apartment that is in fact lived in by a real person. And if the timing of a story is also important that brings up a host of other problems – like, what if it wasn’t in fact rainy in San Francisco that day?
I used to avoid all this by creating my own worlds. Somewhere (I think) I still have a very thick notebook from high school with more details than you can imagine about a fictional metropolis named Harrison City along the southern coast of Oregon. Here was an urban center not unlike San Francisco, a sprawling suburban canvas reminiscent of the suburb I grew up in, a university, a small liberal arts college, a military base, everything I needed. When I set stories in Harrison City (there was some figure of Oregon history who leant his name to the place) I used to sort of imply that I was inspired mostly by Faulkner and his astonishingly complex (given that it was entirely made up) Yoknoptowhatever(who knows how to actually spell this word?) County. Which, I mean OK, I was probably inspired by Faulker a little bit, but in retrospect I had a lot more experience with the fictional Maine towns created by Stephen King (Jerusalem’s Lot, Castle Rock, and Derry, which are themselves apparently based on the trio of fictional town created by HP Lovecraft).
More and more, though, I realized that sometimes the university where a story was going to be set couldn’t be in Oregon – it needed to be in the desert, or in New England – or that the story was about Las Vegas as much as the characters in the story. My reaction was typically overblown. Suddenly every detail had to be right. There’s some use in this. My LA story character is the sort of obsessive who would know everything about all the possible freeway combinations and who would never once tell you how his morning was without relating which route he took to get to work. But ultimately this is inconvenient when you’re me and most of your experience with LA freeways is knowing how to get from the 91 to Disneyland. Moreover, it’s just not important. Sure, there will always be a reader who knows you got a detail or two wrong, but it’s fiction so the nit picky stuff doesn’t matter.
Or then in the middle ground of those two extremes is a place like the fictional San Francisco of Daniel Handler’s The Basic Eight and Adverbs. It is recognizably San Francisco, would be even without being named as such (though it is), with all the landmarks and weather and topography we expect from that city. But it is not San Francisco. It’s Handler’s own unique world. There are band names and terrorist acts and supernatural wonders that are unique to his world. This is all appealing to me and to some extent I emulate the idea. Of my four novels mentioned above, at least three share characters or reference each other in one way or another, and there are short stories that also branch off from those same characters. These are all the same people living in the same world at the same time. If LA is experiencing extreme wildfires in the fall of 2003, it’s something my characters in San Francisco are aware of. If an earthquake hits San Francisco, LA might feel the shock as well. At the same time, I’ve gone back and forth on just how fictional to make my world. Consider my main character in “the San Francisco novel:” He’s an unabashed music lover, virtually everything in his life (all his memories, most of his relationships) is based around music. If I base him on me (and he’s certainly not in full but I’m allowing him much more of me than any other character I’ve ever written), for example, he’ll be a Pearl Jam fan, and a great many of his memories will be traceable to major moments (and concerts) in Pearl Jam history. This is both useful and a detriment to the narrative, potentially. It’s useful in that it’s identifiable. If he wants to compare a feeling to the sweeping chorus of some hit song, there’s a literal equivalent there that the reader can relate to. It also creates a solid timeline around which the narrative can be built. But these are also the potential detriments to the book – Pearl Jam is a known band, so every reader brings a preconceived notion of what it means to be a Pearl Jam fan with them and this may influence their perception of the character more than the actual characterization as put forth in the book. Moreover, the timeline of the real world is often inconvenient for fiction – Pearl Jam’s huge, free (and then aborted) concert in San Francisco was in July of 1995, they have had tours and albums in many but not all years, and their popularity has declined massively over the past decade (it makes me feel so old to write that) … so what if none of this fits the needs of the book? What if, to work with the character’s age and life, Pearl Jam needs to be on tour in San Francisco in 96 or 97? It didn’t happen, so do I look for another band that was touring in San Francisco, then? It gets complicated.
But on the other hand, while you can mold a fictional band to whatever career path and tour schedule you need, you can’t use them as any kind of reference point with the reader. You might love U2 or hate U2 or be indifferent toward U2, but if I talk about U2’s song “One,” you know what I’m talking about. There’s a key scene in the book right now which takes a cue from Better Than Ezra’s “At The Stars.” I could create a fictional song, a fictional band – even one that is self-consciously Better Than Ezra- and “At The Stars”-like, but I can’t guarantee that, as I describe a song about the joys of driving around in a convertible late at night with no cares in the world that the reader will actually think of “At The Stars.” Maybe they’ll think of “Pink Moon,” a great song, but one with a decidedly more somber feeling. Maybe they’ll think of some other song I’ve never heard.
It all gets very complicated, and so the urge to just distance the entire story from pop culture becomes strong. This works sometimes. The Las Vegas story, to the extent I’ve conceived it so far, has no reason to make reference to much of pop culture (the where is more important than the what). But both the San Francisco and the Los Angeles stories rely heavily on pop culture, and I think this is important because pop culture is such a part of all of our lives. The songs we listen to really do say something about us, they really do influence our moods and our decisions.
(As I write this it has just occurred to me that if the LA story and the SF story take place in the same universe then they need to be governed by the same laws of pop culture. The final scene of the LA story (which is all very cinematic) is set to a Beach Boys song. It has to be. So the decision is either maintaining consistency throughout all the novels or letting them be creations unto themselves. Hm.)
The songs we listen to even influence the way we (as writers) write. One of the novels I wrote in high school was completed on an adrenaline-fueled night when the last hundred or so pages came rolling out of me all at once, as I stayed up late into the morning, with The Refreshments’ “Mekong” on repeat virtually the whole time. When I later went back and read parts of the end of that book, I realized the language actually could be read to the songs, it had the same rhythms. Or, for another example, consider that when I write fiction I always listen to music – usually music that is deliberately reflective of the mood I’m looking for in the work. The playlist on my laptop for the LA story includes a lot of Nine Inch Nails, but also Oingo Boingo, 70s Elton John, and Soul Coughing. The Las Vegas story’s playlist is heavy on early-90s U2, Ryan Adams, and Ben Folds. But if what I’m writing is academic I cannot listen to pop music – really nothing with lyrics is appropriate. Film scores, orchestral “tribute” records to pop bands, and classical are my choices then. But no matter what I’m writing, it’s always much easier with music.
And, to bring us full circle (did you catch that? I didn’t even plan it! I am so awesome!), the other thing that has always encouraged my writing is travel. There’s something about being in a different (not even new necessarily) place that intrigues my mind, encourages writing. Day-to-day life at home is uninspiring. Even when I want to write, with work (and now school), and a house to take care of, it’s all but impossible to find the time. I was writing sporadically in the spring and summer but once my classes picked up heavily in July the fiction/creative writing pretty much stopped (that’s also, you’ll notice, when my blog became a ghost town). All of the reading and analyzing was stimulating a different part of my brain. I was reading a lot, even a lot of stuff that had nothing to do with school, and thinking about it a lot, but the creative part of my mind was dead, which is always dangerous because as I’ve grown older I’ve come to realize that not writing tends to result in depression. (When I was younger I had it backwards: I thought that when I was depressed, I could write to pull myself out of it, but writing’s not the cure so much as it’s the symptom. I don’t have much in my life to be depressed about, but sure enough I was depressed just a few months ago, because I wasn’t writing.)
Then I went to California for two nights and suddenly it was bursting out of me quicker than I could possibly write it all down. Even still, weeks later, all those ideas for scenes and conversations crowd my mind, begging to be put to paper before they are forgotten. But real life is again in full effect. I go to work in the morning, I go home and clean and cook and do homework. I write academic papers because I must, and all the while the ideas in my head are forgotten, they trickle away. I lay in bed at night and the ideas come and I must choose between hoping they’ll still be there in the morning or getting up, writing them down, and getting even less sleep than the too-little I already get.
It’s not that I write about foreign places (LA, Las Vegas, San Francisco) because they are more special or better suited to stories than home is. It’s just that home is home. It’s boring. One day I’ll write stories that take place in Phoenix … but not until I’m inspired to write them because I’m here on vacation.
My Daniel Handler problem
As promised, here's something I wrote several months back. As always, I feel no shame in spoiling the end of all the books discussed.
Sometimes it almost feels like this Daniel Handler fellow is living in my head.
Well, OK, he’s a writer and I’m a writer (clearly far less accomplished than he but still) and he’s a well-red lover of books and I’m a well read lover of books (clearly far less well read than he but still) and so it’s logical that my brain has more of an affinity with Mr. Handler than, say, with the girl at work who just asked me how to spell "threw."
And of course the particular obsession that his writing indicates that he shares with me is an obsession that is probably shared by most writers. More than anyone else, I suspect, it is writers who fret about the lack of simplicity in the world. I can only think of one writer who even seems to have considered the idea that the world is a simple place. That’s Ernest Hemingway and, as much as he valued simplicity in all things, I could easily make an argument that the plainness of his writing was a deliberate attempt to contrast with the complicated world, not an attempt to reflect it. So maybe the actual count of writers who see the world as uncomplicated is an ironically uncomplicated zero.
Few writers, though, confront the complexity as a problem itself worthy of discussion. For most writers, the obsession (frustration might be a better term) is only apparent between the lines – books that are overfull of characters, novels that should have been short stories, sophomore efforts that run to thousands of pages and never get finished. But Handler takes the problem head on, and nowhere more so than in the last of his Lemony Snicket volumes. Having created a whole bizarre world of mysteries and questions and with each successive book presenting far more questions than answers, he had backed himself into a corner: How to resolve all this? But the answer was clear from the very first page, the onion metaphor.
Someone more cynical than I could easily make the argument that this is a cop-out. The novelist chooses their topic and thus it is the novelist’s responsibility to answer all the questions they raise within the narrative. But this is short-sighted and restrictive. If the goal of fiction is to reflect the real world, and for me it certainly is, then fiction must also acknowledge at least at some level that no matter how fleeting a character is they do have their own story, and so does everyone who ever briefly enters their life, and so on and so on. The rebukes to the orphans ("You think your story is the only story in the world?") are in fact direct rebukes to the reader. When you start out with the series, you simply want to know what happens to the orphans – that much is explained. All the other questions we as readers clamor for answers to are questions we have invented and they are tangential to the actual story. Or in other words: If you pick up just one layer of an onion, you can’t expect to know everything there is to know about the whole of the onion.
But as much as it might seem a convenient way out of his predicament, there’s plenty of evidence in his other novels to suggest that the world’s complexity really is one of his obsessions and that, as such, the onion-skin rebuke of Book The Thirteenth might have been planned all along.
Consider the first thing we hear from the narrator of his first novel The Basic Eight: "One may as well begin with ..." she writes. Because, of course, that’s not really where the story starts, but it’s where we may as well start because the whole story of Flannery’s birth (and conception, and her parents’ meeting, etc etc) is just a bit too tedious. Part of the story, certainly, but too tedious. So we may as well begin where we do. We flash back, we get background info, but we don’t have to know how all the Basic Eight became friends or every blow by blow of her previous failed relationship. We don’t have to know it, but it is a part of the story.
Or look at Watch Your Mouth, in which Handler becomes the only person I know of besides myself who admits to being interested in those Library of Congress subject guides. And, of course, interest in order and categorization is itself an awareness of the world’s complexity – organization is how we attempt to minimize the world’s cruel complications. WYM also features one of the most self-aware narrators of any novel (novels?) I’ve ever read, and he too discusses the topic, the millions upon millions of stories the universe can tell. (A side note as it relates to WYM and Handler’s in-my-headedness: While basing a novel on the form of an opera is something that has never occurred to me, it is worth noting that the narrative structure of one of my current novels-in-progress is based on the structure of a piece of musical theatre that I’m particularly fond of.)
And his most recent work, Adverbs, is as blatant a look at the bizarre, complicated world as may be possible in 300 pages. Do these characters inhabit the same world? Are those with similar names in fact the same character? If so, are they all living at the same time? We don’t know. Based on the jacket description Handler wrote the whole point is that he wants us not to know – and to wonder.
But Adverbs is also, I should point out, where Handler and I begin to diverge in our philosophy of how to deal with this issue of the complex world. Maybe because he’s a better writer than I, Handler is more interested (at least in Adverbs but also it seems this is true in The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth) in how to tell stories rather than what stories he’s telling. Adverbs is infuriatingly obtuse, sometimes ending at just the moment we start to care about what’s happening in a story. What horrible act was committed? Did they ever get across the bridge? Who flew a plane into what?
It’s not that I’m adverse to the pleasures of language set free. Hell, look at the emails I write or notice how often I’m using dashes and parentheses and otherwise going off on tangents herein – if writing is something you enjoy and believe yourself to be good at then it’s fun to let your typing fingers run free every now and then. But that, to me, is more poetry than prose and I’ve always enjoyed prose more. Poetry exists to tell a simple truth in a beautiful way (which is also the exact point of Adverbs). There’s value in that, but I was also at one point a journalist, so it’s not hard to understand why my heart falls closer to the prose (tell me what happened) camp. It’s not unlike the difference between a Baz Luhrmann movie – all glitz and color and pomp built around a simple premise – and some kind of David Mamet caper – uninteresting to look out, but full of story to unravel in your mind. Neither approach is wrong, I just like story more than I like artifice. Or maybe Handler is just a better writer than I am, and I’m jealous.
But this brings us to the final proof of my argument, which is again an area where I find I have a lot in common with Mr. Snicket’s personal assistant – we find ending all but impossible. Let’s be honest, Handler’s novels (and the SoUE books) are excellent in many ways but the ending of pretty much all of them could be improved. Strangely, it’s not that he doesn’t know how to end a story – his problem is more that he just can’t leave well enough alone once he has ended his story.
This is eminently understandable. In a universe full of people and lives and stories, nothing really has an end. Flannery’s story isn’t really over after the fateful Halloween party, of course it’s not, but the part we really need to know is over. Same goes for Joseph at the funeral on the riverbank. And for Chapter Fourteen.
At some point, the story you’re telling stops. It doesn’t mean it’s the end for the character, and – unfortunately – it’s often harder for the writer to identify this ending point than anyone else. That’s what editors are for.
Sometimes it almost feels like this Daniel Handler fellow is living in my head.
Well, OK, he’s a writer and I’m a writer (clearly far less accomplished than he but still) and he’s a well-red lover of books and I’m a well read lover of books (clearly far less well read than he but still) and so it’s logical that my brain has more of an affinity with Mr. Handler than, say, with the girl at work who just asked me how to spell "threw."
And of course the particular obsession that his writing indicates that he shares with me is an obsession that is probably shared by most writers. More than anyone else, I suspect, it is writers who fret about the lack of simplicity in the world. I can only think of one writer who even seems to have considered the idea that the world is a simple place. That’s Ernest Hemingway and, as much as he valued simplicity in all things, I could easily make an argument that the plainness of his writing was a deliberate attempt to contrast with the complicated world, not an attempt to reflect it. So maybe the actual count of writers who see the world as uncomplicated is an ironically uncomplicated zero.
Few writers, though, confront the complexity as a problem itself worthy of discussion. For most writers, the obsession (frustration might be a better term) is only apparent between the lines – books that are overfull of characters, novels that should have been short stories, sophomore efforts that run to thousands of pages and never get finished. But Handler takes the problem head on, and nowhere more so than in the last of his Lemony Snicket volumes. Having created a whole bizarre world of mysteries and questions and with each successive book presenting far more questions than answers, he had backed himself into a corner: How to resolve all this? But the answer was clear from the very first page, the onion metaphor.
Someone more cynical than I could easily make the argument that this is a cop-out. The novelist chooses their topic and thus it is the novelist’s responsibility to answer all the questions they raise within the narrative. But this is short-sighted and restrictive. If the goal of fiction is to reflect the real world, and for me it certainly is, then fiction must also acknowledge at least at some level that no matter how fleeting a character is they do have their own story, and so does everyone who ever briefly enters their life, and so on and so on. The rebukes to the orphans ("You think your story is the only story in the world?") are in fact direct rebukes to the reader. When you start out with the series, you simply want to know what happens to the orphans – that much is explained. All the other questions we as readers clamor for answers to are questions we have invented and they are tangential to the actual story. Or in other words: If you pick up just one layer of an onion, you can’t expect to know everything there is to know about the whole of the onion.
But as much as it might seem a convenient way out of his predicament, there’s plenty of evidence in his other novels to suggest that the world’s complexity really is one of his obsessions and that, as such, the onion-skin rebuke of Book The Thirteenth might have been planned all along.
Consider the first thing we hear from the narrator of his first novel The Basic Eight: "One may as well begin with ..." she writes. Because, of course, that’s not really where the story starts, but it’s where we may as well start because the whole story of Flannery’s birth (and conception, and her parents’ meeting, etc etc) is just a bit too tedious. Part of the story, certainly, but too tedious. So we may as well begin where we do. We flash back, we get background info, but we don’t have to know how all the Basic Eight became friends or every blow by blow of her previous failed relationship. We don’t have to know it, but it is a part of the story.
Or look at Watch Your Mouth, in which Handler becomes the only person I know of besides myself who admits to being interested in those Library of Congress subject guides. And, of course, interest in order and categorization is itself an awareness of the world’s complexity – organization is how we attempt to minimize the world’s cruel complications. WYM also features one of the most self-aware narrators of any novel (novels?) I’ve ever read, and he too discusses the topic, the millions upon millions of stories the universe can tell. (A side note as it relates to WYM and Handler’s in-my-headedness: While basing a novel on the form of an opera is something that has never occurred to me, it is worth noting that the narrative structure of one of my current novels-in-progress is based on the structure of a piece of musical theatre that I’m particularly fond of.)
And his most recent work, Adverbs, is as blatant a look at the bizarre, complicated world as may be possible in 300 pages. Do these characters inhabit the same world? Are those with similar names in fact the same character? If so, are they all living at the same time? We don’t know. Based on the jacket description Handler wrote the whole point is that he wants us not to know – and to wonder.
But Adverbs is also, I should point out, where Handler and I begin to diverge in our philosophy of how to deal with this issue of the complex world. Maybe because he’s a better writer than I, Handler is more interested (at least in Adverbs but also it seems this is true in The Basic Eight and Watch Your Mouth) in how to tell stories rather than what stories he’s telling. Adverbs is infuriatingly obtuse, sometimes ending at just the moment we start to care about what’s happening in a story. What horrible act was committed? Did they ever get across the bridge? Who flew a plane into what?
It’s not that I’m adverse to the pleasures of language set free. Hell, look at the emails I write or notice how often I’m using dashes and parentheses and otherwise going off on tangents herein – if writing is something you enjoy and believe yourself to be good at then it’s fun to let your typing fingers run free every now and then. But that, to me, is more poetry than prose and I’ve always enjoyed prose more. Poetry exists to tell a simple truth in a beautiful way (which is also the exact point of Adverbs). There’s value in that, but I was also at one point a journalist, so it’s not hard to understand why my heart falls closer to the prose (tell me what happened) camp. It’s not unlike the difference between a Baz Luhrmann movie – all glitz and color and pomp built around a simple premise – and some kind of David Mamet caper – uninteresting to look out, but full of story to unravel in your mind. Neither approach is wrong, I just like story more than I like artifice. Or maybe Handler is just a better writer than I am, and I’m jealous.
But this brings us to the final proof of my argument, which is again an area where I find I have a lot in common with Mr. Snicket’s personal assistant – we find ending all but impossible. Let’s be honest, Handler’s novels (and the SoUE books) are excellent in many ways but the ending of pretty much all of them could be improved. Strangely, it’s not that he doesn’t know how to end a story – his problem is more that he just can’t leave well enough alone once he has ended his story.
This is eminently understandable. In a universe full of people and lives and stories, nothing really has an end. Flannery’s story isn’t really over after the fateful Halloween party, of course it’s not, but the part we really need to know is over. Same goes for Joseph at the funeral on the riverbank. And for Chapter Fourteen.
At some point, the story you’re telling stops. It doesn’t mean it’s the end for the character, and – unfortunately – it’s often harder for the writer to identify this ending point than anyone else. That’s what editors are for.
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