Julian Barnes is crazily good-looking.
Crazy, I know.
Archive for the ‘Literature’ Category
So I read Janet Reitman’s “Inside Scientology” recently
November 2, 2011And have been slow to put up anything up about it – mostly because I’m, you know, a mother to an infant, a full-time working journalist, and kind of a proper playwright nowadays as well.
The book has stayed with me, though, and I feel compelled to say at least something, if not write a proper review.
I think we all ought to be grateful to Reitman for attempting to write a dispassionate book on the Church of Scientology. I understand that a lot of the teachings of Scientology are supposed to be this Terribly Important Secret, but as both a member and a fan of the Russian Orthodox Church in all of its wacky glory, it seems to me that Scientology is really no more insane than the rest of humanity’s major cults. I still think L. Ron Hubbard was mostly a con artist (based on the compelling evidence put together by the writers at one of my favourite websites), but certainly some of the stuff he wrote ended up helping a lot of people and whatever, more power to them. And for all of the people who are bitching and moaning about how Scientology made Tom Cruise into a weirdo – no. Just no. Dude was always a weirdo. You can see it in his smile from way back when. Scientology just helped him get in touch with the inner freak inside.
Still, Reitman is right to point out that the way Scientology is currently run makes it ripe for criticism – both from random outsiders who are staring at it in that whole “check out this fascinating slo-mo trainwreck” type of way, and from ex-members. So I’m betting that there will be proper Protestant Scientologists and Puritan Scientologists and, you know, Calvinist Scientologists soon enough, i.e. the church is splitting.
People looking for Shocking! Horrifying! Facts! are probably going to be disappointed with Reitman. She doesn’t trade a whole lot on rumour and her tone is dry. Perhaps the biggest revelation here is that for a non-believer, Scientology is really not that fascinating – in a sense that non-believers who are looking to be fascinated are going to gravitate towards reading about fringe cults who sacrifice their elderly to Jeff, the God of Biscuits, instead.
Perhaps what’s most interesting about Scientology is how, by virtue of a whole lot of secrecy, church leadership has managed to cover up the fact that it’s fairly bland. Even if you account for all of that Xenu and exploding volcanoes stuff. In a world that already has Kali and Hades and stoning evil apostates – is Scientology really that impressive? I guess the price-tags for some of the spiritual packages it offers surely are. In this economy, anyway.
It still weirds me out to see ‘Lolita’ equated with porn
September 4, 2011Different strokes, I guess…
…Yeah, I’m secretly 12 years old.
I cannot get out, said the starling
March 11, 2010Am off on one of my bizarre road-trips tomorrow. Already, I am wrung out , and I have at least 5 days of other people’s booze and sight-seeing and work and terror ahead of me. Going to see Krakow for the first time. Well, technically it won’t be the first, but my childhood memories of Krakow are completely nonexistent. It’s a blank space. As if someone once held up a cigarette to a particular newsreel.
I’m so tired. I haven’t slept a wink. I’m so tired. My mind is on the brink. Etc.
I used to listen to the Beatles on the floor of my bedroom in Charlotte. Just like today, my room was draped in garlands of lights year-round. But back then, staving off sleep was a game. I took pleasure in delaying it, painting my nails at three a.m., John Lennon murmuring in the background, knowing that when my head hit the pillow, it would be all the more sweeter.
The contents of my head at present, on the other hand, prevent it from resting well. To illustrate them, here is the wonderful Janet Finch:
…I was tired of men. Hanging in doorways, standing too close, their smell of beer or fifteen-year-old whiskey. Men who didn’t come to the emergency room with you, men who left on Christmas Eve. Men who slammed the security gates, who made you love them and then changed their minds. Forests of boys, their ragged shrubs full of eyes following you, grabbing your breasts, waving their money, eyes already knocking you down, taking what they felt was theirs. – White Oleander. (A book I first read in Charlotte, of course).
Finch’s follow-up, Paint It Black, was also excellent – David Lynch really ought to do a screen adaptation, goddamit – but it’s White Oleander that’s always going to sit somewhere inside my ribcage. The roots go deep.
I like to think I have roots in this world.
Late-night Lord of the Rings homage
January 8, 2010
Is suitably dramatic.
“Many are the strange chances of the world.”
Cormac McCarthy’s “faux-arty machismo”? Say what?
November 26, 2009
Iker Casillas begs to differ.
So Stephanie Zacharek used her review of the film adaptation of The Road to bash the original source material. There’s no accounting for taste, but does Cormac McCarthy really have a “he-man streak”? And even if he does… why is that bad?
I rarely agree with Zacherek’s reviews, though I think she gets unfairly lambasted all of the time, and really don’t appreciate the meanness in the comments directed to her (Salon’s commenters, of which I frequently am one, have a bad reputation for a reason). I just don’t understand the criticism being leveled at McCarthy here, I guess. I still get chills just thinking about his description of the Man who contemplates whether or not anything is living in the sea – giant squid, perhaps. I mean, think about it, a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which a man dreams of squid in the cold, dark sea. I don’t even… That’s terrifying. And brilliant.
And the details of “The Road” — which must be particularly wrenching for people who have children, given that nearly every page stokes a common parental fear — repeatedly ask the same question: Are you man enough to take it?
You know, as a woman who read the book and enjoyed it – although perhaps the word “enjoyed” is wrong here, perhaps “admired” works better – I really didn’t get the sense that McCarthy was asking me if I was “man enough.” He was just telling a story in a hard (no pun intended), unflinching style. I didn’t think there was anything gendered about the way he was treating his readers or his subject matter. Sure, it’s a tale of a man and his son, and the mother is gone and not by accident, so there’s that aspect of it. But the man and his son didn’t make me feel as though I was an outsider at He-Man Thunderdome. If anything, I spent a long time thinking about my brother afterward, wondering if I’d be able to take care of him like that if shit should hit the fan. That’s because the writing is so personal; I think it clearly comes from a place wherein McCarthy himself was contemplating various scenarios, and wondering if he could take it.
[The director of "The Road", John Hillcoat] also knows that sometimes it’s not just healthy to recoil — it’s essential.
Well now. First of all, you can’t deny that these are two different mediums we’re talking about here. Because of the way we interact with the written word, and because of the way that the written word interacts with us, there are images we can conjure up in books that don’t translate well when it comes to film. The gruesome image of an infant roasting on a spit is the one that Zacharek has particular issues with, and she praises Hillcoat for not dwelling on it in the film. I think that’s a little like praising Stanley Kubrick for not attempting to re-enact Nabokov’s image of “a sultan, his face expressing great agony (belied, as it were, by his molding caress), helping a callypygean slave child to climb a column of onyx.” Hells to the yeah! Who cares about Oscars, let’s start giving out Common Sense Awards!
I also think that there is quite a bit of “recoiling” going on in The Road, it’s just done in this very graceful, penetrating (bwahaha – OK, fine, I’m intending all of these puns) manner. Like many of the writers I admire, McCarthy writes beautifully about absolutely horrifying things. That’s not so much a recoil as it is an act of transcendence. And if you can’t avoid stepping in blood or shit, you might as well transcend it – is what I always say.
Anyway, all of this is very depressing. Let’s end this post on a happy note, by objectifying Viggo Mortensen for a second:
He may not have made a particularly excellent King, but he was still the best Strider a dork could hope for. Haters to the left.
Sluts! Feminists! Tom Wolfe! Again! Headdesk!
November 13, 2009Can we please stop resurrecting the writer who has his panties in such a twist over the fact that some women aren’t afraid of the “slut” label anymore that he even wrote an entire bad, bloated novel about it every time this stupid conversation about young women and sex happens? This is about as old as Ruslana at Eurovision, for God’s sake.
And the girls — it used to be even if they were total sluts, they always insisted they were virgins.
Oh, for the good old days of double-standards. Then again, I don’t know. There is a streak of such bitterness running through I Am Charlotte Simmons, that Dr. Sigmund here has to wonder how much of this is actually sour grapes.
That’s totally changed, and along with it comes a change in language in which girls talk the same way as the boys. I call it the f— patois.
I cringed with secondhand embarrassment when I read this response years ago, and I am cringing again right now. Other people were cringing at Tom Wolfe that year too, which is why Charlotte Simmons won the Bad Sex in Fiction Award.
So why is this guy relevant to the discussion of modern female sexuality again? Because he’s an old, rich white dude who looks great in a suit? I see.
Honestly, I don’t like bashing Wolfe, I really don’t. He’s a stylish older man with an endearing smile and lots and lots of talent. He charms me, despite his ridiculous, horrible statements. I’ll cop to that. BUT HE STILL HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOUNG WOMEN AND THEIR COLLEGE SEXUAL HABITS, OK?
Oh, and, classy headline there, ABC. “Sluts or New Feminists?” – huh?
“Do you like being unhappy?” “Do you like the fact that rain is wet?”
October 18, 2009No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering… – David Foster Wallace.
Someone asked me recently if I “like” being unhappy. It’s a strange and, at the same time, normal question. Unhappiness can, after all, become familiar, like a pair of well-worn boots you slip into with a little sigh of satisfaction, even if you actually think that the heel is fugly or whatever.
What do you do when you isolate and recognize the feeling of familiarity? Look for a consenting rainbow to have sex with? Hop along the yellow brick road to enlightenment picking up endearingly creepy companions along the way?
These aren’t just rhetorical questions on my part, because I’ve been thinking about the idea of acceptance lately. In TIME*, the awesome Barbara Ehrenreich recently wrote that:
We don’t have to dwell incessantly on the worst-case scenarios — the metastasis, the market crash or global pandemic — but we do need to acknowledge that they could happen and prepare in the best way we can. Some will call this negative thinking, but the technical term is sobriety.
Ehrenreich is talking about responding to the ongoing economic crisis here, but I find that this kind of wisdom applies equally to other, even more abstract areas of life. Sometimes, things suck, and you have to admit it. Sometimes, you suck, and not in the fun way either. The night gets longer, and colder, and even more densely populated by howling stray dogs and drunks. Your idiot neighbours leave the building door open, and someone swipes your welcome mat, and probably trades it for heroin – along with their firstborn. A creature slithers out of a Stephen King story and sits on your chest at night, drinking your blood and breath. You struggle to write clever blog entries, when you really should be working.
Dave Cullen & Wally Lamb on Columbine
July 22, 2009I read Dave Cullen’s Columbine while in Edinburgh this year (yes, that’s what I do on vacation, hang around pubs with a book about some horribly depressing subject, after all the museums close), and came away both impressed with the thorough analysis of the massacre and deeply moved by Cullen’s sensitivity to the subject matter.
It was natural, then, that I would snatch up Wally Lamb’s The Hour I First Believed after spotting it in a bookstore a few weeks later. In this fictional account that sashays back and forth through time, a couple’s lives are irredeemably changed by the Columbine massacre. And then a bunch of other horrible crap happens.
One is a nonfiction account that tries to lay the facts as bare as possible, while the other is a novel that deals with a great deal of issues, both artistic and psychological, but both writers grapple, profoundly and unsettlingly, with the seeming meaningless of the actions of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Cullen looks at the way that psychopaths/sociopaths operate, while Lamb looks at the mythological undercurrents in our struggles with understanding evil.
Lamb has been accused of offering a sugary little pill for the problems we face in our modern lives – from the Columbine massacre to the Iraq war – but I view his novel differently. Yes, the narrator dictates quite a bit to the reader, but that’s kind of the point in this case, isn’t it? Gods, such as Poseidon or the Christian God, do quite a bit of dictating to us, but it’s what we do with their words that is really the difficult part. Lamb seems to be asking his reader – “hey you. What are you going to DO?” And I like that.
I’m tired of the idea that good writing has to be very open-ended in its conclusions. I think the Bible is gorgeously written in places, for example, and it’s not as if the authors were trying to be ambiguous. I think that in a way, Lamb’s forthright prose is much more challenging that all lot of the stuff that’s written to be as disengaged from the reader as possible. Being walloped over the head with Wally Lamb’s hope did not conjure up simple emotions in me. I think that most writers do obvious really poorly, but Lamb is not one of those writers. He’s fun when he’s obvious. And funny. Every once in a while, I want a writer to hold my hand, if they do it gallantly and beautifully.
Is “The Hour I First Believed” a reassuring book? I didn’t think so. I think that in many ways, it’s actually as reassuring as Dave Cullen’s stark, painful work of nonfiction. Lamb has purity of purpose, just like Cullen does when he tackles the enduring myths around the massacre, but it’s not as if he flinches away from the little and big horrors of life, or tells us that we will be able to flinch away ourselves when our time comes. Lamb wants to give his reader hope, but he warns us that hope itself comes at a price that may be a little too much to bear. Even then, it may not even work out for you in the end, as we witness when we examine the fates of some of the more peripheral (but no less interesting) characters.
Even Lamb’s mentions of such seemingly extraneous personages as Mark Twain and Nikola Tesla are part of a great American tapestry that the novel ambitiously weaves. The Civil War corresponds to the Iraq War. Mark Twain losing his daughter finds an echo in… Well, I don’t want to talk about the plot much. Let’s just say that while some people found the book’s vast scope to be wearying, I found it very rich. It’s like a novel inspired by Walt Whitman’s “I contain multitudes…” What could be more American than that?
I think anyone who’s doing any kind of thinking about the Columbine massacre ought to read “Columbine” and “The Hour I First Believed” back-to-back. At the very least, you’ll get a kick out of different, but equally engaging approaches to very similar and troubling questions. And ultimately, what’s chilling and – oddly enough- deeply satisfying about both of these works is the sense of inevitability they inspire.
Something that stopped me dead while reading Zoë Heller’s “The Believers”
July 1, 2009‘Only ideas are perfect. People never are,’ Joel would tell her. ‘When you’ve lived a bit longer, you’ll be more forgiving.’ But Rosa had scorned these attempts to modify her wrath. For a person as deeply offended by injustice and inequity as she was – as committed to changing the world – a degree of ruthlessness was imperative, she felt. Her usual response to her father had been to quote Lenin’s defence of Bolshevik tactics: ‘Is regard for humanity possible in such an unheard-of ferocious struggle? By what measure do you measure the quantity of necessary and unnecessary blows in a fight?’
Oh dear. Now, I must first explain that I have a knee-jerk reaction to Americans like Rosa’ character – for a while, I’ve even pretended as if they don’t exist at all, which is, of course, completely untrue. It’s as if some well-intentioned American decided to quote a passage from the Q’uran to Apostate at a party – there’s a sense of “hey moron, this is MY lived experience, not YOUR lived experience. Piss off, why don’t you.” (Without putting words in Apostate’s mouth, I somehow imagine her reaction to the aforementioned scenario would be similar to my reaction upon encountering people like Rosa)
In my family, the harshest words of criticism were always reserved for Lenin, not Stalin. There are several reasons for this. First of all, the symbolism of the gruesome murder of the royal family. Then there is the belief that without a Lenin, we would never have had a Stalin in the first place, that Lenin was the foundation for everything. Finally, and this is the part that I think few people know about (I could be wrong), those Bolshevik tactics that Lenin defended? He enjoyed them. Something that Western radicals rarely quote is Lenin’s famous attempt at humour – “We’re not shooting enough of those little professors!” Haw haw. The diminutive Lenin uses for professors, meaning, of course, the academic establishment, is insulting in a uniquely Russian way, and hard to translate, but I’m sure you can imagine what it sounds like. Lenin was gleeful, absolutely gleeful, at the violence he presided over.
Having now finished the excellent Believers, I also believe in something.
