When the Old Crow heard what our second reading selection was, he asked if every one of our endorsements were going to have been optioned for a movie. I don’t think this is quite fair because a) I didn’t know that The Road had been optioned when I picked it, and b) I like movies, so hey c’mon. I decided to avail myself of the undeniable pleasure of sniping that a movie “was good, but not as good as the book” by going to see Atonement yesterday, and here is my report.
One of my Indie Tastemaker friends told me, a few weeks ago, that there was a shot in Atonement that was “unparalleled in the history of shots”. Now, caveat emptor – this same I.T. told me that there was a scene in I am Legend “unparalleled in emotional depth”, and when I saw I am Legend and asked, bemused, what that scene was, she could not recall it. But this time she delivered, and there was indeed a tracking shot that was simply incredible in Atonement and of which many of you have probably heard. I had heard that this unparalleled shot was a tracking shot, but that was all I knew about it, so every time the camera started to track, I got all excited and wondered if this was it. When it finally rolled around, I knew after about a minute. The scene was handled with the bravura appropriate to a five minute tracking shot (I don’t really know if it’s five minutes; IMDb has consecutive trivia items about it naming it as 4 ½ and 5 ½ minutes, so I will split the difference). After about a minute, though, I – and my moviegoing companion, who had neither read the book nor had advance warning about this shot – stopped thinking, “what an incredible illustration of the things that humans, for some reason, do to each other” and began thinking “what an amazing tracking shot”.
Now, the adjective for things like that is “virtuosic”, and the last time I dragged out “virtuosic” it was to talk about the paragraph in the novel Atonement in which Briony reacts to Robbie’s letter. The difference between the virtuosi behind them, though, was that during the book, I never stopped thinking about Briony, and in the movie, I actually spent time thinking only about Joe Wright and how goddamn expensive it must’ve been to lay down all that track. I don’t think that should be a slag on Joe Wright – the scene is beautiful, and moving – but it I think I found it moving principally as a contrapuntal example to what it portrayed (what nasty things people can do) by being an exquisite example of what people like talented filmmakers can create. In the novel, because Briony only exists in the milieu of words, a bravura performance of words can make her more real. In film, the camera cannot draw attention to itself without enforcing its status as an observer, rather than a creator. So what? I’m not really sure. I enjoyed both the film and the book (more on the end of the book later in the week), but I think that since one of the concerns I have is the reason for reading, this contrast with film might provide one element of an answer. The alloyed pleasure, of an artist’s virtuosity and of characters’ presentation of experience, may be one unique to written fiction.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Print Recommendation
This month’s Harper’s not only features three pages of something new “in progress” by David Foster Wallace, but also a small, enjoyable piece by Ursula le Guin about the state of reading in this country. She makes the case, first of all, that the gloom-and-doom people that you hear every month or so on NPR bemoaning the lack of reading in this world are wrong; compared to almost any other time in history, our literacy is ok. It is only the freakish, overachieving century between 1850 and 1950 that’s making us look bad: that was the century of the book, when, as she and the Dudebrodogman independently point out, eager New Yorkers herded around ships from Britain wanting to know what had happened in the latest Dickens installment. We are not up to that level. But we are not so bad.
The rest of the essay, which I am recommending wholeheartedly, includes a discussion of the physical, printed nature of books; several snarky and hilarious comments about the stupidity of outfits that treat books like commodities (with at least one of which outfits I have some familiarity); and a brief comment on why electronic books will not take off. All things close to my much-vaunted and ballyhooed "concerns" about the status of reading, that I mentioned in the last post. I started out writing more about this essay, but it was mostly summary peppered with out-of-order quotes, and was kind of lame. But the essay is good, and out now, and comes with some David Foster Wallace writing, so go for it.
That, and my mother and aunts keep asking about the blog, and I felt bad-ish sending them to one whose first post was on dirty words. Can anyone else tell based on how concerned I am about those words that I went to catholic school? This is the last you'll hear about them, I promise. More on Atonement, and the announcement of the next pick, later in the week.
The rest of the essay, which I am recommending wholeheartedly, includes a discussion of the physical, printed nature of books; several snarky and hilarious comments about the stupidity of outfits that treat books like commodities (with at least one of which outfits I have some familiarity); and a brief comment on why electronic books will not take off. All things close to my much-vaunted and ballyhooed "concerns" about the status of reading, that I mentioned in the last post. I started out writing more about this essay, but it was mostly summary peppered with out-of-order quotes, and was kind of lame. But the essay is good, and out now, and comes with some David Foster Wallace writing, so go for it.
That, and my mother and aunts keep asking about the blog, and I felt bad-ish sending them to one whose first post was on dirty words. Can anyone else tell based on how concerned I am about those words that I went to catholic school? This is the last you'll hear about them, I promise. More on Atonement, and the announcement of the next pick, later in the week.
Saturday, January 19, 2008
"I love you" and the c-word
I am through the first part of Atonement, which details the events of one day in 1935 (I’m pretty sure it’s 1935). Part two picks up again in the thick of the second world war. On the day in question, the younger daughter of a wealthy family intercepts and reads over a note written to the older daughter that contains a particularly nasty word.
The word – which the younger daughter, Briony, will not say and will only spell backwards when she explains it to her slightly older cousin – is the c-word, which I will not say either. The effect that the letter has on Briony is complicated – “the very complexity of her feelings confirmed [her] in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit” (McEwan, 106) – but it is remarkable the degree to which that word affects her as a word, prior to anything else. Since Briony is a writerly – which is to say, a hyperliterary – character, she is of particular interest to us as readers. More so than many other characters – Leon, for example, or Emily – Briony has a particularly sensitive relationship to words, and since she lives in a novel that makes her a character particularly open to us. McEwan’s description of the c-word’s effect on her is a virtuoso performance, and it is representative of Briony’s writerly nature.
At first, the representations of the word are totally divorced from any but the most oblique insinuations: she thinks of words that rhyme with the c-word, but won’t even say those rhymes (“the smallest pig in the letter” rather than “runt”). The word, “a typographical demon” (McEwan, 107; all the rest of the quotes are actually from the same paragraph, so I’ll stop attributing) has a specially typographical life for Briony because she has “never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks”. But she knows to what it must refer – apart from context,
“the word was at once one with its meaning, and almost onomatopoetic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddled at the foot of the cross.”
That, I think, is virtuosic; and, beyond its pure entertainment value (and its sophomoric charm – this is, after all, a little girl outraged by a dirty word), its negative presentation of a word is a forceful depiction of the power of words. Later in this chapter, Briony’s cousin Lola calls Robbie, the letter’s author, a maniac, and that word similarly becomes more and more resonant until Briony’s conception of Robbie as a maniac overcomes her. This passage enacts such an engulfment in miniature, culminating in the strange and wonderful description of what is probably the dirtiest word in English as “three figures huddled at the foot of the cross”. This reimagining of the word as a form of feminine humility before religion, I haven’t quite figured out yet. But this is a frenzied castle that Briony has built out of words, and triggered by one word. That triggering, I think, is what enchants me the most about the passage. It seems as if reading, as an activity, is daunting going outwards – the number of things that have been written is staggering, a point that has been beaten pretty much to death by anyone who’s ever written about the interwebs. But Briony’s, or McEwan’s, reading of a single word in Robbie’s letters reminds us that there is an equally daunting depth to books – even the dirtiest word can (as a piece of “demon typography”, no less) be transfigured into one of the most sacred scenes in human history – that is more inviting than anything else. It is a supreme act of readerly creation, and has an echo in Briony’s horrible crime (which crime becomes hers and horrible by an imposed misreading of a different, already nasty crime scene). Briony’s reading of the letter may not be a particularly palatable reading – and it may forebode the terrible act that gives the shape to the book – but it serves as a testament nevertheless to the raw power of reading.
A partially integrated footnote: I imagine that this determination to avoid the word – it has not, in its proper form or even in asterisks, cropped up since Robbie’s original letter – might clue us into another echo, when the text is far more elliptical than we’d expect when, in their appropriately bibliotechnic lovemaking, Robbie tells Cecelia that he loves her.
“Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as if she had been the first to say them” (McEwan, 129).
Again, the words themselves don’t show up near this passage. This obfuscation is what puts me in mind of Briony’s reaction to the letter, and I think this counts as a vote for the power of words to do good: it is not just Robbie’s love for Cecelia, or hers for him, that has been able to survive centuries of abuse uncheapened; it is the words themselves. Later, Robbie will have his personalized mantra: “Come back. I’ll wait for you.” But the talismanic property of unassociated words – words qua words – is on display here as steadfastly as the demon that typographically infects fervent Briony.
Your thoughts on words, talismanic, dirty, or otherwise, are appreciated. More on non-Atonement stuff in the coming week.
The word – which the younger daughter, Briony, will not say and will only spell backwards when she explains it to her slightly older cousin – is the c-word, which I will not say either. The effect that the letter has on Briony is complicated – “the very complexity of her feelings confirmed [her] in her view that she was entering an arena of adult emotion and dissembling from which her writing was bound to benefit” (McEwan, 106) – but it is remarkable the degree to which that word affects her as a word, prior to anything else. Since Briony is a writerly – which is to say, a hyperliterary – character, she is of particular interest to us as readers. More so than many other characters – Leon, for example, or Emily – Briony has a particularly sensitive relationship to words, and since she lives in a novel that makes her a character particularly open to us. McEwan’s description of the c-word’s effect on her is a virtuoso performance, and it is representative of Briony’s writerly nature.
At first, the representations of the word are totally divorced from any but the most oblique insinuations: she thinks of words that rhyme with the c-word, but won’t even say those rhymes (“the smallest pig in the letter” rather than “runt”). The word, “a typographical demon” (McEwan, 107; all the rest of the quotes are actually from the same paragraph, so I’ll stop attributing) has a specially typographical life for Briony because she has “never heard the word spoken, or seen it in print, or come across it in asterisks”. But she knows to what it must refer – apart from context,
“the word was at once one with its meaning, and almost onomatopoetic. The smooth-hollowed, partly enclosed forms of its first three letters were as clear as a set of anatomical drawings. Three figures huddled at the foot of the cross.”
That, I think, is virtuosic; and, beyond its pure entertainment value (and its sophomoric charm – this is, after all, a little girl outraged by a dirty word), its negative presentation of a word is a forceful depiction of the power of words. Later in this chapter, Briony’s cousin Lola calls Robbie, the letter’s author, a maniac, and that word similarly becomes more and more resonant until Briony’s conception of Robbie as a maniac overcomes her. This passage enacts such an engulfment in miniature, culminating in the strange and wonderful description of what is probably the dirtiest word in English as “three figures huddled at the foot of the cross”. This reimagining of the word as a form of feminine humility before religion, I haven’t quite figured out yet. But this is a frenzied castle that Briony has built out of words, and triggered by one word. That triggering, I think, is what enchants me the most about the passage. It seems as if reading, as an activity, is daunting going outwards – the number of things that have been written is staggering, a point that has been beaten pretty much to death by anyone who’s ever written about the interwebs. But Briony’s, or McEwan’s, reading of a single word in Robbie’s letters reminds us that there is an equally daunting depth to books – even the dirtiest word can (as a piece of “demon typography”, no less) be transfigured into one of the most sacred scenes in human history – that is more inviting than anything else. It is a supreme act of readerly creation, and has an echo in Briony’s horrible crime (which crime becomes hers and horrible by an imposed misreading of a different, already nasty crime scene). Briony’s reading of the letter may not be a particularly palatable reading – and it may forebode the terrible act that gives the shape to the book – but it serves as a testament nevertheless to the raw power of reading.
A partially integrated footnote: I imagine that this determination to avoid the word – it has not, in its proper form or even in asterisks, cropped up since Robbie’s original letter – might clue us into another echo, when the text is far more elliptical than we’d expect when, in their appropriately bibliotechnic lovemaking, Robbie tells Cecelia that he loves her.
“Finally he spoke the three simple words that no amount of bad art or bad faith can ever quite cheapen. She repeated them, with exactly the same slight emphasis on the second word, as if she had been the first to say them” (McEwan, 129).
Again, the words themselves don’t show up near this passage. This obfuscation is what puts me in mind of Briony’s reaction to the letter, and I think this counts as a vote for the power of words to do good: it is not just Robbie’s love for Cecelia, or hers for him, that has been able to survive centuries of abuse uncheapened; it is the words themselves. Later, Robbie will have his personalized mantra: “Come back. I’ll wait for you.” But the talismanic property of unassociated words – words qua words – is on display here as steadfastly as the demon that typographically infects fervent Briony.
Your thoughts on words, talismanic, dirty, or otherwise, are appreciated. More on non-Atonement stuff in the coming week.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
Why The Road Is a Bad First Selection for a Book Club
“Do you think your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.” -- The Road, p 196
Now, although The Road was not my selection for the Unpacking My Library book club, it was my idea to put it first, and it’s really the first-ness that this post is going to wind up finding objectionable. So, don’t worry, the buck stops here.
A very smart man once told me that Rasselas, the novella-length piece of fiction by Samuel Johnson, was a novel written against novels. It probably is. It is a very boring story about the Prince of Abyssinia, who leaves the Happy Valley in which he lives to have a series of very long conversations about just what it is that he might do with his life, and finds out that pretty much everything’s a bummer. No one in Rasselas’s world does much, and everyone talks a lot. It is basically a series of Johnson’s moralizing essays, like the Rambler, yoked together with dull narration. It’s the dullness of the narration that makes it an anti-novel, really: compare it to its contemporary, the arch-novel Tom Jones, to see just how inimical that kind of plod is to the novelistic enterprise. Johnson was terrified of Tom Jones, and, as the very smart man who told me this suggested, that kind of inimicality might have been purposeful. Rasselas resists the charms offered by a lively narrative like Tom Jones, because the novel – or rather, Johnson, its author – refuses to give any but the thinnest serving of plot and character, only serving us moral pabulum.
So. We have (some of us have) just finished another plot that plods, and, I think, another novel written against novels. Tim called The Road, in his post, a novel that had been redacted, and that seems appropriate: there is something taken out of this book, that most books have got. I think that the sense of the novel as a valuable object has been removed from The Road, and that the specter we are left with is terrifying.
I hope that my remarks will tie together some ideas from the previous posts. The Old Crow, with a wisdom appropriate to his many avian years, that the muddy grammar in the end times of the book traces a muddying of categories – particularly the echt category of good/bad. This, I think is true. Both the father and the son put pressure on the distinction between what it is good, and what it is bad to do. The father’s morality grounds out in pragmatism – things end up being good insofar as they enable the boy to stay alive (keeping himself alive seems secondary; his being alive is only a good insofar as it ups the chances that the boy will live). The boy puts the lie to this as a real system of morality, because he wants it to be absolute: he wants to share more food than there is to share, he wants to let live those people who would kill him. His morality is untenable, and the father knows this, because it is going to get them both killed. And the father’s morality is untenable, and the son knows this, because it is totally arbitrary that their morality should be based on keeping the boy alive, rather than everybody else.
The quote with which I opened this post speaks to the father’s moral crisis. His fathers, of course, may well have availed themselves of the idea of an ancestral ledgerbook. It would have been easy for them, as it can be easy for us, to live as though there are morals because there are plenty of people – and plenty of amenities – around. It is easy to think about things like the greater good, things your buried fathers would’ve approved of. But when your world has been radically reduced – when one boy is your world entire – the moral crisis becomes a crisis of meaning.
McCarthy demonstrates the depth of this moral crisis of meaning by paralleling a dissolution of meaning in the book. By the time of the father’s death, the hallucinatory passages the Crow describes – those points where, for example, we can’t properly assign antecedents – have given way to the dry reportage style that characterizes the novel as a whole. But after the last gasp of the father’s meaning-bestowing consciousness – one that notes “old dreams encroach[ing] upon the waking world” (McCarthy, 280). There is language like this in the boy’s discourse: it is a remnant of a moral world like ours, like the father’s, one that depends on a system more substantial that mere survivalism – and one that, as The Road shows us, will collapse under pressure.
And thus does The Road make its case against the novel, and thus do we find it so harrowing. It exposes the structure of novels in general as one that is assailable, and not only assailable in theory, but in practice. It doesn’t take the catastrophe that occurs in the prehistory of The Road to put the importance of the novel on shaky ground; the pressure exerted just by the idea of a survivalist society is enough to get us to wonder why bother, with morals and with literature, at all. In the end, The Road offers the opposite of Johnson’s pabulum – it has plot and character, but neither of them seems to mean anything, both pale in importance compared to the mere struggle for life.
The last hope for novelistic value is, naturally enough, with a metaphor: the one metaphor the boy knows, the one thing he seems to possess that reaches beyond his stringent “good” and “bad” valuations: carrying the fire. Until the nearly inscrutable (actually, totally inscrutable to me, I would love to hear what anyone else thought of it) final section of the book, the boy’s one reference to carrying the fire is all we get in the way of metaphor (or literariness of any sort, really) after the father’s death. That may be comfort – its promethean suggestion carries a promise of something, certainly – but it is small comfort indeed compared to the general and uncompromising dressing down that moral and literate endeavors receive at the hands of this novel.
So that is what I thought, in the last analysis, of The Road, and why its argument that books (that everything) are a form frippery is not the best argument to stare down while beginning a program of reading books. But! Our next selection is Ian McEwan’s Atonement, just in time to catch the movie, and which, based on the time-honored technique of skimming without reading, has much fuller paragraphs and pages. Happy reading, comrades!
Now, although The Road was not my selection for the Unpacking My Library book club, it was my idea to put it first, and it’s really the first-ness that this post is going to wind up finding objectionable. So, don’t worry, the buck stops here.
A very smart man once told me that Rasselas, the novella-length piece of fiction by Samuel Johnson, was a novel written against novels. It probably is. It is a very boring story about the Prince of Abyssinia, who leaves the Happy Valley in which he lives to have a series of very long conversations about just what it is that he might do with his life, and finds out that pretty much everything’s a bummer. No one in Rasselas’s world does much, and everyone talks a lot. It is basically a series of Johnson’s moralizing essays, like the Rambler, yoked together with dull narration. It’s the dullness of the narration that makes it an anti-novel, really: compare it to its contemporary, the arch-novel Tom Jones, to see just how inimical that kind of plod is to the novelistic enterprise. Johnson was terrified of Tom Jones, and, as the very smart man who told me this suggested, that kind of inimicality might have been purposeful. Rasselas resists the charms offered by a lively narrative like Tom Jones, because the novel – or rather, Johnson, its author – refuses to give any but the thinnest serving of plot and character, only serving us moral pabulum.
So. We have (some of us have) just finished another plot that plods, and, I think, another novel written against novels. Tim called The Road, in his post, a novel that had been redacted, and that seems appropriate: there is something taken out of this book, that most books have got. I think that the sense of the novel as a valuable object has been removed from The Road, and that the specter we are left with is terrifying.
I hope that my remarks will tie together some ideas from the previous posts. The Old Crow, with a wisdom appropriate to his many avian years, that the muddy grammar in the end times of the book traces a muddying of categories – particularly the echt category of good/bad. This, I think is true. Both the father and the son put pressure on the distinction between what it is good, and what it is bad to do. The father’s morality grounds out in pragmatism – things end up being good insofar as they enable the boy to stay alive (keeping himself alive seems secondary; his being alive is only a good insofar as it ups the chances that the boy will live). The boy puts the lie to this as a real system of morality, because he wants it to be absolute: he wants to share more food than there is to share, he wants to let live those people who would kill him. His morality is untenable, and the father knows this, because it is going to get them both killed. And the father’s morality is untenable, and the son knows this, because it is totally arbitrary that their morality should be based on keeping the boy alive, rather than everybody else.
The quote with which I opened this post speaks to the father’s moral crisis. His fathers, of course, may well have availed themselves of the idea of an ancestral ledgerbook. It would have been easy for them, as it can be easy for us, to live as though there are morals because there are plenty of people – and plenty of amenities – around. It is easy to think about things like the greater good, things your buried fathers would’ve approved of. But when your world has been radically reduced – when one boy is your world entire – the moral crisis becomes a crisis of meaning.
McCarthy demonstrates the depth of this moral crisis of meaning by paralleling a dissolution of meaning in the book. By the time of the father’s death, the hallucinatory passages the Crow describes – those points where, for example, we can’t properly assign antecedents – have given way to the dry reportage style that characterizes the novel as a whole. But after the last gasp of the father’s meaning-bestowing consciousness – one that notes “old dreams encroach[ing] upon the waking world” (McCarthy, 280). There is language like this in the boy’s discourse: it is a remnant of a moral world like ours, like the father’s, one that depends on a system more substantial that mere survivalism – and one that, as The Road shows us, will collapse under pressure.
And thus does The Road make its case against the novel, and thus do we find it so harrowing. It exposes the structure of novels in general as one that is assailable, and not only assailable in theory, but in practice. It doesn’t take the catastrophe that occurs in the prehistory of The Road to put the importance of the novel on shaky ground; the pressure exerted just by the idea of a survivalist society is enough to get us to wonder why bother, with morals and with literature, at all. In the end, The Road offers the opposite of Johnson’s pabulum – it has plot and character, but neither of them seems to mean anything, both pale in importance compared to the mere struggle for life.
The last hope for novelistic value is, naturally enough, with a metaphor: the one metaphor the boy knows, the one thing he seems to possess that reaches beyond his stringent “good” and “bad” valuations: carrying the fire. Until the nearly inscrutable (actually, totally inscrutable to me, I would love to hear what anyone else thought of it) final section of the book, the boy’s one reference to carrying the fire is all we get in the way of metaphor (or literariness of any sort, really) after the father’s death. That may be comfort – its promethean suggestion carries a promise of something, certainly – but it is small comfort indeed compared to the general and uncompromising dressing down that moral and literate endeavors receive at the hands of this novel.
So that is what I thought, in the last analysis, of The Road, and why its argument that books (that everything) are a form frippery is not the best argument to stare down while beginning a program of reading books. But! Our next selection is Ian McEwan’s Atonement, just in time to catch the movie, and which, based on the time-honored technique of skimming without reading, has much fuller paragraphs and pages. Happy reading, comrades!
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