Cool Ideas

This is going to be a post against cool ideas. Now, in general, I am for cool ideas. They are often cool. A cartoon song about George Washington? That's a cool idea. Puppies at halftime during the super bowl is a cool idea. These are also both clearly the fruit of someone thinking "you know what would be cool?" and then making their cartoon or their halftime show. So, in most walks of life, cool ideas do good work. But not novels. I mean, novels are the one place, really, where just wanted to have a cool idea set forth just isn't going to cut it.

I started writing this post without really knowing why this was going to be true, but knowing that I was going to end up coming down on Downtown Owl for failing as a novel by being rather obviously a string of written episodes clearly inspired in their author by a series of cool ideas. Related but non-interlocking stories is a cool idea, and sets up early for a big convergent ending, which is a cool idea. Nicknames are a cool idea, and novels offer unchecked nicknaming range (it's almost only in novels that we find those guys with nicknames whose working is dependent on a nickname-last name hookup [I say that as a gut thing, especially since the only such nickname I can think off the top of my head is from a movie {Randall "Pink" Floyd}]). But none of these nicknames sound like anything that real humans would make up, and, more importantly, none of them seem especially revelatory about the characters whom they nickname. One guy is called the Dog Lover because he, uh, loves his dog; but at no point does his dog-loving stand in poignant counterpoint, or even poignant point to anything else that goes on in the novel. One guy -- one of our main guys-- is named Mitch Hrlicka, and is called Vanna, because his football coach thought his name needed more vowels. That is clever enough -- except it seems like cleverness cheaply bought, because, of course, the same author who made up the nickname actually made up the nickedname, too.

I think that one of the opposites of this is the sublimely ridiculous Armies of the Night, by Norman Mailer, where Mailer talks at huge length about his own involvement in a march on the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War. He keeps yammering about Mailer's long suffering, and the Huge Historical Importance of everything he does. On paper, it is irredeemably lame: writing a novel more or less explicitly to justify a certain thing you've done is like the anti-cool idea. But Mailer has two things that I think are at the core of what good novels need: he has an undeniably magnificent sense of literary style, and he has an unswerving sense of commitment to writing these things down with that style, a sort of ineffable sense that he, Mailer, is absolutely compelled to write this book (this sense of compulsion is something that I keep invoking to defend Bolaño's so thinly veiling the version of himself [Belano] who stars in the Savage Detectives). What Downtown Owl ends up suffering from is a decent but not overwhelming style -- a style that's really most at home with observational stand-up comedians and a pre-backlash Malcolm Gladwell-- and an overarching sense not of compulsion, but of coolness.

This may not be a thing that causes concern for everyone, I have just thought; but to me, what makes these two shortcomings (and shortcomings may be putting it strongly; cool ideas and hey-what's-the-deal-with-this style make some brilliant essays, for sure) so galling to me is that they seem to come short of justifying the invention of the world of Downtown Owl. Why this might not concern everyone, is that I am well aware that I more than most put heavy stock in fictional people. I care about them deeply, and want to care about them almost as autocratic beings. When the characters in a book like this -- and a book that, in its final third, is clearly set up to inspire some kind of cosmic pathos -- seem to have been born not out of a compulsion to create people on the behalf of their author, but out of a desire to serve cool ideas, it ends up making me feel disappointed.

So that's that. According to the BS report with Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman's next book will be essays; I will almost definitely buy it in hardcover. And leave my highly exacting needs for novels to somebody else. Somebody called maybe, Bolaño? More on him tomorrow.

Green Eyed Monster

So, this isn't super surprising, probs, but I am often jealous of fictional people. I am much more often jealous of fictional people than I am of actual people, because, whatever actual people, do your own thing. But people on television and in books, I am often envious of. This is probably not the way most normal people confront the universe. But it's what I've got. So anyway, I have been barnstorming through our soon-to-be Book Club Book Emeritus, the Savage Detectives, and it got me to wondering in a particular way about these jealousies, to wit: I started to wonder whether the oblique way in which Belano and Ulises Lima exist has eclipsed the occasional way in which television characters exist, as the mode of going about life of which I am most (and most unrealistically) jealous.

I should say that, ever since I started waking up to watch the 3am to 5am block of Nick at Nite programming (Dick Van Dyke, the Lucille Ball Show, and maybe F Troop?) when I was in fifth grade, I have felt as if living in a television program would have been the best way to do it. In my own, actual life, I would say I generate enough activity of interest (to hold my own interest, I mean) for maybe an hour or two, with, which skillful editing, could be brought down to about forty-eight minutes, a week. So I could be an HBO show or something. The rest of my actual time I spend doing things that even I think would be better left off camera -- sitting around, waiting for things, updating my cache of quotes that are clever enough to text to people. I used to think that what would really be the best, would be if I could have to pay attention to what I was doing for those forty-eight minutes -- with music and montages -- and spend the rest of the week, I don't know, doing something else. This happens to me especially when I drive home from work, having had a successful night of playing Trivia Whiz on the Megatouch at the bar in Lockport, and a song I really like comes on the radio while I pull into my driveway. This, I think to myself, ought to be the end of this episode, and it seems like a big anticlimax that I actually have to get out of the car and brush my teeth and all of that.

Anyway, those montages are great and all, but now, more and more, I find myself wishing that the best way for my life to be talked about wouldn't even be in episodes, but in peripheral interlopes into other people talking about what they were up to when I ran into them. This morning I wore pajama pants and a Clap Your Hands Say Yeah t-shirt to go buy an air freshener and a frozen pizza at the grocery store, and the whole time I thought about how fantastic it would be if instead of something like this blog post, my trip to the grocery store was chronicled in somebody else's story about how they were picking up a sandwich tray and saw some guy in a CYHSY shirt ambling towards the aisle with scented candles and incense and such. And, say, that's how you'd know I spent a year here outside Buffalo. Just like Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, I wish to be hovering around whatever narrative arc that I'm currently propelling, in the muddled way that I'm propelling myself. Is that a strange thing to want? Periphery? And what do you guys think is better, that one, or episodes? Please, let somebody write that they too are jealous of the invented. Please?

The Book Review Review

So, yikes, a whole week with no posts. I am sure that you are all wondering what I could have been doing during all that time. Well, what I was doing was mostly sitting in my kitchen, drinking scotch, eating cereal, and reading gawker. So, really, I have no excuse for myself. I did read a little -- I finished Downtown Owl by Chuck Klosterman (on which more later in the week), I read a bunch of the Savage Detectives (on which more a little later in the week when I finish the book), I continued my adventures without underlining. Mainly, though, it was cereal, scotch, and the Book Review!

The big essay in the Book Review this week was about Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith's bon vivant who would be turning eighty this year. He is also the star of one of the very few books that I own that are tie-ins to movies or tv shows. Here is the whole list: Fight Club, the Talented Mr Ripley, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Les Miserables, and Different Seasons by Stephen King (which is a tie-in for Apt Pupil, one of the stories in the book; I bought it for a different would-be tie-in, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption), and the copy of Gossip Girl that I stole from my sister. I don't think that that list has any sort of cohesion, frankly. I managed to get in just under the wire with both the Road and with Atonement, my copies of which have their original paperback covers, but a little sticker that says "Soon a Major Motion Picture!", and I fought hard to get a copy of The Haunting of Hill House that had not been repackaged as just the Haunting. I don't know why i have this constant battles against movie tie-ins, especially because I so often determine to read books just so I'll be ready to watch the movies that they make of them. Like most of the things about my books that have more to do with objectness than bookiness, I think I do it for the benefit of people who will look at my books someday, even though pretty much no one ever looks at my books. Someday, though, I will be able to say: "Oh, yeah, Everything is Illuminated, I read that a while before it came out."

Ahem. Tom Ripley, I should know, would've probably made a point of discouraging any movie tie-ins among his books at Belle Ombre. He was stylish to the point of madness, according to the end of this Book Review essay: "the madness of perfect manners, of impeccable taste, of watertight civility." Now, because the rest of the Book Review was long, and because of all the scotch and cereal, the only other book review I read was the prequel somebody wrote for the Maltese Falcon (looks interesting!). Other than that, all weekend, all I did was watch Gossip Girl. Now all I do is watch Gossip Girl. I keep having to go buy myself dinner so that I will be reading, at least, instead of watching Gossip Girl. Anyway, that is my lame excuse and apology for slagging off my blog. More tomorrow!

The Book Review Review

Book Review this week: eh. The most interesting thing to me, naturally, was the double review of those two new Johnson biographies. Now, I'm sure that many of you have been waiting for literally weeks! for me to make some kind of noise about these new biographies of Johnson, ever since Adam Gopnik wrote up and down about the bizarre sex life of Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale in his summing up of these new books. Gopnik says stuff like this: "Johnson’s piety is more impressive if we imagine it up against the keen daily edge of erotic appetite, rather than simply a long-term bulwark against imagined insanity." I guess it is? Whenever Johnson's undoubtedly bizarre life is brought up again for reconsideration, besides token deference to Boswell, the thing people always mention is that Johnson did biography too, as if that we reason enough to put him under the microscope again. But I'm not convinced that any reimagining of a grumpier Johnson or a more sexually frustrated Johnson is especially warranted, and I hardly think that that's what Johnson did to those whom he biographied. He complained about Milton's politics, as most note; but I think the sort of legend-making that he preferred, and that he got from Boswell, is more like what he puts forth in the Life of Savage, or even in the Life of Swift where, for all his nastiness toward Swift, he refuses to mention why Swift's food was pre-cut at the end of his life (he had tried to stab himself with his fork). Boswell, for all his flaws, did something that his further biographers seem to either not wish, or not be able to do; which is to make him a great character. It may be that Boswell poisoned the well; that the character of Johnson is such that it's now impossible to create a great nonfiction character out of him to contend with Boswell's more literary creation, the way that, say, Joe Gould, from Joseph Mitchell's Joe Gould's Secret is a great nonfiction character. Anyway. The review of these two new books (like most reviews of them I've read, this post has coupled them and had a lot more to say about Johnson than the books themselves) ends by pointing out that though neither of these books will be wished longer than they are, Johnson would've appreciated their being written for the tercentenary of his birth. Maybe. I will try to get a hold of library copies of these and let you know. Or maybe I'll just reread a hundred pages of Boswell or so, instead.