For Those About to Rock Band, We Salute You

I decided the other day that one of the ways I had scaled back my big dreams was, that I had previously imagined being in a band, and now I just imagine impressing a group of people with my prowess at the game Rock Band. Really. Like, before, while dangerously closing my eyes and air guitaring in the car to When You Were Young by the Killers, I would see myself on a stage with like minded hipsters in thrift store clothes, belting away. Now, instead of that, I listen to the same songs and imagine myself impressing instead maybe eight or nine people in thrift store clothes at a party. Sometimes it gets so bad that I end up thinking explicitly about that scene at the end of the episode of Gossip Girl where Serena and Vanessa decide to become friends via Guitar Hero. Terrible.

There are more than enough, probably, books about famous singers; the two I can think of off of my head are Great Jones Street and The Ground Beneath Her Feet, though I would count Ulysses as a book that's at least a little about famous singers because of Blazes Boylan, I imagine that there are a lot books about aspirant singers, too, though I am sorry to say I cannot think of any of them that I have read. I think the new Jonathan Lethem one was about that? I don't know. But at any rate, I am willing to bet, and cannot imagine, a book about someone's quest to become great at Rock Band. No one wants to see Rock Band on television or in a movie or in a book. Even that thirty second scene in Gossip Girl, with Guitar Hero, seemed as though it were wasting its and our time. The only way that could possibly be deployed would like to mark the would-be Rock Star hero as a dork.

It is as if the kind of fame simulacra is unjustifiable in a fictional character, or at least it is unjustifiable for now. It is as if we expect that if a character is going to be given some dreams, they can at least be bigger dreams than we ourselves could get for one hundred and fifty dollars at WalMart. It would be like reading about someone whose big goal was to break into Twitter, or someone who wanted to get their photos accepted by facebook. Those are not things about which people ought not to care; they are not even things about which particular persons ought not to care a great deal, or to the exclusion of caring about making it as a tambourinist or a writer. But, and because everything seems like an excuse to me to think one more thing about books, it seems worth appreciating that characters -- those fictitious entities whose race written people are the most representative of, for their pure created-ness (viz., there is not even a real person confusing things by portraying them) -- for the fact that no matter how mundane my dreams and goals get, theirs, if I'm going to care about them, will remain big. No matter how many times I start dreaming about five oncoming neon rectangles as the notes I'm banging out instead of guitar tabs, there will still be fictions dreaming the biggest dreams dreamable, like their ancestor, tilting at windmills.

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!