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.

Screen Book Reviews

So here's one for you, the week that I got drunk and watched very late-night tennis instead of reviewing the Book Review for you: should we bother reading book reviews? What's the point of them? Whom do they serve? I don't mean to ask these things rhetorically, but really: after all, I do read book reviews, compulsively, and wherever I can find them. I am often unsatisfied, for example, with my review-knowledge of a book of short stories if I haven't seen a breakdown of each story, with a little description of each one (vide my high-school era review at Prestigious Critical Organ amazon.com, of Girl with Curious Hair {or rather don't vide it, because I wrote it in high school}). I want to know what's what, going in, usually.

But I don't know if I want book reviews. I think that really, what I want is something like "to have already read the book and formed a shorthand reminder of what it's about, which reminder is:". So, instead of a few quotes and some musing and scene setting, my pre-reading review of, say, the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay would be "Depression and World War II Era comic book guys/lots of relationship trouble/episodic pacing/very well written/satisfyingly unsatisfying ending". It would be like "plot keywords" on IMDb, except for books. And really, too, I do not know whether that would lead to a better idea of what was in store for books I meant to read or not; probably not, given that most of you who have read Kavalier and Clay might've put down totally different keywords, and many of you who have not read it might now be imagining Kavalier and Clay, based on my list, to be a book totally different from what it actually is. Although possibly not too different, because probably too amorphous. The reason I got to wondering all this about the worthwhileness of book reviews has to do with the occasionally massive discrepancies between the actual books we read, and the books we imagine we're approaching based on their reviews.

Pierre Bayard borrows a term from Freud and calls the idiosyncratic set of ideas we each make for ourselves out of the reputation of a given book that "screen book", and I think that what happens so often to me is that I dream up, based on a book review (or an amalgamation of book reviews) a screen book that is radically unlike the idiosyncratic ideas about the book that are based on actually reading the book. Which is absolutely not to say that I feel as if book reviewers are disingenuous, or shoddy, or creating unjustified hype; simply to say that I am I and they are they and thus we think different things. I think the most egregious case of this was the review I read a book that I enjoyed very much, the Emperor's Children by Claire Messud. I don't know why; subtle phrasings like this: "the metaphorical pawn in their struggle [that is, between Murray Thwaite, Mr. Earnest Liberalism, and Ludovic Seeley, who is basically Nick Denton] -- a struggle over status -- is Bootie Tubb." This is a slightly sophisticated point; in the book, Murray and Seeley are largely unconcerned with Bootie, who's kind of a twerp. But the position here in the book review made me keep an eye out for it. Also, the three main characters are introduced, naturally, at the beginning of the review, and as a group; in the book, they are less of a group and more of a loose aggregate.

Are these big deals? Are they some kind of misrepresentation of the book? Absolutely not. But they are a series of what, to a reader sensitive to sorts of readymade stories, could launch a weird series of in-between screen books. So, in sum, I don't know what to do about book reviews. I guess I'll just keep reading them; it's not like I've got that much better to do. Except maybe read the books they're about.

Time in a Bottle

Ulises Lima and Arturo Belano have made it to Europe, at the point I've gotten to thus far, and Ulises Lima farther than that, to Tel Aviv. Today I want to talk a little bit about how the oral history structure of the book is working, and how that contributes to the way, discussed earlier, in which Our Guys are got at peripherally, rather than head-on. First a note on what it is not: every once in a while, when someone says something particularly nice about Arturo Belano, I am tempted to think what I have been told is sometimes thought, viz., this looks like a way for Bolaño to sneak in some nice things about himself, like Norman Mailer's huffing and puffing about "Norman Mailer" in the Armies of the Night, or anything that has to do with Agent Michael Scarn. But I don't think so. I don't have a really definite reason for why I don't think so; maybe it's just because I haven't read the introduction, and don't yet know how narrowly or widely the life of Belano differs from the life of Bolaño.

But I mention this because it is, critically, not that displacement strategy which I think is served by the oral history. Now, to be disclose-y, I am not what you'd call an oral history expert; the only other one I have read is Rant by Chuck Palahniuk which, like the Savage Detectives, is totally made up. What I think Bolaño is doing, and doing better than Palahniuk does in Rant, is to create different time signatures. The passages that made up Rant tended to be roughly the same size, and passed not chronologically as far as the events related were concerned, but seemed presented chronologically with their telling. Not so with the Savage Detectives. So far, I have sorted out three kinds of passage: one, the self-contained stories, like Auxilio Lacouture on her activities during '68 or Norman Bolzman talking about Ulises Lima in Tel Aviv; then, the running commentaries that keep pace with Our Guys, like those by Quim Font and his daughters, or Luis Sebastian Rosado, whose years of comment keep ticking up; and then, by itself, the very long description of an encounter with Arturo Belano and Felipe Muller that we get, alway from 1976, from Amadeo Salvatierra. That last one, in particular, is probably one on which to keep an eye.

As usual, these ideas are inchoate, and consist mostly of notes and very little of judgments (beyond the fact that, given that I am now reading this book at a rather fast pace, they appear to be working). But so. There's something about the Savage Detectives to bear in mind. Until to-morrow, friends.

Where's Waldo?

Today I have some books missing. Now, I always have books missing, somewhere or other. Many of them are lost to the ages, that I lent to people whom I no longer ever see, like the pothead who ran the coffee shop in Lockport when I was in high school, or the son of my family doctor. Others, I just don't see around my bookshelves anymore and can simply not account for. The white whale of these books is the Norton Anthology of Poetry (Shorter Edition), which I had to buy for English 121, in 2004, and which fell into a black hole shortly thereafter. But. This white noise of lost books is nothing at all compared to the freakout in which I engage when I lose a book which I am in the middle of reading. This has happened before, as documented here, when I left Gargantua and Pantagruel at a Buffalo Bisons game, and couldn't handle 24 hours before buying a new one. Now, the book I have lost is Ralph Waldo Emerson's Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems, a book that my facebook Visual Library says I've been reading for eight months.

I kind of have; I keep starting it and then getting distracted and then deciding that the part where I pick up isn't resoundingly Emersonian enough and starting again at the beginning. But now, I don't know where it is, and I find this troubling. Should I clean out all of our cars? Look in the refrigerator (I've found books there before)? Last night, after looking for it at my uncle and grandfather's houses, I went to Barnes and Noble and stood looking at the outside of the book for like twenty minutes, wondering whether or not to spend $4.95 on a new one. To put how hard of choice this really should've been in perspective: I spent more than twice that much this weekend buying shots of Ouzo for the bartender. But I didn't buy it, then went home and sat around scowling that I didn't have any books of Emerson to read. I tried reading some Civil Disobedience, but it just wasn't the same.

Thinking about it, I have no idea why I didn't just buy a new damn Selected Essays &c. I have some things underlined in my current copy, but nothing that's really lighting the world on fire. Most, in fact, are things that I got all excited about from recognizing them from other things that referred to Emerson, like the epigram to Then We Came to the End (Is it not the chief disgrace in life, not to be considered a unit?) or things that Bootie Tubb really liked from the Emperor's Children. I guess I just like having lost books. I wish them well; I hope that they are doing right by whoever has found them. (The big exception in this case is my copy of High Fidelity, which was lent out and which, I have on good authority was unread and then later dropped in a ditch and not recovered, sad, sad.) So. I think I will resign to another lost book, and by another copy later today, and keep it on my shelf next to my successor copy of Gargantua and Pantagruel. A proud spot, indeed.