Book Log - Jan. '07 - May 11

Altman on Altman - ed. David Thomson - Very little to say; fun reading for Altman freaks and, presumably, no one else. My one complaint would be that Thomson (understandably, needing to coax Altman — noted as an interviewee who frequently went on auto-pilot, seemingly uninterested in discussing his work at great length without the help of long-calcified anecdotes — through a whole book) plays nice and easy; O.C. & Stiggs, cultists, for example, get only about a paragraph's worth of reminiscences to tide them over. And I would've loved some hardcore interrogation about Altman's spiraling coke addiction, esp. on the set of Popeye. Oh well.
(early January)
Oblivion - David Foster Wallace - Much of the negative criticism of this short-story collection, at least at the time of release, reiterated the idea that Wallace's characteristically lengthy sentences and language smother the stories, as if his style were some kind of malevolent, overwhelming force that lends the exact same feel to every story. This seems to be missing the point: yes, Wallace's verbosity seems to be a part of him he can't dispense with entirely, but it serves a different purpose in every story. In "Oblivion," for example, it's a rationalizing mechanism that allows the first-person narrator to try to dodge his way around the fact that he's incestuously attracted to his daughter; in "Good Old Neon," the lengthier the sentences become, the more they despair of language's fundamental inadequacy to convey all the meaning it wants to. "Good Old Neon," by the way, may be Wallace's single most moving piece of prose, the monumental cry for sincerity that Infinite Jest is aside; Wallace assumes the voice of a deceased buddy (or at least so the convoluted meta-plotting would have us believe, and Wallace has advocated sincerity in fiction enough times for me to take him at his word, or "word," or whatever) and makes the single most moving "Choose Life" plea since Taste Of Cherry. Elsewhere, "The Suffering Channel" is a refreshingly subtle take on 9/11, making meaning by introducing typically well-drawn characters who, it's only gradually revealed, work in the WTC, placing their relatively trivial and comic concerns in stark relief. It's also the closest thing Wallace has written to conventional prose in a while, with relatively wieldy paragraphs. The only real problem I have with him at this point is his tendency to characterize all women as either enigmas or far more neurotic versions of his typical male "hero" (women are just more insecure versions of men, apparently). Still, this leads to the infinitely amusing sentence: "What neither Ellen Bactrian nor anyone else at Style knew was that the executive intern had had a dark period in preparatory school during which she'd made scores of tiny cuts in the tender skin of her upper arms' insides and then squeezed reconstituted lemon juice into the cuts as penance for a long list of personal shortcomings, a list she had tracked daily in her journal in a special numerical key code that was totally unbreakable unless you knew exactly which page of The Bell Jar the code's numbers were keyed to." So I guess it's all good; DFW remains my favorite contemporary writer.
(March 8 - May 11)

Academia Pt. 2

Brit Lit II - Brit Lit II picks up after Paradise Lost, which means a lot of poetry. I discovered an unexpected fondness for Byron's more ironical moments and Robert Browning's dramatic monologues, and also Keats isn't consistently uninteresting. (Those Odes are deadly though.) The novel front included re-readings of Dickens' Hard Times (deadly, and I ended up writing a 10-page paper comparing it — unfavorably — to Gissing's New Grub Street) and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which, uh, I didn't do this time round). Also Aphra Behn's bizarro Oroonoko, about which I have nothing useful to say aside from it seems to be a "classic" increasingly in academia while of no popular interest in, say, the Penguin paperback market, and Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, which proved to be the first (and possibly only) Woolf book to my liking.

Most importantly: Jane Austen's Emma finally popped my Austen cherry, and it's good fun. I don't read as much 19th century lit as I probably should, so all I have for comparison in terms of novels that dwell on psychology and economically-dictated class structure are Balzac and James, both of whom I like more — Balzac for his strong voice and dramatic contrivances (much as I hate to admit it), James for going so deep (Austen is more interested in manners than motivation, which is admirable but not really me). At heart, this is basically a horror story disguised as a romance, a story of women with few economic opportunities who imperil their entire lives if they get the wrong suitor. Our TA got all hot and bothered about the section where Emma and Harriet Smith read and interpret the charade (I guess scenes that glamorize your academic career can't help but be fun), but I'm much more intrigued by Miss Bates' endless monologues: "So very obliging of you!— No rain at all. Nothing to signify. I do not care for myself. Quite thick shoes. And Jane declares— Well!— (as soon as she was within the door) Well! This is brilliant indeed!— This is admirable!— Excellently contrived, upon my word. Nothing wanting. Could not have imagined it." etc. etc. ad infinitum. It's not the thoughts, it's the half-complete phrases and near stream-of-consciousness that fascinate; Ms. Austen would probably have gotten along well with DFW.

Unmoorings: Adrift In Contemporary British Literature - Mostly composed of excerpts from the reaction e-mails I had to send in for each book, frequently after only reading half of it (I finished nearly all of them eventually). Sorry if they seem particularly glib or half-assed, which I kind of suspect they are, but copying them saves me a lot of time and trouble.

Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - I never worked up the will to finish this loathsome book. E-mail snippets:

* pg. 132: "The day can't be far off when we get things like the Kellogg's Pop Tart Queen Mother" etc. Not sure why this is so shocking: it's not that far off from the corporate sponsorship of buildings, sporting events etc. in the US, although points to Bryson for making this joke a year ahead of David Foster Wallace giving years corporate names in Infinite Jest. There's a difference here between specifically national problems and broader trends.

* Point about how the Brits would've done well under dreary communism well-taken. Certainly the architecture wouldn't have had to change much.

*Bryson appears to think that England should stay undeveloped and antiquated solely for his benefit, not for its own economic good. This is what he thinks after years of residence? Overall, this book went from engaging to grating pretty fast: pages upon pages of bitching about architecture (as if ill-conceived, poorly matching architecture were endemic solely to England), interspersed with quaintness. What a blinkered world-view.

*pg. 185: "I had never paid much attention to Hockney, but I'll tell you this: The boy can draw." That was *so* much more enlightening than the exhibition I saw at LACMA. I feel myself growing a more favorable opinion already. And it's symptomatic of a larger, clueless gentility that apprises mediocrity over "culture" or any serious engagement with it; for what little it's worth, I don't really like Hockney, but I certainly wouldn't (in a published work!) give off that kind of philistine clause just for the hell of it.

* The absence of any direct mention of colonialism as the reason *for* the much-noted decline is striking.

British Teeth - William Leith - In seemingly bitter rebuke to Bryson, Leith delivers a bracing amount of anti-British self-loathing invective in record time, making the unlikely titular metaphor (decaying teeth = decaying Empire) work shockingly well. There's all kinds of bracing observations here, like when Leith tracks the shift in teaching Latin from manly texts about conquests to the domesticated Cambridge Latin Course (which I used myself in high school), finding in the normative family narrative a sign of Britain's diminished self-worth.

E-mail snippet: "If not for said constant self guilt-tripping, phrases like "a racing industry dominated by Arabs" would come off as racist in American context, i.e. the very mention that some industry is dominated by "non-native" people would immediately begin long, anguished studies about who gets to be called a native after how long, and isn't power defined by whiteness, etc. Here, it seems simply like an extension of observations about Britain's incompetence at managing itself rather than anything maliciously felt, but you couldn't get away with this in America."

From Hell - Alan Moore - Now I have finally read one of the Seminal Graphic Novels, which is a relief because now I can talk shit about them with authority. E-mail snippets:

* I'm not the right person to be reading this: don't read graphic novels in general (why is it that the people who protest most for its legitimacy don't seem to do a lot of non-pulp reading?), and when people start ranting about the Masons, my eyes glaze over. My dad was firmly convinced that the Masons were in a conspiracy with the Illuminati, Trilateral Commission, Committee on Foreign Relations, and the Jews in general to rule the world.

* Even if Moore's set-up is metaphorical (trying to find a general way to explain the latter-day rottenness of the British Empire without invoking, again, the Imperial Adventure) rather than something he actually believes, it still strikes me as vaguely unfair to dredge up obscure Victorians who can't defend themselves and make them famous for no purpose other than demonization. Considering the number of references in the appendix, though, that's a big "if."

* Vaginas everywhere in the imagery. I know the Victorians were "repressed," but c'mon. Seriously.

* The fascinating amount of advertising imagery (Cadbury's et al.) proves Orwell was right: the billboards of our time will demarcate it. Also Moore has a good point: billboard advertising does seem to be an emerging phenomenon of the late 19th century. Or am I wrong?

* I hated this book.

Our Fathers - Andrew O'Hagan - Hated it. E-mail snippets:

* Metaphor, pg. 48: " The day cracked open like an oyster." What does this mean - that the day was full of irritants but eventually formed a metaphorical pearl? That it snapped open satisfyingly? That it smelled ocean-y? And the book is FULL of pseudo-poetic garbage like this. I don't want to fix down everyone's meaning, but please.

* There actually is a smart idea here. "Where other kids lighted their imaginations with Buck Rogers and Outer Space, Hugh's was taken up
with...rows of sharp modern houses." The clash between public housing intentions and their ultimate effect reminds me of a book my parents brought when they came over from the USSR; most of the book is full of traditionally elegant St. Petersburg architecture, but towards the end there's a cluster of hideous new apartments. An accompanying essay suggests thinking about the thousands of people living there, and reconsidering it in that light. It doesn't work there either.

But I hate the way it's written. No dice. And why bother to dress it up in fictional rags? It's blatantly semi-autobiographical. What else could it be? The other option would be doing research.

Crash - J.G. Ballard - This book is not like Empire Of The Sun in any way. E-mail snippets:

* "The world was beginning to flower into wounds" indeed. After about an hour of reading, walking down the street became an exercise in geometric perversity, as I actually paid attention to the layout around me for once, trying to find weird sexual shapes in it; instead, I found only cluttered rectilinears. As Paul Fussell writes in BAD: Or, The Dumbing of America, "curves and rounded surfaces are indispensable to the human desire to think of oneself as subtle, varied, valuable, and interesting." Maybe, or maybe it's just the sublimated, free-floating sexuality Ballard seems to find everywhere.

* I don't have much to say about cars per se or dystopian apocalyptic-type musings, all of which have been well-covered. What Ballard's work *doesn't* predict, sort of, is the "AirWorld" phenomenon that Walter Kirn named in his novel Up In The Air. Ballard's characters take spaces that are supposed to be sterile and dirty them up biologically; the premise of AirWorld is that we can now *glory* in the interchangeable nature of airports everywhere and enjoy living in interstitial spaces. To me, this is a slightly more interesting notion, because it's not predicated around a mild curiosity taken to an extreme. Then again, Wikipedia claims Ballard curated an exhibition of wrecked cars in the early '70s.

* Obviously this novel treats plastic surgery and deformation through accidents as two sides of the same coin. But there's not much more I have to say about that besides noting it.

* Regarding the novel's disputable status as pornography: eh. "Inserted his penis into her vagina" is more like a parody of porn than the real thing; the sex is made banal next to the automotive danger, which I guess is the point.

Fever Pitch - Nick Hornby - Finally caught up with Hornby's first book, having read all of his other long-form works, increasingly to my despair. The short version is that it's good, but Hornby works very hard to make himself a likable narrator. The frequent selfishness and immaturity of Rob Gordon is more interesting. Unfortunately, I related to this book, as I do to pretty much any work of art about obsession and monomania. E-mail snippets:

* It certainly seems like TV has changed the practice of watching sports. There's been a shift from going to watch games in person to TV making it more convenient (and wildly more affordable) to stay in. The whole ritual of joining 20,000 other fans seems oddly archaic, at least if you're not moneyed (a concern Hornby notes) - certainly I associate going to watch an NBA/NFL game with a certain amount of money (which is not to be confused with high school games or, to a certain extent, college games, although those are too being gradually priced out). In this sense Fever Pitch is not just a document of generic fandom, but a veneration of a now-passed experience.

* One thing that strikes me as unique about Hornby's fandom is that it is exclusive, and that this appears to be normal for UK soccer fans. American sports buffs seem to be convinced that they must be multidisciplinary - one may prefer one of the major sports, but to devote oneself exclusively to, say, basketball makes you an inadequate sports fan. I'm frequently flabbergasted by the ridiculous amounts of cross-sport trivia American sports fans expect everyone to know.

* In framing his life through something ostensibly trivial, there's an overlap with Chuck Klosterman's Fargo Rock City, a sort of autobiography augmented by huge amounts of '80s hair metal analysis, down to classifying personal events by the date of overlap with the history being discussed. I have no idea what it means that more people are incapable of writing stories of their lives without a poppy reference; on the other hand, without it many undistinguished people would have no story at all.

* I've also read all of Hornby's other books (god knows why - he stopped being good after About A Boy, and while A Long Way Down isn't
quite as awful as How To Be Good, it's still pretty dreary), so there's obviously a huge amount of overlap in the themes of males cordoning themselves off from real relationships by delving into trivia.

* In discussing the first game he saw where "England" (rather than a regional team) played, Hornby notes that for once, he was able to treat the game as part of a larger "entertainment industry," rather than a matter of deep personal concern. Hence another thing that separates sport fans from obsessives of film, music, etc. - it might be disappointing to (most) De Palma fans to see The Black Dahlia, but it's not taken as a personal disappointment. The sense of identification seems far more unnerving in sport than anything else - and, of course, the outcome is supposed to be the result of real-time effort rather than a pre-fabricated work made under (hopefully) ideal circumstances. The element of *adversity* is key (although that still doesn't explain why most film geeks are overwhelmingly male, nor why music geeks tend to be equally male and female).

* "Charlie Nicholas" is the player whose dismal fortunes mirror Hornby's own; "Charlie Nicholson" is the woman who broke Rob Gordon's heart. Cute, very cute.

King Rat - China Mieville - didn't have the patience to finish this one either. Sorry fans. E-mail snippets:

* There's absolutely NO WAY that title isn't, in some obscure fashion or other, operating in reference to the James Clavell best-seller. Unfortunately, even with a cursory knowledge of that book's plot, I have no idea what the connection might be. Sewers = POW Camp? London = POW camp? I don't know. Maybe it's just borrowing the idea of the rat as a symbol representing greater mobility and dexterity.

* I didn't really care too much about the book one way or another; it passed pretty quickly. What it did do - that none of the narratives besides, arguably, From Hell did - was create the fundamental urge in me to find out What Happens Next. This is an urge I normally have no use for (I'm one of those Bela Tarr freaks, among other things), so it's a shame that, after explaining the premise halfway through, there's nothing really to do but wait for it to be over. No way that our fundamentally "good" protagonist would allow his mythical Campbell cycle to be compromised by an unhappy ending.

* Mieville seems heavily influenced by Stephen King in terms of grabbing any archetypes/myths/fairy tales/religious stories he can and rejigerring them for his purposes. Too bad he doesn't have King's sense of humor.

* I get the connection Mieville is drawing between Jungle and urban life, I guess - Jungle isn't the logical stripping-down of dance music, but a way of transforming purposeless noise to music ("he became acutely aware of sounds," it says of our hero). What I do find silly is the assumption that the novel has to revolve around album references - sentences that inform us that Natasha wants her synthesizers to sound like those of Public Enemy, "especially" the trebles on Fear of a Black Planet, which "always seem to be looking over their shoulder." This is music criticism in the author's voice masquerading as necessary character insight.

Or maybe I'm just mad that Mieville's one indie rock shout-out was to diss My Bloody Valentine.

The Beach  - Alex Garland - I'll let the e-mail do all the work here. Why can't Garland's collaborations with Danny Boyle be this entertaining?

* Not much to say, mostly because for the first time this semester I actually enjoyed the book, start-to-finish. Gripping beach read, ha ha ha.

* To demonstrate that I actually read it, I'll perform some rudimentary thematic analysis: what separates this Lord Of The Flies redux from all others, I suppose (besides the relative fleetness of its prose, which disguises its shallow thematics), is the Vietnam imagery and Richard's desensitization to it. We think we've solved the Eden problem, but it's not just man's inherent savagery when the thin veneer of "civilization" (but What Is Civilization anyway etc.) peels off that's important, but that Richard can numb himself to his own violence - to him it's all just a game, like the perfect footprint game, just like Vietnam movies have glamorized that experience. This, I suspect, is also the reason for the Gulf War invocation - quite possibly an invocation of Baudrillard (R.I.P.).

* To be fair, it is a less shrill and hysterical Lord Of The Flies, a book whose premise (much less execution) I've never bought. "Civilization" is a thin veneer? Well there's no one who lives outside of it, so it's not exactly relevant is it?

* The almost total absence of sexual tension and/or desire on the island is less than convincing.


I just want to elaborate on this whole LOTF thin veneer thing real quick (my g/f always tells my I'm wrong and what this is really about is Euripides' The Bacchae. Whatever.). If you dump a bunch of kids on an island, deprive them of all the usual resources and then make them fend for themselves, thereby having the whole project degenerate into savagery, it proves nothing — it's like Dogville, where the ending determines how everything unfolds. To me, it's like looking me in the eye and saying "Yeah, you're happy now, but if I chopped off all your arms and legs? I'd destroy your thin veneer of happiness, wouldn't I?" Well, yeah. But it never happens, you know? The assumption that we're all secretly waiting to kill each other is pretty annoying.

Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone - J.K. Rowling - Good God. I can't believe I read one of these finally. E-mail snippets:

*"Strange and mysterious" is used twice in the opening page, which brings out one of my main fears; it may be for "kids of all ages" or some garbage like that, but it's definitely written in the sing-song tone of children's fantasy everywhere. The language here reminds me of nothing so much as the implausible "masterpiece" Emma Thompson is writing in Stranger Than Fiction. Never picked one of these up in my life, and I'm still puzzled as to why allegedly millions of adults read these quite independent of their kids: it's public school fiction sprinkled with fantasy archetypes in a way that's not particularly complex or insightful.

* "Nasty, common name" sniffs Mrs. Dursley about "Harry." Good to know class distinctions live on in even the most mundane children's lit. Or maybe it's the other way around: class distinctions are *only* important in children's lit because they're the only ones who are still impressed by that while England slips into a morass of William Leith-annotated mediocrity and universal class shame. [Or maybe it taps into children's latent insecurity, actually. But whatever.]

* There's a nasty interpretation you could do where Hagrid's anger that Harry knows nothing about "our world" could be the roar of the old empire-builders who want their racist standards still in place, but I won't go there. It seems unintentional.

* "Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans" - not just an old-fashioned public school, but even in the names, resistant to Americanizations like "Mars Bars". Quidditch is an obv. cricket parody - arbitrarily complicated, has the possibility of going on for months - and it's telling that an old-fashioned Victorian name like "Neville" can now be seen as novel and belonging in the company of fantasy. Even the poetic spells are a hangover from the days of teaching boys verse composition in multiple languages as if it were manual-writing - which, here, in a way, it is.
cordoning themselves off from real relationships by delving into trivia.

* In discussing the first game he saw where "England" (rather than a regional team) played, Hornby notes that for once, he was able to treat the game as part of a larger "entertainment industry," rather than a matter of deep personal concern. Hence another thing that separates sport fans from obsessives of film, music, etc. - it might be disappointing to (most) De Palma fans to see The Black Dahlia, but it's not taken as a personal disappointment. The sense of identification seems far more unnerving in sport than anything else - and, of course, the outcome is supposed to be the result of real-time effort rather than a pre-fabricated work made under (hopefully) ideal circumstances. The element of *adversity* is key (although that still doesn't explain why most film geeks are overwhelmingly male, nor why music geeks tend to be equally male and female).

* "Charlie Nicholas" is the player whose dismal fortunes mirror Hornby's own; "Charlie Nicholson" is the woman who broke Rob Gordon's
heart. Cute, very cute."

The Beach - Alex Garland - This book is retarded but a lot of fun. It's the first thing I really enjoyed reading all semester in this class.

E-mail snippets: "* Not much to say, mostly because for the first time this semester I actually enjoyed the book, start-to-finish. Gripping beach read, ha ha ha.

* To demonstrate that I actually read it, I'll perform some rudimentary thematic analysis: what seperates this Lord Of The Flies redux from all others, I suppose (besides the relative fleetness of its prose, which disguises its shallow thematics), is the Vietnam imagery and Richard's desensitization to it. We think we've solved the Eden problem, but it's not just man's inherent savagery when the thin veneer of "civilization" (but what is civilization anyway etc.) peels off that's important, but that Richard can numb himself to his own violence - to him it's all just a game, like the perfect footprint
game, just like Vietnam movies have glamorized that experience. This, I suspect, is also the reason for the Gulf War invocation - quite possibly an invocation of Baudrillard (R.I.P.).

* To be fair, it is a less shrill and hysterical Lord Of The Flies, a book whose premise (much less execution) I've never bought. "Civizilization" is a thin veneer? Well there's no one who lives outside of it, so it's not exactly relevant is it?

* The almost total absence of sexual tension and/or desire on the island is less than convincing."

Let me expand on this Lord Of The Flies thing for a second: it's been ages since I read it, and it will be the resurrection before I pick it up again, but I've always found it to be one of the most singularly retarded middle school/HS standard curriculum books. The standard way of teaching it is that beneath civilization's constraints we all harbor primal sentiments and surprising amounts of savagery, etc. (My girlfriend claims it's a Bacchae thing, but I ignore her.) To accomplish this lesson (both in Golding and Garland) requires an improbable series of circumstances completely unlike life. This is sort of like saying "You might be a reasonably happy human being now, but I bet if I chopped off both your legs you wouldn't be so happy. This demonstrates the thin veneer of human happiness." And that too would be retarded.

Harry Potter And The Sorcerer's Stone - J.K. Rowling - I still don't get it, and I swore I'd never read any of these. E-mail snippets:

* "Strange and mysterious" is used twice in the opening page, which brings out one of my main fears; it may be for "kids of all ages" or some garbage like that, but it's definitely written in the suggestive, sing-song tone of children's fantasy everywhere. The language here reminds me of nothing so much as the implausible "masterpiece" Emma Thompson is writing in Stranger Than Fiction. Never picked one of these up in my life, and I'm still puzzled as to why allegedly millions of adults read these quite independant of their kids: it's public school fiction sprinkled with fantasy archetypes in a way that's not particularly complex or insightful.

* "Nasty, common name" sniffs Mrs. Dursley about "Harry." Good to know class distinctions live on in even the most mundane children's lit. Or maybe it's the other way around: class distinctions are *only* important in children's lit because they're the only ones who are still impressed by that while England slips into a morass of William Leith-annotated mediocrity and universal class shame.

* There's a nasty interpretation you could do where Hagrrid's anger that Harry knows nothing about "our world" could be the roar of the old empire-builders who want their racist standards still in place, but I won't go there. It seems unintentional.

* "Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans" - not just an old-fashioned public school, but even in the names, resistant to Americanizations like "Mars Bars". Quidditch is an obv. cricket parody - arbitrarily complicated, has the possibility of going on for months - and it's telling that an old-fashioned Victorian name like "Neville" can now be seen as novel and belonging in the company of fantasy. Even the poetic spells are a hangover from the days of teaching boys composition in multiple languages as if it were manual-writing - which, here, in a way, it is.

The Winshaw Legacy - Jonathan Coe - FWIW, ended up writing a 20-page paper on this, but I'm not vain enough to post that. E-mail snippets:

* The best book we've red all semester yet, displacing The Beach, though they're both equally shallow in what they're "about" in the big broad sense and equally strong on narrative prowess and what they're about. Plus Coe has the big, ambitious frame of high and low references to draw upon that makes him seem like one of those omniverous authors that always impress me. I was wondering if the name "Owen" would pay off eventually with an Agatha Christie reference, and sure enough. Although he does forget to mention that "U.N. Owen" is..."Unknown"! Oh well.

* Impressively po-mo structure, some of the most convoluted I've ever seen really: all the thoughts and motivations are sincere, but the narrative is advanced in almost Mobius-loops, even making key revelations through footnotes (such as revealing which of the two publishing companies will publish the Winshaw chronicle, in the process revealing at least that it's finished - or so it seems). And it would probably take a good 5 pages to keep track of similar revelations. Also impressive: the fact that, even after the last 2 pages reveal whose narrative voice is responsible for the prologue, it's impossible to tell "who" wrote large chunks of it. And the fake diary of Henry ("Mater and Pater" etc.) is astonishingly dead-on.

* Moving on to the actual content, at least briefly: is Coe intentionally trying to parallel the rise of Saddam and Thatcher? It certainly seems like they're each other's evil image, rising into public consciousness at roughly the same time. Also unclear to the extent on which Michael himself is meant to represent England - promising for a while, falls into a listless stupor in the '80s thanks to Ms. Thatcher's iron grip. I will ask these questions in class while
leading discussion and see if they lead to a deadly silence. Also I'm curious why people - or at least the review blurbs - classify this as "comedy." Sees far too strident for that.

King Rat - China Mieville - Never bothered to finish this one either. E-mail snippets:

* There's absolutely NO WAY that title isn't, in some obscure fashion or other, operating in reference to the James Clavell best-seller. Unfortunately, even with a cursory knowledge of that book's plot, I have no idea what the connection might be. Sewers = POW Camp? London = POW camp? I don't know. Maybe it's just borrowing the idea of the rat as a symbol representing greater mobility and dexterity.

* I didn't really care too much about the book one way or another; it passed pretty quickly. What it did do - that none of the narratives besides, arguably, From Hell did - was create the fundamental urge in me to find out What Happens Next. This is an urge I normally have no use for (I'm one of those Bela Tarr freaks, among other things), so it's a shame that, after explaining the premise halfway through, there's nothing really to do but wait for it to be over. No way that our fundamentally "good" protagonist would allow his mythical Campbell cycle to be compromised by an unhappy ending.

* Mieville seems heavily influenced by Stephen King in terms of grabbing any archetypes/myths/fairy tales/religious stories he can and rejigerring them for his purposes. Too bad he doesn't have King's sense of humor.

* I get the connection Mieville is drawing between Jungle and urban life, I guess - Jungle isn't the logical stripping-down of dance music, but a way of transforming purposeless noise to music ("he became acutely aware of sounds," it says of our hero). What I do find silly is the assumption that the novel has to revolve around album references - sentences that inform us that Natasha wants her synthesizers to sound like those of Public Enemy, "especially" the trebles on Fear of a Black Planet, which "always seem to be looking over their shoulder." This is music criticism in the author's voice masquerading as necessary character insight. Or maybe I'm just mad that Mieville's one indie rock shout-out was to diss My Bloody Valentine.

Transmission - Hari Kunzru - E-mail snippets:
* Loved this book unreservedly. A first for the semester.

* Kunzru avoids the kind of Indianized English that I've read a lot of in e.g. H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ghote series; the syntactical differences between his American and Indian characters are a lot subtler and hard to pin down; I just know no one here uses awkward, retro Anglicized phrases here. It's also not a post-colonial novel in any obvious sense, which is kind of a relief.

* Kunzru is also the only person I'm aware of so far to not just make fun of business-book language, but to make his characters' interior thoughts use it. Guy Smith is an ingenious creation; rather than just making fun of business-world inanities, Kunzru creates someone who actually kind of believes the generalities he peddles.

* Metaphors like "disaster, like an overweight suburbanite in front of a workout video, followed every step" probably would incur the wrath of old-school writers for being frivolous, but it makes sense to me: linking things that people actually think about everyday to the prose rather than forcing us into the tortured "literary" frame of reference of an overread pedant. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood.

Rodinsky's Room - Rachel Lichtenstein, Iain Sinclair - I didn't finish this one either. Sigh. E-mail snippets:
* Just personally, I'm Jewish and have always kept in mind Kirk Douglas' valuable injunction: "The one true advantage of being Jewish is that you can be anti-Semitic without guilt." That's pretty much my attitude, and I find something creepy about Jewish people who devote all their time and energy to studying aspects of Judaism. When Lichtenstein goes to visit Bella for the first time and is confronted with Chinese teens measuring out coke in the elevator, I don't blame her for not being particularly thrilled about it, but something in her attitude seems to suggest that she's less mad that they're there than that the Jews still aren't. Sinclair continually offers variations on the suggestions that she's completing the work of the past, discovering her heritage, etc., but to me it seems an awful lot like Lichtenstein is rejecting the present on a certain level.

* That said, I preferred her segments to Mr. Sinclair. We've been circling round his specter all semester, and the glimpses I got I didn't like; it's not that he doesn't have any points, but that his poetic (I suppose) writing makes it difficult sometimes to realize what he's saying. He's also very much a theory-heavy academic; oddly, his allegedly lyrical writing crosses the border back into parody of bad academic writing, with all kinds of speculation as to, for example, whether early morning workers who are photographed aren't deliberately posing themselves for photography. I know what he's saying - like the Heisenberg principle, taking photos of something we don't see very often makes us suspect their veracity - but I wish he would say it, because the act of thinking about it and teasing it out isn't actually particularly rewarding.

* I'm not sure what he brings to the table. Lichtenstein brings information, he brings "meditations." Though I'm tempted to say that they create a dialectic that points out the flaws in each other's writing - she is, I must admit, kind of a wooden writer - I doubt that was the intent.

In The Wake Of A Deadad - Andrew Kotting - This is an "art book," which is why you probably can't find it on Amazon. I tried anyway. E-mail snippets:

* The letters are the best idea here, an almost unparsable confluence of intentionality and randomness. For example, alphabetical order is random...unless you invite your entire family to come in about 1/2 of the way through to correct every erroneous idea proposed by the commentators so far. The letter scheme also allows access to a wide range of different types of responses that top on a number of different facets - which is to say, albeit vaguely, that Kotting makes his project ambitious and huge without even having to do most of the writing. But surely he must have had some idea what would happen.

* It's curious how many of the writers have the same idea of who Kotting's dad "must" have been - "sensitive" and "unconventional" keep coming up, as if the death of a parent is automatic occasion for presuming that they must have been, in their own way, quite special. There's a second, rather conventional myth here - that most '50s/'60s dads, behind their gruff exteriors, really just wanted to reach out but felt constricted by societal mores. Only his family knows that he was, in fact, a bit of a bastard, and they don't hesitate to say so.

* The roll call of the letters brings up a whole special sub-culture of "filmmakers" who presumably know each other, who I don't know. I didn't have the time to look up whether they were more art museum masters (as I suspect) or maybe just more prominent in the UK, but between that and the constant, somewhat idolatrous quoting of E.M. Cioran (who I had to look up), I'm reminded that whole worlds of reference and deep meaning can be constructed out of people I've never even dreamed of. I imagine this is how some people feel about my bizarre recall of trivial directors and bands. I *did* enjoy the Bela Tarr shout-out though, even if the analogy regarding the function of the whale is misguided in my opinion. Werckmeister Harmonies rulez. etc.

Out Of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence - Geoff Dyer - This book is awesome. E-mail snippets:
* Forget Iain Sinclair; the constant nervous repetition of the same phrases not only exactly captures the feeling of self-loathing procrastination, it's the real "prose poetry." Dyer re-arranges his thoughts in so many self-deprecating ways that he almost outdoes Dave Eggers' intro to A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. Although he handily outdoes that book as a whole.

* In similar neurotic terrain, I'm reminded of some reviewers' complaints about Adaptation that the parts that stuck to the book were so good that why do we need to see this neurotic Charlie Kaufman nonsense? I think Dyer exercises these liberties because in an odd way they get to what Lawrence really, at the end of the day, means to him, which is always (to me, anyway) one of the most persuasive arguments for why something ought to be read.

* I'm impressed by Dyer's unfashionable willingness to make sweeping statements about entire countries and ethnicities. I suppose this will raise some hackles in class discussion tomorrow - cf. stereotyping and racism, I guess - but most people form impressions of the countries they travel in somehow, and I definitely noticed (when I was in Sicily) some mild unhappiness in myself whenever I saw Italians "acting like Italians," as Dyer constantly does. Besides, most of the injunctions against stereotyping seem to result in noting that every culture has different people, many of whom hold many liberal values that whoever the speaker is seems to treasure in himself. I'm increasingly in favor of respecting and acknowledging the otherness of different cultures rather than trying to persuade ourselves that we're really all alike. I may be a bit influenced in this by Momus' blogging about the Japanese.

* I can't tell how Dyer decides that Barthes is worth his time but Kristeva isn't. I know that I agree with him for reasons of sheer readability, but it's not exactly laid out, unless I missed something.

The Winshaw Legacy  - Jonathan Coe - I ended up writing a 20-page paper about this one, although much of what I wrote was admittedly specious theoretical game-playing. Shallow fun that thinks it's meaningful — this book, I mean. E-mail snippets:

* The best book we've red all semester yet, displacing The Beach, though they're both equally shallow in what they're "about" in the big broad sense and equally strong on narrative prowess. Plus Coe has the big, ambitious frame of high and low references to draw upon that makes him seem like one of those omnivorous authors that always impress me. I was wondering if the name "Owen" would pay off eventually with an Agatha Christie reference, and sure enough. Although he does forget to mention that "U.N. Owen" is..."Unknown"! Oh well.

* Impressively po-mo structure, some of the most convoluted I've ever seen really: all the thoughts and motivations are sincere, but the narrative is advanced in almost Mobius-loops, even making key revelations through footnotes (such as revealing which of the two publishing companies will publish the Winshaw chronicle, in the process revealing at least that it's finished before we get there in narrative real-time - or so it seems). And it would probably take a good 5 pages to keep track of similar revelations. Also impressive: the fact that, even after the last 2 pages reveal whose narrative voice is responsible for the prologue, it's impossible to tell "who" wrote large chunks of it. And the fake diary of Henry ("Mater and Pater" etc.) is astonishingly dead-on.

* Moving on to the actual content, at least briefly: is Coe intentionally trying to parallel the rise of Saddam and Thatcher? It certainly seems like they're each other's evil image, rising into public consciousness at roughly the same time. Also unclear to the extent on which Michael himself is meant to represent England - promising for a while, falls into a listless stupor in the '80s thanks to Ms. Thatcher's iron grip. I will ask these questions in class while leading discussion and see if they lead to a deadly silence. [Lord, did they ever.] Also I'm curious why people - or at least the review blurbs - classify this as "comedy." Sees far too strident for that.

Transmission - Hari Kunzru - Note: everyone should read this. It's short, sharp, well-written, and hits its satirical targets; exhilarating, in short. It's also readily available at used bookstores in cheap, unsold hardback editions. What's not to love? E-mail snippets:

* Kunzru avoids the kind of Indianized English that I've read a lot of in e.g. H.R.F. Keating's Inspector Ghote series; the syntactical differences between his American and Indian characters are a lot subtler and harder to pin down; I just know no one here uses awkward, retro Anglicized phrases here. It's also not a post-colonial novel in any obvious sense, which is kind of a relief.

* Kunzru is also the only person I'm aware of so far to not just make fun of business-book language, but to make his characters' interior thoughts use it. Guy Smith is an ingenious creation; rather than just making fun of business-world inanities, Kunzru creates someone who actually kind of believes the generalities he peddles.

* Metaphors like "disaster, like an overweight suburbanite in front of a workout video, followed every step" probably would incur the wrath of old-school writers for being frivolous, but it makes sense to me: linking things that people actually think about everyday to the prose rather than forcing us into the tortured "literary" frame of reference of an overread pedant. Maybe I'm just in a bad mood.

Rodinsky's Room - Rachel Lichtenstein, Iain Sinclair - couldn't stand it, never even intended to finish it. I hate Iain Sinclair. E-mail snippets:

* Just personally, I'm Jewish and have always kept in mind Kirk Douglas' valuable injunction: "The one true advantage of being Jewish is that you can be anti-Semitic without guilt." That's pretty much my attitude, and I find something creepy about Jewish people who devote all their time and energy to studying aspects of Judaism. When Lichtenstein goes to visit Bella for the first time and is confronted with Chinese teens measuring out coke in the elevator, I don't blame her for not being particularly thrilled about it, but something in her attitude seems to suggest that she's less mad that they're there than that the Jews still aren't. Sinclair continually offers variations on the suggestions that she's completing the work of the past, discovering her heritage, etc., but to me it seems an awful lot like Lichtenstein is rejecting the present on a certain level.

* That said, I preferred her segments to Mr. Sinclair. We've been circling round his specter all semester, and the glimpses I got I didn't like; it's not that he doesn't have any points, but that his poetic (I suppose) writing makes it difficult sometimes to realize what he's saying. He's also very much a theory-heavy academic; oddly, his allegedly lyrical writing crosses the border back into parody of bad academic writing, with all kinds of speculation as to, for example, whether early morning workers who are photographed aren't deliberately posing themselves for photography. I know what he's
saying - like the Heisenberg principle, taking photos of something we don't see very often makes us suspect their veracity - but I wish he would just say it, because the act of thinking about it and teasing it out isn't actually particularly rewarding.

* I'm not sure what he brings to the table. Lichtenstein brings information, he brings "meditations." Though I'm tempted to say that they create a dialectic that points out the flaws in each other's writing - she is, I must admit, kind of a wooden writer - I doubt that was the intent.

In The Wake Of A Deadad - Andrew Kotting - surprisingly palatable art-book (i.e, I'm not selling it off, much to my own surprise), though I still wonder who are all these "artists" and "filmmakers" are, and if they just sit around in circle jerks all day. E-mail snippets:

* The letters are the best idea here, an almost unparsable confluence of intentionality and randomness. For example, the alphabet is random...unless you invite your entire family to come in about 1/2 of the way through to correct every erroneous idea proposed by the commentators so far. The letter scheme also allows access to a wide range of different types of responses that top on a number of different facets - which is to say, albeit vaguely, that Kotting makes his project ambitious and huge without even having to do most of the writing. But surely he must have had some idea what would happen, structuring the letters for maximal narrative effect.

* It's curious how many of the writers have the same idea of who Kotting's dad "must" have been - "sensitive" and "unconventional" keep coming up, as if the death of a parent is automatic occasion for presuming that they must have been, in their own way, quite special. There's a second, rather conventional myth here - that most '50s/'60s dads, behind their gruff exteriors, really just wanted to reach out but felt constricted by societal mores. Only his family knows that he was, in fact, a bit of a bastard, and they don't hesitate to say so.

* The roll call of the letters brings up a whole special sub-culture of "filmmakers" who presumably know each other, who I don't know. I didn't have the time to look up whether they were more art museum masters (as I suspect) or maybe just more prominent in the UK, but between that and the constant, somewhat idolatrous quoting of E.M. Cioran (who I had to look up), I'm reminded that whole worlds of reference and deep meaning can be constructed out of people I've never even dreamed of. I imagine this is how some people feel about my bizarre recall of (possibly) trivial directors and bands. I *did* enjoy the Bela Tarr shout-out though, even if the analogy regarding the function of the whale is misguided in my opinion. Werckmeister Harmonies rulez etc.

Out Of Sheer Rage: Wrestling With D.H. Lawrence - Geoff Dyer - this is the other Great Must-Read of the semester (along with Transmission). E-mail snippets, much as I'd love to sit here and type out whole passages:

* Forget Iain Sinclair; the constant nervous repetition of the same phrases not only exactly captures the feeling of self-loathing procrastination, it's the real "prose poetry." Dyer re-arranges his thoughts in so many self-deprecating ways that he almost outdoes Dave Eggers' intro to A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. Although he handily outdoes that book as a whole.

* In similar neurotic terrain, I'm reminded of some reviewers' complaints about Adaptation that the parts that stuck to the book were so good that why do we need to see this neurotic Charlie Kaufman nonsense? I think Dyer exercises these liberties because in an odd way they get to what Lawrence really, at the end of the day, means to him, which is always (to me, anyway) one of the most persuasive arguments for why something ought to be read [and possibly the only one; at bottom, isn't all criticism kind of a form of justification of an arbitrary preference? Let's keep such thoughts to ourselves].

* I'm impressed by Dyer's unfashionable willingness to make sweeping statements about entire countries and ethnicities. I suppose this will raise some hackles in class discussion tomorrow - cf. stereotyping and racism, I guess - but most people form impressions of the countries they travel in somehow, and I definitely noticed (when I was in Sicily) some mild unhappiness in myself whenever I saw Italians "acting like Italians," as Dyer constantly does. Besides, most of the injunctions against stereotyping seem to result in noting that every culture has different people, many of whom hold many liberal values that whoever the speaker is seems to treasure in himself. I'm increasingly in favor of respecting and acknowledging the otherness of different cultures rather than trying to persuade ourselves that we're really all alike. I may be a bit influenced in this by Momus' blogging about the Japanese.

* I can't tell how Dyer decides that Barthes is worth his time but Kristeva isn't. I know that I agree with him for reasons of sheer readability, but it's not exactly laid out, unless I missed something.

OK, OK, here's a passage: "However much you are enjoying a book you are always flicking to the end, counting to see how many pages are left, looking forward to the time when you can put the book down and have done with it. At the back of our minds, however much we are enjoying a book, we come to the end of it and some little voice is always saying, 'Thank Christ for that!'"

Now read it already.