Book Log - The Lost Months

In January, as I was preparing to update this booklog finally, my hard drive crashed and I lost 2 months' worth of work. Here's what I remember reading - no dates, obv. - before and since then, without the actual books to help me. I got all bogged down in this Third Reich history thing for 3 months, so my apologies, oh faithful 14 readers.

P.G. Wodehouse - Robert McCrum - I read one Wodehouse bio a while back by Barry Phelps, which mainly insisted that Wodehouse was a very boring man with little to no discernible interior life, whose exterior dullness bore no obvious relation to his books. McCrum, more interestingly, digs around Wodehouse's neutered sex drive and infamous wartime expedition to arrive at something more interesting, a man whose oppressive upbringing hid a well of deeply suppressed, well-disguised emotion. In youth, Wodehouse - like one of his first franchise heroes, Mike (of Mike & Psmith fame) - aspired only to play cricket, but instead was packed off by his dad to the bank. He wrote to achieve financial independence and never looked back. McCrum tracks down Wodehouse's seemingly absent sexuality, pointing out that sexual ignorance was far from uncommon for the Victorian era, making his point in a hilarious anecdotal footnote about Wodehouse's friend Bill Townend. One day Townend went to the doctor, noting that he and his wife had a great marriage, walking the dog together etc., but their friends kept telling them there was more to married life and he had no idea what it was. The doctor gave him a manual of sexual instruction. Two months later, Townend returned and said that he and his wife had tried to follow the book's instructions but found the whole business disgusting. The doctor advised him to forget it; they did, and lived happily ever after.

McCrum offers a thorough account of Wodehouse's wartime misadventures; after being removed from the POW camps, he was sent to live in the countryside with a German family, where he gained a warm affection for the little girl in particular. When it was finally time for him to leave, he wept openly, a first for him. This incident seems as illuminating to what Wodehouse missed in his life as the infamous moment when Nixon snuck off to the Washington Monument and rambled to youthful protesters about his love for football. McCrum also tracks the brief intersection of Wodehouse and Orwell, combining two of my great loves; upon meeting, they found common ground in the fact that no matter where they were, they both checked the cricket scores of their old schools. Wodehouse later noted in his diary that Orwell appeared to be one of those "weird birds" permanently warped by their school lives. Someone damn well ought to write a book about how British public schools affected turn-of-the-century authors (Wodehouse, Orwell, and Cyril Connolly for starters), and if no one else does it I just might. I have nothing to do with my life but go to grad school anyway.
(October-ish)

A Long Way Down - Nick Hornby - The worst thing about Hornby's latest (which is more readable than How To Be Good, but only slightly) is the constant ladeling on of forced metaphors. In High Fidelity, the constant digressions and metaphors seemed like a fresh way of illuminating Rob Gordon's stagnant mind (I've been thinking of the Vesuvius metaphor in particular a lot lately, the one where Rob compares how he's been stuck in his heartbroken adolescence for near 20 years now to how annoying it would be to be frozen in lava at the moment when you'd been playing dice and to be remembered as a dice-player; what if you'd just written a brilliant poem and were just playing to keep your friend company?); here, they're every half-page or so, pedantically illustrating a wearisome textbook on Nick Hornby's Views On Life, which by now are set in stone. Life is disappointing, compromises await at every turn, love doesn't last, you need friends to get by regardless of their quality, etc.; the worldview which once seemed refreshingly bleak now is naggingly insistent, as if there couldn't be any other way to to look at things. There's some effective bits of black comedy scattered throughout, but Hornby seems narratively spent by this point. Stick to book columns bud.
(December-ish)

Made In Detroit - Paul Clemens - I only read two other Books Of 2006 (Freakonomics and the aforementioned Hornby), which I guess makes this the Best Book of 2006 in a walk. Clemens' alarmingly honest memories of growing up in Detroit in the 80s — at the point when it'd finally earned the label of the first Third World city in the United States — deals mostly with race and the conflicted feelings most white liberals (myself included) are too squeamish to discuss in public. Raised in a reactionary, racist environment, Clemens naturally rebelliously swings over to liberalism but then struggles with very real instances of black crime in his face, peaking when he discovers that his wife-to-be was raped by a black man; his internal struggle between trying to remember that the man is an individual, not a representative of a stereotypical socioeconomic trend, and giving in to the comforts of racism is the most extreme example. As such, Clemens is a white man brave enough to admit in public that the state of Black America is kind of fucked-up and he doesn't know how to think about that in good conscience, which risks being called a racist (a call the readers of Amazon.com, for one, have risen to). It's also a fascinating, rich memoir of place and time: details like his high school football coach instructing the cold players to stick their hands down their pants for warmth are indelible.
(December-January)

The Declaration Of Independent Filmmaking - Mark & Michael Polish, Jonathan Sheldon - There's not really much of a way to make a filmmaking manual readable or interesting on its own, but the Polishes offer plenty of solid advice, predictably rejecting notions of conventional script wisdom along the way. They also offer — for ambitionless readers like myself — some bitchy accounts of how many worthless (tactfully nameless) producers made Northfork's production hell, and some insight into the as-yet little documented world of indie financing, along with casually explaining the symbols and plot of Northfork as if it were obvious all along. The back-cover blurbs come from James Woods, Keith David and...Ridley Scott. Huh?
(November?)

Storytelling - Robert McKee - This was "assigned" reading for a NYU writing class I couldn't get out of; I didn't have to read it to fake my way through the class, but I decided to read it cover to cover just so I could be informed on what The Enemy was thinking. (Note: the teacher who saw fit to assign it - I won't give her name for fear of Google, but she was the screenwriter of Heights, if you care to do a quick IMDB look-up - lamented that the film department had absolutely barred teaching Syd Field, if that gives you the idea of the mentality we're dealing with here. A favorite film she brought up as a model of dramatic structure: Wall Street. 'Nuff said. Nice person though, who gave me way more of the benefit of the doubt than should be advisable.) And then I lost the scathing exegesis I'd written. Guess that's what I get for doing something out of sheer spite.

Mediocrity and the comforts of staid narrative story-telling are the order of the day here: McKee declares the breakfast scene from Kramer Vs. Kramer "one of the most memorable scenes from the last 20 years," which speaks for itself. McKee's advice actually isn't bad if you want to write a conventional screenplay, though it's a bit vague. What's really offensive is that the book isn't just a How-To for the interested; it's also a Fuck You to the non-interested. At one point, McKee creates a list of different genres (sports, biopic, etc.), then tacks on a caveat for those readers who feel that "so-called" experimental or "art" films have no rules of their own. McKee repeatedly refers to such films as indulgences, movies in which the filmmaker tries everything without discipline and try to destroy real narrative with no replacement in mind; so much for all post-Antonioni/Godard cinema. To reassure readers that he's serious and not a philistine, he repeatedly refers to Weekend and Red Desert as great films, which makes me suspect that he dated some arty girl or other in the '60s, tried to get in her pants with arthouse dates and failed, and has been bitter ever since, but remembers liking a couple of those movies under the feminine influence.

McKee is also, ironically, a really horrible, blustery writer who tries to make readers feel like they're getting their money's worth from the (widely-spaced, suspiciously empty-looking) pages with really overwrought prose which insists on the passion of the cinema etc., as well as many pseudo-scientific and utterly incomprehensible diagrams. At one point, he instructs the potential writer to watch the audience the next time he/she attends a movie; they're sure to see an audience in the grips of intense pathos/mirth, laughing in astonishment, crying in terror and so on. McKee's insistence that audiences take movies seriously won't square the experience of anyone who's ever visited a multiplex, where most treat film as a commodity to wile away the time and/or use as a cheap date. Overall, Charlie Kaufman's unsympathetic caricature of McKee in Adaptation seems well-deserved.
(October-January)

Music In Every Room - John Kirch - A book name-dropped in Paul Fussell's essential, underrated Abroad, but what I was really drawn to was the sub-title: Around The World In A Bad Mood. Word, my brotha. Turns out that Kirch is a ex-'60s hippie/Marxist/idealist, and traveling through most of Asia was just a springboard to fancy himself a Writer. Not just a travel writer — the kind who reports with dry detachment and an acute sense of context the weirdnesses of being Abroad — but a real honest-to-goodness writer, the kind who traffics in purple prose and elaborate metaphors and sentences so convoluted you have to read them twice just to figure out where the content resides. As such, it's a boring, self-indulgent trek through Kirch's mind rather than through sub-continental Asia, although I have to admit that months later, the general outline — backpacking through godforsaken patches of Tibet et al. while slowly having his idealism crushed, being viewed with puzzlement rather than open arms by the locals, contracting nameless diseases with no remedy and viewing this with satisfaction as proof that he's now a real seasoned traveler — has remained with surprising clarity. Still, it's fairly obvious that nothing much actually happened to Kirch on his trip, and he doesn't have the reporter's ear for reporting illuminating overheard dialogue, so this is really just a slog I maddeningly sacrificed my winter break to.
(December-January)

The Coming Of The Third Reich - Richard J. Evans - Why did it take me 3+ months to finish something under 500 pages? Because at the end of a long day of unwanted work, commuting, and general anxiety about your future, it's hard to sit down and engage with the depths of the Nazi regime. The first of a projected 3-volume history takes us from the 19th-century roots of German military aggression and longing for a Bismarckian restoration to mid-1933, with Hitler's cabinet already firmly installed and a cultural revolution well underway. It's fascinating stuff, my personal life and lack of energy aside, although I'm afraid I learned all the wrong lessons, forgetting most of the key policy names and concentrating instead on racist trivia. For example, some early 20th-century idiot believed so firmly in the physical superiority of the Aryan race that he began the publication Ostara: Magazine For Blond People. Awesome! Liberals should read up on the many sanctions imposed on "degenerate" et al. art by the Nazis, a history lesson you can draw upon should you feel the need to demonize your opponents with the fascist label whenever they protest; frighteningly, smear tactics by reactionaries haven't changed much in 70 years. And, because I am a product of the public school system and not a history major, I learned a lot of things I should've already known: about how Hitler gained power legally and then used emergency powers in perpetuity, about German resentment over the "stab-in-the-back" myth of WWI (that is, that Germany would've won if not for the traitorous and defeatist Jews et al.), about the myth of Bismarckian patriarchalism that made Germans long for a real restoration of power. This is an awesome work of synthesis, with every sentence seemingly drawing upon 3 specialist reference books. If anyone is Evans' point of identification, it's Victor Klemperer, a Jewish cultural conservative who longed for the restoration of Order and Discipline but read the writing on the walls w/r/t the Naxi Party way ahead of his time; the excerpts from his diaries paint a complex picture of a man whose wrong-headed biases didn't prevent him from identifying what was happening; he deserves a book of his own. I won't have the energy for volume 2 anytime soon, sadly.
(Jan. 15 - Apr. 28)

Zeno's Conscience - Italo Svevo - A book I expected to identify with even before I picked it up, and sure enough; what ended up surprising me was that my expectations of identification ended up making the book less interesting than it might've been. Zeno's simultaneous promiscuity and inability to pursue the affairs he really wants, his tug back and forth between self-flagellation and the active pursuit of reasons to do so, his complicated sense of guilt and denial towards his parents: so what else is new? This is the stuff of acute psychological penetration, although reading it all at once is a bit of a slog: Zeno lacks imagination or the truly outlandish events that would propel him above the ordinary. I guess, truth be told, I prefer my psychology served up with just a pinch more flair; only the ending, in which Zeno achieves self-realization by becoming a war profiteer, truly leaps off into the pitch-black. (The chapter on his "business partnership" stands out because you don't read much sympathetic to commercialism in the liberal arts.) All that aside, this'll be ringing in my head for a long time to come. The one quote I'll reproduce: "If he didn't manage to kill himself first, sooner or later he, too, would reach maturity." Let's hope. Also, William Weaver's translator's introduction makes me want to change majors and transfer to Bard just to study under him.
(May 4? - 18)

The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen - Did I pick up the Best-Selling Novel Of The Decade (not really, I guess), Oprah-approved controversy and all, on my own? No I did not. I read the first paragraph's consciously writerly prose ("The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through" is the first sentence; what, it would've killed Franzen to make his first sentence have a subject, object and verb?) and dismissed it as overhype; more so when Franzen had the dick-like idea of titling an essay collection How To Be Alone and was dismissed in several reviews as an arrogant solipsist. Then a friend gave me a copy for my birthday. Lo and behold, this novel is quite simply The Shit, something I discovered in the following paragraphs. The thing is I'm not much on writers flexing their muscles and seeing how Poetic and Literary they can get, which is funny cuz I read a lot (relative to the general population, I guess) and still am, after all these years, in favor of simple, straightforward prose which concentrates on details rather than the writer's imagery. (To me, David Foster Wallace — abortive short story experiments aside — is straightforward, because the way he writes is the way my mind works. But I guess that's a potential source of disagreement.) And what Franzen mostly offers is the bravura accretion of details, a collection of names of places and objects and living spaces and Christmas ornaments and all this stuff that makes his family drama feel lived in.

I'll confess to not being crazy about the chapter where he evokes Alfred Lambert's incipient dementia, which offers him an excuse to abandon devastatingly straightforward prose for a "poetic" way of getting inside his subject's head, but I can see how it's necessary. But the portraits of the remainder of the Lambert clan are the rich stuff of epics. Franzen takes major risks too: a sub-plot about Chip's involvement in Lithuanian bank fraud take a political leap that he can actually sustain, and Chip overall is obviously a dangerous figure, a literary academic who probably serves as Franzen's closest point of identification (which is probably why he starts with him) and poses the danger of bogging the novel down in the kind of university insider-ism that closes off a book. (A.S. Byatt, I'm looking at you.) Dangerous, too, the anti-capitalist railing that he can barely disguise as the thoughts of his characters, and the portrayal of sophisticated Easterners who got out versus their Midwestern parents: the potential for vilifying caricature is immense, but just barely dodged. In short, this is fiction both of intimacy and of risks, with a fabulous sweep that makes its many chronological back-and-forths easy and illuminating to follow. It's a popular fiction masterpiece, up there with the equally deservingly popular Middlesex. So yes, I apologize for my easy scorn.
(May 19 - 23)