Book Log - May 24 - July 9


New Grub Street - George Gissing - I found this in a $1 copy, sitting outside on the "bargain books" ledge (i.e., "we don't mind if you steal these") of a bookstore on 12th & University. Nice. Based solely on Orwell's copious praise, I picked it up. What we have here: a 3-volume Victorian novel that — as Irving Howe points out in this cheap '60s edition's introduction — decries the infamy of requiring authors to pad their work out to 3 volumes. What that means is that roughly every 7-10 pages, Gissing strikes up a dogmatic lament, whether directly through authorial voice or indirectly through his characters, about the horrors of poverty and its degrading effects; the rest of the time, the book is awesome. Actually, it may well be one of the most pernicious things I've ever read: going to NYU has always made me feel kind of poor and resentful about it (the closely-spaced rungs on the middle-class ladder are a pretty horrible thing to become conscious of), and about halfway through I started to get seriously depressed. But this may have more to do with my personal issues than the book itself: if I spend this whole summer obsessing over money — which seems entirely possible — blame Gissing.

Other things Gissing does are acute psychological detail Balzac wouldn't disown (e.g. "He was not the kind of man who can resist an opportunity of justifying, to himself and others, a course into which he has been led by mingled feelings, all more or less unjustifiable") and almost no plot, which is fine by me. In between all the character sketching comes a disturbingly authentic-feeling rendition of the late-19th century writers' mill, with long discussions about the market for a fiction writer, exactly how much he must produce in order to earn a comfortable living, how to cynically serve the tastes of the public, etc. Would that even a single writer would be so forthright about today's industry; I suspect things haven't changed much. (One plot thread, in which ambitious up-and-coming reviewer/essayist Jasper Milvain plans his upwards trajectory around a series of increasingly prestigious parties and introductions, rings true; I couldn't get a goddamn thing done if I didn't know anyone, and I'm barely getting anywhere as it is.) In short, good recommendation Orwell.
(May 24 - June 20)

Tales From Development Hell - David Hughes - Once, while sitting in the Film Forum waiting for some obscure retro double-feature or other to start, I heard one middle-aged loudmouth talking to another: "I tell you what, if I have to move to LA to be a success, I'd rather be a failure." Score one for the smugly self-righteous camp, but Tales From Development Hell offers plenty of fun schadenfreude and at least a little justification for that POV, if that's your thing. The caveat, of course, is that all the projects discussed are generally big-budget crap (miles away, from, say, Tad Friend's New Yorker account of how ABC screwed over the original pilot of "Mulholland Drive"), and as such you're (OK, me) more inclined to marvel at the sheer absurdity of the development process than sympathize with the unmade projects and their authors. Even within those boundaries it's good fun. Hughes (whose bio notes he has 4 unproduced scripts of his own) smirkingly recounts how an unpaid screenplay about real-life French magician Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin changed his name to "Jean-Pierre," since Jean-Eugene would be too hard for English-speaking audiences, and later changed his last name to a simple "Houdin," "presumably for the convenience of the same audience who could not be trusted to pronounce 'Jean-Eugene.'"

Notable Moments in Hubris: Adam Rifkin noting — with no apparent irony — of his (unmade) '80s pitch for a Planet of the Apes remake that "In a way, Gladiator did the same movie without the ape costumes" (this from the auteur behind Detroit Rock City, though let's be honest: I'd probably rather watch that than sit through Gladiator again). Other fun stuff: The chapter on Indiana Jones IV's various treatments manages to bring up every cliche of the pulp trade, from Atlantis to Roswell to mysterious Egyptians to Viking ghosts guarding Valhalla (!). AICN's "Moriarty," complaining about a late '90s draft of the unmade Sandman project that "The whole thing is tied to the Millennium. That's rapidly becoming one of the most heinous, preposterous cliches in film. Stop it." (Aw: I rather enjoyed millennialist panic. Actually, almost every chapter relies on quotes from AICN posters, which is a clue to the book's average sensibility: I especially like the AICN poster who commented, of an early Tomb Raider draft, that it showed "a general disrespect for the Tomb Raider mythos." Mythos. I mean c'mon.) David Koepp, extraordinarily productive (and generally competent) Hollywood hack noting that "Aristotle would not approve of the way your average human life is laid out" (this while trying to justify some rewrite of a movie that was "too realistic" or some such, but unintentionally justifying instead the entirety of arthouse cinema). Sign o' the changed times: noting, of a mid-'90s proposed rival to Outbreak that never got made, that "It was a very expensive picture - $40 or $50 million" (nowadays, it can take $83 million just to make a fucking Adam Sandler movie). Finally, sloppy fact-checking/copy-editing abounds at all turns, so be alert: Hughes uses "phased" when he means "fazed," italicizes "alter ego" (I know both those words are originally Latin but come on, I mean Jesus), and claims that the original Planet Of The Apes was a "virtual life-saver for 20th Century Fox, which, less than a year earlier, had lost a fortune...on the epic costume drama Cleopatra." Cleopatra had actually come five years before, thank you very much; perhaps Hughes means the nearly-equally-disastrous Dr. Dolittle. How the fuck does stuff like this make it through the editing process.
(June 9 - July 3)

What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver - This past semester, in accordance with my goal of pursuing a double-major in English, I took my first required core class, "Literary Interpretation," in which we read a lot of short stories and then sat around and discussed them; generally, the more straightforward they were (e.g., Henry James) the less there was to talk about, and the obvious inverse was true as well. I now bring extraordinary degrees of alertness to any short story, because I know that pretty much anything can be explained with enough effort. So Carver's prose disarms me, because the skeletal outlines and sheer compactness of storytelling don't leave much room for doubt. The terse language of his lower-middle-class (and occasionally low-class, period) narrators leaves little room for imagination, which is as it should be; I especially like the terse dismissal of the possibility of metaphor at the beginning of "I Could See The Smallest Things" ("It was a white moon and covered with scars. Any damn fool could imagine a face there.")

What gradually grew on me was the menace lurking under the tense language of every story, i.e. the way the narrator of "Sacks" lets us know his wife has either divorced him or died: only at the beginning when meeting his dad ("'Everyone's fine,' I said, which was not the truth") and then in 3 sentences that close the story ("Mary didn't need candy, Almond Roca or anything else. That was last year. She needs it now even less."). Violence and familial instability is never far away. Carver starts off with his strangest and most disorienting stories ("Why Don't You Dance?" has a man putting all of his house's furniture and equipment on his front lawn to express his dislocation; "Viewfinder" has a one-armed man, 'nuff said), so that when he descends to the more skeletal and mundane, the reader is already on edge. The stories gradually get longer and longer (though they're still absurdly short), as Carver seemingly trusts the reader enough to not get distracted by their relative gregariousness. I read most of these twice in a row; as short as they are, they're paradoxically impossible to concentrate on enough to absorb in one go-round. That said, the reason I finally picked up this collection after all these years has a lot to do with seeing Altman's overwhelming Short Cuts recently; the generous, free-wheeling sense of fun he brings to the material is the very opposite of Carver's claustrophobia, and it's more in tune with my sensibility. The stories here that were used for that film I was too distracted to really approach on their own terms (I was also constantly humming the Old 97's homage "What We Talk About," but that's OK).
(June 23 - July 3)

Phantom Lady - Cornell Woolrich - Read this and The Bride Wore Black sometime back in high school; life was simpler when I thought I'd have time to read everything I wanted to. Decided to re-read this after actually seeing the movie and realizing that I didn't remember a damn thing about the source material. My main reaction can be explained by analogy: I once made someone with a background in '80s punk-rock listen to the Delgados' Hate (this was also when I was in high school, natch), who said it was good but the constant orchestration and sonic frills made him feel like he was overdosing on sugar. With my preference for writing to concentrate on details and psychology and leave metaphors alone whenever possible, Woolrich's inexhaustible barrage of emotionally-charged overwriting is extremely impressive, and best taken in small doses. It's hard to quote something and make it clear what I'm battling up against; you just have to read a lot of it all at once, and then you understand. Finely written stuff, with so much sexism it's not even worth thinking about.
(July 4-8)