Book Log - May 12-late June, 2007

Perfect From Now On - John Sellers - Sellers' book caught my eye for the title alone, and if name-checking Built To Spill doesn't grab your attention too, pass on by. Sellers gets credit for being one of the first to attempt to do for indie rock what Klosterman's done for more above-ground music, but only half-credit for execution. (A copy-editor at "The Daily Texan" got it right in titling a review "Perfect For Now.") This chunky book moves in distinct segments. In the first (and best) part of the book, Sellers describes his movement from 1) musical indifference to 2) happy Top-40 listening kid jockeying solely for high school status to 3) tentative indie kid; coincidentally (let's be charitable with the assumptions), this is the best part of the book. Sellers understands how little indie fandom can, at times, be informed by disinterested listening (it's a confluence of wanting to be cool and liked and also - hopefully - genuinely liking the music; also, like Peter Parker said, "Every story is about a girl," and Sellers is no different from me in this respect). Sellers is at his best at the intersection of fandom and the actual music, as in his massive footnote (yes, it's one of those books) about his all-day drink-and-listen annual memoriam to Ian Curtis, where he increasingly questions whether he needs to do this or not and if he's outgrown Joy Division. The last 60 pages, though, are devoted to a blow-by-blow account of every single interaction Sellers has had with Guided by Voices — including weird trivial fanboard friction —and while it's funny enough (esp. in its detailing of Robert Pollard's marathon drinking capacity), this isn't enough for the unconverted (me, say; I've heard all of 2 songs, one of these days etc.). There's list-geekery a-plenty towards the back, and Sellers gets credit for keeping me company during an all-night drinking session in a bar in a foreign city and sheer amiability. But the definitive indie-rawk document is still Dig!
(May 12)

Then We Came To The End  - Joshua Ferris - Ferris' much-hyped debut hit my (inexplicable) g-spot for anything related to office life. The Strand's review copy was a good investment; this is a tonally assured novel of much promise that only makes one major misstep (more on this in a second). Ferris uses the first-person plural, a collective narrator gambit that pays off nicely with the very last sentence (no spoilers here); suffice it to say that a distinctive narrative POV isn't lost. Ferris expertly anatomizes how ennui and boredom can evolve into an uncomfortably comfortable routine, blowing up mundane battles over office property and lunchtime flirtation into something surprisingly absorbing. Two caveats: a middle chapter abandons the narrative voice for a woman's point-of-view and comes off about as convincingly as Nick Hornby's similar experiment in How To Be Good. This later reveals itself to a tricky, not particularly interesting po-mo gambit, the part of the novel where Ferris abandons the relatively bland politeness appropriate to his office environment for a more conventionally "literary" feel, and it kind of sucks. Leading me to the other caveat: said bland politeness makes sense for the subject, but I wonder if Ferris has the wildness necessary for a second novel not set in the office. Oh well; a page-turner about corporate America that actually plays by CA's own rules. Who knew.
(May 12 - 15)

Other People's Property - Jason Tanz - Starts off cautiously and ends with a whimper, but somewhere in the middle Tanz's book (subtitled "A Shadow History of Hip-Hop In White America") delivers on its promise of becoming something far more interesting than more handwringing about white kids commodifying gangsta-rap and/or yet another look at Eminem. (Eminem's work — at least his first 2 albums — certainly needs a great deal more examination and unpacking, but not from the viewpoint of looking at how his work opened up a great many white teens — myself included — to rap; the work itself is fascinatingly contradictory and supple, and it seems like time to examine it at face value. But I digress.) The most amazing thing is that this is the first book in ages that made me turn back to the works cited pages just to puzzle how in the world Tanz tracked down such obscure tidbits (e.g. when he notes that breakdancing led to tongue-clucking medical papers like "Differential Diagnosis of Scrotal Pain After Break Dancing"). Tanz's willingness to do undoubtedly tedious research of this kind pays off in spades - unlike, say, Sellers above, this is hardly the work of a self-assured auto-didact. A good thing too, because the "History" in the title is emphasized. Tanz's analytical skills are weak, and it's telling that he barely spends any time engaging head-on with albums. Instead, he hangs out with people and reports on their background. The first chapter is an effective and interesting examination of the complex interaction of liberal guilt, black fetishization and etc. that white rap fans (or at least myself) seem to all go through at some point but it's hardly novel; the chapters which delve into the specifics of radio programming, hip-hop advertising, etc. on the other hand, are all gold. The result is a slight book whose research is fascinating, and which actually educated me; it's hardly as engaging as, say, Klosterman's work, in which subjective reactions somehow seem to become more insightful than doing the appropriate homework. Tanz's omission of nearly every contemporary rapper isn't exactly puzzling — he makes it quite clear that he's an old-school hip-hop fan, mercilessly mocking contemporary figures like Slim Thug, even if he never really quite addresses why, say, he finds Cypress Hill more acceptable — but he's content to leave aside the scolding. I feel more grounded after reading this, but it didn't exactly speak to me.
(May 16)

Arthur And George - Julian Barnes - A high-class non-fiction novel page-turner that's more or less exactly the sum of its parts. I have a thing for Arthur Conan Doyle in general — in a lot of ways, he seems to be a key to some of the best-intentioned, most endearing aspects of the Victorian Age — and Barnes expertly taps into the bull-doggish sense of fair play and athleticism Doyle brought to his whole life. If he was an unrepentant colonialist (there's a brief stop here for the Boer War), he was also the finest possible outcome of the public school system, bringing that dogged fairness to the case of George Edalji. In a way, Barnes' set-up is almost too clear in its intentions, with Arthur & George representing the two biggest failings of domestic Victorian society (sexual repression and racism, respectively; Arthur enacts his weakness actively while George is a passive victim of it, but both are unaware of how much societal expectations condition their lives, and hence basically equal victims); the two stories interweave, although necessarily the beginning of each increasingly long segment can be frustrating. Arthur's story is fascinating for how it exemplifies his fast rise to Victorian fame and the spirit of the age; George's is much more bound up in procedural details and day-by-day stuff. But Barnes finds equilibrium eventually, and each segment becomes riveting until the two men are briefly in the same track in life. The closer makes an unexpected left-turn into considering Doyle's spiritualist tendencies, suddenly leaving the factual realm of much of the book and asking if that's enough. I think it is — this is an ace, brilliant reconstruction —  but the last bit almost gave me chills.
(May 22-24)

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller - "So, how's it feel to read the book too late?" asked my smirking BFF. "You mean now that I'm not a teenager?" I said. "Exactly." Well, it feels OK - like Slaughterhouse-Five, Catch-22 is one of those books generally read exclusively by angsty teens and slow-reading hipsters, but that still manages to be OK. Until the end, that is; I could see where it was going from a mile away, and praying that Yossarian's dark humor wouldn't give way to a Serious, Sobering Contemplation of the Face of War, where the foolishness ends and we see the True Suffering. It's formulaic, it's heavy-handed, and it just doesn't add anything to the proceedings to read about corpses and devastation. But I can get behind Heller's anger at the world (my inner 15-year-old was unleashed at the passage "Misery depresses you. Ignorance depresses you. Persecution depresses you. Violence depresses you. Slums depress you. Greed depresses you. Crime depresses you. Corruption depresses you."), and passages like the first one on this page are masterpieces of spry, paradoxical anti-logic used for fine-tuned comedic routines, although sometimes it can be kind of rote in upending every possible expectation. But the reason I didn't love it was because I could feel that eventually it would turn into a standard Denunciation of War - which may have been brave at the time, but has aged poorly. I wish more satires had Dr. Strangelove's commitment to heartlessness, which of course drives the point home even better. Also: no one ever mentions how interesting the deja vu structure is. Why is that?
(May 25 - sometime in June)